Watching Our Language
As I mentioned yesterday, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween was the No. 1 movie in the country this weekend. Its “family friendly” PG-13 rating certainly helped raise its box-office tally, even though I didn’t find the film particularly family friendly. But turns out, the MPAA originally slapped the movie with an R rating before director/star […]
Madea Says Boo to the Box Office
Maybe now she can buy a newer car. Madea, Tyler Perry’s raging, gray-haired alter ego who drives a famously ancient Cadillac, drove to the top of the box office, with Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, peeling away with an estimated $21.7 million. Boo 2! technically had plenty of competition for that top spot, too: They […]
Happy Death Day Wins the Weekend
It’s been a bad year financially at the box office. A gigantic horror show, some might say. So maybe it’s only fitting that horror movies have been among the year’s only bright spots—financially speaking, at least. The grotesque genre continued its horrific hot streak this weekend with the debut of Happy Death Day, which blew […]
The ‘Trespassers Will’ of Childhood
No offense, Walt Disney. But to really understand the magic of Winnie-the-Pooh, you need to read it. Open the book and you walk into a comfortable, wryly funny and beautiful world. You track Woozles. You attend birthday parties. You sail through the Hundred Acre Wood in an umbrella. My mom read A.A. Milne’s beloved stories […]
Culture Clips: Fall of a Hollywood Kingpin
The bigger you are, the harder you fall goes the old cliché. But in Harvey Weinstein’s case, that seems to be true. Weinstein, one of Hollywood’s most successful kingmakers, was summarily ousted from his namesake movie distribution company after The New York Times revealed that the producer had been the subject of several sexual harassment […]
Television Learns That It’s Nice to Be Nice (And It Makes Money, Too)
We’re in the heart of the new television season, and I’ve noticed something a little odd about it. It’s trying to be nice. Strange, right? For the last several years, television has been besotted with undoubtedly gripping, unbearably grim prestige TV. HBO’s Game of Thrones revels in its episodic cruelties, both physical and political. Hulu’s […]
Blade Runner Runs Into Trouble
Picture a landscape filled with amazing technological advances, but one that feels curiously depressing—something teeming with simulated life, yet strangely lifeless. The Los Angeles megalopolis from Blade Runner 2049? No, I’m talking about the box office from this weekend. Blade Runner 2049 zoomed into theaters with a strong pedigree, lots of ooh-ahh special effects and […]
Culture Clips: No Words
We suffered through a week of loss and grief, a week that left us looking for answers. We know the who, what and where of the tragedy in Las Vegas, when a gunman opened fire on a stadium filled with country music fans, killing 58 of them and injuring hundreds more. But the why remains […]
IT Rises From the Grave
Here’s the problem with supernatural, undying beasties. They are, by definition, really difficult to finish off. It’s pretty much a horror-movie cliché: Monsters only look dead until you kill ’em three or four times. Contenders for this weekend’s box-office crown discovered that to their detriment this week, as two-time champ IT—which last week had sunk […]
Culture Clips: Emmys Put on a Red Shawl
Back in the day, television was considered something of a cultural unifier—the very definition of mass entertainment that would serve as a focal point for familial, communal, and even intergenerational gatherings. Yeah, about that. The Emmy awards—from the tone of the show to the awards themselves—illustrated a certain cultural divide. “In an age of hyper-polarization, […]