Am Fan, Will Travel
Rich Bennett writes on the Plugged In Facebook page, “When visiting the Indianapolis area a few years ago, I walked the floor of Hinkle Fieldhouse, home to Butler and the site of Hickory’s upset victory in the movie Hoosiers.” Wendy Lynn Brion says, “Actually, I live about a half hour from one of the towns […]
And by a Half Hour of Relaxing Inspiration, I Mean a Flat-Out Food Fetish
My family and I have been known to watch a show or two on the Food Network. My wife finds it inspirational. She loves to cook (and she’s quite good at it), and the shows on that channel often give her ideas she tries out on our family. So far be it from me to […]
A Brave Heart Is Not Always a Good Heart
Sometimes I like to think I’m a pretty good person. That I’m aging gracefully, not grumpily. That I do a little better than average. That I give a little more come the end of each year. That I make fewer mistakes than the guys who sit next to me. And about that last one, well, […]
The First Job of a Movie Is to do WHAT?
I’ve been diligently digging through cause-and-effect stories about media for more than a decade and a half now. It’s sort of a Plugged In tradition, sometimes even an obsession to find connection points between entertainment and the way people act. We find funny stories, like the spaghetti taco craze that started on Nickelodeon’s iCarly. We […]
Quacking and Baaing and Pointing Fingers
The late Douglas Adams, of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame, wrote, “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.” How we act, and how we present ourselves does […]
Cheating Is the New Competing
Lance Armstrong is a cheater. The International Cycling Union says so, his teammates say so and 1,000 pages of documents say so. That makes me very, very sad. And maybe a little mad. But not everyone feels that way. In fact, some people don’t believe that Armstrong did anything wrong. Read what Buzz Bissinger wrote […]
Am I One in a Billion? Or Just Not Cool Enough for the Crowd?
I don’t have a Facebook page. And I’m starting to feel pretty bad about that. After all, out of the 2.5 billion or so folks who have Internet access on our planet, 1 billion of them now apparently have a Facebook page. Or maybe it’s only 900 million, if you whack off 100 mil or […]
Simon Sez R-Rated Movie Is ‘Child Abuse’
It wasn’t what he said that got me. It was that he hadn’t noticed before. Stephen Simon, a movie producer whose credits include What Dreams May Come and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, was horrified recently when he noticed a mother who had brought her young son to a showing of the R-rated End of […]
Hello. Your Stories Killed My Soul. Prepare for Me to Leave.
It wasn’t his first movie, but chances are that the first time you saw Mandy Patinkin was in The Princess Bride. He was Inigo Montoya, the drunken swordsman whose only purpose in life was to catch and kill the six-fingered man. And his famous lines are probably already rolling around in your head even before […]
Bright Lessons From the Dark Knight (Introduction)
It’s summertime already—at least as far as the movie studios are concerned—and that means one thing these days: superheroes. It officially started three weeks ago when The Avengers stormed into theaters (and refused to leave). The Amazing Spider-Man reboots that franchise on July 3 and, two weeks later, The Dark Knight Rises will cast its […]