He wasn't bad in Jurassic Park and The Hunt for Red October.

I haven't seen the show, but the movie was god-awful. I ended up laughing so much it might as well have been a comedy. 'Leaden and obvious' is right on -- the fact that that movie won an Oscar is a great tragedy in film history.

about crash. i didn't see the movie, but i did like the other one with james spader and all those folks. that would make an interesting series.

but this one seems to just go out of its way to piss off the viewer. if it weren't for Hopper it's be a total loss.

I loved the movie "Crash". I found it thought-provoking and depressing and eye-opening. But I would never watch a TV show based on it. The movie made its point. It was painful to watch - the expose on racism, classism, etc. for 2 hours. But it made its point very well. There's nothing more to say. Why would I want to keep watching it, over and over again, by different people and different scenarios, every week? No thank you.

To quote Ms. Havrilesky: "How is it possible for the show's writers not to realize how impossible it is to care about characters who consistently behave like charmless, soulless thugs?"

Because they see the success of series like The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm and even, God help me, Desperate Housewives. They see that despicable bastards are apparently "this year's blonde," so they quickly whip up similar characters and throw them into a screenplay from the bottom of the slush pile. And they hope they can at least get a pilot deal and run with the money.

As far as Crusoe, with only two continuing characters, the series has to have a limited perspective, and NBC's programming people should have recognized it from the start. There are ways out of that trap. (Stationing a pirate cove nearby, giving Crusoe and Friday something to raid and harass, would be easy - heck, I'm a nonpro and even I thought of it.)

Didn't they remember that Gilligan's Island had seven people, and even then, they had to add improbable guest stars to keep that from getting boring? And even that got tired.

How the hell can you mention this drivel in the same breath as (especially) "The Sopranos" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?

Soulless? Oy veh!

I'm speechless...

The manipulative, lying, traitorous bitches of Wisteria Lane are no different in their basic motivations than the Soprano family. Yes, one is a "comedy" and the other is a drama, but they are on the same continuum.

They both advocate the philosophy that got us where we are, that one never stands so tall as when he steps on the neck of his friend. One pitches to those with a taste for drama, the other for those with a soapy palate, but the message is the same. I could have also thrown in Breaking Bad or Dexter or any of the other bastards the audience is worshipping. It's not the quality of each presentation I'm arguing, only that they're all promoting greed and selfishness.

There's an odd solice in a fictional world filled with dispicable people. It's so much like real life...or at least how we preceive it.

We don'tneed an innocent character to identify with anymore, since we, as viewers, are now active characters in the stories we watch. Our "judgement," of what we are seeing becomes the missing element.

The show's producers know that, and so do the advertisers.

....that most people didn't get - including, apparently, both Heather Havrilesky and Stephanie Zacharek - is that it wasn't actually about racism. It was about isolation, and the jarring and disruptive acts that it drives people to. Race was just the divide that was used to tell those stories.

Don Cheadle, at the beginning of the movie, says something to the effect of "people don't touch each other in this city. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something." That, in a nutshell, is what the movie was about. It had a lot of subtlety to it. You just had to look beyond the obvious to see it.

That being said, I can't imagine a whole television series being based on that. And since I don't get Starz, I guess I'll never see if they manage to pull it off.

Elegant simplicity is the rock star in mathmatics and physics. Big Pauly and Aaron Bonn (above) show us how it's done.

I missed the first season because I was judgmental enough to be put off by the title. Then I listened to my women friends who loved it, and gave it a try. This is one of the more layered, complex dramas on television that happens to have funny moments. These women are worth the effort to get to know them. Soap, schmoap.

Dillon's racist diatribes were the best and funniest parts of the movie. Of course in TV, all brown people are noble, good, handsome and no one, NO ONE can ever ever mention anything remotely interesting about them. TV is all up in that boring annoying self righteousness.

"Robinson Crusoe" is one of Defoe's most famous novels. Some scholars questions whether it should should even be considered a novel because its conventions are those of 17th century travel literature and the book has more in common with the first-person accounts of seafaring explorers and sometime-pirates like Sir William Dampier, a real-life contemporary of the imaginary Crusoe. So many times it has been reworked as a film because its themes are engaging and we all have a soft spot in our fantasies for island paradises. Thanks for your analysis of the latest revival on television. Since you brought up the "gay" theme in this latest version, it does allow us to speculate on Freud's theory that all human beings are essentialy bisexual and, given the circumstances of survival and human social needs, we all are capable of homosexual relationships or, at least, homosocial relations. Clearly that of Crusoe and Friday are an example of that, as was so brilliantly shown in Luis Bunuel's 1954 film of "Robinson Crusoe," starring Dan O'Herlihy as Crusoe and Jaime Fernandez as Friday. Bunuel's classic film plays out the gay relationship with a vengeance. I would definitely recommend watching Bunuel's film and skipping the TV show.