Alan Rapp

The Michael J. Fox Show – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Michael J. Fox Show – Pilot
  • IMDB: link

The Michael J. Fox Show - Pilot

In a plot not that far removed from the actor’s own struggles, Michael J. Fox stars as a news anchor who leaves his job to spend more time with his wife (Betsy Brandt), sister (Katie Finneran), and three children (Juliette Goglia, Conor Romero, Jack Gore) after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. The Pilot episode revolves around Mike driving his family crazy with his over-attention, Mike’s old boss (Wendell Pierce) trying to woo him back into the studio, and Mike’s daughter Eve (Goglia) making a sappy pseudo-documentary of her father’s struggles to get out of her actual homework assignment.

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Leverage – The Final Season

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Leverage – Season Five
  • wiki: link

Leverage - The Final SeasonSometimes bad guys really did make the best good guys. Nine months after Leverage went off the air for the final time the show’s Fifth Season finally arrives on DVD. The final season offers a new home for the team, Parker (Beth Riesgraf) and Hardison (Aldis Hodge) as a couple, Nate (Timothy Hutton) making big plans, and the return of Sterling (Mark Sheppard) for the series finale.

Highlights of the season include insanely huge cons involving the theft of the Spruce Goose, faking first contact to drive their mark crazy, performing the impossible White Rabbit, solving the real-life mystery of D.B. Cooper, conning Capital Hill, stopping a terrorist plot, stealing Christmas from an evil toy manufacturer, and an injured Parker taking down a gang of thieves on her own.

Other episodes involve the team helping out a minor league hockey team and small winery, taking down a Wall Street swindler in Witness Protection, and Elliot (Christian Kane) enlisting the team to help out an old friend.

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The Hofstadter Insufficiency

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Big Bang Theory – The Hofstadter Insufficiency
  • wiki: link

The Hofstadter Insufficiency

In the show’s Seventh Season premiere Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Penny (Kaley Cuoco) bond while Leonard (Johnny Galecki) parties in the North Sea on his science excursion, Howard (Simon Helberg) attempts to shake Raj (Kunal Nayyar) out of his funk caused by loosing his girlfriend (Kate Micucci) by taking his best friend to a faculty mixer, and Amy(Mayim Bialik) and Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) room together during a science convention out of town. The result is a rather lackluster opener to the season, with a few fun moments, that provides three separate stories, only one of which has much to offer.

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Oh What a Rush

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Rush
  • IMDB: link

RushEven more than winners and losers, championship runs and crushing defeats, sports are defined by rivalries. In Rush, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, Hereafter, The Queen) turn their attention to Formula One and the mid-1970s rivalry between two upstarts whose competition eventually would make them both world champions.

The stark contrast in the two characters and the drama of the season screams Hollywood sports film, and I’m a little surprised it has taken this long for their story to find its way to the big screen. Without the backing of his family Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) bought his way into Formula One with a prickly personality and an unparalleled knowledge of getting the best out of his car. Lauda’s main competition came from the charming but flighty James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) who despite lacking Lauda’s single-mindedness made up for it in his own self-absorbed recklessness and resolve to prove he could beat anyone on a race track.

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Don Jon

/ / Uncategorized
  • Title: Don Jon
  • IMDB: link

Don JonWritten and directed by star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Jon is a romantic comedy presented from the male perspective that’s likely to appeal more to men than women. A film about how a man loves porn more than the woman he’s with is certainly a tricky topic for a date movie (while making certain aspersions to the emotional porn of romcoms and Catholicism along the way), but Gordon-Levitt manages to pull off the intriguing premise even if it looses steam when the film takes its inevitable dramatic turn.

Jon (Gordon-Levitt) really only cares about a handful of things in his life: his friends, his car, his apartment, his religion, and, even more than the bevy of beauties the man takes home every night, his porn. And he really takes his porn seriously. You might even go so far as to call Jon a porn connoisseur. Even when he begins dating the stunning Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), Jon is incapable at letting go of his true love which is always presented in a series of quick-cuts featuring the sound his Mac powering and various porn clips before the inevitable shot of a wad of Kleenex hitting the trash can.

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