By Scott Buckner

If you’re going to get a hankering for a good black-and-white horror flick, just after midnight in that time that bridges Friday and Saturday is as good a time to get it. The folks running the Independent Film Channel certainly get it, because they had the presence of mind to present This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, the subtitled 1967 sequel to At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul by Brazilian macabre master Jose Mojica Marins.
This one’s even better than At Midnight because Marins demonstrates growth as a filmmaker – which basically means it’s even more Felliniesque, there’s considerably more screaming and cheesecake, the women are hotter, and Zé now has a hunchbacked assistant named Bruno.

Read More

Posted on July 30, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If you like your women cold and hard as a well-digger’s ass in January, you’ll like FX’s new series, Damages. (Tuesday’s premiere episode, which I wasn’t home to see Tuesday, is being re-run several times tonight and probably to death this weekend, so you’ll have ample chance to see it.) If you like legal dramas where you sit there the whole time trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on but you go along for the ride anyway because it’s not often that you get to see the dark, manipulative underbelly of the legal profession, you’ll like this show, too.
I like my women a bit softer than that, and there are times when I don’t feel like working that hard in order to enjoy a TV show, but it’s still a show worth watching because it solidifies common opinion that lawyers suck.

Read More

Posted on July 26, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Do you believe in God? Well, do ya, punk? That’s kinda the premise behind Saving Grace, TNT’s new Monday night show that, I’m hoping, will quell my incessant bitching about the state of Monday night TV. It’s a good show, but whether it turns out to be a great one will depend how well Holly Hunter can beat it into submission. Or lets us in on why she keeps kissing police headquarters lab rat Laura San Giacamo on the cheek, whichever comes first.
Hunter plays Grace Hanadarko, an Oklahoma City detective who gets her morning hangover started with a healthy Jack and Coke because, well, history has shown that cops with the shakes aim their guns better with some hair of the dog. She drives her own Porsche on duty (which ought to make the citizenry wonder about the pay scale for their civil servants) and her hobbies involve an adulterous affair with her partner (police fraternity runs rampant in Oklahoma City, it seems), parking in handicapped spaces, sucker punching smart-assed cattlemen, and fishtailing through the crowded Okie streets giving her grade-school nephew and his girlfriend a high-speed joyride while blaring the siren and flashing her gun. She also likes to drive drunk and mow down pedestrians, but more on that later.

Read More

Posted on July 24, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Let’s say you’re the programming think tank at VH1 and you want to resurrect an ’80s hair band singer, The Bachelor and Flavor of Love all in one breath because, well, actually showing music videos is just so booooooring and you can beat the lifeless carcass of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to death only so many times. So what do you do?
You create Rock of Love with former Poison singer Bret Michaels, that’s what.
I saw the rerun of the premiere episode Sunday morning. I’ve been entertained by Flavor Flav on Flavor and The Surreal Life>, and Bret’s no Flav. He doesn’t have big gold teeth to flash in a pimp smile like Richard Kiel’s titanium-mouthed villain Jaws The Spy Who Loved Me. He doesn’t wear a way-cool Viking helmet. He doesn’t wear a clock around his neck the size of Big Ben on a chain big enough to anchor an aircraft carrier. He’s never schtupped Brigitte Nielsen – at least not admittedly.
Nope. Bret’s just a long-haired dude in a doo-rag “looking for that special someone” to settle down with.

Read More

Posted on July 23, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Back in the day – which in Internet time amounts to maybe two days ago – there was this neat little sports show called The Best Damn Sports Show Period. Granted, I’m not much of a sports freak – or even mildly dispassionate (or hell, even apolitical for Chrissakes) about any televised sports programming, for that matter. Unless maybe it involves race car crashes or women wearing really short uniforms.
At any rate, back in the day, the non-sports guy that I am actually liked Best Damn when Tom Arnold was left to bounce around all willy-nilly to wherever he ended up. And I was pretty enamored by the show in a month or three ago when Best Damn featured Thursday night chick boxing. This is why I was mystified at last night’s Best Damn show, which happened to be airing – without sound – on Comcast SportsNet on the TV sets of the two local gin mills I stopped into for a quick nip before going home at a sensible hour.
Simply put, it was an hour or so without mentioning a damn thing about sports. Instead, I saw Pamela Anderson and magician – oops, illusionist – Hans Klok promoting their Las Vegas show, The Beauty of Magic.

Read More

Posted on July 18, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Each week, we home viewers of Fox-TV’s Hell’s Kitchen learn two lessons about being a successful chef, even though few of us would probably want to become one because there are easier jobs in the world, like rebuilding transmissions: 1) You’ve got to have teamwork in the kitchen, and 2) when it comes to developing and actually delivering a menu, there’s no place for snobbery.
Naturally, the cheftestants on this program spend a lot of time ignoring all that each week, and last night wasn’t any different. Which again made Kitchen the only worthwhile Monday night program.

Read More

Posted on July 17, 2007

What It Is: Virus- and spyware-protection software for your PC, with support from real, live people.
Quote: “Wouldn’t you like to know how many viruses are sitting on your hard drive right now?”

Read More

Posted on July 17, 2007

By Bethany Lankin

Hang on to your sable-lined lambskin hats historical drama fans! HBO and the BBC have done it again with their latest offering, I, Genghis, a sprawling, scintillating new ten-part series that combines generous helpings of lusty, fur-trimmed tunic-ripping with bloody thirteenth century Mongolian geopolitics.
Writer-producer Michael Hirst (The Tudors, Elizabeth) masterfully balances opulent sets, rich costumes, Machiavellian plotting, and full-frontal nudity with walloping doses of historical veracity, severed limbs, bestiality, and sizzling, goat-milking wenches in woolen undergarments. Last night I watched “Episode Three, The Trouble with Tartars”, and I can tell you, I’m absolutely hooked. If you’re an avid armchair traveler, you’ll find this lavish production really delivers. Exotic locales like Ulaanbaatar, Zuunkharaa, and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver have never looked sexier!

Read More

Posted on July 12, 2007

By Scott Buckner

What kind of TV watcher am I? I didn’t even know Live Earth was on last weekend. There I was, watching You, Me and Dupree instead because I needed the laughs. I think I was better off because the movie was pretty funny and nobody mentioned the environment once. Besides, if Al Gore can help fund something as big as the Internet, he certainly can figure out a way to make solar power affordable for everyone.
*
Monday night’s viewing on Fox-TV began with a miserable program called On The Lot, where would-be directors try to make the least dopiest short film each week on one of the Universal Studio backlots until all but one is left standing at the end of the season. I found this show by accident because I was doing something else at the time and was too disinterested to change the channel. Christ, how many more shows can there possibly be where contestants get voted off? I know! How about one called Float My Boat, where at-home viewers pick off the crew of cruise ship one by one until just the passengers are left to steer the damn thing back home? Or into an iceberg. Or a reef. Whichever comes first. Now that would be fun.

Read More

Posted on July 11, 2007

What It Is: A teaching system for stock market success.
Quote: “Take $1.45 and divide it by $3.55 and tell me what your rate of return is. Folks, 47 percent. You dig that? Now, do inquiring minds want to know how to do it? Yes or yes?”
Bonus Quote: “The market owes us a living, and we’re gonna make that living today.”

Read More

Posted on July 10, 2007