MONDAY
JULY 2
2012

BIANCULLI’S BEST BETS

 

Fox, 8:00 p.m. ET

Part 1 of 2. In this week’s two-parter (concluding tomorrow night), the wannabe chefs compete in Las Vegas, and have to concoct a recipe whose ingredients are determined by a slot machine. Hmm. If they’re playing the one I’m thinking of, and with similar luck to mine, they’ll be making a smoothie: two oranges, one cherry.

 
  
 
 

AMC, 8:00 p.m. ET

May as well start early. Tonight and tomorrow, AMC is presenting the same 1996 action film it plans to present on Independence Day: Independence Day, starring Will Smith (pictured) and Bill Pullman. No matter when AMC shows this movie, I’ll have the same complaint: In the scenes where everyone is fleeing Washington, D.C. at the presumed end of the world, the outgoing highways are jammed, but the incoming ones are empty. What’s to prevent drivers from shifting to the wrong side for an unobstructed getaway? The threat of a traffic ticket?

 
  
 
 

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

Alfred Hitchcock once remade one of his old movies with a new cast, but this 1953 film is just as much of a revisited rarity. Mogambo is  a John Ford remake of 1932’s Red Dust, a Victor Fleming film about a rubber plantation owner torn between two newly arrived women: an opportunistic showgirl seductress, and the alluring wife of a visiting surveyor. In Red Dust, the two women were played, respectively, by Jean Harlow and Mary Astor. In Mogambo, the women are played, instead, by Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly (pictured). But in both movies, made more than 20 years apart, the plantation owner is played by the same actor: Clark Gable.

 
  
 
 

HBO, 9:00 p.m. ET

Marina Abramovic is called, by some, the “grandmother of performance art,” and this documentary traces the path that led her from a standard course of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade to using her body, and her images, to entice, inflame and outrage the art world. For a full review, see Eric Gould’s Cold Light Reader column HERE.

 
  
 
 

Showtime, 11:00 p.m. ET

SEASON PREMIERE: It pays to have fans. When Lisa Kudrow ran into Meryl Streep last year, the latter raved about the former’s Web Therapy comedy series. Kudrow offered Streep a guest-star role, Streep said yes, and tonight’s Season 2 premiere is the result. Streep plays a therapist whose area of expertise is “gay conversion,” seeking to scare her patients straight.

 
  
 
 
 
 
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David Bianculli

Founder / Editor

David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.