By Tom Meek
When it comes to wrapping it up, TV shows tend to go out in one of three ways: the dour blaze of glory (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad), sheer hyperbole, a.k.a. jumping the shark (hello Happy Days), or the slow fade to syndication and nostalgic recall of the early years when the writing was tight and the characters sizzled with vivid crispness. For the latter, if the residual market thrives and enough of the show’s talent is milling around, there’s also that shot for a second life up on the big screen. It worked somewhat for Sex and the City and now the lads from Entourage are getting their chance.
The good news is that the whole cast is back and under direction of series creator Doug Ellin. The result is a facelift of sorts from where the HBO series slacked off in 2011. To stretch out the situational hijinks to a feature-length product, Hollywood “it” boy Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) has hit a mid-career malaise and wants to do something different besides being just another pretty face. Like Clooney, Costner and Eastwood before, he decides to direct. In transition, too, are Vince’s former agent, Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) now a studio exec, and pudgy bud Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), who has dropped most of the extra pounds and founded a boutique line of tequila. Former pizza slinger Eric (Kevin Connolly), too, has stepped it up, taking the reins as the producer of Vince’s film project, called Hyde (as in Dr. Jekyll and set in a zombie-apocalypse future), and is also expecting with Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui), though they’re estranged. The only one who hasn’t had a life-altering realization is Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) still fussing over food and living in baby brother Vince’s big shadow. Continue reading
Colin Firth gets a big scene-chewing role as Stanley Crawford, a 1920s illusionist who takes the stage as a Fu Manchu-like incarnation known as the Great Wei Ling Soo. He wows audiences, making elephants disappear and sawing women in half and, like Houdini did in his time, debunks hoaxes, which Stanley agrees to do when fellow magician Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney) asks him to come to a country villa in France to expose a young American woman shaking down a susceptible and well-off widow (Jackie Weaver). The young American woman in question, Sophie Baker, is played by none other than Emma Stone, a big-eyed cutie with auburn locks and by logistical association alone muse du jour to Allen. But she’s no Diane Keaton, not even a Mia Farrow or Mia Sorvino, for that matter. She’s game, but asked to do a lot with a little and beyond her range. Thankfully she has Firth to play off of, and he’s masterful. Initially when the game is afoot in the gorgeous greenery of Southern France, there’s promise and a playfulness in the air. The film suggests twist and turns to come, false reveals and oneupmanship, but then romance floats into the picture, and the notion of god too. What a buzzkill.
The premise behind “The Heat,” which was shot in in our glorious city of Boston, though it doesn’t look so much like the Boston you and I know, is pretty much the same old comedic cop buddy story popularized by Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in “48 Hrs.,” and later, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the “Lethal Weapon” series, except here, the oddball pairing is women and the focus is more on the funny than the dark and grim, though people do get shot in the head enough and blood does spurt. 
For What it's Worth 