Contributor: Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

Celebrities Just Seem to Grow on Vines

Ever wonder why there seem to be so many celebrities out there these days? Why every time you go to the supermarket you see about two-dozen different faces plastered across the tabloids? Some might say that more celebrities are just an upshot to our ce …

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Movie Monday: Avengers Torpedo Battleship

Davy Jones, meet Battleship. OK, so Universal Pictures’ titanic new release didn’t exactly burble to the box office’s briny depths this weekend: It only felt like it. Battleship fished an estimated $25.3 million from weekend moviegoers and floated to a …

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The Series Is Dead: Long Live the Series!

Yesterday, Time’s movie critic Richard Corliss released what he considers to be “The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far).” The Artist launched the list at No. 10. Corliss named Pixar’s WALL-E as the best of the best. I love lists like these …

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Battleship

A whole lotta red pegs get stuck into battleships here. And while you’ve seen this kind of thing B-4, it’s still worth a review to C if this film’s stuck in row A or row F.

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A Novel Study in Character

Reading can change our lives—quite literally, according to a new study. Researchers say that literary characters can have a sizable impact on how we think and act. Now, that doesn’t mean that Harry Potter readers are going to start shopping for cauldro …

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Movie Monday: Avengers Sucks Life From Shadows

A few weeks ago, Forbes magazine declared that Tony Stark—a.k.a. Iron Man—was worth a whopping $9.3 billion, making him the world’s fifth richest fictional character (one slot behind The Beverly Hillbilly’s Jed Clampett). If real-world dollars count on …

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Dark Shadows

After gaining fame in a cult television hit from the 1960s, vampire Barnabas Collins has decided to inhabit the body of Johnny Depp in this Tim Burton comedy. Note that we said body, because this film has absolutely no soul.

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And the Moral of the Story Is … Ummm …

I’m in the middle of reviewing the ABC show Scandal—a strange little drama that’s a little hard to box inside a recognizable genre (look for the full review tomorrow). It’s part episodic procedural, part serialized mystery. It’s got a little West Wing …

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Movie Monday: The Avengers

Well, we knew it was gonna be big. But this big? The Avengers, Marvel’s supersized superhero flick, didn’t just win the weekend box-office crown. It didn’t just make history. It pounded the record books like the Hulk tossed around poor little Loki. The …

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Getting to the Very Art of the Matter

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about seeing problematic or challenging movies. Not so much about how to decide whether you see them, but rather how to process them when you see them. Last week, I told you about some of the tools we use to h …

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The Avengers

If two’s company and three’s a crowd, what’s four? Or six? In this case, it’s Marvel’s newest superhero movie.

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Movie Monday: Thinking Men Hornswaggle Pirates

It was supposed to be a busy weekend at the multiplex. With the spring movie season winding down and The Avengers just around the corner (May 4), four new films rushed to theaters this weekend to beat the summertime rush. None were expected to be Hunge …

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How Come They Get to Watch Bad Movies and I Don’t?

Shortly after we started this series of blog posts on how to engage with problematic films, I came across a comment from Josh, one of our readers, essentially calling us out in the best possible way. Here’s what he wrote: The thing that get’s me in thi …

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The Five-Year Engagement

Tom and Violet want to get married. But then they have to move to Michigan for her job. So the wedding’s officially postponed. Um, why would that be again?

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Movie Monday: Think Like a Man

Katniss had a good run. After four weeks as box office champ, The Hunger Games was finally toppled by a couple of films about—well, couples. Think Like a Man featured four of ’em, in fact (plus a tag-along divorced guy)—perhaps figuring the only way to …

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