Movie Tuesday: Fast & Furious 6
By the time most film franchises reach their sixth installment, they’re running on fumes. In contrast, the Fast & Furious movies just keep getting, ahem, even faster—and richer—at the box office. Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson and Co. injected the latest installment with a shot of cinematic nitrous oxide, propelling Fast & Furious 6 […]
Movie Monday: Star Trek Into Darkness
Sequels: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Star Trek franchise. It’s mulit-decade mission: to exploit new demographics, to seek out new fans and new markets, to boldly go once more to all the places Captain Kirk and Co. have gone before. As Kirk knows as well anyone, however, sometimes missions just don’t […]
Too Beautiful to Be a Terrorist’
How much does someone’s physical beauty influence the way we think about them? An unfolding storyline related to 19-year-old alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offers an interesting—not to mention disturbing—case study. There’s a mountain of evidence implicating Tsarnaev as one of the two bombers whose improvised explosives killed 3 and wounded nearly 300 during last […]
Very, Very Pinteresting
Forget words. Pictures are where it’s at in 2013. In the always-evolving online and social media landscape, images, not text, are in the ascendant these days. And that trend is making picture-oriented sites such as Pinterest increasingly important to marketers. “Social [media] is very rapidly shifting away from text,” says Apu Gupta, whose company, Curalate, […]
Getting On—and Off—the ‘Naughty List’
The list of celebrities known for their boorish, selfish, obnoxious behavior is notoriously long. I’m not going to name names, here, but you know who I’m talking about: the stars who believe the world revolves around them, who act as if the normal rules of morality and social propriety don’t apply to them at all. […]
When a Rapper Goes to Rehab
For Seattle rapper Ben Haggerty—better known by his stage name, Macklemore—2013 has been a breakthrough year. His infectiously silly (but unfortunately profanity-laced) ode to the joys of low-rent living, “Thrift Shop,” has spent six weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart. His debut album, The Heist, deals with subjects rarely addressed in the genre, including […]
“Why Do You Review Extreme Material?”
One of the questions we’re regularly asked by Plugged In constituents is why we review a particular movie, TV show, album, song or video game when we already know that its content is beyond the pale. That’s a great question. And it’s one that I’d like to address with a case study of sorts. Recently […]
Is There Less Sex on the Big Screen These Days?
What would you say to the suggestion that there’s actually less sex on the big screen these days than there was 15 or 20 years ago? Personally, I was pretty skeptical when I came across that assertion in the March 22 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Week in and week out, I review movies for Plugged […]
The ‘Bachelor’ Goes ‘Dancing’
Sean Lowe, otherwise known as ‘The Bachelor,’ may have chosen Catherine Giudici during Monday’s finale of ABC’s popular matchmaking reality show. But that doesn’t mean he and Catherine, whom he proposed to at the end of the episode, are ready to ride into untelevised matrimonial bliss and live happily ever after in camera-free obscurity. Hardly. […]
Watching ‘The Bible’ With My Family
Sunday night, my wife and I decided we wanted to watch the debut of History Channel’s much-publicized new miniseries The Bible with our family. If you haven’t heard, The Bible is the brainchild of Survivor producer Mark Burnett and his wife, actress Roma Downey (best known for her role on CBS’ Touched by an Angel). Over […]