Are TV shows getting dumber or am I getting smarter? (Commentary)
Are TV shows getting dumber or am I getting smarter? I’m not talking about TV as a whole, because obviously it’s dumber than it was 10 years ago. This is because of the influx of […]
Science Fiction
Where are we? ‘Lost’s’ final season starts tonight (TV commentary)
It’s appropriate that “Lost’s” two-hour final-season premiere (8 tonight, ABC) airs on Groundhog Day. Like the Bill Murray movie, “Lost” has done a lot of circular storytelling. First the characters were in 2004, then they jumped back to […]
Karen Traviss brings her clones into the brave new world of the Empire in ‘Imperial Commando: 501st’ (Book review)
The “Star Wars” movies are essentially the story of the Skywalker family, but there is so much more happening on a larger scale (the Clone Wars, and then the Galactic Civil War that grew from […]
James Cameron takes humanity to task in the breathtaking ‘Avatar’ (Movie review)
Twenty-five years ago in “The Terminator,” James Cameron worried that technology would spell the end of mankind. In his subsequent films, he continued to mull our arrogance about what we create. In “Aliens,” we had […]
John’s favorite movies of the Aughts (Commentary)
Next, here are my top 10 … OK, 20 … movies of the Aughts. 1. “Garden State” (2004) — I’m not going to lie: This is just a romantic fairy tale — average Joe finds true love with […]
John’s favorite TV shows of the Aughts (Commentary)
Next, here are my top 10 TV shows. Some started in the ’90s, but for this list, I am just showing the years they aired during this decade. This top 10 is front-loaded (the most […]
The best movies of the Aughts … as it happened (Commentary)
Sticking with the theme from my previous post, here are my No. 1 movies from the years 2000 through 2008, as I saw it at the end of each year.
Can’t-see TV: 16 sweet shows that aren’t on DVD or Hulu
TV commentary: These are the 16 best shows that can’t be seen anywhere — not on DVD, not on the Internet and not in syndication.
Fun with ‘The Clone Wars’: Guessing Ahsoka’s fate (TV commentary)
Don’t mix up “Clone Wars” and “The Clone Wars.” “Clone Wars” was the spin-off fiction produced from 2002-07; it included nine collected volumes of comic books (plus 10 volumes of the lighter “Clone Wars Adventures”) […]
‘V’ for political parable (TV review)
If “V” (7 p.m. Central Tuesdays on ABC) was just another alien invasion show, we could dismiss it out of hand. After all, there are only two alien invasion stories: 1, the aliens are evil, and we […]