Browsing: Film and Television

So Charlie Sheen says he is on a drug called Charlie Sheen. Can you imagine how long the commercial would have to be to list all the side effects of that? One of them, apparently, is that those who talk to the “Two and a Half Men” star, whose hit CBS sitcom has shut down production for at least the rest of this season, seem to think they are the only ones doing it.

If you were watching the Oscars on Sunday night, the narrative of “The King’s Speech” beating “The Social Network” played out on several levels. The Tom Hooper film won in four major categories – best picture, director and actor, as well as in one of the two screenplay categories – the first time since “The Silence of the Lambs” 19 years ago that a single movie walked away with that quartet of prizes.

Tom Ford knows how to work the spotlight. During last year’s awards season, the designer-director was riding the success of his first film, “A Single Man.” This time around, he’s introducing his long-awaited women’s collection and new boutique on Rodeo Drive with a star-studded opening party Thursday.

After 13 months of pointless scrutiny, federal regulators have done what they were certain to do all along, and blessed the most momentous media deal of this still-new century: The takeover by Comcast, the biggest U.S. cable operator, of NBC Universal, one of the country’s premier sources of news and entertainment.

No sooner are sitcoms pronounced dead, again, than they begin popping up all over, like Whac-a-Moles. This year we have been and will be getting a passel of relationship comedies built around interrelated contrasting sets of couples (and sometimes singles), usually packaged in groups of three, a la “Modern Family,” whose success surely helped turn these lights green. There are perhaps more of them than the market can bear, but if any have to go, I would rather it not be “Perfect Couples.”

Teen pregnancy is a popular topic for TV shows, movies and documentaries. Because the issue is generally considered controversial and there is not an agreed-upon way on how to handle it, the media continues to explore it in different ways.

In an attempt to wring a modern twist out of a fairy tale classic, “Tangled” fumbles around on screen with much-intended charm which, in the end, turns out to be the stubborn knot in this new Disney charade.fA savvy re-vamp of the fable of Rapunzel, “Tangled” is a frank, abrupt, tongue-in-cheek animated musical about the girl with the long blonde hair.