No shit, Sherlock
I know this is the updated, revamped version, but I've spent the last few wekends watching the Jeremy Brett versions on Netflix streaming and now that I've seen them all, I really miss it. Brett so embodied not just the deserved confidence and arrogance of Holmes, but also the fussiness and the…

My Mazarati does 185
and it hails from Minneapolis:

It's not just Oprah and it's not without reason—as you say, "this message is arguable". The relative dearth of "Good Black Men" due to incarceration, interracial relationships, and a whole rack of other things that could constitute a separate conversation has made a lot of Black Women settle for less than they…

I think Viola Davis is also fairly selective, but with the main 'Law & Order' off the air, what's she got left?

In other news…
Despite sluggish economy, sales of pale white pancake make-up inexplicably continue to rise.

Agreed—and that's what I think this is to a degree. But whether he's out of his depth or merely playing it safe, he's taken the edge off the material and that's too bad. I've taught the play (and 'Dutchman' as well) and I really wanted this to be good. In other hands it might have been—but in other hands it wouldn't…

I know I'm late to the party—
I actually formulated a lot of this comment last week when I learned that this topic would be coming up, but then yesterday I had work or something and couldn't get it down—so I'm late, and nobody's reading, but here goes:

According to Ebert's review there is a character in the film (not from the play) that is described as "a rich closeted gay conducting a doomed marriage"—so maybe the answer is no? I know it's facile to read anyone whose shtick includes extensive melodrama, a theatre background and frequent appearancs in sassy drag, as…

Diversity is funny! But not the fact that any one of those is still more likely to show up in a quirky IFC bildungsroman than a typical middleclass African American Woman.

Bravo!

The Problem with Perry (or, alternately, The Trouble with Tyler)
I'm not going to defend Tyler Perry's "art", but I will suggest that in many ways he's the only game in town for middlebrow middleclass African American drama. As an earlier interview with Ice Cube pointed out—financing conventions mean that Black people…

"Why can't she seem to get any good parts?"

It's ridiculous on its face
If you were a foreign power trying to get a puppet agent elected in the United States would you choose and then spend the time and resources on a guy with as many red flags as Obama?

I don't mind spiders. I don't even mind those centipede things all that much—but when I first moved into the DC area I had a Laverne & Shirley model "garden style" apartment that was really a glorified cave (if you set a sheet of paper on the floor you could watch the corners curl up from the moisture—one morning I…

'White Dog' on my queue
'White Dog' just last week turned up on my Netflix streaming queue and I forgot why I had listed it (Sam Fuller) and so I keep passing it up. Now I'll have to go back and watch it. Fuller's 'Pick Up On South Street' is one of my alltime favorites.

So what's an example of a dog that acts well? The dog in 'Poltergeist' was pretty good, but I only mention it because I saw again recently, and because it was an example of a dog whose only purpose in the film was to act like the family dog—and not try to outdo Benji. It seems like dogs—and babies—are more or less on…

I grew up with dogs and always preferred them to cats until I lived with a cat—Now I understand that feline mystique. The thing about dogs is that they are, on the whole, pretty stupid and easily pleased. In most cases, if you feed them and give them a reasonable amount of attention, they'll stick with you and take…

I don't mean to suggest that it's anything like 'The Holy Mountain'—only that it is hallucinatory and, as Duke Ellington might have put it, "beyond category". But it reminds me of my college roommate Shecky, or rather, his older brother (known as Shecky Sr.), who had hundreds of VHS cassettes of every banned and/or…

bobloblaw is right—Maybe the review will go into this, but I wasn't all that confident about 'Session 9' until I realized that it took place and was shot in perhaps the greatest possible Horror movie location: The Danvers State Hospital:

"being in on the joke is so overrated"