Michael Jackson: This Is It (PG) -- High School Musical director Kenny Ortega, who was collaborating with the singer on a series of London concerts, culls a concert film and cinematic memorial (with some sequences in 3D) from the hundreds of hours of footage taped during Jackson's rehearsals for the shows.
Q: I have watched every episode of Sons of Anarchy. However, I still do not understand where the name ''Sam Crow'' came from. What did I miss? Why do they refer to themselves as Sam Crow?
Bill and Betty Garcia moved from New York City to Charlotte, N.C., so their sons could grow up away from the grind and grime of urban life. Now they think they made a mistake.
BIG SCREEN A Serious Man (R) -- Iconoclastic directors Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, Fargo) get personal with this comedy, loosely based on their middle-class Jewish upbringing, about a beleaguered college professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks advice from three rabbis on how to get control of his topsy-turvy life. As funny and bleak as anything the Coens have ever made, but without all the distancing stylistic tricks and irony.
Q: Whatever happened to Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford of The Rifleman? A: After the series ended its five-season run in 1963, Connors starred in Branded, which aired on NBC in the 1965-66 season and remains a cult fave, and Werewolf on Fox in 1987-88. He died in 1992. Crawford acts occasionally but puts more energy into leading the Johnny Crawford Dance Orchestra, specializing in music of the 1920s and '30s.
Growing up, David S. Goyer once made a prediction that turned out to be a pretty accurate flash-forward. ''I remember telling my mother . . . that I was going to go to Hollywood one day and write a Batman movie,'' he says. ''And it happened.''
I was concerned last year when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy began ripping one another's steaming entrails out in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a rewrite of Jane Austen's classic novel. I was downright alarmed when the American cinema embraced the sensuality of rotting ambulatory corpses in Zombie Strippers. And I began marking off the days until the Apocalypse after reading the public taunt a friend left her brother while playing last spring's ubiquitous zombie-combat game on Facebook: ``I sucked out your brains and spit them to the floor, you zombie dog!''
When the Fania All-Stars played a legendary concert at Yankee Stadium in 1973, the stands were filled with 63,000 people who were so crazy for the radical new music called salsa that they stormed the stage. It was a bigger audience than the 55,000 who turned out for the Beatles' famed show at Shea Stadium eight years before. And yet there was almost no mention of the event in mainstream media, as if, for most of the country, one of the biggest concert events to take place in America hadn't happened.
BIG SCREEN Law Abiding Citizen (R) -- An angry man (300's Gerard Butler) targets the Philadelphia prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) who orchestrated a plea bargain for the killer of his wife and daughter. Sometimes, words just aren't enough.
Q: I really miss Party Down with my favorite guys and gals. Will it return to TV?
Third World governments come and go, trading monarchy for populism for military autocracy and even for the trappings, at least, of democracy. Yet the poor remain poor: from one to four billion of them, depending on whose estimate you accept.
You know it's late in the fall TV season when a network can't keep its genre cliches straight. CBS' Three Rivers, fall's final new show, has an irascible surgeon snapping at a hospital bureaucrat: ``Never get between a doctor and his donut!'' I haven't checked, but I'll bet over on CSI: Miami, Horatio Caine is brooding about the cost of malpractice insurance and the promiscuity of ER nurses.
BIG SCREEN Couples Retreat (PG-13) -- Four married couples (among them Vince Vaughn, Malin Akerman, Jason Bateman, Kristin Davis and Jon Favreau) vacation on an island that specializes in relationship counseling. More than specializes, actually: The therapy is mandatory. The cast is promising, and Favreau and Vaughn co-wrote the screenplay, so the movie should be funny. But the trailer looks deadly.
Comedian and actress Mo'Nique can pinpoint when she began to fall out of love with late-night television. It was the spring of 1994, when Arsenio Hall, the man who broke the genre's color barrier, walked away from his popular syndicated show.
Q: I recently started watching the season one DVD of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and find it utterly brilliant and hilarious. How many seasons did this show run and are the other seasons available?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that Norman Bates isn't about to burst out of the bedroom and slice you like a Benihana filet.
Back to you: Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton's joint show didn't work out, but the sitcom vets return to TV tonight with new shows
The Hollywood writers' strike has been over for more than a year now, but Trauma seems to be some sort of final shot across the studios' bow: See, guys, this is what a show would look like if you tried to make it without screenwriters.
All you really need to know about Ken Burns' newest marathon documentary you can learn from the title: The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Really, the best? Better than the polio vaccine, air conditioning, the Internet, the airplane, liberal democracy, rock 'n' roll, bourbon and the abolition of slavery? Better than toilet paper?
BIG SCREEN Capitalism: A Love Story (R) -- Michael Moore's most impassioned cinematic plea for activism yet explores the recent banking and housing collapse and the increasingly larger -- and more destructive -- role corporations have played in the U.S. government since the Reagan era. Moore does an impressive job of compressing a complicated subject into two highly watchable and entertaining hours, replete with man-on-the-street examples of the toll of the recession on the middle class.
RSS|
My Yahoo|
Newsletters|
Widgets|
Mobile|
Alerts|
Twitter
Terms of Service| Privacy Policy| About our ads| Copyright| About The Miami Herald| About the McClatchy Company| Corrections| Contact Us| Advertise
Partners: El Nuevo Herald| Newspaper in Education| WLRN | Miami Herald News| CBS4 WFOR-TV| More
Copyright 2009 Miami Herald Media Co. All rights reserved
Previous
