Movie Monday: Captain America Soldiers On
Sure, Rio’s nice this time of year. And heaven is, well, heavenly. But when it comes to movies, North American audiences still think there’s nothing quite like, well, America. Captain America, that is. Captain America: The Winter Soldier once again took point and marched straight to the top of the box office this weekend—the third […]
Trust Issues
Last Thursday, Adam Holz published a great blog (“It’s an I, I, I, I, I World?“) about society’s growing embrace of individualism. In it, he wrote about recent reports that Millennials are less prone to belong to a political party or join a religion. It turns out that they’re suspicious of ideologies and wait longer […]
Movie Monday: Captain America’s Winter Soldier
Thought spring had finally come? Already digging holes to plant your peonies? Hold off, people. Baseball’s barely begun, it’s snowing here in Colorado Springs, and a blast of winter—the Winter Soldier, that is—is chilling theaters across America and filling Disney freezers with cold, hard cash. Oh, we knew it was coming, this arctic wave from […]
Anger of Biblical Proportions
Unless you’ve been playing an elaborate, and early, April Fool’s joke on us, I gather a lot of you didn’t care much for Noah. Plugged In outlets have been awash with angry Noah viewers and even some angry non-Noah viewers who wouldn’t see the movie for a gazillion dollars. “The movie got NOTHING right except […]
Movie Monday: Noah
After weathering a deluge of controversy before it even launched, Noah and his ark sailed over a sea of competitors and came to rest at the top of the box office. The pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? An estimated $44 million—a fairly worthless sum for Noah himself, given the lack of […]
Are Movie Theaters Sanctuaries?
I was kicked out of a theater the other day. I’d settled in to review Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel in a downtown Denver theater. It wasn’t a private screening for reviewers (the way I see most of the films I write about) but that was no biggie: I’ve reviewed lots of movies without […]
Movie Monday: Divergent
Sorry, Kermie, the Muppets weren’t the most wanted stars this weekend. Audiences took, shall we say, a more divergent path. Divergent, the newest aspiring movie franchise based on a series of young adult books, got off to a strong $56 million start this weekend to lap the rest of the box office field. OK, so […]
Were the Good Old Days Ever Good?
My family and I were watching The Twilight Zone the other day—a Season Two episode called “Static.” It featured an old grouch named Ed who can’t understand why all his housemates schedule their lives around the television—and indeed, they appear to mindlessly watch whatever might be on. He winds up hauling his old, huge radio […]
Setting Tech Aside for God
Adam Holz wrote a blog on the Dalai Lama’s Instagram account last week. He included some really cogent thoughts from the Dalai and Pope Francis, both of whom have embraced social media but caution against its overuse. Now another religious figure—Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle—is talking about social networking. In fact, he […]
Movie Monday: Mr. Peabody & Sherman
Moviegoers hopped into their own wayback machine this weekend, visiting some old, old Saturday-morning friends. Yes, that’s right: Mr. Peabody & Sherman, the dog and his boy who originally rose to fame as part of the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons of the 1950s and ’60s (and who reintroduced themselves repeatedly through the magic of reruns), […]
