Linda Holmes

While The Audience Turned Away, 'American Idol' Found Some Great Singers

Linda Holmes — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:04:46 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMet8T87JU8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-aAwKQ2CMQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp1x6Mbs5SA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beUD20VZ8Fg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64S5Rn9mlxs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRTVnSioKDQ

A Farewell To 'The Office': The 10 Best Episodes

Linda Holmes — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:39:25 +0000

It really only hit yesterday: It's the end of The Office.

After nine seasons, Dunder Mifflin is going dark Thursday night, with an hour-long retrospective at 8:00 and a 75-minute episode at 9:00 that may or may not feature a cameo from Steve Carell.

Why Angelina Jolie's Op-Ed Matters

Linda Holmes — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Pop culture does not mean celebrity culture; I have perhaps said this more often than anyone you're going to meet. Who dates, who gets a divorce, who has a tantrum, who has surreptitious photos snapped of him by mangy, grim opportunists — these things are not culture of any kind, popular or otherwise, unless there is something else at stake. They are curiosities, and given that we are curious creatures, their pull is not surprising, nor is it new, nor was it invented by the internet, or television, or Americans.

At The Met Ball, Those Are Some Crazy Dresses

Linda Holmes — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:49:42 +0000

Monday night was the big night for unusual dresses (you may remember a previous post about Madonna's bunny ears): the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, known as the "Met Ball." It had a loose punk theme (because the costume exhibit it's celebrating is punk-centric), but everyone got up to quite a bit of her own thing.

Shut The Door, Have A Suite: 'Mad Men' Steps It Up

Linda Holmes — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:43:39 +0000

[CAUTION: This is all about Sunday night's Mad Men. Obviously, if you haven't seen Sunday night's Mad Men and you still intend to, you might hold off.]

It's reductive to conclude that on far too many episodes of Mad Men, nothing happens. Of course something always happens: someone feels something, or learns something, or is locked in a continuous internal struggle with something. A dynamic continues to simmer, a memory comes to the surface, angels and demons battle for somebody's soul.

But it can feel a lot like nothing happens.

MTV's Musical Legacy: How 'Unplugged' Sold The Radio Star

Linda Holmes — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:35:26 +0000

It's generally understood that something about MTV was revolutionary.

Armor And Anxiety: Tony Stark Is The New Captain America

Linda Holmes — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:32:32 +0000

Meet Tony Stark at the opening of Iron Man 3: insanely wealthy, possessed of every toy, and traumatized by an attack on New York that has left him restless, anxious, belligerent, and given to both hunker-down security measures and fate-tempting swagger.

Boston's Art Museums Offer Free Admission To Provide A 'Place Of Respite'

Linda Holmes — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:29:00 +0000

UPDATE, 4:08 p.m.: In addition to the institutions mentioned below, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has announced that admission will be free on Wednesday, April 17.

At least two art museums in Boston, the Museum Of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art, have announced that admission on Tuesday will be free as a service to a city still dealing with the trauma of the explosions Monday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Superheroines, Fighters, And Why Isn't There A Wonder Woman Movie?

Linda Holmes — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:13:38 +0000

Any comics fan of any seriousness can rattle off female superheroes who have either had their own books or appeared in other or ensemble books.

But what about ordinary absorbers of culture?

The same people who don't actually read comics but can tell you that Superman is the idealized, square-jawed fighter for good, while Batman is the darker, more conflicted survivor of tragedy and Spider-Man is the scrapper barely concealing an ordinary kid — how many women can they name who have worn capes, particularly ones that aren't superhero derivatives like Supergirl or Batgirl?

In many cases, th

Big Hair, Big Shoulders And Big Money: Linda Evans On '80s Excess

Linda Holmes — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:16:00 +0000

You may find a hint to the era in which you were born (as well as your taste in entertainment) in Linda Wertheimer's clarification that on the '80s nighttime soap Dynasty, actress Linda Evans played Krystle Carrington — Krystle with a K, that is.

Thank G-O-O-D-N-E-S-S: The National Spelling Bee Adds Meaning

Linda Holmes — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:51:00 +0000

As Eyder Peralta reported last night, the National Spelling Bee has made a big change to its rules.

For the first time, the written (or computerized) test students use to qualify for the semifinals and championship finals will include vocabulary questions requiring them to know the meanings of words, not just the spelling.

Viewer Discretion: Deciding When To Look Away

Linda Holmes — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:17:00 +0000

I was out of the house, as it happens, for most of the first half of yesterday's Louisville-Duke game, and when I got home and looked at Twitter, before I turned on the TV, there was a huge stack of stuff to read, and the first thing that caught my attention about the game was this.

That's Dan Fienberg of Hitfix, tweeting about the grisly broken leg suffered by Louis

Here We Go Again: Leno, Fallon, And Why The Late-Night Wars Are So Boring

Linda Holmes — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:48:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYzVdv6V5Vs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXnh4tYpA-U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq-URl9F17Y

'The Simpsons' Better Than 'Cheers'? It Is To Laugh

Linda Holmes — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:47:02 +0000

For the last couple of weeks, Vulture has been running a "Sitcom Smackdown," a contest between 16 sitcoms of the last 30 years to determine an eventual champion.

From the beginning, it was fairly openly a nonserious exercise in terms of determining actual quality: Murphy Brown was booted for being too topical, Everybody Loves Raymond for not "mov[ing] the sitcom needle" (quality and innovation are different questions, perhaps in sitcoms more than anywhere), and s

The Oscars Broadcast, Zooming Way Past Cheeky To Land Squarely On Crass

Linda Holmes — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 07:20:00 +0000

If you like Argo (which won Best Picture), the movie Chicago (which made a couple of appearances) and jokes about women (which just kept coming), you probably had a substantially better night than the average viewer, who was subjected to Seth MacFarlane's delivery of one of the worst hosting performances in Oscar history.

In fact, David Letterman is writing Seth MacFarlane notes of gratitude right now for taking all the pressure off of "Uma, Oprah, Oprah, Uma," the most famous bomb of 1995, and more recent troubled hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway are feeling a little l

Rubio's Water Bottle And The Authenticity Craving

Linda Holmes — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:59:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w2A0qsgurU

Ten Clues That The Zombie Outbreak Being Announced On Your Television Is Not A Hoax

Linda Holmes — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:08:00 +0000

As reported on Tuesday's Morning Edition, KRTV in Great Falls, Mont., was apparently the victim of hackers who broke in and broadcast a warning of attacking zombies. The station now says that it was a hoax, fortunately.

But in the future, how can a viewer at home identify a similar alert that really requires immediate action to avoid a very real zombie horde?

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Get Severance: Interview With An Iron

Linda Holmes — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:55:00 +0000

Wednesday, Hasbro announced that it was welcoming a new member of the Monopoly-token family. And because it asked the Internet, it wound up with a cat. (For whatever reason, the Internet was not offered Gotye or a bacon cupcake.)

Unfortunately, "rightsizing" the Monopoly token collection meant that as one new token was introduced, one old token had to be ushered out the door, and by popular vote, it was the iron.

That Was A Great Blackout Last Night

Linda Holmes — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:46:00 +0000

Great blackout last night, right?

It's been clear for some time that substantially more people watch the Super Bowl than have the slightest interest in watching the actual football game. That's why there's such hubbub over the halftime show and the commercials — it gives non-football types something to pay attention to instead of football.

But this year, Beyonce put on a perfectly polished but in no way surprising show at the half.

Choosing Sides: How To Pick Between The Ravens And The 49ers

Linda Holmes — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:23:00 +0000

Headlines were circulating last week about how, as Slate put it, "almost everybody" is rooting for the San Francisco 49ers over the Baltimore Ravens in Sunday's Super Bowl.