'Dancing With The Stars': Did The Show Suffer This Season?
The words I have been hoping for since the third week of September were uttered by Tom Bergeron Tuesday night when he handed over the coveted Mirror Ball to Amber Riley and Derek Hough: our new...
View ArticleMiley Cyrus: PR Genius
Don't let her youth, angular haircuts, barely-there ensembles or the extra-long tongue fool you... Miley Cyrus is a PR genius, someone who is using the there-in-an instant media landscape to make...
View ArticleA Pratfall Too Far
Mike & Molly started with promise, settled into comfortable, and descended into being nearly unwatchable by making Molly, once a dedicated fourth grade teacher, into a careening mess. The retooled...
View ArticleThanksgiving and Russell Baker on Turkey-eating
"THANKSGIVING IS indeed the nearest thing we have to a national liturgy. From sea to shining sea, it calls forth a grand harmony of groaning boards...Yet, what must we think of a nation that, as the...
View ArticleAbout Time Movie Review: 5 Reasons You Should Watch It
Warning! Spoilers! The writing is wonderful. The casting and acting is spot on. But what else could we expect from Writer/Director Richard Curtis? He brought us Notting Hill and Love Actually. Mr....
View ArticleWhat GQ's Influence List Gets Wrong
GQ has released its list of the "25 Least Influential People." Here's the problem: The list measures the wrong thing. Before you say, "Lighten up, Connie," please consider that I get it. I've spent the...
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Drac is Back
From Hammer to The Hunger, Twilight to True Blood, when it comes to screen memes, vampires really do seem to be the gift that keeps on giving. But I'll confess that when I heard that Sky Living were...
View ArticleEnchanted Evening: Great Big Sea Comes to Tarrytown
Few bands are as evocative of time travel as Great Big Sea (GBS), so it's fitting that the final leg of the group's twentieth anniversary XX tour should include a stop in the historic heart of...
View ArticleHit and Myth: Nebraska
In the opening of Nebraska, written by Bob Nelson and directed by Alexander Payne, aging Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) limps with surly determination along the shoulder of a snow-framed Montana highway....
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Casting Our Perfectly Awful Thanksgiving Dinner
For some, breaking bread with people you actively try and avoid 364 days of the year is what Thanksgiving is all about. Between alcoholic uncles, racist grandparents, and that vegan cousin who just...
View ArticleEthan Hawke's Macbeth and the Small Engine Repair: Among Men
Ethan Hawke is a manly Macbeth in a leather skirt. The men in "the Scottish play" look good in skirts, even John Glover's "weird sister," with pendulous breasts. At this stylish "Macbeth" directed by...
View ArticleFilm Financing With State Tax Credits
The most important development in film financing over the last decade is the drastic expansion of state tax credits for film production. These state tax credits come in two basic flavors: those that...
View ArticleOf Phil Spector, Marshmallows and Ebb Tides
During the early 1960s, my father, songwriter Carl Sigman, and many of his "Great American Songbook" contemporaries watched in horror as airwaves and record stores were overrun by alien creatures...
View ArticleBouncing Booties, Bounties and Bankruptcy: PR Pardons for 2013
It's been a tough PR year for President Barack Obama. Between the botched roll-out of his Affordable Care Act and the shenanigans at the NSA, he probably wants to wring a lot of necks right about now,...
View Article10 Times Midnight Memories Changed Your Life
It's finally here ladies and gents! Directioners everyone can now (legally) enjoy One Direction's new album Midnight Memories! After fighting to not listen to the album when it leaked, we all know it...
View ArticleThankful for IDFA Documentary Market & RIP Peter Wintonick, 'King of Docs'
"...Time and memory are the only subjects of every film" -- Peter Wintonick (1953-2013) For deal making, and bringing one's documentary project to the next level, with great partners, there is nothing...
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8 Days of Thanksgivvukah in Picture Quotes
For the next eight days I will post one thing I am grateful or ungrateful for on each day in honor of Thanksgivvukah. I let my big hair down and compiled this list in picture quote format. Let me know...
View ArticlePutting the "F" Word in Its Place
I've come to the conclusion that, with few exceptions, stand-up comics who use the "F" word are simply lazy and untalented. I don't reach that conclusion as a prude from whose lips the word has never...
View ArticleWatch: Stories You Won't Believe From Some of the World's Dirtiest Jobs
Are people who do physically demanding, not-afraid-to-get-dirty jobs like farming, mining and sheep castration (yes, you read that right) the happiest people on earth? So says Mike Rowe, host of the...
View Article"Christmas in Conway" Is a Winner For the Hallmark Hall of Fame
TV Review Jackie K Cooper "Christmas in Conway" (Hallmark Hall of Fame) With its latest production, "Christmas in Conway," the Hallmark Hall of Fame reaches back to its emotional roots and delivers a...
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