Movie Monday: Contraband
There was a full-fledged exorcism at the box office this weekend. Just seven days after The Devil Inside topped the charts with a shocking $34.5 million weekend, the schlocky screamfest took a diabolical 77% dive. Devil earned just an estimated $7.9 million and fell to sixth place—the metaphorical equivalent of a deep, sulphuric pit (in […]
Reviewing Reality
“If you can’t say anything nice …” That’s what our mothers always told us. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. It’s a pretty good rule … unless you’re an entertainment critic. Critics like me are paid to be, well, critical. Not vitriolic; not flat-out mean. But when you come to […]
Movie Monday: The Devil Inside
How does one explain the strange, disturbing weekend success of The Devil Inside? How does one rationalize how a dumb, throwaway film like this can earn an estimated $34.5 million—$20 million more than what most prognosticators had predicted—to win the weekly box office tourney? One might almost suspect that a legion of weekend moviegoers were […]
Movie Tuesday: Impossible Rings In New Year
With sequels and retreads dominating the box office in 2011, it’s somehow fitting that a squadron of holdovers would ring in the new year. Granted, Hollywood seemed disinclined to release anything new for the New Year holiday: The only new release anywhere was The Iron Lady, which debuted in a whopping four theaters (and earned […]
The Year’s Top 10 Culture Shakers (and What We Can Learn From Them)
To paraphrase Steve Martin circa the 1970s, it’s been a wild and crazy year. We’ve been through the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement. We’ve watched politicians bicker and our 401(k)’s sag. We marked the passing of a notorious North Korean dictator and celebrated the return of our troops from Iraq. But for […]
The Day My iPad Made a Break for It
My iPad cracked the other day. My wife and I had just gotten back from my parents’ house, and we were laden with food and packages and old magazines and newspaper clippings … and somewhere in the midst of all that stuff, the iPad was watching, waiting. Perhaps it got a glimpse of the front […]
Movie Tuesday: Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol
What did Santa Claus (or whatever treasured, commercialist holiday figure Scientologists eagerly await this time of year) bring Tom Cruise this Christmas? A box-office win for Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Granted, the payoff wasn’t massive: an estimated $29.5 million over the traditional three-day weekend (and $46.2 million if you’re counting Monday, which many of […]
Re-Gifting
A couple of weeks ago, part of the Plugged In staff gathered around the microphone and talked about our favorite television Christmas specials for the Official Plugged In Podcast (it’s episode #127, if you’re interested). My personal fave: A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has been aired every holiday season since 1965. I loved the special […]
Kim Jong Il Is Dead; His DVD Collection Lives On
Kim Jong Il, hereditary dictator of global wallflower North Korea, is gone now, allegedly after suffering a heart attack from overwork. While the world at large may not miss him, Hollywood will probably shed a tear or two at his passing—not because anyone in the entertainment industry loved the man, but rather because they loved […]
Sherlock Holmes and Sluggish Sequels
Consider: The original Sherlock Holmes earned more than $62 million its opening weekend two years ago when it debuted on approximately 3,600 screens. The sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, earned an estimated $40 million this weekend on 3,700 screens. What do you deduce from that? It’s elementary, my dear reader. Perhaps people are […]
