Movie Monday: Chronicle
And you thought the Super Bowl was close. In a box office battle not quite for the ages, the sci-fi popcorn-muncher Chronicle pushed past Daniel Radcliffe’s horrifish The Woman in Black by the slim margin of $22 million to $21 million—a veritable pop-culture squeaker, according to the estimates. Granted, the overall numbers weren’t huge. It […]
Leave the Past in the Past? Not Facebook.
It’s Groundhog Day, people. And really, it’s only natural that on this revered holiday, my mind turns its attention to … Michael Bolton. What? The connection isn’t obvious? Let me explain. Ever since the 1993 film Groundhog Day was released, most of us no longer associate Feb. 2 solely with a large, skittish, rodent meteorologist. […]
Oscar Nominees: We Like Them! We Really Like Them!
The year’s Academy Awards nominations were released this morning. Let me be honest: Since I’ve been doing this gig, I don’t think I’ve seen a more positive collection of films in the running for Best Picture. First, let’s run down the nine nominees for Oscar’s top honor: The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly […]
Movie Monday: Underworld Awakens Box Office
The setup of the Underworld franchise sounds like something that a couple of 12-year-old boys would plot during a lazy Saturday afternoon. “So what if, like, vampires and werewolves hated each other?” one might say. “Yeah, and they, like, had a secret war! And used grenades made of silver and stuff!” His friend would opine. […]
The (Bleeped) Things Kids Say These Days
You’ve heard about it. We’ve talked about it. Some folks begged ABC never to air it. But air it did. On Wednesday, Modern Family presented to the world “Little Bo Bleep,” an episode in which a cute little girl utters the infamous f-word. The girl in question is Lily, the travel-size adopted daughter of gay […]
Tim Tebow and the Gift of Losing
Tebow time is over, at least for now. Last weekend, the Denver Broncos suffered a humiliating 45-10 defeat at the hands of the New England Patriots—a score that could’ve been far worse had Tom Brady felt a bit more vindictive. So while we still have a few more weekends of football left, some Broncos fans […]
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 […]