Would Meryl Streep play Pepper Potts if she came along now?
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, an Oscar win for a young actress usually meant a salary upgrade and the ability to land even better roles in A-level productions. Meryl Streep won the 1979 best supporting...
View ArticleComing: the ‘Difficult Men’ who made TV better than the movies
Faced with a choice this weekend of hitting the neighborhood multiplex to see “The Internship” or staying home to binge-watch some tasty HBO or Showtime or AMC series, who over the age of 25 would opt...
View Article‘$11 Billion Year’: inside the movies of 2012
Veteran Hollywood reporter Anne Thompson puts all of the jagged pieces of today’s ever-changing movie industry together in her lucid and compulsively readable new book “The $11 Billion Dollar Year”...
View Article‘The Cosmoplitans’: movie to TV exodus continues
Add Whit Stillman to the growing list of smart movie directors who are finding shelter in the ever-expanding world of TV. The creator of “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “Damsels in Distress” recently...
View ArticleGood for Hollywood, bad for us
The year-end statistics coming out of the Hollywood movie studios this week were bad news for adults who aren’t interested in going out to see 3D/IMAX comic book extravaganzas or dramatized young adult...
View Article‘Iceman’: Chicago’s gift to New York City
I’ve never understood people who complain that serious plays depress them. They have enough problems in their own lives, they say, why would they want to see something downbeat, etc. etc. What’s...
View ArticleHow demographics have changed major studio films
A depressing study of big studio filmmaking last year was recently released by the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California. Looking at 2014’s 100...
View ArticleThe spellbinding new Brando documentary
Working from a recently discovered cache of private audiotapes that Marlon Brando made over many years, writer-director Steven Riley has come up with a unique documentary portrait of the great actor,...
View Article‘The Grand’: binge-watching, British-style
Like almost everyone else, I’ve been knocked out by the ever-rising quality of American television – from “The Sopranos” almost 20 years ago, through new hits such as “Transparent” and “Mr. Robot.” HBO...
View Article‘Episodes’: under the Netflix radar
For those of us who have never subscribed to Showtime, the comedy series “Episodes” came and went in 2011-2017 without ever registering. The show, created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik (who brought...
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