Culture Clips: For Halloween, Some Scary Screens
Halloween is a big deal in the United States. The average American will spend $185.50 for the hallo-day, including $76 on candy. But we’ve got another major day to commemorate this week as well (without so many bite-size candy bars, presumably): On Nov. 1, the MPAA ratings system will turn 50. And to mark the […]
Halloween Scares Up Another Win
Most of the movies at the multiplex turned on all their lights and hid in their secret basement bunkers this weekend. After all, Michael Myers was on the prowl again, and he had its competition running scared. Myers, the masked boogeyman from the Halloween movies, dragged the franchise’s latest iteration to its second-straight win, hacking […]
Culture Clips: It’s a Boo-tiful World
As we fill big bowls with candy in preparation for next week’s onslaught of little ghosts and goblins, then eat all the candy and fill the bowls again, we know that we live in a time of fearsome frights. And I’m not just talking about Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, which is apparently keeping […]
Halloween Does Its Tricks, Gets Its Treats
Forget the candy corn. Forget the bite-size chocolate bars. Halloween came a-knocking this weekend, and audiences filled its bag with lots of cold, hard cash. Halloween, a direct sequel to that 40-year-old slasher “classic” once again starring Jamie Lee Curtis, knifed its way to an estimated $77.5 million in North America. That would’ve been an […]
Why Watch a Movie That’s Going to Break My Heart?’ A Conversation With Director Dianne Dreyer
Plugged In reviews a lot of movies. My cohorts and I probably write about 200 reviews every year, covering just about every movie you’re likely to see in the local multiplex. And we just scratch the surface. More than 730 movies were released in 2017, most of them under-the-radar indie films or special-interest flicks. We […]
Venom Gobbles Up Second Win
It was a crowded weekend at the box office. Four newcomers rolled relatively wide this weekend, and several other films debuted in limited release. But no matter: The weekend was one for the old-timers. Not too old, mind you. Both top earners still have vestiges of that new-movie smell. Still, in the economics of modern […]
Culture Clips: Heroes, Heels and Hacks
It’s not easy to find heroes these days. So it was nice to see Drew Brees, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints and apparently all-around good guy, break the National Football League’s all-time passing mark this Monday night. Even better, though? His post-game interview. When the ESPN interviewer Lisa Salters asked Brees what he told […]
Venom Bites The Box Office in a Big Way
Back in the day, being box office poison was a bad thing. But the folks at Sony Pictures were more than happy to inject the box office this weekend with a little Venom. Answering pent-up demand from fans who hadn’t seen a superhero flick in, oh, months, Spider-Man’s longtime nemesis-turned-antihero shrugged off scathing reviews and […]
Culture Clips: The Facebook Trauma Edition
Perhaps it’s not exactly news anymore when Facebook announces a data breach. The ubiquitous social network has been as leaky as a perforated garden hose lately, so what’s another 50 million users? Still, it made the virtual front pages of a lot of virtual newspapers, and what might’ve gotten lost in the week’s Facebook headlines […]
Night School Pays Off at the Box Office
Making a successful movie is tough. It takes skill. It takes craft. It takes, often, a little bit of luck. But sometimes, you gotta have something extra: You gotta have Hart. Night School, starring funny people Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish, roared to first place with an estimated $28 million in its weekend debut. ‘Course, […]
