Change Your Image
Rich Wiggins
Reviews
Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night (1988)
What a gem to see -- and to hear
The local PBS station just showed this gem for its infernal pledge drive. What a find! The audio is great and the band is very tight. KD Lang, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen -- quite a band, and about the same time the Traveling Wilburys were born. And a hell of a guitarist named James Burton puts all the instrumentalists to shame -- look up his pedigree.
Really strong performances from an all star band in a live performance, very nicely videoed in b&w.
Also fun to pick out the LA luminaries in the studio audience.
This REALLY needs to come out on DVD. Great stuff!
/rich
Everwood (2002)
24 positives and no qualms? I smell a viral marketing campaign!
OK, on the strength of the previous comments I tuned into the show, expecting a bit of "Ed" and "Northern Exposure".
What I found was unbelievable and sappy beyond belief.
There was actually a bizarre glitch in the video, where the screen went totally blank, during the speech about moms and Thanksgiving. My wife and I concluded that our television was choking on sap.
Nice production values, attractive stars, some amusing twists, but overall sappy, sentimental, and silly. And the ending was entirely predictable.
NOT great television. Not even very good television.
Big (1988)
Big versus Vice Versa
I saw "Big" when it was first run, and thought it was a good movie with really good acting by Tom Hanks. I liked the premise.
Right now, Comedy Central has "Vice Versa" on, with Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold. I am shocked by how similar the premise is! This is a swap between father and son, so that's a bit different, but: kid finds himself in a workaday world involving toy sales, kid in adult body has to relate to women in a grown-up way, etc..
It's hard to imagine these two movies were both made in 1988 without one screenwriter knowing what the other one was up to...
(PS -- anyone else notice how the IMDB search engine chokes on finding "Big"??!)