J.J. Abrams

How have we never heard the term "internerds" before? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tina Fey uses our new favorite new word to describe the hordes of opinionated internet commenters who have become an extremely vocal minority in the last few years. Brilliant, Ms. Fey! We're totally stealing that... starting now: the trailer for J.J. Abrams' reimagining of Star Trek, which premiered in front of Quantum of Solace this weekend and is now available online (in HD!), has made the internerds very, very unhappy. To put it another way, hell hath no fury like a Trekkie scorned!

A quick scan of Ain't It Cool News reveals that the natives are not only restless, but also kinda pissed.  read more »

After six episodes, we're still not sure what to make of Fringe. While J.J. Abrams' much-hyped new show has become a permanent fixture on our DVRs, we can't say that we really like it. However, we don't really dislike it either. Tonight brings the series' first new installment in two weeks, ominously titled "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones". As Fox's website describes it: "a strange, almost-otherworldly parasite mysteriously attaches itself to the internal organs of a dying FBI agent." Eek! Sounds good to us! If you haven't been watching, here are some pros and cons to help catch you up before tonight.

Pro: Fringe is super scary...  read more »

Good news for fans of absurd science fiction! Fox has picked up J.J. Abrams' Fringe for a full season order. After an iffy pilot and slack ratings, Fringe has become a moderate hit since being paired with House on Tuesday nights. Its audience has grown and stabilized, two good signs for a network show, and now Fringe sits on an average of roughly ten million viewers per week.  read more »

We stayed home last night to watch J.J. Abrams' new show Fringe and, happily, found it to be passable entertainment, perched even, on the precipice of possible excellence. We won't give you a review, since our esteemed colleague already did that, but the pilot did leave us with one question. What was with all that sexist 1950s dialogue?

Unless we were watching Mad Men or reruns of Cheers we didn't think it was possible to hear a grown woman called "sweetheart" or "honey" by her male colleagues on television in 2008 so many times. Yet there on Fox, on a television show that supposedly exists in present day America, FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) was being derided at seemingly every turn. We swear she was called "sweetheart" or "honey" at least four times within the first half-hour! The clunky, antiquated dig stuck out like a sore thumb.  read more »

When it comes to casting leading women, J. J. Abrams may be the smartest person working in television. For his first show, Felicity, he plucked an unknown Keri Russell from the land of extras and made her an instant star, with her signature mass of kinky hair and antique visage. For Alias, he cast a barely known Jennifer Garner—she’d appeared on Felicity, and had also briefly played second-string to Jennifer Love Hewitt on a Party of Five spinoff—and launched the career of a major Hollywood actress. And where to begin with Lost? Evangeline Lilly, the earthy Canadian who’d barely done more than a commercial; Yunjin Kim, a Korean starlet little seen in America; Elizabeth Mitchell, blond and blue-eyed, faintly recognizable but never before terribly memorable … they’re just a handful of the irreplaceable women on Mr.  read more »

Monday: 13 Going on 30
Though we try to recommend a classic straightaway, this week we're going with a bubblegum hit. A 13-year-old girl, Jenna, makes a wish on her birthday to bypass adolescence and just be 30, which of course happens. (It's Big, gone girly!) She wakes up to discover that she's got an incredible body, a fab job as a magazine editor, a hot boyfriend, and a wardrobe to die for—but she's also a total bitch. Jennifer Garner manages to be completely charming as a teen soul trapped in—or blessed with—a body toned by years on Alias. (The always yummy Mark Ruffalo co-stars.  read more »

When it comes to having a party for anything at all J.J. Abrams–the man who still has us trying to figure out what the heck the deal is with smokey the smoke monster on Lost -- we suppose it’s best to expect the unexpected. But a premiere party for his new show Fringe (premiering September 9th on Fox) all the way out there on 28th street between West 11th and 12th avenue? It actually felt like a J.J. Abrams show.  read more »

A teeny little feature in the Times' Home & Garden section about parents who turned their house into a maze of hidden puzzles, games and treasures for their four pre-teen kids will be a movie. J.J. Abrams (producer of Lost, Cloverfield, etc.) has signed on to produce, and two scribes (neither is the article's author, Penelope Green) will whip up a script, according to Reuters. The premise seems a little, uh, Chronicles of Narnia-ish (closets leading to other worlds and all) and maybe a little like Jumanji too. But as long as they don't hire Robin Williams for the movie, Mr. Abrams should do alright at the box office.  read more »

On Saturday night at Tribeca Film Festival’s premiere of Tennessee, we caught up with the righteous and stern Lieutenant Daniels from The Wire, also known as Lance Reddick.  read more »

Oh, poor New York. It just isn’t getting any better for you at the movies, is it?

After seeing I am Legend, with the haunted empty Manhattan streets, and the rabid virus-mutated zombies, and the German Shepherd, etc., you might think you’d be prepared to watch Cloverfield.

And you’d think wrong!

The top secret J.J. Abrams produced-project has had people speculating for months about just what was going to be destroying New York this time. Weather has been done already. Germs too. And terrorism … oh wait, that was real ... and for anyone who spent time in New York in the fall of 2001, certain scenes in this movie will feel almost unbearably too close.

Do any of us really need to watch a building collapse downtown, only to send up a rolling, menacing thick cloud of dust? Or, to see dazed and traumatized people wandering about with ash on their face?  read more »

Cialis, Viagra, Spanish Fly, whatever—nothing could save the Bucket List (No. 7) from a limp performance this weekend. The movie, starring geriatric gents Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, may have managed a robust national opening, but it was blown away here in the city like a couple of old farts on the observatory deck of the Empire State Building during a wind advisory. At 10 theaters, the film averaged a listless $9,000 per screen. Everyone’s seen Steel Magnolias: Pull the plug!  read more »

About 10 minutes into the new Will Smith movie I Am Legend, which opens in Manhattan theaters on Friday, my heart rate went up to about 200 and stayed there for the next hour and a half.

Staggering back out into Times Square's holiday crush from the screening room it seemed we'd just been through an aerobic workout before even facing the crowds of tourists and commuters--surprisingly not zombies.

And the lingering questions were weird ones. Would corn naturally grow in Madison Square Park if humanity were wiped out, or did Will Smith have to plant it there himself? Should I get a German shepherd?

But what really stuck was this: why is Hollywood (and, it sometimes seems, much of the rest of the world the world) so keen to see New York City obliterated?  read more »

• A bunch of geeks join the new J.J. Abram’s Star Trek movie.
• Why can’t die-hard fans quit Weezer? MTV lets us know.
• Guilty pleasure movies: ones that the critics hate, but we love. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter Is Dead, anyone?
• Proust was a neuroscientist. “[I]n understanding the brain, artists and writers got there first, anticipating many major scientific discoveries in their work.”
• Norman Mailer wrote his own obituary for Boston Magazine in 1979. “Gloria Steinem stated: ‘A pity. He was getting ready to see the light.’”