By Rex Reed 10/02/12 7:39pm

movies

Janney, Platt, Laurie and Shawkat in The Oranges.

From Concentrate: Julian Farino’s Saturated Direction Weighs Down Disastrously Dense Oranges

Leaden and cliché-riddled, The Oranges is, for starters, not about the four neighboring townships in New Jersey. There are no emerald green lawns in New Jersey in December (and it was filmed in New Rochelle). No, it’s about two neighboring dysfunctional families—instead of just one—who live across the street from each other. David and Paige Walling (Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener) have been best friends with Terry and Carol Ostroff (Oliver Platt and Allison Janney) for years. They exercise, barbecue, raise their kids and celebrate Christmas together, and frankly it’s as boring to them as it is to the viewer. Paige is obsessed with Christmas and spends too much time shopping for ornaments and organizing her choir of carol-singing flakes to pay much attention to David, who holes up every night in front of his TV set in his off-limits “man cave.” (Shades of Tommy Lee Jones in the brighter, far superior Hope Springs.) Their marriage has hit a speed bump, and one of the many things wrong with this movie is that nobody ever bothers to explain why.

But things are about to change in the teeth-clenching dramedy of a TV sitcom, when the Ostroffs’ daughter Nina (Leighton Meester) returns home after five years away at college (Huh? No summer vacations or Thanksgiving reunions in five years?) and a hippie romance that has just hit the rocks, and starts sleeping with Mr. Walling, who is more than twice her age. Read More

By Daniel D'Addario 2/09/12 4:00pm

tonight in dvr

Who's rooming with whom?

Tonight in DVR: 500 Days of January with The Roommate

January’s over now–meaning that the movies will slowly get a little better until summer. (April’s a really underrated moviegoing month.) But the quintessential January movies–schlocky, cheap in every sense, poorly acted by stars either slowly rising or rapidly falling–live on year-round on premium cable. Tonight, enjoy watching two television actresses torment one another in The Read More

By Molly Fischer 2/04/10 10:49pm

The Cost of Celebrity

How much can you get paid to sit in the front row of a fashion show?

One hundred thousand, if you are Rihanna.

B-listy designers pay A-list celebrities many dollars to come to their shows—and Fashionista did some digging to find out exactly how many. The answers reveal some surprising hierarchies: Rihanna costs Read More

By Christopher Rosen 9/15/09 3:25pm

Gossip Girl Returns on Horseback!

For most teen shows, the transition between high school and college is the beginning of the end—the death rattle before inevitable cancelation. For Gossip Girl, however, it appears nothing will change at all. Think about it: has a show about high schoolers-turned-undergrads ever cared less about featuring its characters in class? We can Read More

By Christopher Rosen 7/14/09 1:04pm

If We Had An Emmy Ballot…

When you’re perusing the 61st Emmy nominations on Thursday (the announcements begin at 8:30 a.m. EST), don’t be shocked if it all feels so very 2008; both 30 Rock and Mad Men appear poised to once again pace the field with the most nominations (last year they lead the way with 17 and Read More

By Meredith Bryan 5/05/09 6:48pm

Models Mob the Met!

The theme of this year’s Met Costume Institute Gala—i.e., the Oscars of the East—was “the Model as Muse,” and the weedlike mannequins floating up the red carpet in weapons-grade shoes and teensy get-ups appeared only moderately more human than the “superheroes” that inspired last year’s ball.

Molly Sims called her elaborate gold Dolce & Read More