Kari Ann Marquart of L7 Women's Magazine asked me to weigh in on the upcoming TV season.
Five New and Five Returning Shows to Watch This Fall "Boardwalk Empire created quite a stir with its season two finale that caused many to be taken completely aback when the writers killed off a main character. 'The events in the last episode make it hard to wait for its return,' LaScala said. 'I have to just put it out of my head or else I get too anxious for the show to start again.' Watch to see how season three of this Prohibition-era television show plays out on Sept. 16th at 9/8c on HBO."Click through to read the rest (and see many more examples of me stumping for my favorite shows).
I interviewed Ben Schwartz about his TV projects: Parks and Recreation, House of Lies, and Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja, but this was my favorite question I got to ask:
Finally, when certain people in this office are in kind of a down mood, it's possible they use this video of you and Zooey Deschanel signing "You Belong to Me" to cheer up. Can you say how that came about?
That’s amazing! That’s so sweet. That came about because my friend Sophia Rossi created a website called HelloGiggles with the talented Zooey Deschanel and Molly McAleer. Sophia asked me to do a video for them around the time when they launched, and I asked Zooey if she wanted to sing an old song that Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters sang from The Jerk. Zooey is a professional singer and amazing at just about everything, so I was so lucky when she said yes. She learned the song on her ukulele in two seconds. We hit record on Sophia’s laptop, sang it a few times, and picked our favorite take. I love that people are watching it. The trick is to get someone who is an amazing singer to sing with you, then hopefully she sings loud enough to make everyone forget that you are singing, too.
Click here to read the full interview.
Photo: DISNEY XD/RICK ROWELL
'Go On': Matthew Perry's Sarcastic Charm
Ryan joins a group for people “in transition.” While so many new sitcoms in the wake of Modern Family‘s success are offering different permutations of “the family,” this one sets up early to showcase people learning to cope without theirs. But this deviation from the current trend doesn’t mean that Go On is devoid of all sitcom tropes. Ryan is all too familiar in a couple of aspects. First, he’s a diehard sports fan who can’t talk about his “feelings.” As the typical alpha male, he cracks jokes about his own tragedy and denies that he needs to grieve: “If I go see a shrink,” he says, “My dad would roll around in his grave. At last I think he’s dead. We don’t talk about that kind of thing.” He’s also conventional in his need for help. Like Will in Good Will Hunting and pretty much every reluctant-patient-in-therapy TV show or movie except One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ryan finds the group helpful.
Click through to read the rest of the review at PopMatters.
Each year, putting together the Fall Arts Preview for the September issue is my favorite assignment. You can read it online, but our designer's layouts really make the feature what it is, so I suggest downloading the PDF. It's long, so I'll break it out into different sections before posting the feature in its entirety. First up: the fall movie preview.
And here's the entire thing in one shot. You can read it online,or download the PDF above.
Nabbed!
A round-up of URLs that Westchester-based groups nabbed first, such as artscenter.org and writerscenter.org Home Theater
The Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, and Damsels in Distress
Amos, Lee, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Whoopi Goldberg, Dionne Warwick, and The 5 Browns
'The Hunger Games' Looks More Like the Past than the Future -- and Too Much Like the Present
"The book covers a lot of ground, from wealth inequality to the media’s desensitization to violence. It’s a good thing, then, that the adaptation landed in the hands of a director as confident as Gary Ross. He understands that the movie should stand for itself, as opposed to functioning as a staged reading of the novel. The most important shift, and ultimately the most successful one, is the decision to liberate the movie from Katniss’s point of view. The movie is thankfully voiceover-free—which would’ve been a cheap, easy way to sneak in both Katniss’s reactions and Suzanne Collins’s words—and actors’ facial expressions are allowed to stand-in for pages of inner monologue. The universe of the movie unfolds without being over-explained. Ross trusts his actors’ performances to get across the information we need to know without necessarily saying it, and he trusts the audience to absorb all of the movie’s nuances without underlining every revelation and reaction." Click through to read the rest of the review at PopMatters.