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Better Off “Fred” By Aymar Jean Christian What can network TV learn from the runaway success of a no-budget YouTube sensation?   I have six subscribers to my YouTube channel, so you can imagine my jealousy when the news broke that the most popular YouTuber, “Fred,” became the first vlogger on the site to reach one [...]

  Con Artists fall in love. Sound familiar?   The Brothers Bloom is Duplicity for people who like their movies weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. (Grade: B)   By Aymar Jean Christian If you want to know whether you’ll like The Brothers Bloom, ask yourself if a character aroused by routine weather patterns would annoy or excite you. A bolt of lightning strikes outside [...]

Duplicity‘s lukewarm box office showing doesn’t have anything to do with her age. By Aymar Jean Christian I saw Duplicity this weekend, and, like everyone else, I liked it. It’s a smart and stylish corporate caper, and a great vehicle for Julia Roberts. She chose her comeback well. But the stage is set for a [...]

Review of (500) Days of Summer. [...]

Kafka in Japan Tokyo! is easily the weirdest movie in the recent trend of omnibus films. (Grade: C) By Aymar Jean Christian Why the sudden interest in shorts and cities? This year’s Oscar-nominated short films have made over $600,000 in just about a month, which is an incredibly large amount of cash for a genre [...]

TV: How Not to Fail a TV Show By Aymar Jean Christian You may not know we lost an important show this past week: The L Word. The series was among the most inconsistent on television. Each season would have a new focus and tone; characters would completely change personalities; wardrobes would magically improve. Still, [...]

UPDATE (7/30): EW‘s Ausiello now confirms an extensive Betty makeover is being tested among audiences by ABC! A month after I wrote this original piece, Silvio Horta, the brains behind Betty, suggested these changes would be on the way. UPDATE 2: Ugly Betty moving to Fridays, after ABC flirted with canceling it. If you care [...]

Aymar Jean Christian Apparently Hollywood wants to make a movie about the 44th president before he even takes office. Photo by Matthias Winkelmann. Spike Lee stopped by my office yesterday for a chat. Okay, he didn’t come to see me. He spoke to an undergraduate class at Penn about his movies, black film and, of [...]

My New Love In praise of that forgotten home entertainment system, the projector. A projector in 1958. Photo from the Library of Congress, via bobster1985. By Aymar Jean Christian I have no idea why people spend thousands of dollars on a flat screen TVs. Okay, I have some idea: the picture is the clearest and [...]

A Couple Movies To Fight Over http://www.splicetoday.com/moving-pictures/a-couple-movies-to-fight-over MOVING PICTURES Nov 13, 2008, 10:07AM Aymar Jean Christian When in doubt, go to a challenging movie over an easily graspable one. Sometimes I think the best movies are the most challenging. Sure, a nice Hollywood blockbuster is satisfying, but the movies that stick are the ones that [...]