Starz Originals: ‘Head Case’ & ‘Hollywood Residential’
Starz has a long way to go before it attains the quality of HBO or Showtime. The cable channel’s original shows just aren’t all that original. I guess that comment pertains more to the unfortunate airing of the home makeover parody Hollywood Residential than it does to Head Case. Both shows premiere on Wednesday, Jan. 23 on Starz, with Head Case celebrating it’s expansion from a 15-minute comedy to a full half-hour show. I didn’t love Head Case when I first saw it, but at a quarter-hour, the show had a pace that made up for its often patronizing, Hollywood insider humor. Thankfully, the half-hour version keeps its momentum. With Alexandra Wentworth as Dr. Goode, therapist to the B-list stars, you still get the female equivalent of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, only with patients instead of subordinates. It’s hard...
Read MoreTV Review: Hard as Nails
I grew up in the same city as Justin Fatica, a Catholic youth minister who infuses his religious program with a touch of Scared Straight. It’s a small city with a predominantly Catholic citizenry. Fatica, a Catholic, attended the region’s most notable Catholic high school (one that is still boys only). The HBO documentary Hard as Nails follows Fatica as he builds his controversial Catholic ministry, Hard as Nails. Fatica’s ministry is intense and extreme by any measure, but when he’s preaching to Catholic youth who are used to convention and not conviction, the experience is visibly jarring for those being evangelized. Though the ministry builds a team of youth ministers, all of whom share the same clarity of faith, none are nearly as powerful as Fatica, who may even have the audience converted by the end of the...
Read MoreTV Review: I Am an Animal
Late in the documentary I Am an Animal, PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco says that PETA founder and president Ingrid Newkirk believes there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If that’s the case, PETA could have used a scathing indictment and not this boring, balanced portrait. I Am an Animal is at once a profile of Newkirk, an historical look a PETA, a contemporary tale of animal activism and a look at PETA’s controversial publicity machine. After catching the recent release Your Mommy Kills Animals, a documentary on the history of the animal rights movement which didn’t have anything kind to say about PETA and its fundraising over fur-saving, I fully expected this film to be a rebuttal. It’s not. It’s hardly anything. With fairness in its sights, I Am an Animal, in a mere 75 minutes, woefully attempts to...
Read MoreTV Review: To Die in Jerusalem
To Die in Jerusalem (2007)–*** To Die in Jerusalem, a documentary account of two mothers in mourning after an 18-year-old Palestinian girl’s martyrdom operation kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, leaves the viewer with two questions in the end: who will lay down their arms first and who should lay them down? It’s not surprising, the questions we are asking, because they are the same questions we were asking before the documentary. To Die in Jerusalem doesn’t claim to answer either question, but rather shows the audience the ideological stalemate through the eyes of mothers who lost their daughters. The daughters are Rachel and Ayat, the former being an Israeli teen who went to the supermarket for her mother and the latter being a suicide bomber. Both girls look eerily similar with long dark hair, dark eyes, and dark complexions....
Read MoreDVD Review: 30 Rock – Season 1
There are some books that you can’t put down. And then there are some DVD sets that you can’t stop watching. NBC’s 30 Rock is too hilarious and too lovable to merely casually watch one episode at a time. The half-hour comedy, set in the world of late-night TV, is a riotous laugher that tempts first time viewers with seven and a half hours of marathon-worthy episodes. Starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock follows Liz Lemon (Fey), head writer and producer of The Girlie Show. Lemon’s show is a safe, secure hit until GE exec Jack Donaghy (Baldwin) takes over as Vice President of Television and Microwave Oven Programming. Donaghy, the author of Jack Attack: The Art of Aggression, sees a hit that can do boffo business outside of the show’s mostly female audience. Before Lemon can...
Read MoreTV Review: Weeds, Season 3 (Episodes 1-4)
Weeds has always been on the periphery of a larger scale political debate. Sure, it’s a show about a white woman in a suburban California city who sells weed to the upper middle class locals, but it always appeared to be a dramedy first. It wasn’t until season two bridged into season three that I realized how much Weeds really reflected the culture at large. To catch up, Weeds follows the widowed Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) as she sells marijuana here and there to make some cash to pay for the finer things in her suburban paradise. Stretched to the limit by the affluent lifestyle the now single mother wants to keep, Nancy ventures deeper into the world of dealing. Her African-American, working-class supplier, Heylia (Tonye Patano), pushes her around a little too much, forcing the assertive, ambitious...
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