Celebrities Just Seem to Grow on Vines
Ever wonder why there seem to be so many celebrities out there these days? Why every time you go to the supermarket you see about two-dozen different faces plastered across the tabloids? Some might say that more celebrities are just an upshot to our celebrity obsessed culture. Others might point to the myriad entertainment outlets […]
Movie Monday: Avengers Torpedo Battleship
Davy Jones, meet Battleship. OK, so Universal Pictures’ titanic new release didn’t exactly burble to the box office’s briny depths this weekend: It only felt like it. Battleship fished an estimated $25.3 million from weekend moviegoers and floated to a second-place finish—far, far behind Marvel’s The Avengers. Even though Battleship’s already made more than $200 […]
The Series Is Dead: Long Live the Series!
Yesterday, Time’s movie critic Richard Corliss released what he considers to be “The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far).” The Artist launched the list at No. 10. Corliss named Pixar’s WALL-E as the best of the best. I love lists like these. It’s great to cruise through things like this and see where […]
A Novel Study in Character
Reading can change our lives—quite literally, according to a new study. Researchers say that literary characters can have a sizable impact on how we think and act. Now, that doesn’t mean that Harry Potter readers are going to start shopping for cauldrons or fans of the book The Hunger Games will stalk neighborhood pets. But […]
Movie Monday: Avengers Sucks Life From Shadows
A few weeks ago, Forbes magazine declared that Tony Stark—a.k.a. Iron Man—was worth a whopping $9.3 billion, making him the world’s fifth richest fictional character (one slot behind The Beverly Hillbilly’s Jed Clampett). If real-world dollars count on this fictional list, methinks that Mr. Stark may be moving up. The Avengers, starring Stark and a […]
And the Moral of the Story Is … Ummm …
I’m in the middle of reviewing the ABC show Scandal—a strange little drama that’s a little hard to box inside a recognizable genre (look for the full review tomorrow). It’s part episodic procedural, part serialized mystery. It’s got a little West Wing going on, without the idealism. It’s a little Law & Orderish, too (though […]
Movie Monday: The Avengers
Well, we knew it was gonna be big. But this big? The Avengers, Marvel’s supersized superhero flick, didn’t just win the weekend box-office crown. It didn’t just make history. It pounded the record books like the Hulk tossed around poor little Loki. The Avengers‘ opening weekend is so big, in fact, that we’re not even […]
Getting to the Very Art of the Matter
For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about seeing problematic or challenging movies. Not so much about how to decide whether you see them, but rather how to process them when you see them. Last week, I told you about some of the tools we use to handle the films we see—everything from praying […]
Movie Monday: Thinking Men Hornswaggle Pirates
It was supposed to be a busy weekend at the multiplex. With the spring movie season winding down and The Avengers just around the corner (May 4), four new films rushed to theaters this weekend to beat the summertime rush. None were expected to be Hunger Games-like smashes, of course. But all hoped to be […]
How Come They Get to Watch Bad Movies and I Don’t?
Shortly after we started this series of blog posts on how to engage with problematic films, I came across a comment from Josh, one of our readers, essentially calling us out in the best possible way. Here’s what he wrote: The thing that get’s me in this particular post is the idea of movies being […]