No show will ever impact me the way that the US version of The Office did. It was the show that taught me to love television as an entertainment medium, and it remains one of my favorite shows of all time. I grew up watching cartoons and multi-camera sitcoms, so when my friend Tyler (who…
If you’ve been keeping up with the Top 100, it should be little surprise that I’m a fan of young adult fiction in all media. I’m a sucker for coming of age stories — particularly thoughtful, male-oriented (or otherwise non-girly) stories. I’ve decided my unending enjoyment with teen-focused stories is twofold: First, stories with teens…
“Having dreams is what makes life tolerable.” Rudy is an excellent underdog movie, doing almost everything right and almost nothing wrong. On a technical level, as the sum of its parts, it’s very good, borderline great. It’s also one of my favorite movies in the entire world. It has X-factor magic in spades, it’s genuinely…
When I saw The Shawshank Redemption in high school, it was one of the movies (along with, believe it or not, The 40 Year Old Virgin) that convinced me that movies could tell stories on a more profound level than simple entertainment. Shawshank has a little bit of a strange backstory. It was a pretty…
Well that was a step down from Season 6. Not an outright disaster… just a bastion of mediocrity. Definitely a step down. First, the good: As expected, giving Neil Patrick Harris some dramatic material to work with gives the show great moments. Both his relationships — with soft-hearted Nora or, more effectively, with silver-tongued stripper…
“You don’t discover [The Beatles], you reclaim them… You have to take [them] back from everyone who’s admired [them] before and find your own way in, even if what you’re really looking for in the music is the same thing those old admirers found there.” – Alex Pappademas What, in the name of Saving Private Ryan,…
Party Down is a comedy that ran for two seasons on Starz before being canceled. And, goddamn, what a pair of seasons. It burned bright and bailed just before its writing or premise grew stale, giving us some fantastic character growth and hysterical jokes in just twenty episodes. Party Down is about a catering company…
In my Top 100 Everything entry about How I Met Your Mother, I admitted that I gave up on the show during its sixth season. The show just became too miserable, too disappointing, too unsatisfying for me to tune in every week. Well, my wife and I have slowly been working through the series, and…
The Wayside School trilogy of books is, as far as I’m concerned, a seminal masterpiece of comedy and kidlit. They operate on a surreal, childlike level of logic that still speaks to my brain today. More than that, the Wayside School books are honest portrayals of the confusion and paradoxes involved with being a child.…
Last week, I reviewed the first musical by StarKid Productions, A Very Potter Musical. The second production by the group is called Me and My Dick and it’s a coming-of-age, high school love story in which everyone’s genitals are anthropormophized, walking around and having conversations with their owners. If you couldn’t guess by the title, it’s a…