As any reader of this site knows, being fluent in pop culture has its own rewards. But those Type A sorts among you will be excited to hear that Entertainment Weekly has partnered with GetGlue to actually reward you for checking out the recommendations in our weekly Must List. READ FULL STORY »
Archive: March 2011 (301-310 of 379)
Mar 7
2011
12:09 PM ET
Sarah Palin: Kathy Griffin's a '50-year-old, adult bully,' 'a has-been comedienne'
The feud between Kathy Griffin and Sarah Palin marches on, and this weekend, Palin took a few jabs via Fox News. When asked for comment about Griffin’s rumored upcoming role as a Palin-type Tea Party politician on Glee, the former Alaska gov responded: “You know, Kathy Griffin can do anything to me or say anything about me, because, you know, she’s a 50-year-old adult bully, really, is what she is — kind of a has-been comedienne.” READ FULL STORY »
Mar 7
2011
11:20 AM ET
'After Lately' premiere: Chelsea, don't try so hard
Image Credit: Brandon Hickman/E!Part of late night show Chelsea Lately’s appeal is the seeming lack of effort involved by the people producing it: Chelsea Handler has a hard time reading the prompter and knows it, Chuy the Nugget recites poorly written jokes but makes them funny by mangling them, and the roundtable comedians acknowledge that they’re part of something delightfully slapdash. To me, the show is best when I put as little effort in watching it–it works well as background noise while I’m cleaning, reading a magazine, or playing Angry Birds. After Lately, the new behind-the-scenes pseudo-reality series that follows what happens before and after filming Chelsea Lately, doesn’t seem like it takes too much time out of the staff’s workday, but I was almost hoping for even less effort. READ FULL STORY »
Mar 7
2011
11:03 AM ET
Charlie Sheen admits first 'Sheen's Korner' sucked, dedicates second episode to dead pug Betty
Charlie Sheen has admitted via Twitter that his inaugural live Internet broadcast “Sheen’s Korner” was ”treasonous to the movement” Saturday night. He said it was “my bad” and promised that a “video solution” would be coming soon. EW’s Chris Nashawaty sat through the 50-minute event and dubbed it, “a sloppy, self-indulgent bit of cringe theater that felt more like cable-access snoozefest than a cogent broadcast.” Sheen, Nashawaty reports, took swipes at Dr. Drew Pinsky, praised Sean Penn, quoted Wall Street, and showed photos of cats beating up dogs. Ten minutes in, the number of viewers, which had climbed to well over 100,000, began to decline. Perhaps Sheen earned a little respect for the writers of Two and a Half Men… READ FULL STORY »
Mar 7
2011
02:00 AM ET
'Breakout Kings' Premiere: Cops and criminals unite! Also, clichés galore.
Image Credit: Mitch Jenkins/A&E Breakout Kings, which premiered last night on A&E, is unfortunately not a Breaking Bad spin-off. It’s a cop show. No, wait, I’m wrong. It’s a cop show about cops who aren’t cops (seriously, ask them) because they’re convicts! But still cops. So, yes, it’s a cop show, but it’s (trying to be) a little different. If Guy Ritchie were stuck in solitary confinement for a month and forced to watch nothing but NYPD Blue and Ocean’s Eleven, this is the television show that he would produce on the 31st day. (Irish fighting sequence? Check. Fast talking criminals? Check. Quick camera moves with freeze and titles to introduce characters? Double check.) It’s a bit formulaic, but what can you expect from such a well-trodden genre? It feels like cop shows have been around since Zworkin patented the kinescope. In a world currently showing three CSIs and three Law & Orders, do we need another detective show? And more importantly, will this fill the Jeremy Sisto-sized hole in our hearts?
Mar 7
2011
12:02 AM ET
'America's Next Great Restaurant' premiere: Perfect Mediocrity
Image Credit: Byron Cohen/NBCThe key to understanding America’s Next Great Restaurant is to realize that the title is an outright lie. The purpose of NBC’s new reality show isn’t to create a “great” restaurant — it’s to create a solid concept for a chain of restaurants, an idea that can be franchised up and repackaged throughout the country. Not for nothing does the show feature Steve Ells, the founder and CEO of Chipotle, as one of the main mentor/judge figures. Now, I love Chipotle. There’s one right down the street from my apartment, and I go there so often that the evening shift and the noon shift know my usual. From a capitalist perspective, I admire Chipotle’s simplicity. From a taste perspective, I love their burritos. It’s functional-plus: Relatively cheap food that’s relatively good for me and tastes relatively good while only requiring me to wait a relatively short time. But I would never call Chipotle “great.” READ FULL STORY »
Mar 6
2011
11:50 PM ET
ABC's 'Secret Millionaire': Why it sends the wrong message
Image Credit: ABCOn Sunday ABC premiered its new philanthropic reality series Secret Millionaire. A conceptual cousin to Undercover Boss, each episode features a member of the super-rich going undercover to scout out charities for possible televised donations. Needless to say, I have mixed feelings about the show, which formerly aired on Fox in 2008. While it’s admirable that ABC is giving deserving non-profit organizations much-needed publicity that they wouldn’t receive otherwise, the narrative impulse of the series—based largely around rich folks encountering the less fortunate—reveals much about how lacking our national dialogue on poverty remains. READ FULL STORY »
Mar 6
2011
05:11 PM ET
'Firefly' debuts on Science Channel tonight. We'll be watching. Will you? (Plus: Exclusive video!)
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection Firefly – about a tight-knit band of war-scarred smugglers, seekers and runaways eeking out a semi-honest living in the final frontier of newly colonized space — is remembered as one of the great shoulda-been/coulda-been TV tragedies of the young century. A quirky blend of sci-fi space saga and Western frontier adventure, the short-lived Fox series arrived in the fall of 2002 with great expectations from critics and geek pop fans alike thanks to the pedigree of its creator: Joss Whedon, the acclaimed mastermind behind Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, an ace dramatist with a distinctive voice renowned for telling stories great with wit, scope, heady themes and psychologically complex, emotionally accessible characters. Also? Much with the Whedon Speaky and cool pop culture references. Buffy and Angel had been youth-skewing niche hits for The WB (and, during Buffy’s last two seasons, UPN); the hope was that Firefly would appeal to bigger, broader audience on Fox. It didn’t. The show – airing on Friday nights – premiered with 6.3 million viewers and declined from there. Fox cancelled the series, airing only 11 of 14 episodes produced by Whedon. Those who had taken an instant liking to the show – a tribe of fans who called themselves Browncoats – were heartbroken, as was Whedon and his cast, led by its breakout star, Nathan Fillion. An attempt to pull a Star Trek and keep the Firefly creative world alive as a movie franchise failed to launch: Despite admiring reviews, the Whedon-helmed 2005 feature Serenity grossed just $38.8 million worldwide. The dream of more Firefly was finally extinguished. READ FULL STORY »
Mar 6
2011
11:03 AM ET
Johnny Depp's 'Rango': Its top six riffs on classic movies
Image Credit: Everett Collection; Kobal Collection; Everett Collection(3)
In Rango, Johnny Depp voices a pet lizard who fancies himself an actor, only to find himself lost in the desert and drawing fire from the hardscrabble local critters with his tough-guy act. The comedy draws on Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah shoot-’em’ups for inspiration, but the film shout-outs don’t stop there.
Director Gore Verbinski, who worked with Depp on the previous three Pirates of the Caribbean movies says Rango is kind of a “film within a film,” packed full of movie references because Rango is such a storytelling buff and sees everything through that lens. For example, when he staggers into the town of Dirt, which is wasting away from a lack of water, suddenly the Chinatown references start popping up.
“We have a character who is literate in the Greeks and Shakespeare, but I think also in Leone, and Peckinpah and in this case Polanski,” says Verbinski. “The whole world is in some way a byproduct of his mind, and all the references are there because we have an actor as a protagonist.”
Here are some of Rango’s coolest movie riffs …
- Prev
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- Next
Latest News
- Demi Moore: 911 call from home released
- 'Big Bang' vs. 'Idol': Tight ratings race
- Sundance '12: Star portraits, day 6
- Will Ferrell...in a telenovela?: First Look!
- 'The Voice': Exclusive sneak peek!
- 'Gossip Girl': 'Gasp' moment on Monday
- 'Ferris Bueller' returns in Super Bowl ad?
- Robert Hegyes, 'Kotter' costar, dies
