The Emmys: A Pretty Depressing Evening
Sunday’s Emmy Awards—a time when the TV industry pats itself on the back for its best artistic achievements—are well in our rearview mirror now, and we’ve had time to come to grips with the winners (Breaking Bad for best drama, Modern Family for best comedy and scads of others), losers (critics howled that The Newsroom’s […]
Movie Monday: Prisoners
You might say that Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal took no prisoners over the weekend. The pair abducted an estimated $21.4 million from moviegoers, pushing their gritty crime thriller Prisoners to the top of the box office heap. No matter that the movie pushed two-and-a-half hours, or that its themes weren’t exactly the stuff of […]
New Television Season: Back to the Future
With the debut of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow last night, the new 2013-14 season officially got underway. Unlike some mainstream media outlets, we don’t get advance screeners of the shows we watch, so I can’t really talk about any of them with any sort of authority. But I am struck by a couple of trends. It […]
Movie Monday: Insidious Chapter 2
It was a horrific weekend at the local multiplex. And as we’ve learned repeatedly this year, there’s money in fear. Insidious Chapter 2 made a frighteningly lucrative play for the box office crown, scaring an estimated $41.1 million from moviegoers to exorcise all competitors and become the second-highest grossing September release of all time (just […]
Eating My Words
My iPad doesn’t want me to read. It’s the only reasonable explanation for why this otherwise near-perfect piece of technology would eat my online library. It’s a shame, really, because that’s a big reason I bought the thing. I like to read, but I tend to read three or four books at a time—and that […]
Movie Monday: Riddick
Riddick, Vin Diesel’s see-in-the-dark anti-hero, ain’t afraid of much. Packs of wild dingo-beasts? Nah. Poisonous, pincer-laden aliens? He has those for breakfast. Nasty, weapon-toting bounty hunters? Please. So clearly, a little competition at the box office isn’t going to make Riddick shake in his bloodied boots. The R-rated Riddick was the biggest movie in the land […]
Can the Amish Have iPads?
The habits of the Amish have always confused me a little, and reality television hasn’t helped. After reviewing Amish Mafia a couple of weeks ago and watching some of the characters split their time between horse-drawn buggies and imported luxury cars, I asked myself a question that I know most of you probably already knew […]
Movie Tuesday: One Direction Tops The Butler (Sort Of)
One Direction mounted a late-summer assault on movie theaters with its concert flick One Direction: This Is Us. The British/Irish boy band toppled the very American story of The Butler to reign—at least for a weekend—supreme. The concert film collected an estimated $15.8 million to The Butler’s $14.9 mil to win the traditional Friday-through-Sunday frame. […]
Never Too Young to be Old
LinkedIn, social network for professionals and job seekers everywhere, will allow young teens to join its 225 million users as of Sept. 14. The minimum age to join will be 14 in the United States, Canada and a couple of other countries, 13 everywhere else. And just in time for the end of summer, too. […]
Movie Monday: The Butler Cleans Up Again
The fictionalized story of Cecil Gaines is, to some extent, about longevity. In Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Gaines served seven presidential administrations over the span of four decades. So it seems only appropriate that the movie would stick around in theaters for a while, doesn’t it? The Butler cleaned up again this week, buffing about […]