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Category: Entertainment

Latest movie and TV news, in-depth reviews, opinion essays, plus book highlights. Your ultimate entertainment hub for films, series, and reading.

Book Reviews

Last Train To Memphis & Careless Love (Box Set) Review

William McPherson5 Comments

In Peter Guralnick’s 1994 book ‘Last Train to Memphis’ (The Rise of Elvis Presley) and his 1999 follow up ‘Careless Love’ (The Unmaking of Elvis Presley) a post mortem rescue mission is attempted on the humanity of one Elvis Aaron Presley. Elvis Presley died a full twelve years before this writer was even born, and so I and many others can only look back on his life with an odd sort of disorientation from an unbridgeable distance of time and culture. Guralnick sets aside (although does not…

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Entertainment

Looper Review

William McPherson3 Comments

Along with being a pretty enjoyable Sci-Fi suspense picture, I have the weird duty to report that 2012’s ‘Looper’ may be the overall best movie about mass suicide and attempted child murder that I’ve ever seen. Not that I have seen that many films like this mind you, nor do I particularly hope the genre catches on; but for what it is, which is basically an amped up B-Movie Sci-Fi thriller (which was advertised as the second coming of ‘Inception’ unfortunately) with a better than average cast and…

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The Pacifier
Entertainment

The Pacifier Review

Gary Smith2 Comments

Vin, Vin, Vin, Vin. What were you thinking? You’re an action guy. You blow shit up. It’s all good to try and do comedy, because comedy kicks ass, but…this was…not good. Diesel stars as Lt. Shane Wolfe, a Navy SEAL trained to fight in the most dangerous and impossible situations known to man. So imagine his surprise when he is told he must “baby-sit” the five children of a recently assassinated scientist, who had developed a program to scramble missile launch codes or something(he must also try…

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Tombstone
Entertainment

Tombstone Review

Gary Smith1 Comment

I don’t know why I’m writing this, everybody should already know this is a fantastic movie…what? There are people that haven’t seen this? You’re kidding…my God, those poor bastards. Ok, for the six people in the universe that haven’t seen this movie, allow me to give a brief summary. Tombstone is the story of legendary lawman Wyatt Earp (Russell) and his brothers (Elliott and Paxton), who have moved out west to Arizona in order to make their fortune. The Earps’ reputation precedes them…

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Barbed Wire City
Entertainment

Barbed Wire City Review

William McPherson4 Comments

Does the wrestling world really need another documentary on the late promotion known as Extreme Championship Wrestling? (1993-2001) I don’t know man, I don’t know. All I can say here is that this documentary managed not to bore me, and for the most part did a good job with what it had to tell the story it wanted to tell. The WWE did a superb job (if admittedly biased in their own favor as you’d expect) with The Rise and Fall of ECW DVD way back when, so good in fact that it went on to become one…

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The Third Man
Entertainment

The Third Man Review

William McPherson7 Comments

As a big fan of classic film noir it is to my utter embarrassment to have to admit to not having until now, finally seen ‘The Third Man’ in its entirety. The final motivating factor that pushed me over the edge was a statement written by my movie reviewing hero, the recently deceased Roger Ebert, when he said that whenever he met someone who had never seen ‘The Third Man’ or ‘Singin In The Rain’ (another movie I will get around to seeing eventually, although I am not the biggest fan of musicals…

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The Words
Entertainment

The Words Review

William McPherson

Here’s a fact I defy anyone to challenge. No movie, television show, book or any other piece of fictional entertainment containing a main character named “Rory” has ever been any good. I will personally shake the hand of anyone who can find evidence to convince me otherwise. (Provided said person is willing to pay for their own travel, lodging, and food if the journey to collect said handshake proves to be a longish one.) In a way it really pains me to write this review, as Bradley Cooper, who…

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Silver Linings Playbook
Entertainment

Silver Linings Playbook Review

William McPherson5 Comments

This is a delightful movie about lovably crazy people. Silver Linings Playbook was smartly written, wonderfully acted, and full of life from beginning to end. If you want the gist of this review without reading through all of the below banter, I’ll sum it up with this. Go see this movie. Matthew Quick, the author of the novel from which this movie was based, and David O. Russell who did the screenplay and directed the movie itself, should both be commended much here at the start. It’s a very…

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A View To A Kill
Entertainment

A View To A Kill Review

William McPherson

Hello everyone and welcome to the fourteenth official installment in my series of reviews chronicling the James Bond film franchise. When last I left you, we had just reviewed what would have been number fourteen in the series, had it been an official EON production. However, the film we reviewed (1983’s Never Say Never Again) was an unofficial title starring the great Sean Connery in his final outing as James Bond, and thus shall not be counted in the overall tally here. Now with that little…

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11/22/63 Book
Entertainment

11/22/63 Review

William McPherson

The novel 11/22/63 tells the story of Jake Epping, a (soon to be time traveling) high school English teacher (the job and life that Stephen King himself occupied before his whirlwind success started with the publication of Carrie in the late 70s) from Lisbon Falls, Maine, recently divorced, who is also teaching an adult GED preparation class in the evenings, after school. One of his pupils in that class is his own high school’s janitor, Harry Dunning, or ‘Hoptoad Harry’ as the kids have cruelly…

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Gangster Squad
Entertainment

Gangster Squad Review

William McPherson2 Comments

Gangster Squad is a sleek and stylish 1940’s Los Angeles period piece/shoot em’ up filled with terrific actors, great costumes, elaborately ornate sets, and wall to wall action. Now, if only the producers had invested as much in an actual story and some three dimensional characters as they did in the carnage and aesthetics, we might have really had something worth talking about here. As it is, what, judging from the ingredients, could have been a film on par with such gangster luminaries as ‘The…

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Killing Them Softly
Entertainment

Killing Them Softly Review

William McPherson

Now, it used to be when Hollywood wanted to make a political statement, but also wanted to do so in a semi-inconspicuous manner that they would turn to the ever trusted western to do the trick, with the Civil War often filling in for the then too controversial Vietnam War in subject matter, and cattle kings and big land barons filling in for the evils of modern corporate greed and various other ills. Nowadays though, the classic western has been pretty much supplanted in that station by the more…

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Stand Up Guys
Entertainment

Stand Up Guys Review

William McPherson

A great big vintage car rolls up to a prison. Two old friends, both of them wearing suits that look like they have some serious age to them make some cursory small talk and then embrace. After exchanging brief pleasantries, they drive off for one last adventure to relive their glory days. It sounds like the set up for a sequel to the Blues Brothers, which with Christopher Walken and Al Pacino in the starring roles could have been a bizarre hoot, but instead what is about to transpire is more…

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Devil in the White City
Book Reviews

Devil in the White City Review

William McPherson2 Comments

I read this book a few years prior to this writing. Coming into it I was expecting, like other reviewers, to be more interested in the sordid tales of H.H Holmes and his infamous 'Murder Castle' rather than the great engineering feat that was the 1893 World's Fair. But during the reading of this book I found myself almost wanting at times to skip past the sections focusing on Holmes story to get back to the fascinating and inspirational story of Daniel H. Burnham and Fredrick Law Olmstead, and…

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The Big Sleep
Entertainment

The Big Sleep Review

Gary Smith4 Comments

Humphrey Bogart is considered by many movie-buffs to be one of, if not the, greatest actors of all time; so you knew it was only a matter of time before a Bogart movie was finally featured in this series (and considering this is the first Bogart film I’ve seen, you can probably guess another popular film of his will also be coming soon). Bogart stars as Philip Marlowe, a private investigator hired by the wealthy General Sternwood regarding some blackmailing of his daughter Carmen. Sternwood’s…

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Tin Man
Entertainment

Tin Man Review

Gary Smith

Tin Man is the epic miniseries from the SyFy Channel that took Oz to a new level; it’s a modernized retelling of the story and science fiction intended for teens and adults. When this originally aired on SyFy it was a three night event that was six hours long (and that’s including commercial breaks). There are no commercials on this Blu-ray release though, so the actual length is somewhere between four and five hours, and I always like to watch it all in one sitting. That may seem tedious, but…

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The Vikings
Entertainment

The Vikings Review

Gary Smith

* Spoilers ahead! The History Channel miniseries “The Vikings” premieres this Sunday night, and since I’m actually looking forward to it (along with “The Bible”) this CCW felt like the perfect time for an epic that I hadn’t seen before for with the same name. Luckily, Amazon Instant Prime has this 1958 “epic” available for free streaming for Prime members. The Vikings is the tale of two half-brothers who don’t know that they’re half-brothers, both sons of the Viking King Ragnar. Ragnar led a…

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Pathfinder
Entertainment

Pathfinder Review

Gary Smith

Besides the subpar acting, one thing stood out as the downfall of what could have and should have been a wonderful movie- the directing. So I wasn’t too surprised when I looked up Marcus Nispel on the Internet Movie Database and found that the only thing he’d ever directed was music videos; and boy does that show. Pathfinder is filled with cameras shaking and rapid angle changes, all edited together to leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell was the point of doing that. Nispel…

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Contact
Entertainment

Contact Review

Gary Smith

Jodie Foster stars as Ellie Arroway, a scientist who has dedicated her entire life to making ‘contact’ with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Ellie’s work finally pays off, when she hears a radio message being broadcast from the distant star, Vega. Together with her team, she unlocks the broadcast, Hitler’s speech from the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics and thousands of pages of alien text, containing the blueprints to build a machine. The machine, will send a single person…

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Treasures of Bruce Lee
Book Reviews

The Treasures of Bruce Lee Review

Gary Smith

I have seen a little of Bruce Lee’s work as an actor, but not much and I’m certainly not a big Bruce Lee fan. Having said that, I really love this book; so if I, as someone who isn’t a Bruce Lee fan, love this book then fans of Mr. Lee should be doing cartwheels over it. Really, it’s pretty awesome (as these kinds of books tend to me, at least in my opinion). The book is written by Paul Bowman (a Bruce Lee expert) and contains a brief foreword by Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee. It’s a good…

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