More Broadcast TV Moves Online: CBS Enters Market

August 16, 2006
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More Broadcast TV Moves Online: CBS Enters Market

CBS TV will begin offering free, streaming, next-day video of primetime shows online this fall, the LA Times reports. According to the Times story, CBS will have the most online primetime programming of any broadcast network, offering seven programs, nearly a third of the net’s primetime schedule. CBS is making several of the network’s most popular shows available, plus one new one, the Times reports: The company will make available "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," "CSI: Miami," "CSI: New York," "NCIS," "Numb3rs," "Survivor" and its new…

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“Cracked” Magazine Returns

August 16, 2006
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“Cracked” Magazine Returns

  One of the more successful Mad magazine imitators (in terms of longevity), Cracked, is back in publication after a two-year hiatus. The magazine, now 48 years old, was originally aimed at adolescent males and is now targeting the 18-34 demographic, the new adolescent males. The magazine is available on newstands now, and sample articles are available on the magazine’s website.  According to the press release from the new publisher: Michael Ian Black, a character actor who appeared regularly in the cancelled NBC TV series…

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Film Critics Under Fire

August 15, 2006
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Film Critics Under Fire

An article in today’s Los Angeles Times observes that the reputation of the American film critic appears to be at an all-time low: The new trailer for Paramount’s upcoming numskull comedy "Jackass: Number Two" is full of quotes from reviews of the first movie. There’s just one tiny twist: The studio uses the vitriolic reviews attacking the first film ("A disgusting, repulsive, grotesque spectacle" says an aghast Richard Roeper) to promote the new picture. With a sly, leering note of triumph, the narrator intones: "Unfortunately…

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Theft or Canny Marketing Ploy: You Decide

August 14, 2006
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Forthcoming TV programs are increasingly appearing on peer-to-peer networks, evidently without the owners’ permission. Pretty much everything ends up on these file-sharing networks, so it’s no great surprise that yet-to-be-aired TV programs are turning up, but the downloads, and the underground publicity surrounding the programs, are actually affecting TV networks’ programming decisions, the Wall Street Journal reports: A new television show called "Jericho" has a small but dedicated group of fans, who’ve been buzzing about the show online. The reaction has been surprising — considering…

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Thomas Kinkade Moves In

August 14, 2006
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Thomas Kinkade Moves In

The Thomas Kinkade company reports that a new development in Columbia, Missouri, will feature homes modeled on the popular artists’ paintings:  Thomas Kinkade- inspired homes will be featured in a new master-planned community in Columbia, MO, announced HST Group, LLC, the Northwest-based real estate development firm in charge of the project. About 100 luxury homes will feature architectural designs inspired by the artwork of Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light(TM)" and world-renowned artist. "The homes will be reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade’s charming cottages that are…

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Ramsay’s TV Nightmares

August 13, 2006
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Ramsay’s TV Nightmares

The two-hour, season-ending episode of the Fox TV program Hell’s Kitchen airs tomorrow night beginning at 8 EDT. It’s a reality program in which a dozen contestants vie to become the head chef of a multimillion dollar Las Vegas restaurant that is in the process of being built in a new resort. The program stars English celebrity chef enfant terrible Gordon Ramsay, and the gimmick is that Ramsay verbally abuses the contestants as they try to cook dinners in his Los Angeles restaurant named Hell’s…

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Dixie Chicks Abandon Dixie, and Vice Versa

August 12, 2006
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Dixie Chicks Abandon Dixie, and Vice Versa

There is a mad variety of entertainment choices available to the average American today, and celebrities would do well to remember that. Their popularity is always due in large part to a magical combination of talent (not always necessary in any great amount), guile, ambition (absolutely essential), and pure luck that creates a desire on the part of total strangers to welcome these people into our humdrum lives. The one thing that all celebrities have in common—the only thing they all have in common, in…

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NYC Fringe Festival

August 11, 2006
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The New York International Fringe Festival opens today in the city that never sleeps, kicking off 16 days of theater in 20 venues. It’s an offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which I wrote about recently in these pages. As I’ve noted earlier on this site (here and here), an interesting and essential aspect of the Omniculture is that "the counterculture continuously becomes the culture. If you want to know what is going to surround you tomorrow in American culture, look at what is on…

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Stone’s World Trade Center Movie

August 10, 2006
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World Trade Center, Oliver Stone’s film about the 9/11 attacks, is really about just one aspect of the events of that day. As has been widely reported, World Trade Center tells the story of two New York City Port Authority policeman who went into one of the Twin Towers, as part of a team of five, and were buried in rubble when the first tower collapsed. They survived the subsequent collapses of two other buildings in the seven-building WTC complex, and were rescued after enduring…

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Pirates a Huge Hit, Critics Wrong Again

August 10, 2006
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Pirates a Huge Hit, Critics Wrong Again

Here’s another interesting bit of news from Disney: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest has taken in over $800 million worldwide thus far. Disney spent a very large amount of money on promotiing the film, to be sure, but that doesn’t always work. Hence, $800 mil is an impressive box office intake for a film that got mediocre to poor reviews. I thought Pirates II was terrific, and I’m glad to see that the audiences once again outsmarted the critics. ‘Tis often thus.  

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Disney Profits Soar As Company Goes Back to Roots

August 10, 2006
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Profits at the Walt Disney Company have soared as the studio has been moving back into family programming and jettisoning its adult-oriented ventures, according to Reuters. Disney CEO Robert Iger has quickly reversed the move toward a hipper, edgier approach spearheaded by longtime Disney head Michael Eisner. Disney grew rapidly under Eisner’s leadership, but much of that growth in the early years can be attributed to Jeffrey Katzenberg, who rejuvenated the company’s film division with its turn toward spunkier animated movies. Subsequent growth was based…

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Stone’s WTC Disaster Flick

August 9, 2006
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Stone’s WTC Disaster Flick

I know, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center opens today, but I’m busy working, so I’ll just save that one for later. Does that seem crass? Is it an obligation on my part, as a critic and, much more important, as a citizen? Is this like church?   I don’t think so. I was very impressed with the earlier theatrical treatment of these events, United 93. It showed in microcosm the struggle that was to come in the War on Terror, and it was very moving…

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Culture and Population

August 8, 2006
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Culture and Population

The eminent poet and philosopher Frederick Turner provides some big-picture, civilization-level cultural commentary in an excellent article in TCS Daily today, thinking about why some societies die out and others manage to hang on or even thrive. Turner’s thesis: that people who have a sense of life beyond themselves tend to have children and build for a future they will probably not live to share. After demonstrating that birth rates, not environmental or social catastrophes, best explain population declines such as those of ancient Rome…

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A Program I Will Never See….

August 8, 2006
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As I’ve pointed out before, in the Omniculture, everything happens. A particularly vivid current proof of that is the Fuse Network television program Pants-Off Dance-Off, "the only naked dancing game show on television," as Fuse describes it. The content is exactly what you might expect, given the title: "ordinary" people strip off their clothes, to the accompaniment of rock music, before the hungry cameras of an obscure music video channel. The participants are nonprofessional, and their naughty bits are tastefully covered with video "towels" when…

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Richard Matheson’s Evocative Vampire-Zombie Story

August 8, 2006
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Richard Matheson’s Evocative Vampire-Zombie Story

Warners Bros. has announced that its film adaptation of I Am Legend, the 1953 horror novel by Richard Matheson, will be released on Nov. 21, 2007, according to Reuters. Matheson’s novel has been seen as a response to McCarthyism, and it can be read as such, but that limits its meaning unnecessarily. In fact it is a strong assertion of individualism and against forced social conformity in general. As such it is very much a product of its time, as the Omniculture began to form…

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
"To judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products."—Ilana Mercer

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