WHY WE LOVE RAYMOND Nice cold open on Everybody Loves Raymond tonight. Deborah, played by one of our heroes, Patricia Heaton, comes in all cheery. She announces that she has just come from a church meeting, during which she signed up to do charity work at a local homeless shelter. Ray is non-plussed until she adds that she also signed Ray up to be a volunteer at a local hospital. Ray: Oh, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? Deborah: Because that’s what people do. When... Read more

STILL GAGGING ON GANGS I woke up in a crabby mood this morning, and dragged myself to Mass snarling and feeling annoyed. Poor Jesus. This is, no doubt, a hangover from having been slimed by Gangs of New York last night. Who says movies don’t affect culture? I am in a definitely iconoclastic frame of mind today, and it’s all because of a movie. The question is, what in the movie left such a slime residue? It seems to me... Read more

SCORSESE GANGS UP ON THE AUDIENCE Just saw Gangs of New York tonight. This is such an awful movie that I can’t even bring myself to relive it for the purposes of reviewing it. The only thing more repugnant than the graphic brutality and filmmaking excesses in this over-long piece of cinematic pretension, is the fact that it is nominated for TEN Academy Awards! It’s the kind of project that makes me want to run from Hollywood, and go get... Read more

I’LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS CHURCH AGAIN Here goes… Okay, I admit it. I was bored and confused during The Fellowship of the Rings. I started looking at my watch after only thirty minutes of The Two Towers, and then, kept looking at it every five minutes for the next two and a half hours. The idea of having to sit through one more of these dark and dripping marathons this November is casting a dreary pall over the... Read more

THIS YEAR’S ACADEMY AWARDS GAYLA Michael Medved puts together some “Good grief! What are we going to do?!” numbers in his column over at World Net Daily. “The Advocate, America’s most prestigious homosexual magazine, published a list of the 10 top gay films for 2002, and seven of those 10 emerged as major Oscar contenders.” I was aware of having been smashed on the head with the piano sized lesbian themes in The Hours, and the bi-sexual themes in Frida,... Read more

THE PIANIST HITS THE SAME TERRIBLE NOTES We’ve seen this movie already. We’ve seen it hundreds of times. We’ve seen it much better. The latest entry in the extensive catalog of Holocaust films adds nothing to our understanding of the many issues surrounding the terrible years of Nazi power. As always, we have the shocking brutality of the German soldiers, and the incomprehensible passivity of the Jewish people as they are led to the slaughter. We get to see innumerable... Read more

AND THE WINNER ISN’T THE AUDIENCE It’s award season here in Tinseltown. If you think the few award shows you people in “fly-over” get to see on TV are annoying, you should be here for the ad nauseum infinitum Gush Fest that we all have to endure from January to April. We’ve got hundreds of award ceremonies from every possible sub-set of the industry, and, beyond, from every public policy group which wants to make a point and raise some... Read more

SEND A MESSAGE TO HOLLYWOOD – BUY A TICKET! Do your part to hasten cultural renewal. Skip Daredevil next weekend, and go see God’s and Generals instead. People outside of “the industry” do not appreciate how much importance is attached to a movie’s opening weekend. Religious people tend to stay away from a new release until a few weekends have gone by…or, much more devastatingly to our hopes of changing the film industry, to wait for things to come out... Read more

FOR THE “WE DON’T EAT IT, WE JUST COOK IT” FILES AP reports this week that the instances of sexually explicit material on television has increased in the last year. This is news to no one, it seems, except the people who make TV shows. “I am blown away … at how much sexual content there is in primetime television,” said Paramount Television president Garry Hart. “It’s a tidal wave.” It’s like that great scene in Casablanca, when the Claude... Read more

CHICAGO! With a well-deserved 13 Academy Award nominations, Chicago is my pick for pretty much Best Everything this year. The only exception is Queen Latifah’s nod for Supporting Actress. Her performance was stilted, in a role that could have been one more fabulous quirk in a film that is a quirky rush. I loved this film. I wanted to see the opening number again, immediately after it was over. The storytelling here is great – first time Director Rob Marshall... Read more