Each winter, as February becomes March, Columbia, Missouri transforms itself into a grand stage for the True/False film fest, a four-day international nonfiction film festival.
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Author Archive
Exploring True/False
An Entourage Movie? Why?
Entourage may have already given HBO’s parent company Time Warner all that it’s capable of giving.
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Brave: Changing Our Fate
If Pixar is truly a cutting-edge animation studio, why did Brave take seventeen years?
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Who (does HBO hope) is watching Girls?
After two episodes of trying to decide how I feel about the show, I started to wonder: Who does HBO hope will watch Girls? Girls’ small initial audience suggests that its audience “isn’t easily defined.”
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Half-time in America
I love the SuperBowl, but not for the reasons you’d expect. I usually don’t know who’s in it, don’t care who wins it, and don’t watch it. I do, however, love to use it in class when I teach TV Criticism because I’ve found the Super Bowl’s ads are useful texts with which to...
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Out of Time
Each year, the anticipated fall premiere television season is followed by an equally exciting period: fall cancellation season. The failures of The Playboy Club and Pan Am raise the question of why we turn to period TV, especially post-Mad Men.
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Dumpster Divers or Culture Jammers?: TLC’s Extreme Couponers
The Learning Channel's Extreme Couponing evokes surprise, and even disgust for the lengths to which people go to accumulate coupons, acquire products, and display their stockpiles. It fails, however, to thoroughly explore people’s motivations for their actions.
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Report from Console-ing Passions 2010
At Console-ing Passions, you can expect scholarship on culture, identity, gender, and sexuality (as they relate to media) in every panel—and it’s great to mingle with so many brilliant feminist scholars!
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Undercover Boss: Making CEOs More Palatable?
Positioned against bad press about extravagant executive compensation in the midst of a financial meltdown and growing national unemployment, Undercover Boss is a makeover show that aims to humanize executives in the eyes of the masses disillusioned with corporate America and teaches them to be humble in the presence of their employees.
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The Role of the Media in Times of Crisis
The US television coverage of Haiti has me thinking about the role of media in a humanitarian crisis.
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