A Knuckle Sandwich to Chew On
Plugged In has passed the halfway point in my 584-part series on film and faith (well, it seemed that long while I wrote it), and this week’s installment is all about on-screen violence: what it is, what it does to us when we watch it and whether it’s ever appropriate. Americans (speaking in broad generalities […]
Power to the People
We tried. We really tried to keep this blog an Adam Lambert-free zone in the wake of his American Music Awards appearance Nov. 22. But recently he said something perhaps as provocative as his awards performance. For those who missed the fracas, Lambert—an openly gay singer and American Idol runner-up this season—unleashed a raunchy, S&M-tinged […]
Blinded by the ‘Twilight’
Leave it to a vampire to drain us of our discretionary income. Recession? Pish. The Twilight Saga: New Moon powered to a staggering $140.7 million take at the box office this weekend, breaking all sorts of records and proving, yet again, that tween girls really do rule the world. With all the hubbub surrounding Team […]
An Unfriend-ly Trend
The New Oxford American Dictionary, North America’s last word on words, recently named unfriend as its word of the year. It means, in dictionary parlance, “to remove someone from a social networking site.” But you already knew this. This annual announcement used to be a bigger deal, before all of us started using the Internet […]
To Meep or Not To Meep
Just call them the Meep Generation. A bunch of kids from Danvers (Mass.) High School nearly hopped into (ahem) a beaker full of hot water when they used the word meep as a method of social disruption. Meep, to my ear, seems an odd sort of rallying cry for school chaos. Introduced to the English […]
The Sky Is Falling! Again!
Disaster. No, I’m not talking about my hair. I’m talking about movies, people. The film industry has been on a disaster kick lately, and in the last couple of years we’ve seen the world destroyed (or, at the very least, seriously threatened) by monsters, men, machines, men and machines, robots masquerading as men, robots masquerading […]
‘A Good Story Well Told’
It’s November now, and here at Plugged In that means we’re on the cusp of Oscar season. Films with Academy Awards aspirations are starting to trickle into the the theaters, and those sorts of films present all manner of opportunities and challenges for us. I mean, what do we do with beautifully made films that […]
Rocking the Boat
So, I just finished writing my review of Pirate Radio (don’t look for it right away, though — the movie doesn’t come out until Nov. 13), and from the Plugged In perspective, it had all sorts of problems: Sex, drugs, anarchistic … you know, all the paraphernalia that comes along with stories about rock ‘n’ […]
Storytime
If you look at Plugged In‘s home page “rotator” today, you’ll notice a big picture of a candle grasped between two fingers. It’s a pretty cool picture for what, I hope, you’ll think is a pretty decent story—the first of an 8-part series (titled “Not Just a Movie”) I’ve written that explains why we at […]
Miley Worse Than Britney?
What would Hannah Montana say? Reigning teen queen Miley Cyrus has been named as the “worst celebrity of the year” by the readers of AOL’s teen-centric pop culture website, jsyk.com, beating out such celebrities as Kanye West and Britney Spears. The results, at first glance, feel pretty bizarre. I mean, it’s hard to imagine Miley […]
