News Cycles: Entertainment Reviews

Father, daughter make baseball a year-round quest (AP)

AP - "The Baseball Fan's Bucket List: 162 Things You Must See, Do, Get, and Experience Before You Die" (Running Press, 288 pages, $15.95), by Robert Santelli and Jenna Santelli: Baseball is played by the boys of spring, whose sport also runs through summer and spills into the first several weeks of fall.

Life's too short for "Minute to Win It" (Reuters)

Reuters - Without football or Olympics, NBC has a Sunday slot to be filled. At the same time, it has a game show, "Minute to Win It," which is capable of filling an hour. At NBC these days, that qualifies as a programing match made in heaven.
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"Sons of Tucson" mixes warmth with sly wit (Reuters)

Reuters - One might call Fox's "Sons of Tucson" a blended-family comedy.
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Thai thriller straddles homophobia, homoerotica (Reuters)

Reuters - In the slasher-thriller "Slice," a cop-turned-convict tracks down a serial killer by delving into his own troubled childhood memories.
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'The Scottsboro Boys' examines racial injustice (AP)

AP - Let's get right to the point. "The Scottsboro Boys" is a staggeringly inventive piece of musical theater.

Review: Pattinson still brooding in `Remember Me' (AP)

AP - In "Remember Me," Robert Pattinson has temporarily stepped away from "Twilight," apparently in search of his "Five Easy Pieces" or "Rebel Without a Cause."

Review: `Final Fantasy XIII' falls flat (AP)

AP - During the 1990s, the Square brand was synonymous with the role-playing video game. A generation of gamers got hooked on the challenging quests, quirky characters and sweeping story lines of Square RPGs like "Chrono Trigger," "The Secret of Mana" and, of course, the "Final Fantasy" series.

Author reveals the unwritten rules of baseball (AP)

AP - "The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime" (Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $25), by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca: Major League Baseball is a complex, intricate game with a thick rule book that covers everything from balks and bunts to force plays and foul tips.

Review: `Green Zone' is a failure of intelligence (AP)

AP - All the war-zone authenticity in the Arab world cannot salvage the silly Hollywood plot at the heart of "Green Zone," Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass' first collaboration outside the Jason Bourne realm.

Phantom sequel a "shadow of the original" (Reuters)

Reuters - Comparisons with the original were inevitable when Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to write a sequel to his record-breaking musical "Phantom of the Opera."
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"Remember" this: "Twilight" star shines in romance (Reuters)

Reuters - "Remember Me" is a smart, engaging drama about young love flourishing amid sadness and loss. The story ends on September 11, 2001, in New York, which, depending on your point of view, further underscores the sense of loss implicit in the movie's title or is an unnecessary dramatic ploy to end the film with a devastating twist of fate.
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"Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" a cold-case chiller (Reuters)

Reuters - Revolving around an investigative reporter and his unlikely crime-solving partner, Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson's posthumous Millennium trilogy of novels were not so much best-sellers as international publishing phenomena.
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Review: `Our Family Wedding' surpasses stereotype (AP)

AP - One enters a movie like "Our Family Wedding" bracing for cheesiness.

"Who Is Clark Rockefeller?" a rip-off (Reuters)

Reuters - Con men. Those charming devils who smile as they plunge the knife in your back, then make you want to thank them for the privilege. Hollywood, and let's face it, audiences, love 'em.
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`Candida' channels power struggles of marriage (AP)

AP - The power struggles of marriage are eternal. Witness George Bernard Shaw's domestic comedy, "Candida," written 112 years ago.

CW's reality shows an affront to female viewers (Reuters)

Reuters - The CW is taking its largely female audience into two women-centric worlds with the reality shows "Fly Girls" and "High Society."
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Review: Gary Allan reveals pain on new CD (AP)

AP - Gary Allan, "Get Off on the Pain" (MCA Nashville)

"She's Out of My League" an inspirational comedy (Reuters)

Reuters - "She's Out of My League" is that rare modern screen comedy that is better than the trailers make it appear.
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'Rain' expertly examines the question 'Who Am I?' (AP)

AP - Playwright Andrew Bovell knows how to get an audience's attention: a dead fish.

Billboard CD reviews: Drive-By Truckers, The Chieftains (Reuters)

Reuters - Drive-By Truckers know all about big to-dos, whether it's releasing a full-blown "Southern Rock Opera" or such sweeping conceptual pieces as "The Dirty South" and their last studio album, 2008's "Brighter Than Creation's Dark." By those standards the band's latest release, "The Big To-Do," is a modest affair: a collection of unconnected -- though certainly related -- songs that traverse all sorts of Southern terrain and situations.
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