Category: Books (41-50 of 322)

Dec 27 2012 04:58 PM ET

Spot Inspection: What entertainment are you marathoning now?

Scandal

Image Credit: Vivian Zink/ABC

With the holidays (and snowstorms, in some parts of the country), it feels like an ideal time to hunker down and marathon TV shows, movies, or books. In fact, 53 percent of readers say marathoning TV shows is their ideal way to spend a lazy afternoon in today’s EW Daily Poll on the homepage. So tell us: What are you currently bingeing on? Maybe you’ll give someone else — either trapped with family or alone — an idea.

We’ll start. My colleague Denise Warner has been watching Grey’s Anatomy all day — “in the background, of course,” she adds, because we’re one of the few EW staffers working. Also on the clock are my colleagues Laura Hertzfeld and Hillary Busis, who are catching up on Scandal and admitting an “embarrassing” yet totally understandable addiction to My Fair Wedding with David Tutera, respectively. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 27 2012 11:16 AM ET

The year in nostalgia: Reboots, sequels, comebacks, and callbacks to a simpler time

boy-meets-word-cory-topanga

Image Credit: Everett Collection

There’s nothing new under the sun — which is just the way Millennials like it.

We’re a generation obsessed with our own recent past, as befits the children of Boomers. Our influence on the entertainment industry is also increasing as we grow older. That’s probably why 2012 was the year that a collective nostalgia for pop culture from the ’90s and even the early ’00s hit in full force. Sure, the year also featured its share of projects inspired by/cribbing from the ’80s or even earlier — we learned it by watching you, Generation X! — but generally speaking, a yearning for the days of Boy Meets World, Titanic, and the Spice Girls has supplanted a yearning for the days of Growing Pains, Journey, and The Breakfast Club.

Here’s a month-by-month rundown of 2012′s most nostalgia-driven moments, from announcements of sequels and reboots to random late night comedy bits. (Tom Hanks recited a slam poem about what?) Though it’s pretty ’90s heavy, even non-Millennials should find something here they get a kick out of — or something that makes them righteously furious. (For many nostalgia hounds, the two go hand in hand.)

READ FULL STORY »

Dec 26 2012 11:03 AM ET

Peter Parker left for dead in new 'Spider-Man' comic

amazing-spider-man-700

Image Credit: Marvel

After 50 years of spinning webs and catching a who’s who of criminals, Peter Parker is out of the hero game.

But Spider-Man is still slinging from building to building — reborn, refreshed and revived with a new sense of the old maxim that Ben Parker taught his then-fledgling nephew that “with great power, comes great responsibility.”

Writer Dan Slott, who’s been penning Spidey adventures for the better part of the last 100 issues for Marvel Entertainment, said the culmination of the story is a new, dramatically different direction for the Steve Ditko and Stan Lee-created hero.

“This is an epic turn,” Slott said. “I’ve been writing Spider-Man for 70-plus issues. Every now and then, you have to shake it up. … The reason Spider-Man is one of the longest running characters is they always find a way to keep it fresh. Something to shake up the mix.”

And in the pages of issue 700, out Wednesday, it’s not just shaken up, it’s turned head over heels, spun in circles, kicked sky high and cracked wide open. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 20 2012 10:17 AM ET

Hey there, Little Red Riding Hood: You sure are looking good on Google's doodle

google-doodle-red-riding-hood-02In 1812, the first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales — a folklore collection meticulously assembled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm — was published in Germany. Two centuries later, the Grimm brothers’ work has had an indelible effect on pop culture, inspiring everything from countless animated films to countless rags-to-riches romances. (“Cinderella” is the original romantic comedy, plus or minus a few foot mutilations and eyes being pecked out by pigeons.)

To celebrate this anniversary, Google has gone all out — once again — with an interactive doodle that tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood solely through emoji-esque pictures. Click through to see the moppet trundle into the woods, meet a very geometric Big Bad Wolf, get gobbled up along with a little green Yoda-like Granny, and eventually be freed by a kindly ginger woodcutter.

READ FULL STORY »

Dec 19 2012 06:00 PM ET

This Week's Cover: The Best and Worst of 2012

EW-1239-1240-COVER.jpg

It’s not easy saying goodbye to 2012. Whether we were cheering at The Avengers, dancing Gangam style, or tracking the bad guys on Homeland, this was a wild year for entertainment — and we’ve captured all the excitement for posterity in EW’s 2012 Best & Worst issue, on stands now. Want to debate the year’s greatest hits? Our critics’ annual top ten lists spotlight all the best movies, TV, music, books, games, and stage, from the edgy genius of FX’s Louie to the sugar-rush high of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. We’ve also come up with our list of Great Performances, honoring the artists — Jessica Lange in American Horror Story, Javier Bardem in Skyfall, Jennifer Hudson remembering Whitney Houston at the Grammys  — who made 2012 so unforgettable. And we didn’t forget the jeers either: Our lists of 2012′s worst include clunkers like Christina Aguilera’s Lotus and Clint Eastwood’s Trouble with the Curve.

READ FULL STORY »

Dec 14 2012 01:18 PM ET

'Hobbit'-ized children's books: Check out these grown-up adaptations of 'Charlotte's Web,' 'Butter Battle Book,' and more

CHARLOTTES-WEB

The Hobbit is a children’s book. Or at least it used to be. Before J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical Middle-Earth saga became fodder for a billion-dollar-grossing, Oscar-winning, New Zealand labor-law rewriting mega-franchise, The Hobbit was a classic of juvenile literature, written in a conversational style that was perfect for young readers. If you read the book as a kid, you almost certainly wanted to see it adapted into a movie. Today, your wish is finally granted. Kind of. There is a Hobbit movie in theaters. But it’s hardly a kids’ movie. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a massive battleground epic, replete with vengeful monsters and sword fights; it’s also merely the first of three movies adapted from the slim book, which ran 310 pages in its first edition. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 13 2012 05:28 PM ET

iTunes reveals top-selling music, movies, TV, books, and apps of 2012

ADELE-21

Adele had a good year — again.

Though 21‘s American release came in February of 2011, the album’s sales were strong enough to put the soul singer at the top of iTunes’s album chart for a second straight year. The electronic entertainment store also reported strong showings for 2012′s usual suspects (The Hunger Games; “Call Me Maybe”) and a few less predictable picks — well done, Sherlock and Alcatraz. Here’s a rundown of what moved the most on iTunes this year:

READ FULL STORY »

Dec 12 2012 07:00 AM ET

Tops on Facebook in 2012: 'Hunger Games,' fun., Channing Tatum, and (no joke) 'Duck Dynasty'

DUCK-DYNASTY-HUNGER-GAMES

Image Credit: AETV; Murray Close

This morning, Facebook announced its “2012 Year in Review,” a series of lists of the top trends of the year. And befitting a website that boasts hundreds of millions of users, popular, youth-skewing taste ruled the day — with one very hairy exception.

READ FULL STORY »

Dec 7 2012 11:00 AM ET

Check out 'Walking Dead' artist Charlie Adlard's alternate cover for 'Invincible' #100 -- EXCLUSIVE

Invincible

As regular EW readers know, Robert Kirkman is both an executive producer on the Walking Dead TV show and the creator-writer of the long-running comic upon which it is based. But Kirkman doesn’t just enjoy dramatically tormenting characters in the zombie apocalypse. Oh, no! He also gets a kick out of doing so in an array of other titles, including Thief of Thieves – on which Kirkman collaborates with a string of other scribes — and the almost-as-long-running-as-the-Walking Dead superhero saga Invincible, which he cocreated with artist Cory Walker and whose hundredth issue is being published by Kirkman’s Skybound imprint Jan. 23, 2013. And to celebrate that latter landmark Kirkman has recruited regular Walking Dead artist Charlie Adlard to create an alternate cover (Ryan Ottley is now the title’s main artist). “Charlie Adlard and I have been working together on the Walking Dead for near a decade at this point and he still manages to surprise me,” says Kirkman. “I don’t think Charlie’s drawn a superhero in a while, so seeing his take on Invincible was a lot of fun.”

You can check out Adlard’s variant artwork — which was colored by John Rauch — above and in larger form below.

READ FULL STORY »

Dec 6 2012 10:17 AM ET

Bret Easton Ellis thinks Kathryn Bigelow's overrated because she's 'a very hot woman'

Bret-Easton-Ellis_510x317.jpg

Image Credit: Jeff Burton

Professional troll Bret Easton Ellis has grown weary of baiting gay people and defending socialites who make anti-gay remarks. If he wants to keep making headlines — and he does, he really does — he’s going to have to target an even larger swath of the population. Like, say, women.

The controversial author tried this new tactic on his Twitter page last night, lobbing an insult at Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow weeks before her latest film, Zero Dark Thirty, opens in theaters.

READ FULL STORY »

Advertisement

TV Recaps

Powered by WordPress.com VIP
Who will win 'Dancing With the Stars'?