Archive | TV Matters

Astro PSA: Full Moon in Buzzy, Busy Gemini

I write from a neighborhood bar that has a great and relatively quiet happy hour. Drinking sazerac, mawing nuts, rereading the day’s pages, and listening to a man my age mack on a girl who at the very oldest is 25. I’d judge the shit out of him except when I walked in, he raised his eyebrows suggestively and I shook my head. Also the last person I snogged was half my age, which made them roughly 25 (ok, younger). If this paragraph didn’t land where you expected, welcome to my 2019.

Then again, time is a construct.

Earlier today NYC was a storybook—-kids bobbing on parents’ shoulders, everyone bundled like toddlers in mittens and hats, and snow, glorious snow. But by midday it was back to bleak, urine-drenched, and sooty. Enter free-wheeling Sagittarius season and tonight’s full moon in Gemini. Both aspects remind us to be here now since linear time is big old myth and nothing else is real either save the story you tell yourself. And love, the greatest gravity of all.

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling that inside and out. Even on television, at least Watchmen, the most momentous show anywhere right now (see what I did there?), the notion of linear time is being savagely imploded.

Fourth dimension is, like, so twenty-teens.

Taking place in the earliest hours of tomorrow–that’s 12/12 at exactly 12:12 am!–tonight’s “long cold night full moon” also exits us out of a cycle of karma since the number 12 is all about reincarnation. Ask yourself: What hard lessons have I begun learning this year that I can finally put to use? Venus, Saturn, and Pluto are conjuncting, which suggests the lessons may be taking place in our relationships and finances. Certainly that was true for me, though ain’t that always the case? Bottom line: we are moving past the limited thinking that we were taught kept us safe but really has held us back. Don’t be scared. Be glad–and dress warmly.

Little Women, Inner Children

Yesterday we taped the first episode of Talking Pictures since my back went kablooey (and yes that’s the official medical diagnosis). To celebrate I got it into my head to decorate my head, and so wove into my triple-braided bun pine cones and branches, baby’s breath, and tiny bird. All in all it was an effect that raised more than a few eyebrows among the normally unflappable population of NYC.

Chalk it up to the fact that I was reviewing the most recent iteration of Little Women, which I had approached with great trepidation and from which I had floated with great elation.

There have many, many film, television, and stage adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War-set saga about four Massachusetts sisters who are rich in love and poor in cash, but this is the most ravishing and the first that does not betray the intense feminism of its author. Directed by mumblemouth millennial Greta Gerwig (cue my trepidation), it boasts an intensely good cast including Soirse Ronan as stalwart Jo, Meryl Streep mugging to unusually good effect as drolly disapproving Aunt March, Timotheeee Chalomet very right if too slight as Laurie, and Florence Pugh, channeling the authentically big emotions of Midsommar to animate Amy, the most bedazzled and entitled of the March girls. (Laura Dern is too Modern Millie for the Marnie of my dreams, but I’m immune to her Lynchian charms.) Continue Reading →

Of Homographic Utopias and Dowager Chic (The Sound Inside, Terminator: Dark Fate)

Critic drag with co-panelist Jack Rico.

Yesterday was kind of brilliant. The boys and I taped an episode of Talking Pictures, and for the first time since the show migrated from Spectrum to PBS achieved the right balance of jocularity and specificity. Which is to say: I got my points across with some style and minimal manterruption, and we all laughed a lot.

Link to come shortly.

Afterward I had enough cash in my pocket to eat out properly, so I joined up with my friend Little Lisa. In generosity of spirit and strength of mind she is no way little, but as we share a first name and I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood where people of the same name are distinguished by the prefix “Big” or “Little,” Little Lisa she is. To be fair, LL is 7 inches shorter than me and a good 16 years younger.

Big of heart, though, believe me.

Once upon a time we worked together at NY1–she was often the only other broad in the studio when I was on set–but these days she’s a fancy lady producer at a major network and I’m, well–that’s a good question. What am I right now? Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy