The best books about movies

Posted in REVIEWS with tags , , , , on November 12, 2026 by Ross McG
(Disney)

Books. They’re a right pain, aren’t they? They take absolutely ages to get through and they cost a fortune.

But without them we wouldn’t be able to read and we wouldn’t have some of the greatest movies ever made, movies like Die Hard and First Blood. Yes, both based on novels!

Books that inspired movie adaptations are wonderful, of course, but for me, the real gold has always been found in the books about what goes into making the movies.

I am always on the lookout for a good behind-the-scenes book about film, and the great ones are slightly harder to find these days, given that perhaps the market for new books about the filmmaking process doesn’t exactly rival fantasy romance.

However, over the past few years there have been a few literary gems in the movie-making category, books to throw on the pile with some of the greatest ever written.

With that in mind, I have decided to compile my own list of my favourite books about movies, just as I have added two more to my Kindle – Michael Douglas’s autobiography One Helluva Ride, and the brilliantly titled The Book Was Better by Louise Willder. Give me a few months – I am a notoriously slow reader – to see if those two find it on to the list below.

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I need to talk about the 1990 Gene Hackman film Narrow Margin

Posted in COMMENT with tags , , on August 29, 2023 by Ross McG
Anne Archer and Gene Hackman in Narrow Margin (Tri-Star Pictures)

Anyone turned on the TV lately?

It’s bloody awful out there, isn’t it? Critics who drone on about how we live in the golden age of television clearly haven’t switched one on in the last ten years or so.

I’m not talking about the endless options on streaming – which, lately, is its own problem – but the daily shovelling of crud you are fed if you are unlucky or, like me, stupid enough to try to find something to watch on terrestrial telly.

I was in Ireland earlier this month, where, secret payment scandals aside, viewers are lucky enough to have good old RTE. For those of you reading this in the UK, RTE is like BBC, only useful, and not totally beholden to the endless ream of sewing, repairing and masterchefing shite that is served up nightly.

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Movie battle… The Road House remake

Posted in BATTLES with tags , , , , , on March 9, 2023 by Ross McG
Dalton was delighted to hear the Rosses were writing about him again. (MGM)

Ross McD and Ross McG must have been living under two separate rocks the past few months, because they’ve only just found out that 80s classic Road House is getting a remake.

One Ross thinks it’s a great idea, the other… not so much.

It’s time to get loaded in the Double Deuce and start fighting…

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Cocaine Bear, Mad Max, Cloud Atlas and the quest to find the best movie trailer ever

Posted in COMMENT with tags , , on March 2, 2023 by Ross McG
There is plenty of ursine around in Cocaine Bear’s trailer. (Universal)

What makes a good trailer these days?

Must it contain a glacially paced cover of an annoyingly popular song? Does it need a drum effect every time a character loads a gun or throws a punch?

Or can it dispense with such modern clichés and just focus on a bear coked out of its brain flying through the air in pursuit of an ambulance?

Poor Cocaine Bear.

The second I finished watching that trailer, I thought, “No way the actual film is gonna live up to that.”

But who hasn’t thought that after watching a trailer?

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Movie battle… Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Posted in BATTLES with tags , , , , on February 21, 2023 by rossvross
No one was pleased to see Ross McD and Ross McG turn up at the pier together. (Netflix)

You wait six years for one Ross v Ross blog post to come along, then two turn up in a matter of weeks.

That’s what we at RvR Towers call prolific.

You have to go all the way back to 2011 to find the last time Rosses McD and McG had a proper online cinema scrap, when the latter successfully argued against the former that Dirty Dancing kicks Footloose’s Bacon-shaped behind.

Well, from a rasher of Bacon to a slice of onion, one made out of glass. That’s right, Rian Johnson’s hugely divisive Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is getting the movie battleground treatment.

Is it a work of genius, as Ross McD claims? Or is it the pile of muck that Ross McG declares?

Let battle commence…

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It’s been 35 years and I still can’t stop thinking about Crocodile Dundee II

Posted in COMMENT with tags , , on February 1, 2023 by Ross McG
(Paramount)

Six years. Six years since either of us Rosses have posted anything on this crummy site.

You know how much it costs to keep a website going for six years without posting anything? Yeah, not much.

In those six years, Ross McD (him) and Ross McG (me) have seen each other… once. The Atlantic Ocean has that affect on late 2000s blog bromances.

But how many times have I watched Crocodile Dundee II in that same period? The whole way through? Again, probably just once. How many times though have I thought about Crocodile Dundee II in the past six years? Oh that’s easy. Once. Once every day.

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Here are the 30 movies that I watched over Christmas

Posted in TOP FIVES with tags , on January 1, 2017 by Ross McG

hateful1

I used to do these all the time.

Just after Christmas, I’d rattle through all the movies I’d gorged on over the holidays and whack em up on this blog.

You can read the past ones here, and for me it’s like delving into a personal past I never knew existed; did I really watch Mamma Mia? And ENJOY it?!

There are some equally disturbing entries (doesn’t that sound like an early 90s psychological thriller in the mould of Single White Female… DISTURBING ENTRY) in the list below, because it was bloomin’ Christmas.

You might not watch the best films ever made around Christmas, but you tend to watch a lot of them. I know I do.

As in previous years, I didn’t watch every one of the movies below in their entirety. Some of them, sure, but others were caught for 15 minutes or half an hour – that’s the beauty of the Christmas TV schedule.

Most of the below were seen on TV, and they are listed in the chronological order in which I viewed them.

If you get the chance, give us your Christmas viewing list in the comments below. Happy new year…

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What would happen if Alan Rickman’s characters in Love Actually and Die Hard switched places?

Posted in BATTLES with tags , , , , on December 16, 2016 by Ross McG

 

hansharry

This article first appeared on Metro.co.uk

It’s rather strange, given that he stars in two of the greatest festive films ever made, that Alan Rickman once declared on screen that we should call off Christmas.

Let’s put the late, great Rickman’s bah-humbugging in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves aside for a moment, however, and concentrate on his roles in Love Actually and Die Hard.

These two very different Christmas movies (one says you should follow your heart; the other that you should follow terrorists around in your bare feet) have one thing in common: Rickman rocks.

In Die Hard, he plays Hans Gruber, an exceptional thief and lover of nice suits who uses his benefits of a classical education to hold up Nakatomi Plaza in LA on Christmas Eve.

In Love Actually, he is Harry, a disgruntled middle-aged MD of a design agency who dabbles in a spot of extra-marital flirting with his secretary before holding up a queue in Selfridges in London while buying some jewellery.

In many filmgoers’ eyes, both characters are as villainous as Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham, but have you ever imagined what might happen if Hans and Harry swapped movies?

No? Well that’s too bad, because I have, so you’re just going to have to lump it.

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