Review: 'And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles'

After providing so much joy for the world, The Beatles went out in a morass of misery. There were the acrimonious management disputes, the publishing problems, the power struggles, the interpersonal irritations, the hard drug problems, and the weird and disruptive romantic relationships. Also, apparently, Paul was dead. All in all, 1969 was not a happy year for The Beatles.

Review: 'The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who’s John Entwistle'

One of the many things that made The Who so unique is that each member of the band had such a distinct and iconic personality. Consequently, Pete the Genius, Roger the Tough Guy, and Keith the Madman have all been the topics of multiple biographies. As the Quiet One, John Entwistle had not. Had he been, the flimsiness of that oft-used label may be better known. Entwistle may have been a man of few words and the one member of The Who who refrained from leaping around on stage, but he was also the most enduring Rock & Roll animal in the group. He remained a restless, relentless partier, an incorrigible spender seemingly dedicated to materialism above all else, and a serial philanderer right up until his death in 2002.

Psychobabble’s Favorite Year at the Movies: 1968!

A somewhat recent trend in cinema studies finds writers naming their choice for the best year in movies and penning full-length arguments to back up their picks. There have been a couple of books arguing in favor of the year of The Wizard of Oz  (yay!) and Gone with the Wind (gag!). I have not read Charles F. Adams’s 1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year or Thomas S. Hischak’s 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year, though I have read and reviewed Brian Rafferty’s Best. Movie. Year.Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen and Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan’s Cinema ’62. I enjoyed both of those books very much even though I do not share the respective writers’ opinions that 1999 or 1962 are cinema’s best years. They did get me thinking about my personal choice, though, and let’s be honest, all of these books are nothing if not expressions of their writers’ personal tastes. I’ve settled on 1968.

Review: 'The Everly Brothers-The Cadence Recordings'

The two albums The Everly Brothers made for their first label, Cadence, aren’t necessarily their two most essential (that honor goes to their first two Warner Bros. LPs), but The Everly Brothers and Songs Our Daddy Taught Us do contain a few unquestionably essential numbers. These include “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie” on the former and “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” on the latter. Mostly, the first two Everly Brothers albums spotlight the duo’s two sides in an extreme fashion that would be more organically blended on their next albums.

Review: 'Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer'

David Lynch is responsible for the immediately recognizable visual language of Twin Peaks, but as far as its story goes, Mark Frost had the most control over its direction on an episode-to-episode basis. Yet Frost is serially left out of the conversation because he does not have Lynch’s flair for self-promotion and because he did not have as audacious a resume as Lynch did before the show began.

David Bushman’s new book Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer sets the record straight in a few ways. Between February 2018 and October 2019, Bushman conducted a series of 22, one-hour phone interviews with Mark Frost after clearly doing a lot of homework. Bushman asks the right questions to fill in each significant phase of Frost’s family, personal, and creative history. And that history is startling and peppered with odd anecdotes. His grandfather was one of the first doctors to work with Margaret Sanger on Planned Parenthood. His dad Warren (Twin Peaks’ Doc Hayward) once had dinner with FDR. Mark investigated UFOs with a guy from MUFON in the late seventies. He worked alongside Michael Keaton in the lighting department of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and dubbed either Bennie or Bjorn’s voice (he can’t remember which) in a documentary about ABBA.

Review: 'Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies'

Many cinephiles consider 1939 to be the best year for movies, though that largely depends on your tolerance for Gone with the Wind (I have none). Last year, Brian Rafferty made a pretty good case for 1999 despite that being the year of American Pie and The Phantom Menace. Now Stephen Farber and Michael McCellan are tossing another year’s hat into the ring with their new book Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies.

Review: 'The Paul McCartney Catalog: A Complete Annotated Discography of Solo Works, 1967-2019'

Paul McCartney was the most creatively driven Beatle, and he kept up an unstoppable pace of writing and recording after the band broke up that is still ongoing. Not only did McCartney release a slew of albums and singles in his signature pop mold as a solo artist and member of Wings, but he also experimented with orchestral and electronic music and participated in a number of collaborations with artists such as Elvis Costello, Carl Perkins, and Brian Wilson.

Review: 'The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films'

Horror lurks on a hostile terrain, and that landscape is unquestionably most hostile toward women. Throughout most of the genre’s history, women have usually been present to shriek, get slaughtered, show their bodies, and huddle in a corner while some dude tussles with the monster. This is a particularly sorry situation since it was a woman—Mary Shelley—who invented the horror genre as we now know it two centuries ago.

Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence are two horror fans well aware of this problem. Their new book The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films mainly functions as an entertaining movie and TV guide for feminist horror fans frustrated by the lack of non-insulting viewing options. The writers basically whittle their list of feminist-friendly horrors down to a skimpy 29 films, which probably would not fill the first ten pages of the usual horror guide. So, as their book’s unwieldy title suggests, they pack their pages with much more than the standard starred recommendations. The Science of Women in Horror offers some interesting tangents related to the real life science, history, and psychology behind the films; analyses (a reading of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a sort of horror/western is particularly compelling); making-of details; and interviews with actresses, filmmakers, and fellow horror fans.

Review: 'TV Milestones: The Twilight Zone.'

The Twilight Zone haunted TV screens long before the concept of auteur TV, and though Rod Serling was the anthology’s most recognizable face, he did not write every episode. Yet Barry Keith Grant still makes a fairly solid argument for Serling’s role as auteur in the new book TV Milestones: The Twilight Zone. Grant notes how Serling promoted a groundbreaking blend of traditional genres (sci-fi, horror, noir, fantasy, western) and how his center-left politics and Hobbesian “world at war” philosophy (art vs. commerce, individuality vs. conformity, etc.) and willingness to address current events distinguished The Twilight Zone as much as its gremlins, Kanamits, and asymmetrical doctors.

I’m no great proponent of the auteur theory, and such a variety of writing, directing, cinematographic, and acting talent was involved in The Twilight Zone that it would not be my pick for a prime example of auteur TV. Yet Grant makes his case sufficiently convincing by emphasizing how much of its creator went into The Twilight Zone and how unique it was for its time as a result. That kind of focus rather than a more sweeping analysis is also smart considering how slim these TV milestones books are. Barry Keith Grant makes good use of his 100 pages.

Farewell, Terry Jones

It's easy to forget how much Monty Python reshaped the face of comedy. The six-man troupe solidified sketch comedy as arguably the most effective delivery method for laughs. They spread a distinctly British form of absurdity around the globe. They killed parrots. They made at least a couple of great movies. The Meaning of Life wasn't that great.

As the director of those movies (he co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail with that other Terry and did Life of Brian on his own. He also directed The Meaning of Life on his own, but don't worry too much about that one since it isn't that great. Well, Mr. Creosote is pretty funny. Feel free to think about Mr. Creosote), Terry Jones was a particularly important Python. He also co-wrote such classic sketches as "Spam", "The Spanish Inquisition", "The Ministry of Silly Walks", and "Fish Slapping Dance" with writing partner Michael Palin. He was also Mr. Creosote. Terry Jones's fascination with history that fueled the Holy Grail and sketches such as "The Spanish Inquisition" also resulted in more serious projects, specifically the books Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary and Who Murdered Chaucer? both of which are apparently about Chaucer.

Sadly, Terry Jones was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia in 2015, a form of dementia that affected his speech. On January 21, Jones died of complications from the syndrome. He was 77.