Question: Is ABC just not airing the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments this year? I'll give the new version a run, but this is kind of something I look forward to every year. I do understand there is a DVD, by the way.
Answer: Consider this a public service: To steal from my upcoming review, the best thing I can say about the deadly dull and completely unnecessary new remake of The Ten Commandments is that ABC hasn't given up on running the 1956 classic version. My advice: Skip the new miniseries when it airs April 10 and 11, and wait until Saturday, April 15, when the Charlton Heston version airs. And yes, a 50th-anniversary edition DVD of Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winning spectacular has just been issued, packaged with DeMille's earlier (and by some accounts superior) 1923 silent version ...
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Question: I think you missed the boat on 7th Heaven when you called it "comfort food." Sure, there's the obligatory "feel good" message in a lot of episodes, but this show has as much soapy melodrama and misguided teen/young adult sexuality as any other Aaron Spelling production — it's just alluded to more than portrayed. Maybe it's only been since you stopped watching, but Simon went on a sexual frenzy; Martin got a girl pregnant; Mary abandoned her family; and Ruthie is throwing around words like "sexy" and "hot." I've been watching the show for about three years now, and I've always seen it as a devious vehicle for Spelling to portray the same youthful recklessness as his other shows while hiding it behind the goody-goody facade of a minister's family, with some excessively cheesy messages thrown in now and then to make it seem like family-friendly entertainment. But the subject matter is often not at all appropriate for the entire family.
Answer: Kind of like how Cecil B. deMille
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This Sunday at the Golden Globes, Michael Douglas collects the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. How does it feel? The actor — who turns 60 in September — admits to having some mixed emotions.
"I guess I gotta use a little more Grecian Formula in the hair," he cracks. "It's always a lovely honor. On the other side, you're never quite ready for it. You feel like someone's starting to put you out to pasture, at a time when you're still feeling pretty frisky.
"But it's very nice," he adds. "It takes a moment for you to do a little inventory and look back over the past 30 years at what you've accomplished. I'm relatively satisfied with what's there and how it's all turned out."
It bears noting that the Hollywood Foreign Press also DeMilled his dad, Kirk Douglas, back in 1968. "I guess it's the first time that people of the same family have won the DeMille award," Douglas says. "I'm beginning now to appreciate it a
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