Is the crossover the lowest form of marketing? The writers room of Family Guy might agree with that if they clearly weren't having so much fun by getting to play with the Simpsons toy box. Family Guy's 13th season began tonight with the much hyped, the quite worrisome, yet still surprisingly anticipated crossover with The Simpsons. What famous gags would be revisited? What strange bedfellows would be sewn? And was all this the last grasp of two once venerable franchises trying to parlay their separate, though distinctive styles and fanbases, in order to standout amongst an even more cluttered TV landscape? Family Guy might have taken the time to answer that last question, but it was just too damn busy pointing out the oddity of the Griffins meeting the Simpsons.
Try pitching Breaking Bad in one sentence. Or Game of Thrones. Heck, try explaining something as nearly straightforward as Masters of Sex in one sentence. The elevator pitch is the Holy Grail of the Hollywood development process, and when you get that perfect project with that perfect line, you can just throw it out there and everyone will know immediately what you’re getting at. So in that spirit, here’s everything you need to know about Scorpion: it’s The Big Bang Theory meets Mission: Impossible. Boom. If that sounds like something that’s appealing then welcome, and if it’s something that sounds inane or stupid, then you are now free to return to your prestige dramas on premium cable.
To begin with, let me say I applaud the goals of No Good Deed. Our TV screens are filled with psychos, and more often than not their victims are women who by demand of the screenplay are too passive, weak or frightened to fight back against their attacker. It’s meant to empower the bad guy, and make we in the audience hate him all the more as we await the hero, usually male, to arrive with gun drawn to save the day. On the surface, No Good Deed wants to lampshade the damsel in distress motif and say that damsels can save themselves. Sadly though, even the most wily and proactive of damsels though can’t escape atrocious scripting and pacing.
Aging is a problem. Not necessarily the fact of getting old, which does represent its challenges, but more the fact that number of seniors in the general population is going up, while the number of people under the age of 65 is going down. Population by age used to look like a pyramid with the large base at the bottom made up of young people, but that pyramid now looks more like a column, evenly spread out all the way through. In a short time, about 30-35 years, that pyramid will be inverted, bringing with it a whole host of issues. It would seem then that now’s a good time to start thinking about elder care in new ways, and one researcher in Alive Inside thinks he’s tapped into something special to help combat not just old age ailments like dementia and Alzheimer’s, but to enhance quality of life for seniors everywhere.
With solid performances and decent drama, Me and You isn’t Bernardo Bertolucci’s best, but it’s an engaging and enjoyable enough film from a master of the craft. What it lacks in punch, it makes up for in effort.
Of course, one of the highlights of each new Transformers movie is the introduction of a new group of robots in disguise, but with a few exceptions, the film series has carefully avoided the hiring of big name actors to give voice to those robots. Now, it looks like director Michael Bay is switching things up for Transformers: Age of Extinction by hiring a pair of marquee actors to voice new characters. Listen carefully, and you might hear the dulcet tones of John Goodman and Ken Watanabe coming out of the mechanical mouths of a pair of good guy robots in the next Transformers adventure.
When the Ukrainian crisis erupted, and Russia started letting its old Cold War freak flag fly again, the effects were felt beyond the borders of Eastern Europe, and the unwitting side effect was that it sweeped another pending humanitarian crises right off the front page of the Western world’s newspapers. The problems in Syria haven’t gone away in the last few months, and are just as bad as ever, and while world leaders struggle to find diplomatic and political solutions, hundreds of people continue to die, thousands continue to be wounded or displaced, and millions remain in refugee camps, living in a kind of limbo. What can two people do in all this madness?
One of the most fascinating developments in American civil rights is how quickly the country turned from making gay marriage a wedge issue, to making it a matter of national importance that it come to pass. Meanwhile, in California, a supposed bastion of liberal and progressive idealism, passed a ballot measure banning gay marriage in November 2008, coincidentally at the same time the United States elected its first black president. The Case Against 8 chronicles how the legal community rallied quickly, sowed strange bedfellows, and came together in record time to dismantle Prop 8 at the same time that the entire case against gay marriage began to fall apart.
I can’t say that a fashion documentary is entirely in my wheelhouse, which probably speaks to the power of Advanced Style considering that I found it so very appealing. In many ways, fashion is more arbitrary than art, and what can be called great style is incredibly more individualistic than what people might call a good book, or movie, or TV show. What is good style? What does it mean to wear something well? When it comes to fashion, the only constant in all those runway shows is that the people wearing the clothes are all young. Advanced Style tries to turn all that on its head though with the suggestion that one doesn’t have to be youthful to be fashionable, merely young at heart.
Rome is a city well known for its old world charm, its complex and ancient past, and for its relics and buildings that span the history of civilization itself. However, unless you’re talking about its original roads, as in the ones built by the Roman Empire, not a lot is said of traffic in Rome. One interesting aspect of the modern Roman roadways is the GRA or the Grande Raccordo Anulare, which means "Great Ring Junction." It’s a circular road that surrounds the city like, obviously, a ring, and although Rome has its treasures and wonders, the GRA is certainly not one of them.
