Jammer’s Reviews were created by Jammer. They evolved. They rebelled. Some were written to think they were dissertations. And Jammer has a plan — to curtail them moving forward.

When I launched Jammer’s Blog (JB) eight months ago, my mind was already churning away, looking ahead to the future of Jammer’s Reviews (JR) as a viable web site, and more specifically toward a Jammer’s Reviews & Blog (JRB) hybrid site where one would feed the other. (Read more…)

The Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica debuts tonight at 9/8c on Syfy.

Tonight’s two-hour pilot movie is what was released on DVD last April. Many of you have undoubtedly seen it. I saw it back then, but have not yet gotten around to reviewing it. Look for that next week (now that I’m facing a deadline).

For those who have not seen the Caprica pilot, and might have been on the fence as to whether you were going to give Caprica a try, perhaps I can give you a nudge in the right direction:

Watch it. It’s very good. (Read more…)

At long last, I’ve posted my absolutely last review for Battlestar Galactica, for the TV movie “The Plan,” which debuted on DVD and Blu-ray nearly three months ago and premiered on Sci Fi Syfy a couple weeks ago. You can read the review over at the home office known as Jammer’s Reviews. (Read more…)

I wrote last summer about Conan O’Brien’s big, much-anticipated move to The Tonight Show, closing with this paragraph:

But ratings be damned. Our boy has reached the Promised Land. Am I the only Conan fan who couldn’t help but grin happily, seeing that opening sketch of Show One — with Conan running from New York to Los Angeles — as a sort of victory lap?

Insert title card: SEVEN MONTHS LATER. (Read more…)

The film industry has been trying to push 3D on its customers for a while now, but it has just in the past year or so shifted that campaign into high gear. 2009 had a number of notable titles to be released in movie theaters in 3D (most of them CGI-animated productions that easily lend themselves to the 3D process because they are completely digitally created).

Avatar and 3D: The future of cinema? Not so fast.

Now comes the 3D “game changer” behemoth: Avatar. This is going to be the movie that changes everything, right?

Well, not so fast.

Avatar is the first modern 3D feature film that I’ve seen. By “modern,” I mean the sort of 3D by way of modern techniques like circular polarization, as opposed to those 1950s-style red/blue glasses.

Avatar is a wonderfully entertaining and unsubtle message movie and a visual achievement (and no, I will not be reviewing it), but I am not convinced that it needs to be seen in 3D. Granted, the 3D was pretty damn cool. There were scenes where you could literally focus on foreground objects on the screen as if they were really there, and then switch your focus to objects behind them, and the foreground object would go double, just like in real life. There are some breathtaking shots in 3D, where the experience becomes immersive. And impressive. (Read more…)

I enjoy it when an actor just goes for it, completely uninhibited by the fear of looking silly or being accused of going totally over the top — continuing on long after an actor with reasonable restraint would’ve stopped. Memorably hilarious scenes that come to mind include Will Ferrell throwing a tantrum in a phone booth in Anchorman and Kurt Russell screaming bloody murder over a minor arm wound in Death Proof.

Or in the case of this great clip, Stephen Colbert doing an impression of a nuclear explosion. Hilarious.

As everyone who has watched this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (and probably many who haven’t) knows, this was the year in which Curb went hyper-meta and became, in part, a show about making a Seinfeld reunion show. The plotline came to a head in last night’s finale, which was brilliant, and in some weird ways played like science fiction.

“Larry David” and “Jerry Seinfeld” prepare a “scene” on a “reunion show.” In the show-within-a-show, Larry later decides to play George, who was originally inspired by Larry. Brains explode.

Larry David, who plays a fictional version of himself on the show, spent this season getting the Seinfeld cast back together (with the usual amusements that ensue from setbacks, histrionics, and in-jokes) in order to create a Seinfeld reunion that would serve, in a sense, as a second finale to the series which had that famously disliked final episode.

The arc was a clever device that allowed Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld to do a reunion without actually doing one. All season, when Larry was told that this would allow them to “make up for the finale,” he would maintain that there was nothing to make up for. (The whole plot was ostensibly a means to an end — a Machiavellian scheme for Larry to get back together with his wife.) (Read more…)

File this one under “they told you so.” About a year ago, Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper left “Ebert & Roeper & the Movies” after Disney-ABC Television attempted to retool the show into something that it wasn’t. Ebert, who owns the trademarks for “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” had already been in less-than-successful negotiations with Disney over their acquisition of the trademarks. When Disney announced that “At the Movies” would be evolving its format into something else, negotiations apparently broke down completely, and Ebert and Roeper both walked away. (Read more…)