newcritics

Tonight, some of us will gather at the Paley Center for Media to celebrate the first year of this little cultural experiment we call newcritics. It’s going to be a great night, thanks to our host Ellen….er…the fabulous Ms. Peel! You know, on some level this blog feels like a gathering of superheroes in the [...]

I’m a channel surfer, especially when I’m driving in my car. It’s a fundamental, deeply ingrained behavior and the primary way in which I still stay in touch with pop music. Call me old school.
Over the past year, the voice that has stopped my wandering finger most often belongs to Alecia Beth Moore of Doyleston, [...]

The first thing you need to know about me is this:
I : Lost :: Beavis : Soda
I am Lostholio.
The mere mention of anything Lost will send me into a quivering fit, and so, mere hours before the long-awaited premiere of Season Four (tonight on ABC, 8pm EST/7pm CST), you can only imagine the trouble with [...]

To celebrate the first anniversary of newcritics, Tom has invited contributors to identify their most important single piece of media from the previous year, or perhaps, more specifically as Tony Alva reminds me, “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year.” As usual, I’m somewhat late to the blog [...]

Shrunken Heads
Ian Hunter
May 2007
The single most important release in 2007 for me was Shrunken Heads by Ian Hunter. You can read my original post on the subject here, or better yet, just go buy it.
This man has paid his dues. He’s seen good times and bad times. Listening to this [...]

Don’t get me wrong, A Streetcar Named Desire’s a great rhythmic title and it’s what Tennessee Williams was truly terrific at: seductive titles firing up our imagination before even taking in one of his plays. In fact he makes you wonder if he didn’t hit upon a grand title first, then managed to write a [...]

On August 1, 2007, a one of the greatest runs in journalism came to an end when the family owners of The Wall Street Journal sold the company to Rupert Murdoch.
Newcritics readers don’t need a review of Murdoch’s vile track record—if you read or listen to modern media, you feel his clammy touch.
This brief [...]

In response to Tom’s query “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year”…
If forced to pick, I would have to select Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” (well covered here at Newcritics by my esteemed collegue in all things rock Mr. Ted Wilson esq.). It’s been a while since something [...]

Not what you might think. For the first anniversary of newcritics (yeah, newcritics!), founder Tom Watson has asked for a few posts about “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year.” Perhaps not as confounding as “To be or not to be…” in Hamlet, the text which has recently enthralled me, [...]

The Federal Communications Commission wants to fine ABC $1.4 million for airing an episode of “NYPD Blue” in 2003 showing a woman’s nude buttocks. The network owner, Walt Disney Company, will appeal.
In the sexual Dark Ages of my adolescence, teenagers would mark the hot passages of novels for the delectation of their peers. Now the [...]

(Cross-posted at my hovel.)
Tom has asked us to honor the one-year anniversary of NewCritics by posting on “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year”. Fair enough — there have been many, but this is the latest one…

A friend, knowing the kind of research I’m doing for my book on [...]

Newcritics is a year old this week and Tom asked us all to do an anniversary post about the one media moment that moved us the most. When I think back over the past twelve months, the first year of newcritics, I can think of many photographs, paintings, books, movies, songs, albums, and TV shows [...]

Moliere is the French answer to Shakespeare in Love.
Both movies present their playwright heroes as young romantics and show them picking up stray bits of dialog and observing characters and stumbling into situations that the audience knows will later turn up in their plays.  In Shakespeare in Love, we see the origins of Twelfth [...]

Ah, denim. It’s the fabric of the masses, of the worker, of the proleteriat, and currently of my pants. Tonight our designers will be taking on this sturdy fabric. It will be interesting to see what the instructions will be - surely not just sewing a pair of fabbu jeans (though pants [...]

In a world where almost nothing shocks anyone, the news of the 28-year-old actor’s death has stunned us.
I had no idea he was so young. I watched Brokeback Mountain on HBO just last week, and was again swept away by the depth and magnitude of his performance. How could he be SO knowing about all [...]

I wonder what Heather Graham thinks about her eyes.
I wonder if she thinks about how her best feature is her greatest liability as an actress.
Her directors have. They have to.
Graham’s eyes, the biggest, roundest in Hollywood since Betty Boop’s, aren’t lifeless or inexpressive or unfocused. They are just too…beautiful. They are [...]

Her wry smile and throaty voice remain. As Emily Hartley on the 1970s’ The Bob Newhart Show, she was the quintessential loving but skeptical wife in the kind of gentle comedy that is long gone from network TV.
A perfect partner for Newhart’s stammering psychologist, Suzanne Pleshette complemented his confusion with a sardonic sense of reality [...]

I almost hesitate to recommend readers to make an effort to see The Seafarer, since it’s booked for a limited run at Broadway’s Booth Theatre. Sort of a cruel joke, like the Devil coming to collect the soul of a sinner who has just made his best effort yet to turn his life around. There [...]

It’s that time again… time for another stab at the live-blogging of Bravo’s Project Runway. The only difficulty here is the “live” part. For as much as I have loved this show, I’ve been finding it hard to stay awake for this season. There has not been much life in this cast.The entire ensemble seems [...]

Got suckered into seeing Atonement. A fetching, brief love scene between Keira Knightly (what’s in a name?) and James McAvoy but otherwise a static British bore of a movie. Another of those Ivory-Merchant-like jobs, written and directed for Laura Ashley, about as thrilling as wallpaper. It’s not easy getting confronted with careful class crap and [...]

Mark Bowden’s profile of David Simon, The Angriest Man in Television, in this month’s Atlantic seems to confirm what I’ve suspected about The Wire:  that it’s the product of a brilliant mind made paranoid by the owner of that mind’s certainty that he has figured out the very simple answer to all that’s wrong with [...]

(Brief excerpt from the story by Victor Schertzinger and screenplay by Austin Parker)
Terry Rooney (James Cagney), a bandleader, has gone to Hollywood to take up a contract and make a picture. The crooked studio people are conspiring to make him think he’s lousy, when in fact Rooney is dynamite and a surefire hit. (Small wonder [...]

It’s already episode 7 of Project Runway, which for some reason surprises me. Since the holidays gave us that big gap between episodes, I’m not feeling as engrossed in the contestants as I feel I have been in the past. I don’t really have a favorite to win or a favorite to like. [...]

As documentary films persist as an important aspect of the wider cinematic public sphere, definitions of documentary and its social and political role have become increasingly important. Invariably, when I mention at a cocktail party that I am interested in documentary, at least one partygoer will corner me in the kitchen and challenge me [...]

As we recover from a hectic holiday season we are finally being rewarded with a new episode of Bravo’s Project Runway! Season 4 will continue this evening on a sweet note. Tonight’s episode, “Eye Candy”, promises to bring back a brand of challenge that Project Runway is famous for, creating a temporary art garment [...]