Film / TV / Video
83 posts found
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COMEDY MATTERS (Albert Brooks)
"After 9/11, all I did was sit around and be scared," Albert Brooks told me recently. "After a year and a half," Brooks now says, "I just got tired of it." He wondered, "Why isn't this being processed? Do we never mention it?" Looking at what Hollywood was releasing to the public, he concluded that "most of the [current] movies take place in the past -- or are teenage sex comedies." Brooks decided to do something about it. His response,… -
Larry David Died for our Sinsw
Larry David, the producer-writer-star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has just finished airing the fifth season of his HBO program. Many people find him hilarious. Others find him annoying in the extreme. Both are right, of course, and David builds his humor out of this particular intersection of pain and pleasure. However, this season has been more than usually provocative, focusing on matters of identity -- Jewish identity. "Curb" has managed to offend all manner of Jews, from the observant to… -
Crystal Clear (700 Sundays)
Billy Crystal has something he wants to share with you. Crystal has had a diverse and varied career, with plenty of ups and downs, as a stand-up comic, a TV performer and a movie actor. On the one hand, he starred in "When Harry Met Sally," a movie that convinced many non-Jewish women to imagine that they were Meg Ryan and that they could find true happiness by sleeping with a short, funny Jew (we owe you big). On the… -
The Painted Bird - Revisited
Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty. In the years leading up to and following Kosinski's 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a series of revelations that the author employed uncredited editors and associates to produce his novels, and that much of Kosinski's personal history was fabricated. Nonetheless, the reputation of "The Painted… -
More than "Just Legal"
On Monday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m., the WB will premiere “Just Legal.†Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the current home-run king of TV, this is no “C.S.I.†clone, but rather a one-hour drama with occasional comic moments that is about the beauty, the promise, the reality and the heartbreak that is the American legal system. “Just Legal†stars Don Johnson as Grant H. Cooper, a demoralized attorney who operates out of a Venice office, a block from the circus-like boardwalk,… -
The Dream is Over (Dreamworks)
According to reports in various newspapers last week, NBC-Universal is contemplating acquiring DreamWorks’ live-action feature-film division, or as it used to be called, their movie studio. Regardless of whether the acquisition is consummated, it reflects a sad truth: Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen’s dream of creating a modern major studio has failed. When Spielberg & Co. first announced the idea of creating a studio, more than a decade ago, before they had even chosen a company name, their… -
Tommywood: "Raymond's End" (or Phil Rosenthal: Deli Lama) 5-06-05
Phil Rosenthal, the creator of “Everybody Loves Raymond,†which will end its nine-year run on CBS on May 16, and I are fressing at Barney Greengrass in Beverly Hills high atop Barney’s Department Store. It’s not that eating sable is the way I mourn (how is it that a fish can be named after a fur coat my mother owned?) — or that toasted bagels and cream cheese dulls the imminent loss of my favorite sitcom. The reason is altogether… -
Woodman Returns (Woody Allen)
At the end of Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda,†I sat in my seat stunned: Woody Allen had actually made a movie I liked — a good movie that had something to say about life and literature. It felt like a long time since I’d enjoyed one of his films. Many years ago, when Allen seemed intent on making ponderous paeans to Ingmar Bergman, I suggested he be strapped into a chair and forced to watch “Sullivan’s Travels†until he… -
Death of a Moralist (Arthur Miller)
Although Arthur Miller was only 33 when “Death of a Salesman†premiered on Broadway, it was a transformative moment in American drama, and Miller’s impact on successive generations of writers continues to this day. In “Death of a Salesman,†Miller was able to find poetry in the personal that transcended the mundane — while creating drama that mattered. Rod Serling, then in his 20s, attended the original production and saw the kind of moral drama about average people that he… -
The Award Goes to... (2004's Funniest moments on screen)
As the year ends, many of my correspondents (at least one) have been clamoring for the Tommywood Awards, a list of those defining moments in the past year — the best, the worst, the memorable. Frankly, my mind has already gone on vacation and the rest of me is soon to follow. So although I don’t rule out a “best of†list early in the New Year, I won’t trouble you or myself with that this week. Instead, the following… -
The Kid Still Stays in the Picture (Robert Evans)
Tommywood was expecting a Hollywood moment. Publicity guru extraordinaire Michael Levine had arranged for me to meet legendary Producer Robert Evans at his longtime lair, Woodland, the former home of Greta Garbo. I turned north of Sunset Boulevard and, like William Holden, wondered what I was getting myself into. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate Evans’ accomplishments. Evans, the former head of production at Paramount, was responsible for "Love Story," "The Godfather" and "Chinatown" among many other classic films. He… -
The End of 'Friends'
The last episode of "Friends" airs May 6, and while we may all express a collective sigh of relief at the end of more than a year of shameless hype and exploitation, it doesn’t mean that we can’t stop to reflect on this moment in American cultural history. Or that we don’t care about whether Ross and Rachel will get together. One may debate whether Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s "Friends" will join the ranks of comedy classics, but it…