Movies/TV Archives – THE PAGE TURNS

October 30, 2026November 13, 2026

“You Can See Everything”: RIP Patrick Stewart

At one point, when I was pregnant many years ago, we discussed naming the child Picard. Perhaps the middle name. We also discussed Duncan and Morgan, two characters from a book series, and Janeway for a girl. Our eldest was named Kelson, after a character from said book, and the youngest has a middle name from Babylon 5. (The youngest now goes by a different first name, and the eldest on social media uses his middle name first and some other random name … names sort of don’t really matter, so parents should’t obsess too much over it).

Who didn’t love Jean-Luc? However, when Patrick Stewart, who died yesterday, was first announced in 1987 to be the new captain on the new series The Next Generation, I had a hard time seeing him as a good guy. At the time, the American press called him an “unknown British actor,” but if you watched PBS or films made by British directors, he was very much known indeed.

February 26, 2025February 27, 2025

Campaigning for the Arts & the Oscars

The 1st Academy Banquet of 1929, designed by union-busting studio execs. Winners had been announced beforehand; many did not show. Wikimedia photo.

In the final week’s run-up to this year’s birthday party for Uncle Oscar, i.e. the 97th Academy Awards, there have been surprises, rumors, and scandals. In other words, the movie and awards business as usual. Each batch of pre-Oscar awards (SAG, BAFTA, Critics Circle) has led journalists to conclude that this movie or that movie is definitely gonna win because of some quasi-statistical calculation. Some of the nominations have been controversial. “The Brutalist” was slammed for using a little bit of AI-based technology. The “front-runner” for Best Actress made numerous racist and Islamophobic statements on social media a few years ago, so now has quasi-apologized, though what this has to do with her performance may seem head-scratching.

Personally, what I find most head-scratching is that movies which premiere in one theater for one day at the end of December can somehow be considered better than any other movie that is seen by the rest of us all year long. It seems like cheating. But then artistic contests have a history of cheating, campaigning, and judging biases. Patriotism, popular sentiment, and politics influence the voting. It’s not just in the movies. Classical art and classical music have also had their own versions of campaigns and contests. Let’s go back a few centuries and take a look.

October 17, 2024October 18, 2024

The Revolution Will Be Televised and (Saturday Night) Live

Movie poster from Saturday Night, by Sony pictures.

In October of 1975, most of the popular shows on television looked backward. The country was emerging from the chaos of the Vietnam War, the fall of the Nixon administration, economic misery, and civil rights protests. It should not be a surprise that the most watched shows were things like Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, and the Waltons — misty-eyed nostalgia for the fun of the malt shop, the slapstick antics of the gals at the bottling plant, and the family bliss of the good ol’ Depression days. There were some controversial shows as well. A few groundbreaking comedies–All in the Family, MASH, Maude, and Mary Tyler Moore–all pushed the envelope in different ways. But more shows yearned for simpler times.

This was the environment in which Lorne Michaels pitched the idea of Saturday Night Live to NBC executives. The movie Saturday Night describes those precarious ninety minutes before the show first went on the air, when maybe it still might not have made it to the air. It’s a suspense-filled narrative, as Michaels (Gabriel Labelle) struggles with technical problems, network pressures, friction among the cast, too much content, and an impending sense of doom. If you’re under forty, you’ll find the behind-the-scenes narrative fascinating and wonder how the chuckleheads ever got this thing in front of the American public. But if you’re old enough to remember the times, you’ll find it holds a mirror up to what those times were really like. Some of the reviews which have criticized the movie as too mild were clearly written by those who don’t remember. I do.