Bill Murray is simply the best of the SNL bunch that migrated from 30 Rock to Sunset and Vine. Most often, Murray plays himself, or to say it another way, the character he crafted Saturday nights on NBC.

Which question has more relevancy: what did Miles Davis do for jazz, or what did Miles Davis do to jazz? From where I’ve been listening over several decades, both questions have precisely the same answer: “Quite a bit!”

Animal rights activists had a good year, but watch out for tRump! Those who say that we ordinary people can’t have any effect on today’s corporate behemoths should check out two breakthroughs last year by a group the establishment has long derided as somewhere between wacko and criminal: animal rights activists.

Even cast members of Logan Lucky don’t really know who Rebecca Blunt is. A person so named is credited with writing the screenplay for this new Steven Soderbergh film. If a woman, perhaps she’s a sister to Emily Blunt… though I’d guess not.

The Tony Award-Winning San Francisco Mime Troupe continues its 56th season with free performances of “Freedomland.” A door is blown off its hinges! Into a blasted room of scarred walls and shattered windows, armed with M-16’s, America’s bravest duck and dodge for cover, finally training their deadly gunsights on … an old black man.

“Bridge of Spies” – a film review by Gary Chew Seeing Steven Spielberg’s new film as it now opens allows you to compare the current military activity of Vladimir Putin in Syria with the historic and legendary downing of an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet Russia in 1960...

“Spotlight” – a film review by Gary Chew Seeing Spotlight almost made me feel homesick. Not for a place, but for a place in time when covering important events was not supplanted with infotainment or blatant propaganda. Tom McCarthy’s film, which he and Josh Singer wrote, gives us a look into how the investigative team...

If you’re a Franz Kafka or Henry Miller fan and have some curiosity about Sigmund Freud, Anomalisa is a movie you have to see.

We’ve seen a million or more police procedurals in movies and on television; they began well before TV’s Joe Friday was around keeping Los Angeles safe. Time enough has slipped by for us to now learn the intricate steps of the drone procedural.

Which are we? The America of courage, or of fear? Are we the great America of courage, spunk, openness, inclusion, opportunity and democratic promise — as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and Emma Lazarus’ sonnet engraved on the Statue of Liberty?

It may well be that director Miguel Artete and screenwriter Mike White have initiated a new franchise for a string of movies unlike those regarding our friend Harry Potter and more akin to our president … Donald Trump.

“The Intern” – a film review by Gary Chew After making the mistake of installing Windows 10 in my PC and trying to figure out what to do next, I hoped all of my files hadn’t been swept away with a single click. Then I realized I was a reasonable facsimile of Robert De Niro’s...

Dave Lippman’s new CD may have the most songs ever totaling less than 48 1/2 minutes. At 19 tunes, they average a brisk 2 1/2 minutes per song, with five of them under two minutes. But Lippman packs a lot into...

Over at The Spectator Coffee House, I’ve written about James Bond and China.

As a Western, Jane Got a Gun looks quite authentic. It was shot around Santa Fe. Landscapes are top notch in north central New Mexico. There’s plenty of such of terrain to see in this new movie directed by Gavin O’Connor.

The subtlest humor to come from Elvis and Nixon isn’t its relaxed pace and “one-joke-ee-ness,” but something else that quietly comes to mind as this new movie slips through your brain. It’s almost a spoiler, but not quite.

Debating the merits of the republican party is futile, because they don’t have any. Endlessly conveying to my blogvesary how discourse is dead has become, Ray Charles at a shooting range, aimless. Polarization has led us to this place of irreconcilable political differences. To his credit, Pokey saw this coming too. Whereas he blames liberalism for creating an immoral societal malaise, I place the…

We survived our Italian summer – it was tough, but someone’s got to do it! It’s hard to learn even the most basic tourist phrases of another language (hello; excuse me; pardon the fart; where is the toilet?; waiter, the check!; please remove your thumb from my nose) in 4 weeks.

“Has Howard Beal been re-incarnated?” you ask yourself as Money Monster attacks the screen before your very eyes. No … and there aren’t any flashback clips of Peter Finch stalking a TV news set either. But George Clooney comes to us as Lee Gates; not unlike...

A large financial deal is about to be signed off on, but the required signature for the paperwork is that of a man who has taken time off from his New York office for R & R at a remote mountain retreat in Switzerland.