I Am So Wired

On Sunday night, Jan. 6, HBO will broadcast the first episode of the fifth, and last, season of The Wire. To assure fans: The show continues to offer perhaps the most loving and damning portrait of Baltimore ever put to film, from the cops to the teachers to the drug dealers to the politicians who Read More

Glug, Glug … Globes!

Laurence Mark, producer of Dreamgirls, carried his Golden Globe in one hand as he made the congratulatory rounds at the Paramount party following the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles on Monday night. He managed to hug well-wishers with one hand while holding the statue in the other. “Someone said to me, ‘It’s the same Read More

The Great Gervais

At 3 p.m. on Dec. 15, Ricky Gervais stood opposite a picture of his own round face, blown up to three times its size and resting on an easel in the lobby of the HBO building in midtown.

“Look what they’ve done to my teeth,” he said, jabbing a finger at his jaw, his voice Read More

Countdown to Bliss

Wayne Baker and Meredith Ronayne

Met: June 5, 2005

Engaged: Aug. 24, 2006

Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 14, 2006

Meredith Ronayne was a starry-eyed intern at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York when she watched Wayne Baker deliver a passionate opening statement in a trial against Read More

More About Blacks Not on TV

Last night at my friend Dave’s I watched the Fox hit Prison Break and was stunned to find out that there were no black guys in the prison. Well a couple maybe. In order to glamorize its grim setting and avoid hairy racial politics, Fox chose to whitefy the prison. Unrealistically, of course. Read More

Were Smith’s Mormons Ahead of Their Times?

This column is not about the HBO series Big Love. Only flatterers or irritables ascribe culture-changing force to cultural artifacts like TV shows. Fiction, as Stendhal said, is a mirror carried along a road; it shows us what we are, it doesn’t make us what we are. If a new age of poly-relationships is upon Read More

Were Smith’s Mormons Ahead of Their Times?

This column is not about the HBO series Big Love. Only flatterers or irritables ascribe culture-changing force to cultural artifacts like TV shows. Fiction, as Stendhal said, is a mirror carried along a road; it shows us what we are, it doesn’t make us what we are. If a new age of poly-relationships is upon Read More

Spike’s Pique

At 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 11, Spike Lee sat behind a desk piled high with the daily papers in a Regency Hotel suite, dressed in a black blazer embossed with a white Yankees emblem, black pants and round thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. He was there to talk about his new thriller, the Clive Owen–Denzel Washington Read More