In a Sea of Entertainment Delays and Cancellations, ‘The Chosen’ Sails to Season Two
The Chosen, a television series based on the life of Jesus, has already broken a lot of new entertainment ground. According to its makers, it’s the No. 1 crowdfunded media project in history. And the show eschewed distribution through the world’s streaming giants and instead made itself available on its own stand-alone app. Oh, and […]
New Flannery O’Connor Doc Unpacks Her Life and Faith
When she was attending the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1940s, Flannery O’Connor asked her priest whether she could write about “difficult things.” We can only assume that the priest gave O’Connor his blessing: Few writers have tackled more “difficult things” than O’Connor. The new documentary Flannery, playing at a variety of “virtual cinemas” […]
Can’t Keep a Good Evil Empire Down
The empire did indeed strike back: The Disney empire, that is. We’re back again with an encore Movie Monday, but only because the box-office charts are just too interesting to let go without comment. According to Deadline, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back climbed back to the top of the box-office 40 years after its […]
A Role She Was Made to Play
Erica recently snagged a leading role in the planned $70 million sci-fi movie b. Indeed, the movie’s makers might say she’s the only one who could’ve played the part. And certainly, Erica seems to have all the qualities a driven director might want from an actor. She’ll work through lunch and never take a smoke […]
Hamilton! (Oh, and some other important news, too.)
The coronavirus continues to change the world of entertainment. We’ve chronicled those changes in this space over the last several months, watching as the box-office dollars shrank from the hundreds of millions to the just plain hundreds, and as movies moved from the multiplex to streaming services and video on demand. Well, we’re changing a […]
Studios Play Wait-and-See While Will Ferrell Wins the Weekend
We were this close. It looked like the movie business was just a month away from returning to some semblance of normalcy. Disney’s live-action Mulan was set to crack open the delayed summer season July 24. Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was set to premiere July 31. Theaters were warming up their popcorn poppers in gleeful anticipation. […]
Words Can Hurt Us. Especially the Bad Ones.
Sometimes when people ask what I do for a living, I tell them I count profanities in movies. That’s not entirely true, of course, but it is an important part of my job. But why is it important? In a culture that grows ever coarser and, linguistically, less creative, it’s a fair question. And today, […]
Culture Clips: We’re All Playing Games
As our coronavirus-addled country does its bunny hop toward some semblance of normalcy and takes stock of the economic wreckage, some industries would say that COVID-19 has been good for business. At the front of the line? Video games. According to Nielsen, 82% of folks worldwide have played games or watched video game content during […]
In a Realm With No Theaters, King of Staten Island Reigns Supreme
OK, so the headline was a bit of an exaggeration. A handful of theaters are open in North America—joined by a few more every week—and the movies that land there are now pushing their weekend earnings into six-figure territory. In fact, this weekend there was a bona fide box-office showdown at the top: The horror […]
An Interview With Dallas Jenkins, Creator of The Chosen
Faith-based entertainment has something of a spotty history. The best of intentions don’t always translate to the screen as well as we might like, and sometimes a Christian movie or show that can move a believer to tears might leave a secular viewer … unimpressed. Maybe that’s one reason why I was so impressed by […]