When Bill Maher is right, he’s right, and he was oh so right last week on Real Time. The host of the HBO series, now in its 19th season, ended his “New Rules” closing segment with a plea for sanity among major sports leagues: pick one national anthem to play before each game and stick
There was once a joke on The Larry Sanders Show that went like this: Paula (Janeane Garafalo) tried to bluff Larry (Garry Shandling) that she’s leaving to take a producers job at Conan (a fledgling series at the time of the early ’90s episode). Sanders asks how long she thinks that will last; Paula swallows hard and
New Rule: stop being shocked every time Bill Maher says something that skates over the hard line that is cancel culture. That is, after all, his job. Yes, he’s made some egregious mistakes in the past. He claimed that Islam, “has too much in common with ISIS.” In 2017, he used the N-word to make
There’s a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on right now in terms of rock’n’ roll documentaries. To watch HBO’s premiere of Tina Saturday — profiling the great Tina Turner, of course — I had to switch away from an older doc on Elvis. When Tina ended, the show that followed was the recent (and excellent)
I was recently asked to write a Valentine’s Day feature listing ten recommendations for romantic movies viewers can rent or purchase through Rogers Ignite. (You can read that feature here.) I included a film I cherished at first sight when it opened in cinemas in 1977: “Annie Hall.” At the time, it was breathtakingly original,
Fasten your seatbelts for The Lady and the Dale. Actor-producers Mark Duplass (The Morning Show) and his brother Jay (Transparent) are behind HBO’s five-part series, which centres around an audacious 1970s auto scam. Like the best of these documentaries, it is a story no screenwriter would dare make up. Here are the main details: a
News this week that there would be a revival of Sex and the City without Kim Cattrall struck me as such a greedy reach. Would Groucho and Chico have made a movie without Harpo? We live, however, in an age when there is just so much money on the table for reviving any brand that
In 1975 I had a summer job as a linepiler at a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Etobicoke. It is burned in my memory that the Bee Gees had an enormous hit with “Jive Talkin’” that summer. As those large, heavy boxes filled with rolls of 2- and even 3-ply toliet paper came chugging down the line,