The Series

Peter Guber is a veteran Hollywood producer and the present head of Manderlay Pictures. Peter Bart is an accomplished entertainment journalist and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Hollywood Bible known as Variety. Sounds like two guys who really know a whole lot about movies, right? Well, sure.

Too bad they don't seem to know a whole lot about television, specifically the "hosting your own show" department. I'm sure that if I, a self-proclaimed movie supah-genius, sat down for lunch with these two Peters, I'd walk away well and truly amazed by the length and breadth of their collective knowledge, experience, and intelligence. Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic about this.

But as far as their work on Sunday Morning Shootout goes, these seasoned experts seem about as insightful as the leggy blonde on Entertainment Tonight who pops up every Monday to regurgitate the weekend ...Read the entire review

Themovie

I've always been fascinated by the Arthurian legends. What's perhapsmost interesting about the legends of King Arthur is that as youdelve more deeply into the material, instead of becoming clearer, theimage of Arthur becomes hazier, as if receding behind a wall of mist.The archetypal King Arthur, complete with Guinevere, Lancelot, theKnights of the Round Table, Merlin, and Camelot, is a complexcompilation, assembled over the centuries with differentcontributions coming from Welsh bards, medieval English historians,and French troubadours. Add in the findings of archaeologists andhistorians studying the retreat of the Romans from Britain and thesubsequent Saxon invasions, and the only thing that's clear is thatBritain was in dire need of a hero in the 5th century. Whether or nothe was named "Arthur," and...Read the entire review

The movie

Horse racing, now a fairlyminor sport in the mind of the U.S. public, was once a national pastime, withthe lean, blazingly fast Thoroughbred horses and their tiny, daring jockeysfilling the roles of sports superstars. In Depression-era, pre-World War IIUnited States, a racehorse named Seabiscuit was one of those heroes:Seabiscuit: America's Legendary Racehorse sets out to tell his story.

Alas, while the material iscertainly promising, the documentary fumbles it badly. Seabiscuit is anexample of a documentary without a purpose or structure, an odd mish-mash ofelements that don't seem to have been put together with any particularstructural plan. We are told repeatedly that Seabiscuit was a "workingman's horse," a hero for the downtrodden Depression era, a figure morefamous ...Read the entire review