‘I Did It Funny for Funny.’ A Conversation With the Late Tim Conway
Tim Conway could make you weep in the very best of ways. The comedian, who died today at the age of 85, did it all the time on The Carol Burnett Show, where Conway rose to fame. His knack for improvisation, deadpan delivery and comic timing made his castmates, especially Harvey Korman, laugh until they […]
Endgame Escapes Detective Pikachu
Detective Pikachu came to catch ‘em all—all of us moviegoers, that is. But let’s face it: No matter how cute the little electric rascal might be, and no matter how many volts it packs in that strange little tail of his, Pikachu ultimately fainted before the might of Avengers: Endgame. For the third-straight week, Endgame […]
Culture Clips: Goodbye Hello
Goodbyes are hard. We’ve had to say a bunch of them lately, from Boyz in the Hood director John Singleton, who died late last month, to 7-foot-3 Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in most of Star Wars films and died last Thursday. Christians mourned the passing of Rachel Held Evans, an influential evangelical author whose […]
Endgame Still Unstoppable
Endgame, smash. Forget Thanos. The real titan in theaters is Disney/Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame. The movie made hulkish amounts of money again this weekend, turning its competitors green with envy. Just how big is Endgame? Consider this: Disney’s latest and (some say) greatest superhero flick lost nearly 60% of its weekend-over-weekend audience, and it still banked […]
Can a TV Show Kill? It’s a Complicated Question.
Underneath the reviews, the blog posts, the vodcasts and Twitter missives, Plugged In is built on one basic premise: Media matters. The entertainment we consume—the stories we watch and read and listen to and play—impact us deeply, and on levels we might not fully realize. Obviously, the relationship between entertainment and its real-world impact is […]
Avengers: Endgame Lands in First With a Snap
In Avengers: Endgame, Thanos refers to himself and his dastardly actions as an “inevitability.” But he could’ve been describing the financial fate of the film itself. It seemed indeed inevitable that Endgame would finish the weekend No. 1. The real question was by how much. Could it earn more than the $257.7 million its forebear, […]
Forget About Saving the World. The MCU is All About Family
We could unpack a lot of stuff with Avengers: Endgame, Marvel’s three-hour finale to its 11-year, 22-movie odyssey (so far). And hopefully we’ll have opportunity to do just that sometime soon—when most of you have seen it and spoilers aren’t quite as big of an issue. But one thing that I can say about Endgame […]
The Curse of La Llorona is Blessed at the Box Office
Don’t look now, but La Llorona is with us. She cries for her lost children as she stalks through movie theaters, desperately grasping and clawing for the only thing that can assuage her grief: box-office receipts. What? No, no. Got that mixed up for a minute there. La Llorona, the legendary Latin-American bogeywoman, wants to […]
Monsters, Motherhood and The Curse of La Llorona
Horror movies aren’t for everyone. Some aren’t for anyone. But while fright flicks are often freighted with lots of really, really problematic content, some also contain interesting themes, too. Unlike most genres, they have license to deal explicitly with some of the biggest spiritual issues we face: What is evil? What lies in the hereafter? […]
A Culture Clips Blog of Fire and Ice
In the days before the Internet, before television, before most people even knew how to read, there was the church. And Notre Dame, literally and artistically, towered above many. In his book The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo wrote that the cathedral was a “vast symphony in stone.” But it was more than that. […]