HollywoodChicago.com Content

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – I often find that the most interesting characters in a ghost story are not the ghosts themselves, but the humans who encounter them. Ghosts are reflections of a past we are unwilling to depart from, even if it halts us from entering the future. It’s a consolation for us to believe that our departed loved ones view us as their “unfinished business.”

CHICAGO – In our latest action/adventure edition of HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 25 admit-two passes up for grabs to the advance Chicago screening of “The Losers” starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Watchmen”), Zoe Saldana (“Star Trek,” “Avatar”) and Chris Evans (“Fantastic Four”)!

CHICAGO – When a TV show has been on since 1975, comparisons are bound to elicit debate regarding the different eras. “Saturday Night Live in the 2000s: Time and Again,” weighs in on the recent history of the late night legend. The two hour NBC special airs Thursday, April 15th, 9pm ET/8pm Central time.

CHICAGO – Turner Classic Movies, the basic cable gift to film buffs everywhere, is launching their first TCM Classic Movie Festival in Hollywood, August 22nd-25th. TCM’s main movie host and face of the network, Robert Osborne, will be there.

CHICAGO – Sean Bean is an actor who naturally exudes menace. His dark squinting eyes always seem to be up to something, and surely assisted him in getting cast as the bad guy in a variety of blockbusters. While American moviegoers know him primarily for roles such as Jack Ryan’s adversary in “Patriot Games,” British audiences view Bean as their equivalent to a heroic Jack Ryan-type everyman, thanks to his portrayal of swashbuckling soldier Richard Sharpe.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – When David Lynch came to Chicago for an “Inland Empire” screening back in 2007, he offered memorable advice to a moviegoer baffled by his work. He said that his audience should meditate not on the “intellectual experience” provided by his films, but the emotional ideas that they conjure. Meditating on anything else would prove useless because, as Lynch put it, “If you meditate on buttermilk, you’ll end up going to the dairy.”

CHICAGO – Movie tie-in games have a reputation for being subpar at best and sometimes downright horrendous but the legacy of the blockbuster companion is nothing compared to the cavalcade of gaming crap that has come with our favorite TV shows. Games based on great shows like “The X-Files,” “Lost,” “24,” and “The Sopranos” have been absolute disasters. We can now add “Prison Break” to that list.

CHICAGO – Universal Home Video is releasing an impressive wave of catalog titles in HD for the first time this month and we have a preview of them just for you, including a great 15th Anniversary Edition of “Apollo 13,” and HD transfers of four movies that have little in common but the studio that released them: “Dune,” “The Jackal,” “Out of Africa,” and “Traffic”.

CHICAGO – When Wolfgang Petersen’s “Poseidon” crashed and sank in the wave of summer hits of 2006 — making only $60 million domestically on a reported budget of $160 million — I thought the film got an undeserved bad rap (and it actually did much better internationally). It’s no classic and my love for the Irwin Allen era disaster films might have disguised some flaws but it looks and sounds great on Blu-ray.

CHICAGO – Chelsea Handler is on a roll. With huge advance sales for her third book, “Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang,” it’s no wonder there was a large crowd to greet her during a book signing event in Chicago.