The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade is, like its writers, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, many things. It is an autobiography of the writers; a chronicle of how posting a web comic strip back in 1998 led to a company that publishes the web comic; has set up a multi-million dollar charity, and created the […]
Tag: Satire
TELEVISION: The Best and Worst of 2008!
There was an overwhelming amount of great TV, this year [and, as you’ll see not too much later, an almost equally overwhelming amount of excessively bad TV]. Given the truly amazing amount of quality to be found between the networks and the various cable outlets, I’ve decided to list my favorite fifteen shows of the […]
DVD REVIEW: They’re Finally Here – The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: The Best of Season 3!
I remember, with great fondness, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Tom and Dick Smothers started out as a comedy/folk duo, playing clubs like the legendary Purple Onion. When CBS offered them their own TV show, they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. The Brothers Smothers started fairly innocuously, but as the […]
MOVIE REVIEW: City of Ember: The World Ends But Life Goes On… For Awhile!
When a movie begins with a narrator intoning, “The day the world ended…” you can be sure that there’s a caveat somewhere. With City of Ember that caveat is that a bunch of the best and brightest built an underground city so mankind could live on. An ingenious device was placed in a box that […]
TELEVISION: The Starter Wife: Hollywood Ex-Wife’s Tale Darkly Funny!
Last year’s mini-series The Starter Wife chronicled the events that led to Molly Kagan’s [Debra Messing] new, less wonderful life after her Hollywood producer husband, Kenny Kagan [David Allen Basche] told her he wanted a divorce. The mini-series did so well that USA decided to bring it back as an ongoing series [Fridays, 9/8C]. The […]
DVD REVIEW: Quark: The Complete Series: Children and Quasi-Norms First!
In May, 1977, NBC premiered a [very] short-lived satirical science fiction series created by Buck Henry – one of the duo behind Get Smart. The series was called Quark and it ran for seven weeks before it was unceremoniously cancelled. The series was based around a United Galactic Sanitation Patrol vessel captained by Adam Quark […]
MOVIE REVIEW: Tropic Thunder: Apocalypse When?
Tropic Thunder may well be the most [deliberately] politically incorrect film I’ve ever seen – and one of the funniest. The fake trailers alone are worth the price of admission! Ben Stiller’s film takes aim at every level of Hollyweird culture, from trailers to fraudulent writers to explosive studio executives – and is on target […]
MOVIE REVIEW: Swing Vote is a Thought-Provoking Little Dramedy!
Touchstone’s Swing Vote is a political fable on the value of the individual vote; a tale of reversed roles in a dysfunctional family, and the best thing Kevin Costner has done in a decade. The plot revolves around one vote being ruined because of mechanical failure – and the courting of the supposed caster of […]
MOVIE REVIEW” WALL*E Is Simply Dazzling!
With an A-story that features the love story between WALL*E [Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class] and EVE [Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator], and a B-story that involves humanity’s possible return to a post-apocalyptic Earth, WALL*E is more than a bit of a gamble on PIXAR’s part. Neither WALL*E nor EVE has a large vocabulary [at […]