I was lucky enough to know Charles Nelson Reilly, one of the funniest people on the planet. Reilly died this weekend after a very long illness, and today is being mourned by his showbiz colleagues, the public at large, and his legions of former acting students. Charles' oft-stated concern that...

That insanely anachronistic bit of dialogue was uttered by Anne Baxter's Nefretiri to Charlton Heston in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille's second retelling of the Passover story (he first filmed the Biblical tale in 1923) is the campy benchmark against which all other cinematic depictions...

Dear Hank and Annie,

Hey, check it out! Showtime has been overhyping this hot new series about you two crazy kids that starts tonight. Shit man, if you added up all the commercials they've shown for The Tudors, it would last longer than your marriage, you know what I'm sayin'?...

What baby boomer wasn't obsessed with the space program? As a kid growing up in the 1960s I followed every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch with enthusiasm and wonder and created scrapbooks of the missions. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were cultural icons in my childhood the same way Elvis...

Had she lived, today would've been Janet Joplin's 64th birthday. Joplin died in 1970, three weeks after Jimi Hendrix and nine months before Jim Morrison. All three of these rock icons were 27 when they left the planet. What a waste.

I've recently been watching some of the old "Dick...

I was going into my junior year of high school the summer that Gerald Ford became President. I remember calling everyone I knew on that hot August day to gloat over Nixon's resignation. I was a few weeks away from turning 15 but I knew that it was a terribly...

The big Day-After-Christmas buzz in Hollywood is about how surprisingly well the new Bill Condon film "Dreamgirls" performed at the box office, earning $8.7 million in a single day and taking second place among the big-budget holiday movies even though it's playing in only a fraction of the theatres. There's...

I tend to be very cynical about the holiday hysteria but I notice that I haven't engaged in many anti-Christmas diatribes this year. What's the matter with me? Has my heart enlarged inside my body like at the end of "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas?" Nah.

This morning my daughter...

We're always hearing what a liability it is today for conservative celebrities to come out of the closet and admit they are die-hard Republicans. Yet in the 1950s, many of Hollywood's biggest movie stars were unabashedly aligned with the right. The ranks of Republican stars included John Wayne, Lou Costello,...

I know I should reserve my outrage for more important matters, but I just saw the new Gap commercial featuring Audrey Hepburn and my mouth is frozen in a silent scream. As part of their new "Keep it Simple" campaign, the Gap uses footage of the late actress from the...

Is it my imagination or is our ability to accept people who are different from ourselves plummeting to dangerous levels? It was bad enough to see the ugly rhetoric at play in the 2004 presidential campaign surrounding gay marriage. If we are to believe the pundits, a big reason Bush...

What is this country turning into, a Margaret Atwood novel? I was disgusted the other day when I read about the latest machinations of the holier-than-thou FCC. This government agency, funded by our tax dollars, proposed a $3.6 million fine against CBS for airing an episode of "Without a Trace"...

Maureen Stapleton, who died this week at the age of 80, was friends with Marilyn Monroe when they both studied at the Actors' Studio. Stapleton thought that Monroe had a lot of talent but that her looks prevented her from getting the parts she deserved. "I never had that problem,"...

I know I've lived in southern California too long when the natural aging process starts to seem like an abnormality. I just watched the newly released DVD of Ingmar Bergman's Saraband. It's a sequel of sorts to his great 1973 film Scenes from a Marriage and it is so expertly...

I admit that I'm a total hypocrite when it comes to awards shows. There's a big part of me that bemoans the insanity of pitting people against each other in the most arbitrary of ways and then pretending that the nominations and awards actually mean something. My wife always wants...

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Paul Robeson, political activist, singer, actor, and author. I'm aware that Black History month starts next Wednesday and that there will suddenly be a surge of stories about Robeson and other famous African-Americans. So let me jump the gun and...

My daughter was looking at the online Times of India the other day for a school project and I happened to notice a headline article about Chelsea Clinton, the former First Daughter who is currently visiting the subcontinent. Written in stilted English, the article focused not on Chelsea's graduate degree...

Have you seen the new Collector's Edition of The Wizard of Oz? Besides a brilliant new transfer of the 1939 film, the set includes several silent versions of the Oz stories from 1910, 1914, and 1925 plus hours and hours of documentaries, featurettes, deleted scenes, and newsreels about the film....

Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss scientist who invented LSD, turned 100 this week. The fact that Dr. Hoffmann is still alive to celebrate his 100th birthday (and looks damn good) gives credence to the early adherents' claim that LSD can help users achieve profound insights and spiritual renewal. Hoffmann described his...

I have a solution for the increasingly contentious confirmation hearings of Judge Samuel Alito, Jr. As far as I'm concerned, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are wasting their time asking Alito questions about abortion, executive power, and past memberships in conservative groups. There's only one query that will...