Movie Monday: It’s All Greek to Us
Neither LEGOs nor Liam Neeson nor very smart animated dogs could topple the power that was ancient Greece. Not on this weekend, anyway. 300: Rise of an Empire rose to the top of the box office, cutting down all competitors and bellowing taunts at its adversaries along the way. The splashy historical fantasy earned an […]
What a Selfie Says
My Oscar night was a little crazy. Normally, I spend the evening watching the event with my wife and kids. This time around, though, I was technically working—tweeting dutifully to whoever might be listening. I was spending time with four screens Sunday night: The television, a laptop and iPad for my tweets, and my smartphone […]
Movie Monday: Non-Stop
As well-crafted as those little blocks are, you couldn’t expect LEGO to lock onto the top of the box office forever. This week, The LEGO Movie was finally pulled from its perch by two notable newcomers. Non-Stop flew to the top box-office hill this weekend. Liam Neeson’s up-in-the-air thriller soared to an estimated $30 million […]
Watching the Oscars? Join Us!
On Sunday, March 2, movie glitterati will rush Hollywood’s Dolby Theater for the 86th Academy Awards, hoping to rip golden statuettes from the trembling hands of the presenters. They’ll laugh and cry and quip and thank way too many people and be embarrassingly drowned out by the orchestra. But no matter: Almost everyone who’s anyone—at […]
Movie Monday: Lego Kills 3 Days, Blows Past Pompeii
Who is “the Special?” Try The LEGO Movie. In February, this most blockish of blockbusters has been very special indeed. For the third straight week, Emmet Brickowski and his cadre of interlocking pals dominated at the box office, stacking another $31.5 million (estimated, of course) on its ever-growing gross. Any flick that would dare to […]
Oscar Nominees: Hope, Against All Odds
“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer,” Paul wrote in Romans 12:12. Maybe a few characters from this year’s crop of Best Picture Oscar nominees are familiar with that verse: Perhaps Solomon Northup from 12 Years a Slave, or Philomena from the film of the same name. Many others are probably […]
Movie Monday: The LEGO Movie Bricks Out Competition
February is generally thought of as a cinematic wasteland—a month when studios dump their creative dregs on desperate audiences. But The LEGO Movie is proving that any bleak landscape can be gussied up with a lot of colorful, plastic bricks. Yes, everything is still awesome in the world of LEGOs. Piling on its week-one win, […]
Shirley Temple: The Child Star Who Grew Up
Shortly after I read Bob Hoose’s blog on the troubled post-pubescence of Justin Bieber, I learned that Shirley Temple Black—the first and perhaps greatest of Hollywood’s child celebrities—died at the age of 85. For those of us who’ve tracked the often sadly predictable career trajectory of many a child/teen star, it’s interesting to take a […]
Movie Monday: The Lego Movie
Sure, it’s only been out for one weekend. But it’s still not too early to call The LEGO Movie a real blockbuster. One hundred minutes of paradoxically anti-materialistic product placement—and a strangely delightful film in spite of it—pieced together a fantastic, $69.1 million opening weekend (estimated) to build a colorful brick tower atop the box […]
Unfinished
Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died Feb. 2, found in his New York apartment with, we’re told, a heroin syringe sticking out of his arm. He was 46 years old—just two years older than me. Much has been said already of how he died. But I seem to be thinking more about when—not when as in […]
