October 2007 Archives

CBS is the place to go to fill up on crime drama. In the last seven years or so, Les Moonves and his crew have brought us several flavors of CSI, Without a Trace, and several other crime-related dramas with much success. Criminal Minds, which debuted in 2005, distinguishes itself from the pack with the overall darkness that envelops the show.

Bringing very successful Broadway musicals to the big screen is notoriously difficult. It is often easy to loose the power and intimacy created on a stage, when a story is magnified to fit the bigger than life proportions of a Hollywood film.

From day one, The L Wordhas been a powder keg of sex and drama among a gorgeous group of Los Angeles dwelling lesbians. As season four opens, Shane McCutcheon (Katherine Moennig) has left her fiancée Carmen de la Pica Morales (Sarah Shahi) just minutes before their wedding in Canada. Shane is in the midst of an intense alcohol, sex and drug fueled bender with her lover from seasons past, Cherie Jaffe (Rosanna Arquette). When Shane finally does come home from the bender, she finds that her fathers' scorned wife has left Shay (Aidan Jarrar), Shane's nine year old brother in her care. Shane shows a much softer side of herself; taking a modeling job to earn money to pay the medical costs after Shay is hurt in a skateboarding accident and pleading with the principal of the local school to allow her brother to attend classes there. Katherine Moennig shows a fairly impressive range of emotions during the fourth season of The L Word. You can feel her heartbreak as she tries to numb the pain of losing Carmen, her happiness as she bonds with her little brother. As it happens, Shay becomes friends with another boy at school. While on a play date Shane meets the boy's single mother Paige Sobel (Kristanna Loken) and eventually the two become lovers.

Chris Cornell, lead singer of Soundgarden and a poster child for the 1990’s grunge music scene out of Seattle, is now a sober solo artist in his forties living in France with his family. How times have changed. On the cover of Cornell’s latest album Carry On, straggly hair and a flannel shirt has been replaced by a close cropped do and a leather jacket. Cornell’s all too brief stint with Audioslave in the early 2000’s was a harbinger of things to come. With Carry On, Cornell seems eager to make a break with the style that made him famous and become known as a vocalist rather than just an accomplished singer.

It’s hard to believe that Saturday Night Fever is thirty years old this year. I was very young when the film was originally released, but I remember vividly how everyone wanted to dance like John Travolta and the Bee Gees driven soundtrack pulsed out of radio airwaves and the homes of my friends and family. Saturday Night Fever was a true cultural phenomenon, the film influenced the way people dressed, danced and socialized.