review

Spoilers ahead. There’s a tradition for launching a new network with a original programming. The idea is to give audiences something they can’t get elsewhere. On cable creating new original shows often leads to casting, or making shows about, minorities. It’s a remarkable trend. Look at the early scripted dramas and comedies for cable networks, [...]

Television is so awash in great shows no one can watch them all. And yet most TV fans can name the best new show of last year — technically, it’d have to be Girls – and best show overall — take your pick of Mad Men, Treme, Breaking Bad, etc. Online, nobody knows what’s good. There’s too [...]

Spoilers ahead! Read at your own risk. In the very last moment of Django Unchained Hildy grabs a rifle.** The movie follows her husband, Django (Jamie Foxx), on his quest to save her. Saved, Hildy (Kerry Washington) must learn to save herself, and/or her husband. But we have to imagine that future, because Django is a movie about [...]

At one point in José Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, a police officer confronts local gang members in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, asking for his share of their drug revenue. The police are corrupt, but their illicit money supply has been cut off by their own belligerence: a massacre at a prison temporarily [...]

Originally posted at Splice Today. Indie film tends toward realism. It’s not hard to understand why: on a low-budget, the special effects necessary for fantasy and science fiction are hard to achieve. Creative filmmakers aren’t afraid of a challenge, though. In recent years, and especially 2011, a handful of art house movies ventured into the [...]

Anticipating the premiere of NBC’s remake of the British ITV series Prime Suspect, I’ve been watching the original, starting from the first series in 1991. Americans watch UK TV for a lot of reasons, but one of them is to revel in British austerity, their infamous reserve in tense situations. Watching Helen Mirren imperfectly make [...]

Thanks to Deep Research for linking! The Harry Potter series is a strange phenomenon: this week, 10 years into its run, it stands as one of the most profitable, popular and critically adored movie franchises in history. And yet, aside from a harrowing coming-of-age tale, it has never really been able to communicate a clear sociological message, [...]

Posted at Splice Today In his magnificent essay on Avatar in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn contrasts Avatar with The Wizard of Oz, another vibrant fantasy about travelling to exotic places. Using the end of Oz — the return to Kansas — as counterpoint to the end of Avatar — staying in Pandora [...]

Posted at Splice Today Pulp. If orange juice is any guide, some people want lots of it, a few want a dash of it, and the rest want none at all. The same might be said for television. Pulp juiced up ratings HBO’s True Blood and CW’s Vampire Diaries. It worked for Starz’s Spartacus too, and [...]

Full post at Splice Today You have a problem. You’ve got a good script in your hands, adapted from a story by Philip K. Dick. It’s interesting and sophisticated. It’s a romance and a thriller. It’s science fiction and fantasy. It has Christian overtones for Middle America and a New York setting for the urbanites. [...]