Garret Dillahunt

It happens occasionally in movies: an unknown actor will get two or three movie roles back to back, then have them all reach theaters – or a film festival – at the same time. If the movies happen to be good and the actor is particularly noticeable, Boom! He’s having a moment.

It happened, in various years, at Sundance – one year it was Parker Posey, one year it was Lili Taylor, or Steve Zahn or Philip Seymour Hoffman.

There’s something similar happening on TV, though the actors aren’t unknowns. Because of the staggered nature of TV seasons these days, actors are suddenly available for more than one series at once – and can have two or more shows on the air at the same time. (More…)

In case you needed proof that Hollywood is dominated by and aimed at people in their 30s and early 40s, look at all the movies about the 1980s currently on screens.

Talk about revenge of Gen-X.

Both “Adventureland” and “Is Anybody There?” are set in 1987 – what are the odds? “Lymelife” is set in 1979 – and you can already smell the fumes of the Reagan era. “The Informers” is set in 1983 – perhaps the most vapid and dangerous part of the decade, when MTV and USA Today were permanently altering our genetic make-up to shrink our collective attention span.

The ’80s was a decade snowed under a blizzard of cocaine and Republicanism. If the ’70s was the Me Decade (and I’m not sure it was), the ’80s was the Greed Decade – sowing the seeds for the George W. Bush decade of irrational exuberance.

What does it mean to set a movie in the ’80s? (More…)

Much has been made of the fact that, within two weeks, we have two movies that deal – if only indirectly – with the crisis in newspapers that is threatening contemporary journalism as we know it.

In last week’s “State of Play,” Helen Mirren, as the editor of the Washington, D.C., newspaper where Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams work, admonishes them about the fact that the paper has new owners – and they want stories that sell copies. The message is that the bottom-line-oriented business people who have taken over the nation’s print media are more interested in profits than truth, in making money than serving the public trust. Shocking.

In this week’s “The Soloist,” Robert Downey Jr., as real-life L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, watches as one colleague after another packs his belongings into boxes and is escorted from the building by security guards after being downsized. Lopez himself – and his ex-wife/editor, played by Catherine Keener – never seem in danger of a similar fate, but it’s still disconcerting to see it happen to friends.

Still, as canary-in-the-coalmine moments go, these movies are pretty tepid, because movies have such a long lead time. It’s one thing for “Law & Order” to pull plots from the news and rewrite them as crime drama – and even then, there’s a lag time of months. With movies, however, the lag is measured in years.

Which means that whatever these movies are showing about what’s happening to newspapers, it’s much, much worse at the moment. Indeed, if you read the headlines, print media are pretty much on life support. (More…)

I love Bill Maher’s attitude and comedy and watch “Real Time” without fail.

But I was totally stumped as to why he would devote a half-hour last week to an interview with Ron Howard. Especially on a special-edition show where the other half-hour was devoted to a one-on-one interview with Gore Vidal.

How do they even equate? (More…)

Let me say it flat out: “Rescue Me” is the best show on TV. And its fifth season, which kicks off tonight on FX, promises to be as intense, gripping – and hilarious – as each of the previous four. More so, perhaps.

“Rescue Me” stars Denis Leary as TV’s most morally complex character – Tommy Gavin. Like the best TV creations, he’s at once hysterically funny, serious as a heart attack, a victim of his own bad choices and a product of his best instincts.

Like Tony Soprano, the only other central character on a TV series who has ever matched – or exceeded – Tommy as a fascinating figure of conflicting emotions, Tommy Gavin is his own worst enemy. He’s capable of houndishly despicable behavior. Yet like Tony, Tommy is ruled by something more than his id. Call them his better angels, despite his ambivalent (bordering on antipathetic) relationship with the Catholic Church. (More…)