I sure hope you didn’t skip 24’s literally explosive Night 2—seriously (as Shonda Rhimes would say), how dark is this new season already?—for the Golden Globes Monday night. All the flowing wine seemed to have loosened and thickened nearly everyone’s tongue, resulting in long speeches that combined with a sluggish pace and an epic number of ads to push the show beyond the 11 pm/ET cutoff time. (You know an awards show is badly time-managed when the seriously big winners are forced to hurry through their speeches.)Anyway, to have had a good time, it looks like you really did have to be there this year. And partake of the bubbly.Imagine the collective yawns and groans across the land when that international bummer Babel (this year’s overly contrived Crash) took home the best drama trophy, handed out by Arnold Schwarzenegger on crutches that could have been a symbol for the whole wobbly though star-studded evening.But enough about movies, with this except...
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"What's with all the carnage lately?" a viewer e-mailed me recently. He has a point. The body count on TV this season has been unusually high.
For some, these tragic twists seem like cheap stunts, a real turn-off. For me, they're a reason to tune in. Not because I'm blood thirsty. But on shows where the stakes are high — shows like 24, Lost, The Shield, The Sopranos, even a fantasy like Smallville — I expect to be taken out of my comfort zone into a world where bad things can happen at any time to characters we care about.
Facing mortality is essential to any morality play. When Shannon was fatally shot by Ana Lucia on Lost, it cast a pall of suspicion and grief over the merging of the survivors. When Smallville's Clark Kent lost his beloved father figure Jonathan to a heart attack, it was a necessary rite of passage for this superhero-in-the-making.
Nowhere has the death rate been higher than on 24
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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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