Movie Monday: Ice Age Drifts to the Front
Wedged between two iconic superheroes, Manny made the most of it. The lumbering mammoth and his motley band of prehistoric pals pulled Ice Age: Continental Drift into the numero uno slot for the weekend with an estimated $46 million. OK, so the animated movie was the only film released this week, so it didn’t have […]
A Conversation With Mirror Mirror’s Lily Collins
Movies are, by definition, trendy. Filmmakers want to make movies that folks want to see—movies that’ll grab their attention and, hopefully, bring them back for more. They’ll tap into whatever they think we’re interested, be it good (yay, superheroes!), bad (let’s hope profane stuffed animals don’t become a trend) or even a little mystifying (who […]
Movie Monday: The Amazing Spider-Man
Fireworks? Barbecues? Baseball? Hey, they were all viable ways to celebrate Independence Day during this weirdly elongated holiday “weekend.” But it seems as though when folks weren’t shooing away flies from the potato salad or slapping mosquitos in the ballpark, they were getting bitten by another sort of bug. Or, more accurately, a spider. The […]
Not All Heroes Crawl Walls
I woke up in my own home this morning. Incredible. Last Wednesday, I wasn’t sure I had one. It’s been a week since the Waldo Canyon Fire blew up around our neighborhood, threatening my house and thousands more in the Colorado Springs area. I missed the worst of it: I was about 60 miles north […]
Movie Monday: Ted
Well, it was a good run. For 15 straight weeks, the No. 1 movies in North America had borne a PG-13 rating or lower—many of them which would even qualify as “family friendly.” Not since 21 Jump Street was bumped by The Hunger Games way back in March had an R-rated film stood atop the […]
Fathers: Not Just Comic Relief Anymore
Just got through watching ABC Family’s new sitcom Baby Daddy (watch for the review tomorrow), and really the only thing remarkable about the show was how unremarkable it was. Baby Daddy felt as though it had been transported straight out of network television from the 1980s or ’90s, boasting the same setup-punchline rhythm, the same […]
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Facebook
“Twitters broke, my life has no meaning anymore.” Those were the words of an unnamed tweeter who—in a spat of despondency—took to another, smaller social networking site to lament a temporary outage of Twitter last week. And she was far from the only person to treat the loss of service as, really the loss of […]
Movie Monday: Brave
It was a showdown between an arrow-shooting heroine and an ax-swinging president—a family-friendly fairy tale versus R-rated blood and guts and teeth. As it turns out, it wasn’t much of a contest: A certain Scottish princess easily won the weekend’s hand. Disney/Pixar’s Brave hit the audience bulls-eye at the box office, scoring an estimated $66.7 […]
The Typewriter is Dead. Long Live the Typewriter!
Last April, I wrote a blog lamenting the death of the typewriter. The last company to make ’em—an outfit in India—decided to put an end to production, leaving the old machines to fade into history, as if their last words were being typed with an old, worn-out ribbon. But perhaps the eulogy was a bit […]
Movie Monday: Madagascar Roars Again
I think I used up most of my animal puns last week, so let’s just cut to the chase: Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted repeated as box office champ again this weekend, collecting an estimated $35.5 million. Its mane competition (OK, so I didn’t use them all) was, for the second week in a row, […]
