Archive for November, 2008

TV watching in the US is now at an all-time high. According to a new Nielsen survey, the average US household has the TV on for eight hours and 18 minutes each day. That’s more than a third of the day!

Granted, that doesn’t mean people are actually watching closely — having the TV on in the background would count toward that total. But still! Eight hours! Not to say I’ve never done it, but I assume I watch more TV than most people. But I could be wrong, so tell me — how does your TV watching compare to the US average?

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The next project from Tony Gilroy, writer and director of Michael Clayton, is Duplicity, a spy thriller with a sexy couple at the heart of it. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts play two corporate spies with a romantic past who “hook up to pull off the ultimate con job on their respective bosses.” Paul Giamatti and the awe-inspiring Tom Wilkinson also star.

I watched the trailer a few times because I’m easily distracted by how good-looking Clive Owen is, but in the end I think it looks like an intriguing enough film. There’s not a lot of chemistry going on with the main duo, but the premise seems fun. And I think the song used in the second part of the trailer is that Bitter:Sweet tune used as the theme song for Lipstick Jungle (it drove me a little crazy at first trying to figure that out). Duplicity opens March 20. To check out the trailer,

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• Dancing the night away. The Dancing with the Stars finales lit up both Monday and Tuesday for ABC, with 21.3 million viewers tuning in for the final performances on Monday and about 20.6 watching the results on Tuesday.
• Jack’s back. 24: Redemption was a decent re-entry for 24 on Sunday, averaging about 12 million viewers.
• Ugly Lipstick. Maybe the memo that Lipstick Jungle was still on the schedule didn’t get out. The show recorded just 3.3 million viewers for its Nov. 21 episode.
• Rockin’ ratings. The American Music Awards was the best-rated non-football program of Sunday evening, with 12.2 million viewers.
• Rosie’s turkey. Rosie Live wasn’t the success story NBC was looking for, drawing just 5 million viewers on Wednesday.

Photo copyright 2008 ABC, Inc.

• Fox has a repeat and a new episode of Cops and is new with America’s Most Wanted
• NBC has Along Came Polly
• CBS has a repeat of Numb3rs and is new with 48 Hours
• ABC has college football coverage
• MTV has National Lampoon’s Van Wilder
• VH1 has Drumline
• Late-night highlights include Anne Hathaway and The Killers on a repeat of Saturday Night Live on NBC and repeats of MadTV and Talkshow on Fox

Every year on Thanksgiving, my dad hauls out his all-time favorite holiday albums: the Time-Life Treasury of Christmas discs, Nat King Cole’s album The Christmas Song, and (his most recent favorite) Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs. Sure, we’re all driven mad by the repetition of these albums by the time Christmas arrives, but it is tradition that they begin their (heavy) rotation on Thanksgiving Day, and we don’t mess with that.

Later on we’ll all watch our usual holiday movies together (It’s a Wonderful Life, The Homecoming, White Christmas), and I have a long-standing tradition with a friend in which we watch The Preacher’s Wife (the one with Whitney Houston . . . what? It’s very sweet!) every year. And though I might have outgrown this tradition now, as a kid I used to spend every New Year’s Eve holding movie marathons with my parents.

What about you? Do you watch specific movies, like A Charlie Brown Christmas, every year? Does this Thanksgiving weekend begin the holiday season in your home like it does in mine?

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“I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.” — Harvey Milk

The story of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk had a huge impact on me a few years ago when I first watched the Oscar-winning documentary about him, The Times of Harvey Milk. His is truly a stranger-than-fiction tale and is so full of inspiration, absurdity, and absolute heartache that it’s somewhat surprising it has taken this long to create a feature-length dramatization of his life and death. I respect director Gus Van Sant’s decision to memorialize and honor Harvey Milk with his movie Milk, and to my great relief, Van Sant and his exceptional ensemble cast have done Milk’s story justice.

Milk picks up Harvey Milk’s life when Milk (Sean Penn) meets one of the great loves of his life, Scott Smith (portrayed by James Franco) and decides to move from New York City to San Francisco. There, the two open a camera store in the heart of the Castro, a neighborhood with a rapidly growing gay population, and there Milk begins his life as a leader of the gay rights movement in the 1970s. After trying and failing twice, he is finally elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977, largely due to the support of the gay community. For the first time, it becomes apparent that the gay community could be a powerful one, and Milk often emphasizes this during his time in city hall. As the country’s first openly gay man to be elected to public office, Milk brings the gay rights movement to the city’s attention as much as possible, earning him admiration and support along with many enemies — including his ultimate enemy, fellow supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). For more about this and my thoughts on it all,

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Hey Buzz Book Club readers! Have you finished Julie and Julia? I’m excited to chat about this final section, even though I’m still in a food coma from feasting yesterday. I have to say, I can’t believe Julie really pulls this thing off!

Here’s how the Book Club goes if you’re new: Every week I suggest chapters to complete by the next post (which, in this case, was every Friday in November). In these weekly Book Club posts, I posit a few questions to prompt discussion in the comment section.

I’ll fill you in on my December book soon. For now, to discuss the final section of Julie and Julia, in which we read from the chapter titled “Sweet Smell of Failure” to the end of the book, just

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It’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and the best time to start your holiday gift buying! To celebrate and get you started here’s a taste of our many fabulous gift guides — also check out these helpful websites and of course Sale Habit. As always check out all of our awesome holiday content on HolidaySugar, from cooking to decorating to survival tips and more! Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and now it’s time to get into gift-giving mode!

Make A Wishlist on ShopStyle!	Great Gadgets For Sisters	The Hipster Foodie
Woman on the Run	Fab Gifts for Mom	Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh
Great Gits for a Six Month Old	Home Gifts for the Feminine Modernist	Good Stuff For Entertainment Loving Girls