Ashland High School graduate David Fincher received his second Academy Award nomination early Tuesday morning when “The Social Network,” the film about the founding of Facebook earned him a nod as Best Director. Fincher, who has always won the Golden Globe and the National Board of Review honor for the film, shares the Best Director [...]
“What does God need with a starship?” — James T. Kirk When dealing with life’s imponderables, it’s always best to turn to the Shat. In today’s case, to the screenplay William Shatner wrote for “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” universally regarded as the worst of the movies based on the original “Star Trek” series. [...]
I really wanted to use this space and your time to talk about Harry Potter … but even the teen wizard has lost his place atop the pop universe this week to the soap opera that has become the finals of “Dancing With The Stars.” As we know, the melodrama concerns the continuing presence of Bristol [...]
Election Day has come and, for the most part, gone. And now that the silly preliminaries have been taken care of, we can get down to the voting that actually matters. Who will win “Dancing With The Stars”? Or, more to the point, who won’t receive the coveted Mirror Ball Trophy after grueling weeks of [...]
It’s often been said that high school is the most important time of our lives, but that’s rarely followed up with the reason why. In the end, it’s simple: No matter how many years you spend in high school, you never leave. Ever. The latest evidence of this comes in the form of a study [...]
Octomom is writing her autobiography. Snooki is writing her autobiography. Jay-Z is releasing a memoir that details the meaning of his lyrics. Celebrities with even less recognition than Octomom and Snooki and Jay-Z are writing their autobiographies. Or, at least, someone is writing their autobiographies for them. But no memoir has created the stir in the [...]
Of the many ingenious, humanitarian efforts spawned by the Internet — including Justin Bieber’s new line of nail polishes — nothing had the simple genius of the attempt by Seattle resident James Burns to rid the world of Weezer. Burns has set up a website asking for donations toward his goal of collecting $10 million [...]
Sometimes in life, it’s better to fail big than to achieve moderate success. In television, the annual race to be the biggest failure comes after the start of the fall season … when the first new show gets canceled. This year’s biggest loser is “Lone Star,” a FOX dramatic soap about a con artist living [...]
In case you have been too preoccupied with matters of actual importance, director Casey Affleck has admitted that, indeed, his “documentary” of actor Joaquin Phoenix’s descent into madness was a hoax. I’m reminded of a great headline from The Onion, “Madonna Shocks Seven,” which basically summed up that the Immaterial Girl’s act had gone stale. [...]
In the 1999 film “Man on the Moon,” Jim Carrey portrayed the late, great Andy Kaufman, whose great trick was finding humor on a plane of existence outside of our comfort zones. ”Throwing out punchlines that were never there,” R.E.M. wrote in “The Great Beyond,” the second of the group’s two songs about Kaufman. In the [...]