What to Expect From Season Five of The Walking Dead
This Sunday at 9 p.m (EST), Rick, Daryl, Michonne and The Walking Dead gang are back. Cable’s most popular show has survived a rotating cast of showrunners (Scott M. Gimple is now their third) and the slings and arrows of disgruntled fans and critics (especially during season two's extended stay on Hershel's farm) by a zombie-like ability to maintain just enough momentum to keep fans interested. “The show reinvents itself every eight episodes,” said Gimple in AMC's production notes,
Full Immersion: Hollywood Eyes New Storytelling Methods
The dreams of a serious virtual reality, the kind of full-tilt total immersion that have been a part of the collective imagination for as long as we've had computers, had seemingly come and gone. Despite the fever dream virtual realities imagined in films like Tron, The Lawnmower Man, and perhaps most evocatively in Kathryn Bigelow's barely remembered but quite robust on a fresh viewing, Strange Days, we've been left wanting when it comes to virtual reality…until now. The VR scene has had a recent rebirth in the eyes of the consumer,
Moira Walley-Beckett: Emmy-Winning Writer of Breaking Bad‘s Best Episode
After the 14th episode in Breaking Bad’s final season aired, creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan called it “the best episode we ever had or ever will have.” Titled "Ozymandias" after Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, it was the third-to-last episode in the series, and it was the one that, more so than any other in the show’s incredible run, crushed viewers. Death, betrayal and, at long last, the removal of any lingering hope that Walter White might somehow keep his family.
Agent Knox vs. Eli Thompson:Boardwalk Empire’s Brian Geraghty on Season 4 Finale
Spoiler alert. For those of you not caught up with Boardwalk Empire, do not watch the video or read the below.
In one corner, you've got Agent Warren Knox (Brian Geraghty), the young comer at the Bureau of Investigation whose clean shaven baby face belies a murderer's malice. In the other corner stands Eli Thompson (Shea Whigham), little brother to Atlantic City's crime boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), a former police chief,
The Very Real Effect Fictional Characters Have on Tourism
If you've been to Albuquerque anytime in the past few years, you've probably noticed that the city embraced a little show called Breaking Bad. Walter White's visage, as well as Jesse's, Hank's and the beloved hitman Mike's, could be seen peeking out of store windows on T-shirts and spray painted on walls. Such was the mass appeal of Breaking Bad that graffiti artists honoring the show unveiled their work in Leicester Square in London.
Exec Producer & Writer on FX’s Tyrant Talks About Groundbreaking Show
FX's new show Tyrant is unlike anything currently on television. Showcasing Arab characters and cultures, set in the Middle East, the 10-episode first season is a bold step towards showing American audiences people and situations rarely depicted. While Netflix's Orange is the New Black is deservedly lauded for filling the frame with three dimensional female characters who are black, brown, gay and transgendered, Tyrant will put faces on our screen who have too often been portrayed as villains or marginal characters at best.
Father’s Day With the Lannisters: Game of Thrones Thrilling Finale
An absolute ton of spoilers below. Just a ton. Don't read if you're not caught up.
The end of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall,” saw Jon Snow leaving Castle Black after surviving the first onslaught of Mance Rayder’s Wildling army. Giants, mammoths, Wildlings and Crows were strewn inside and outside the wall, dead and soon to be burned. Jon was leaving, alone, without his sword and,
Chatting With Greer Grammer of MTV’s hit Series Awkward
Greer Grammer knows a thing or two about multitasking. The young actress, currently shooting the fourth season of MTV’s breakout scripted drama Awkward, is also making her way through her junior year at the University of Southern California. This sometimes means being on set until 5 a.m., returning to her apartment for two hours of sleep and then heading off to class. The theater major’s not complaining, however. Having nabbed a regular role on the critically acclaimed Awkward,
Lions and Transformers and Giant Lizards, Oh My! Studios Taking to Tumblr
Adidas became the first major brand to build an advertising campaign on Tumblr, back in 2012, shortly after Tumblr announced they would be including paid advertising on their site. Today, the Adidas Tumblr page is a wonder of beautiful product shots, videos, artwork and what feels like an infinite amount of scrollable content.
Tumblr now hosts nearly 189 million blogs comprising more than 83 billion posts, with more than 90 million posts created each day.
Damon Lindelof Returns to TV to for HBO’s The Leftovers
“Two percent doesn’t sound like much, but, two percent of the entire planet, of every person on it, that’s more than the world’s ten largest cities combined. That’s more than every death from every war in the 20th century. If every one of those people joined hands, they’d wrap around the world six times. It’s one hundred and forty million people. And like that…they were gone.”
The above quote comes from one of the clever,
Comedy Central’s Growing Roster of Female Showstoppers
If you haven’t watched any of Inside Amy Schumer on Comedy Central, you should start doing so immediately. Far from coming out of nowhere (Schumer’s been on Comedy Central in several capacities over the years, and finished fourth on NBC's Last Comic Standing), there are still many people in the country who haven’t heard of her, so watching her show can feel like witnessing the sudden birth of the total comedy package—like a foul-mouthed,
Film, Fashion & Passion: Cinemoi is a New Kind of Television Experience
A new kind of television channel has come to the United States. Cinemoi recently launched on Verizon FiOS and will soon be rolling out onto more platforms. An intersection of curated films, high fashion and television, the channel is the inspiration of Daphna Ziman, who introduces a one-of-a-kind television experience to what she hopes is an engaged American audience. Cinemoi features curated films, behind-the-scenes access to film festivals and fashion weeks, documentaries, interviews with filmmakers,
Tribeca 2014: David Simon, Beau Willimon, Nate Silver & Anne Thompson Talk Stories
We all know that our shopping habits are fodder for various entities looking to target their advertising and increase their profits, but the same kind of Big Data is being used by media and entertainment entities, from HBO and Netflix to the New York Times and Fox News, to figure out who we are, what we read and watch, and what, perhaps, we want next. "Does betting on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ bode well or ill for future innovation in film,
Award Winning Documentarian Rachel Beth Anderson on Filming in Conflict Zones
Rachel Beth Anderson is a cinematographer-turned-director who has spent her career working almost exclusively in conflict zones. She was recently awarded the cinematography award for a U.S. documentary at Sundance, along with Ross Kaufman, for her work on E-Team, which followed a group of four Human Rights Watch workers documenting war crimes around the world.
Along with filming in Syria, Anderson has worked in Libya,
The Future of Mad Men‘s Secondary Characters
On April 13th, the seventh and final season of Mad Men premiers on AMC. It's been a long, wild ride. Just think, a mere six seasons ago Don Draper was happily married to Betty, Peter Cambell was a brash and ambitious young buck, Peggy was a secretary, and Sterling Cooper was still a thing. The world around them had barely heard of the Beatles. Who could have guessed then where they would be now?
Game of Thrones: What We Learned From Season Three
Our beloved lunatics from Westeros are back for season four of Game of Thrones, which means it’s time for a refresher course on what the hell is going on in the Seven Kingdoms (and beyond). We all needed a breather after last season’s penultimate episode, “The Rains of Castamere.” That infamous hour of television delivered such a collective gut punch to the millions of fans who hadn’t read George R.
Getting Schooled by Anna Deavere Smith on her HBO Documentary
Playwright, actress, and professor Anna Deavere Smith does not like to be precious about the work she has done with her students over the years. She’s bracingly honest and laid back about the time and effort she’s devoted to helping young people who dream of carving out a career like the one she has had. “It’s not so noble as sharing the craft,” she said when asked why she continues to teach well into a successful career as varied as it is impressive.
From Darryl F. Zanuck to Christine Vachon: The Quotable Producer
Jerry Weintraub, a legendary film producer, took to the stage this past Sunday to accept the Golden Globe for best TV movie or miniseries for Behind the Candelabra. The film was the work of a slew of super talented individuals coming together to create something original and daring. Some of those people include the director Steven Soderbergh, his two stars, Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his young lover Scott Thornson,
Talking Title Sequences With Creator of ‘Art of the Title’
Art of the Title is the most comprehensive online resource of title sequence design you’ll find.
Ian Albinson’s our kind of movie lover—appreciating all the work that goes into the film experience, not just the bold face names.
“From the tense closeups of Kim Novak’s face in 1958’s Vertigo to the singing ruby lips of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975;
The World’s End, Drinking Buddies, & You’re Next: Weekend Watch List
Movie calendars no longer really mean what they used to. Yes, movies with Academy Award aspirations do get back loaded and released during the fall and early winter. Yes, summer is still blockbuster season, a fact as immutable as gravity or Woody Allen releasing a movie a year. Yet assuming you can guess the relative quality of a film based on the date it was released is getting harder and harder to predict.
Take late August,
