Taking a Bite Out of Tourism
I saw a piranha in Nebraska once. Granted, the fish in question—safely ensconced in a friend’s dorm room—subsisted entirely on Cheetos, old test papers and unwary college freshmen, which means it didn’t present a danger to normal folks. But if piranhas splash around in Nebraska dormitories and gnaw on calculus textbooks (“the fish ate my […]
It’s All About Celebrity, Dahling!
She’s famous for being famous—a minor actress who paved her way to celebrity through reality television, gossip rags and a touch o’ scandal. She’s been a sex symbol, a red-carpet fixture and a resident of the California penal system. She’d be a fitting icon for today’s celebrity-obsessed culture—if her celebrity heyday hadn’t been in the […]
Unplugged
Let me make a confession: I kinda like media and technology. I work with it, I play with it, I write about it for a living. We live in an amazing time, filled with gadgets and entertainment options inconceivable when I was a little boy. A decade ago, the Internet was a relatively new plaything. […]
Movie Monday: The Other Guys
Salt couldn’t do it. Dinner With Schmucks couldn’t do it. But, after three weeks on top of the box office, a couple of Other Guys finally managed to knock off Christopher Nolan’s thriller Inception. The Other Guys, a Will Ferrell-helmed send-up of those action-packed buddy-cop flicks that have flourished on the big screen since, oh, […]
A Christian by Any Other Name …
So is Anne Rice a Christian or not? The novelist—author of Interview With the Vampire and other supernatural bestsellers—says she’s not. Though Rice made a very public return to faith a few years ago, ditching her vampire trope in favor of some imaginative bios on the early life of Christ, she made a public, and […]
Movie Monday: Dinner for Schmucks
Inception has been, for the folks over at Warner Bros., a dream of a movie. For the third straight week, the Christopher Nolan/Leonardo DiCaprio thriller thumped the competition at the box office, claiming the top spot with $27.5 million. Steve Carell’s Dinner for Schmucks sauntered into second place with $23.3 million, while the Angelina Jolie […]
A Zombie World Series
So, oil’s still washing up on the gulf, the economy’s in the doldrums, the honey bees are dying and my favorite baseball team, the Colorado Rockies, have lost nine of their last 11 games. Naturally, my thoughts turn to zombies. I’m only half kidding. Zombies are big in the entertainment biz these days, which pretty […]
When Christians Like Bad Stuff
So, between some reading of Augustine and G.K. Chesterton, I’ve been perusing a book from another Christian sage: Jonathan Acuff, best known for his blog Stuff Christians Like. Acuff’s book, also called Stuff Christians Like, is a funny, irreverent look at the Christian subculture—one of my favorite reads this summer. And it contains a particularly […]
Those Sinful Superheroes
Superheroes were kind of a sensitive subject around my house when I was growing up. My best friend and I loved ’em, and whenever he was over, we’d stuff socks in our shirtsleeves (to make our muscles look bigger) throw some bath towels around our necks and zip around our back yard, fighting for truth, […]
Movie Monday: Inception
It was a dream of a weekend for Leonardo DiCaprio and director Christopher Nolan. Their project Inception, in which a team of thought-thieves pilfer corporate secrets from their targets’ dreams, REM’ed its way to a $60.4 million box-office victory. No snoozer there. Holdover Despicable Me scratched to second place with $32.7 million, while another newcomer, […]
