30 rock Tagged Articles at Cinematical

OK, take a deep breath -- I know what I'm about to say is heresy on a movie site, but have you noticed that TV has gotten pretty damn good lately? So good that sometimes it's better than going to the movies ...almost. The Emmys may be long over, and those golden totems to ad revenue are already being displayed in the trophy cases of the winners. But if you were watching the show, you might have noticed a running theme throughout the telecast: the death of broadcast television. Well I'm going to have to respectfully disagree, because while I totally get that the TV landscape is changing, and the networks may not know how to milk this whole newfangled Internet thing for every dollar its worth, audiences are still tuning in (whether its on cable or broadcast TV) for some of the most innovative entertainment in history.

Not since the days of Seinfeld has talk about TV dominated water cooler chat and flooded the Internet forums and chat rooms. When you arrive to work in the morning, are you talking about last weekend's blockbuster, or are you and your co-workers talking about last night's LOST, Mad Men, or True Blood? Now don't get me wrong: I always have, and always will love going to the movies. There will always be something about sitting in the dark alongside strangers with state of the art sound and images that makes it my favorite pastime. But, I still have to hand it to the small screen for managing to finally make TV cool again. So in honor of our friends at TV Squad, I'm going to throw a little love at the small screen - here are just a couple of reasons why I think TV is (sometimes) better than the movies.

After the jump: in defense of the boob tube...

See the expression on Ice Cube's face in this photograph? I wore that same expression for the entire running time of First Sunday. The transition of the holiday movie season into the barren movie wasteland of January is always a jarring one. For the past three months, it seems like I've seen nothing but Oscar-caliber movies -- masterful films by outstanding filmmakers working from amazing scripts. So maybe First Sunday just pales in comparison...

But I don't think so.

No, this is not yet another sequel to that terrific Ice Cube comedy Friday, as many have suspected. Sunday tells the story of "new" characters Durell (Cube) and LeeJohn (Tracy Morgan). As the movie opens, the boys are picked up by the cops for their involvement with some stolen wheelchairs. They are sentenced to 5,000 hours of community service, the owner of the wheelchairs comes to collect, and Durell finds himself broke. Things get even more desperate when Durell's ex-girlfriend (Regina Hall) tells him she intends to move to another state with his son...unless he can come up with $17,000 to pay off a debt. So Durell and LeeJohn do what anyone in their shoes would do -- they decide to rob a church. And of course, after a night amongst good Christian folk, they learn that crime is bad and God is good and blah blah blah.

Remember that mushy-sounding, Irreconcilable Differences-esque movie starring the Fanning sisters that's in the works? About a little girl who sues her parents for divorce after finding out she only exists to serve as a genetic match for her dying sis? It's called My Sister's Keeper, and it just got a whole lot better-sounding. According to Variety, Alec Baldwin has joined the cast, which also includes Cameron Diaz as the mother of Dakota and Elle Fanning. Baldwin fortunately won't be playing the girls' daddy; instead he's set for the role of an attorney representing the younger, wrongfully-conceived sister. He will be going up against Diaz, whose mom character is also a former trial lawyer and will be defending herself. It's still unclear if the father role will be significant, or if the parents are now divorced, separated or simply not cinematic equals. Of course, the production has until its February start date to let us know the actor for that part.

Baldwin, who previously worked with Dakota Fanning on The Cat in the Hat, was able to sign on to My Sister's Keeper thanks in part to the writer's strike, which has halted the shooting of Baldwin's hit TV series 30 Rock (though Variety points out he is contractually allowed to schedule a movie, who's to say it would have happened with this, at this time?). I've just recently become addicted to the show specifically because of him, and hope his attorney character is close in tone to his NBC executive character, Jack Donaghy. Yet something -- perhaps the subject matter of the film -- tells me that won't be the case. Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) will be directing from a script by Jeremy Leven (The Notebook), which was adapted from the novel by Jodi Picoult, while Mark Johnson (The Notebook) produces.