A Month of Junk: The Treasures We Cling to
Verna’s a hoarder, and she knows it. Her house is stacked, floor to ceiling, with 16 years worth of stuff. She collects everything, it seems—broken furniture, empty plastic bottles, yarn. Underneath, mice and rats live and die, unnoticed. Verna abandoned most of her house long ago and now lives, essentially, in the attic: To get […]
Harsh Truth: Is Weinstein’s Bully Movie Too Profane for Kids?
Media mogul Harvey Weinstein had a good night on Sunday. The Weinstein Company’s The Artist won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Its film The Iron Lady propelled Meryl Streep to her third Oscar. The Weinstein Company even produced the documentary Undefeated, which ran away with yet another statue. But in the midst of all […]
Movie Monday: Act of Valor
Ah, the irony. Last night, the entertainment industry feted itself and its biggest, brightest stars at the 84th Academy Awards ceremony. But what was the weekend’s biggest movie? A low-budget, high-body-count, outsider flick that features no stars at all. Act of Valor doesn’t even feature many real actors: They’re real Navy SEALs—not-so-regular Joes who may […]
Oscars 2012: Examinations of Innocence
This Sunday, the entertainment industry will gather and congratulate themselves on another year well done. Some will go home with shiny statues. Others will leave with some nice parting gifts (Oscar swag bags are valued at around $75,000 this year). And most of us will have a chance to pass judgment ourselves on the winners […]
A Month of Junk: The Boring Storing Game
Alas. My rented storage unit will never become a celebrity. It’s not just that A&E’s ludicrously popular Storage Wars is based in California and I’m in Colorado. If that was the only barrier, I could cling to the hope that A&E would create a spinoff—much as they did with Storage Wars: Texas or as they […]
Movie Monday: Safe House
Technically, the holiday weekend is still chugging along. With today being President’s Day, the entertainment industry is hoping that scads of holiday-taking lagabouts will spend the day at the local multiplex, watching movie after movie and subsisting on nothing but Milk Duds and Diet Coke. Alas, it is not a holiday for me. So out […]
A Month of Junk: Collectable or Collecting Dust?
On the corner of my desk here at Plugged In headquarters, I have a stack of empty Mountain Dew cans. The size and shape of the stack varies from week to week and month to month (depending on where I am with my recycling). I was in the process of building a shiny, aluminum pyramid […]
Whitney Houston: The Voice of the Age
Whitney Houston’s body was flown to New Jersey last night in preparation for a Saturday funeral in Newark—the city in which she was born and raised. The private service will be held at New Hope Baptist Church—the place where she first started singing at age 11. Houston, 48, was found dead Saturday in the Beverly […]
Movie Monday: The Vow
Last year, it seemed as though the movie-going public had forgotten its collective love of film. Oh, sure, there were a few blockbusters here and there. But more weekends than not, folks looked at what was playing and shrugged—unable to recall the magic of greasy popcorn, overpriced drinks and a big story writ large on […]
A Month of Junk: Stuff Touched by a Celebrity
I own a record player. We don’t use it, of course. We can’t. It was made in 1928, and the crank handle that wound the turntable doesn’t wind anymore. The record player is part of a massive piece of furniture—the nifty-keeno home entertainment system of the day. The record player dominates one side. On the […]