Uncool, CinnamonToastKen
Emma Jenkins has nearly 32,000 followers on her YouTube channel. She, like most folks with a YouTube channel, talks about what she likes. And that, it turns out, includes Jesus. CinnamonToastKen has nearly 3 million followers on his YouTube channel. He, also, talks about what he likes. And that, its turns out, includes making fun […]
Rampage Rocks Box Office, But Quiet Place Keeps Rolling
Movies don’t get much different from each other than Rampage and A Quiet Place. The former, based on a 1990s-era video game, is dumb, loud fun built on gigantic monsters and CGI explosions and, oh yeah, the bulky charisma of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A Quiet Place is, well, a quieter movie—an intelligent horror thriller […]
Culture Clips: The Unliking Facebook Edition
Ah, Facebook. Welcome back, old friend. We’ve seen quite a bit of you these days—well, in our Culture Clips blog, at least. Every time I visit you myself, you ask me to tell you my social security number and demand that I vote for Vladimir Putin for our local school board. Well, maybe that’s stretching […]
A Quiet Place Makes Some Noise
Movie houses have traditionally been a bit empty in the springtime. And really, it makes sense: The kids are still in school. The movie industry is still recovering from awards season. And it’s not quite summer blockbuster season yet. Movie execs figure that we’ve all got better things to do with our time in March […]
Summer in the Forest: A Quiet Respite in a World of Noise
Sometimes people ask us how Plugged In chooses what movies it reviews. The short, simple answer is this: We watch the movies that make the most noise. I don’t mean we just restrict ourselves to loud movies. It’s more of a cultural noise we’re talking about: What movies are going to play in thousands of […]
Culture Clips: Open the Culture Bay Doors, Hal.
About this time in 1968, Stanley Kubrick released a little ol’ movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey, making it one of the few movies older than I am. But despite being made in an ancient era when Apples were fruits, not phones, the film got a lot right about the future. And, well, quite a […]
Ready Player One Nabs High Score
The movie’s all about the quest for an elusive, and extraordinarily important, video game Easter egg. It was released on Easter weekend. So maybe it’s only fitting that Ready Player One rolled to victory in the box office’s own Easter-egg hunt. Steven Spielberg’s return to flat-out popcorn fare proved to be all sunny-side up this […]
Culture Clips: Putting the Spring in Our Cultural Step
Yes, spring is upon us—a time of … well, snow where I live in Colorado. But everywhere else, it’s a time of budding trees and growing grass, It’s a time of regeneration, when the dismal, dead grayness of winter is replaced by new life and new expectations. Why, even dead television shows can, like crass […]
Three Years With Jesus, Filmed in Five
We’re in the midst of Holy Week now, and moviegoers who want to see a Christian flick have plenty of options. The financial performance of I Can Only Imagine is wowing secular prognosticators. Paul, Apostle of Christ is a competent, moving depiction of one of Christendom’s most important figures. And God’s Not Dead 3 hits […]
Pacific Rim Leads Box Office Uprising
Black Panther is incredibly strong, ludicrously fast and wears an outfit of pure vibranium. (That’s, like, a big deal for the three of you who haven’t seen the movie.) But even Marvel’s talented superhero was no match for a handful of 300-foot-high robots. Pacific Rim Uprising stomped all the way to the top of the […]
