Category: Entertainment Talk

In the wee minutes of his Jammin’ in New York standup concert, George Carlin referenced the novel news coverage assets of the time. Fittingly enough, through the show’s structure, he unwittingly built a wise suggestion for ingesting the type of dominant media that would follow and maintain firm root long after his 2008 death. Carlin…

Lately, more often than not, time has expired on a given Jeopardy! round before the contestants and TV audience can try their hand at all 30 clues. What was once a disappointing rarity has become irritatingly commonplace. Yet the clock continues to reset for Alex Trebek, as his hosting tenure hits 33 years and counting. As multiple…

Saturday Night Live is all but its own category among scripted entertainment programs. It is not a 30-minute sitcom or an hour-long drama, which each have a rigid set of main cast members and characters. It is not like a soap opera, which may run for decades and maintain a revolving door of personnel, but sustains…

“Must you distract me at every level. I am working on something with wonderful movie possibilities. Highly commercial.” – Ignatius Reilly Only John Kennedy Toole knew if he was making a mouthpiece of his main character in A Confederacy of Dunces. But nearly a half-century after Toole penned his magnum opus, little has changed in American…

Alex Dunphy, the designated brain and now happenstance microcosm of Modern Family, was allowed to break her one-week silence in the most recent episode, “Weathering Heights.” What a concept. After the worst phase of mononucleosis had kept her quiet for the preceding installment, her excuse for staying home from college served a purpose for the…

After immersing myself in the rapid-fire banter on Twitter during the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I felt an inclination to chime in on the whole charade over on Facebook. Facebook’s become the slow lane of social media websites (is apps the more appropriate term in 2016?).  As I stared at the gray…

While Saturday Night Live’s entertainment value has hardly bottomed out in recent memory, it could stand to pursue more consistency. The key to that consistency could not be less complicated. It is all in the humor, and even when there is a celestial cast in place, the host must be the humorous centerpiece in any…

One of my favorite pastimes is digging up critical reviews of movies that are universally considered classics, devouring the words of the sour souls that were oblivious to a beloved film’s greatness. The Shawshank Redemption, considered to be the greatest movie of all-time by IMDb users, clocks in at 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes —…

Those of us who grew up on Jean-Claude Van Damme’s action films know that they had a certain formula. The acting wouldn’t be great, the budget would be low, and the plot would be a little convoluted. (This last part often involved explaining away Van Damme’s accent. Ten points if you can tell me the…