The only thing less impressive than Greg Long’s skills as a writer are his skills as an investigator.

In The Making of Bigfoot writer and self-professed journalist Greg Long sets out to uncover the truth about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The Bigfoot film. Captured in the late 1960’s the film features about forty seconds of an unknown bi-pedal creature walking across a creek in the middle of the woods. Allegedly filmed in Northern California by two amateur Bigfoot hunters (Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin) it has been the subject of much controversy since its release forty years ago. Greg Long decides to put all the questions and controversy to rest, once and for all and by the end of the book he is satisfied that he’s done exactly that.

Let me be clear though, if I handed in The Making of Bigfoot as a term paper in University I would receive it back to me, almost immediately, chalk-full of red pen.

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I’ve been a big fan of Montreal-based Stars since a friend of mine played them for one afternoon up in his room. It was 2004 and I must’ve been back from university for the summer. I remember it so clearly because I was so impressed. The album was the band’s break-out recording Set Yourself on Fire. If you’ve heard it then you must know the gripping power of the strings on the opening track, “My Ex-Lover is Dead.” It’s an incredible album and features some of the best songs written of the last decade.

Sadly, Stars follow up to their wildly successful 2004 album was 2007’s In Our Bedroom After the War and as much as I dedicated myself to this album—as hard as I listened to it—I couldn’t get into it. It was a bit of a let down. Following the interesting and original 2004 release, this new record seemed a bit too boring and contrived. It didn’t feel very organic and the tracks seemed like a bit of a hodge podge—incoherent—and that was my biggest concern: it didn’t feel like a complete record.

Well, I’m happy to report that if Stars last album was disjointed, 2010’s The Five Ghosts is the complete opposite—and I like it.

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I stumbled across the new BBC series Sherlock by accident. Frankly, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it earlier. Both Maria and I are huge Sherlock Holmes fans, and huge mystery fans in general, but somehow this slipped passed our radar.

For as long as there have been moving pictures, there have been adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Some have been brilliant. Some have been otherwise. Some have depicted Holmes as rather tame and mild-mannered. Others, like Guy Ritchie’s interpretation, have picked up on Holmes’ lesser savoury habits and tendencies. But the BBC’s Sherlock depicts the famous detective, and his affable partner, in an entirely new way.

Sherlock is an adaptation of the classic Holmes franchise set in modern-day London.

Of course, upon first hearing the premise—a modern day adaptation of Sherlock Holmes—you might scoff, I know I did, but after giving it a chance I found that I would be more than rebuffed. This series, in fact, is brilliant.

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I’ll tell you why I loved Inception.

Sitting in the theatre, Inception is an absolutely mind-throttling movie. It makes you think, harder then you may have ever thought before, to try and piece together it’s complicated puzzle of a plot line. But—and this is the brilliance of Christopher Nolan—it isn’t too complicated that you grow frustrated or bored with it (although it does run a bit long). It’s deep, and gets deeper, as layer is heaped upon layer. It’s a great thinking movie, and a great action movie. Like The Dark Knight, another gem from Nolan, Inception’s action is intelligent, interesting and innovative. Nolan isn’t satisfied with stock footage, he pushes the limits of an action film, and it works.

But what’s really got me sold on Inception is the feeling that I had after I left the theatre. I felt inspired. I felt creative. And I think it’s a direct result of the film.

See, Inception absolutely pushes the limits of the creative imagination. Watching Inception I’m not allowed to take the role of passive observer, instead I’m pulled in and completely engaged with the film, the characters, and the whole world that Nolan’s created. It’s an absolute imagination-stretching film and when I left the theatre, my imagination continued to race, continued to create, the odometer in my brain kept on clicking. I think that’s a hallmark of an incredible movie: not that it’s so good that you talk about it for days after, but that it’s so creative and imaginative, that you keep creating—keep imagining—even after it’s done.  Truly, if there’s ever a cure for writer’s block it’s Inception and in an industry full of creative films, I think that says a lot.

For me, a band like Wintersleep is kind of hit or miss. Unfortunately, I find I have to strike down their newest album, New Inheritors, on the miss side.

When I reviewed Wintersleep’s 2007 record, Welcome to the Night Sky, I had both a lot of high praise for it, and some concerns. I remember writing about the album’s first half, the opening five songs, or so. I remember not being able to get passed them—they were so good. But that was also a fault I found in the album: the top-half was incredible, the songs were well-crafted, well-written and extremely interesting to listen to. Songs like Weighty Ghost, which I count among my favourite songs of all time. But the latter part of the record was a bit dry and a lot less interesting in comparison to the first bit.

What it seemed like to me was that we’d hit upon a band that could write some really great material, but not all the time. A band that had all the elements in place to make great music, but sometimes weren’t putting in all the effort, or mustering up all the creativity or whatever to really make it happen.

I’m not entirely convinced that New Inheritors is the result of the kind of mustering and effort that I’m talking about. I’m just not sure.

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OK, so I have a more than passing interest in the paranormal. So a new television show like Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files is going to, in the least, pique my interest for a few episodes. But can it hold it beyond that?

In my experience, paranormal TV runs the gamut from something very scientific and research-based like MonsterQuest (featuring actual tenured academics) to something more akin to a couple of guys running around in the dark without flashlights cursing and swearing to appear cool—like Extreme Paranormal. (For Extreme Paranormal, picture the Jackass franchise done with ghosts.) Somewhere in the middle, is a balanced show like Ghost Hunters, one of the original and most successful series in this genre. A show in which two plumbers and a rag-tag group of other investigators set out to use what they deem to be scientific tools to track and record ghosts. They’ve been doing it for a long time, seven years now, and they’re honest in their pursuit whether or not the “science” they use is altogether scientific.

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I had the opportunity to watch The Brothers Bloom this weekend. It’s a film that Maria and I had wanted to see for a long time but just hadn’t got around to it. To be honest, after our extended Oscar-nominated film-watching marathon we’ve both been a little burnt out on the cinema. However, if we’d realized how great The Brothers Bloom was going to be, we certainly wouldn’t have waited this long to watch it.

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