Twelve years ago, Rick Springfield was mostly a pleasant memory for fans of 1980s Top 40 music and the soap opera “General Hospital.” But that time out of the limelight came to an end in 1998 when he was profiled in VH-1’s “Behind the Music.” Since then he’s released three albums of original rock tunes plus a covers album to go with his ’80s classics, and he’s playing two or three concerts a week in support of the 2-year-old “Venus In Overdrive.”

If you start a band, one of the first orders of business is to come up with a name. The next order of business: explaining to everyone how you came up with the name.

Think about Mark Wahlberg for a moment. You probably come up with a tough-guy image. Or you might think of dramatic roles where he plays a conflicted guy. Maybe you drift way back to his Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch days and those Calvin Klein underwear ads with his chiseled six-pack on display. One thing you probably don’t think of is Wahlberg as a comedic actor. Wahlberg, 39, gets the chance to go against type Friday in the buddy cop comedy “The Other Guys.”

The thrill is often in the chase. Movies incorporate high-speed chase scenes as a shot of adrenaline – to get viewers hanging on the edge of their seats, buggy-eyed and chewing their fingernails. A good movie chase might include a rockin’ soundtrack – or eerie, tension-filled silence. The best movie chases make your heart race right along with them.

This summer’s concert season has seen a bevy of attractive deals, as more and more acts and venues react to the struggling economy with lower ticket prices and reduced service charges. But the best deal of all is the Creed tour.

Hello Dave has gone from playing dorm rooms to overseas tours. When it formed about 15 years ago, the band's early shows included frat parties with less-than-attentive audiences. Now, they enjoy attentive and enthusiastic audiences -- including the troops they've played for all over the world.

Another week, another disingenuous trifle from Hollywood celebrating the power of independent thinking. It’s called “Dinner for Schmucks,” but a more apt title would be “A Movie for Schmucks,” given how the film industry, in its infinite condescension, views its gullible customers.

Did you know nuclear weapons are a legitimate threat to our well-being? Shocking, isn’t it? Or, at least it is to Lucy Walker, who breathlessly spells out the obvious in her remedial but well-meaning documentary, “Countdown to Zero.”

Zac Efron sees and talks to dead people in “Charlie St. Cloud,” but don’t go in expecting any late-in-the-game Shyamalan-like twists to legitimize its grief-laden machinations.

Wanna hear my new “pet” peeve? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.” Not only does the utterly unnecessary sequel to 2001’s espionage parody “Cats & Dogs” redefine the term “heavy petting,” it presumes to treat the viewer’s mind as its personal litter box, depositing loads of animal waste.

If any genre has benefited from the rise of DVD and Blu-ray, it’s film noir. As evidence, I offer Warner Bros.’ latest “Film Noir Classic Collection,” the fifth one from the studio.

It is a hilarious understatement to suggest that the wily lads in Umphrey’s McGee like to mix things up. The Chicago jamband, which has one of the scene’s most cultishly devoted fan followings, has a reputation for shows that twist wildly, turn on a dime, and even in as short a passage as two or three songs, explore acid-jazz, prog rock, gnarly blues, rippling funk and even classical, most of the time without losing musical coherence or devolving into a clinic.

One of the great French comedies of the past decade was “The Dinner Game.” I still chuckle just thinking about it. So Paul Rudd and Steve Carell have a lot to live up to in an American remake, in which Rudd plays a brownnosing executive trying to please his boss by bringing the stupidest guy he can find to dinner. That would be Carell.

Rumors are flying regarding the much-talked about Janis Joplin biopic - and if it will ever get off the ground. The idea has been in the works for more than a decade, but so far nothing.

Last weekend, the AMC television show “Mad Men” returned for another season of drinking, smoking and character-driven product pitching in the mid-’60s heyday of Madison Avenue advertising agencies. A documentary now available on DVD looks at the reality behind the age of advertising.