Who Has Died Most Often On Screen? (Spoiler Alert!)

Posted on January 7, 2011 at 8:00 am

It’s a big moment in any movie when one of the main characters dies, whether in battle, by accident, foul play, or natural causes. The nice people at the information site ChaCha have done the math and figured out which actors have died most often in movies. They also point out some interesting patterns and coincidences — De Niro was killed by Pacino in “Heat” and then Pacino was then killed by De Niro in “Righteous Kill” and Bruce Willis had two movie deaths at the hand of his then-wife, Demi Moore.

Tough Teen Girls in the Movies of 2010

Posted on January 5, 2011 at 3:52 pm

The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday has a terrific year-end round-up about an unusual trend in 2010 movies, tough teen girls. From gritty dramas like “Fish Tank” and “Winter’s Bone” to ultra-violent fantasies like “Kick-Ass” and “Let Me In” (both starring Chloe Grace Moretz, who was a wise and confident middle schooler in “Diary of a Wimpy Kid“), from a fairy tale (“Tangled“) to a western (“True Grit“), to an armor-wearing, dragon-slaying Alice in Wonderland, teen girls were brave, strong, adventuresome, and bent on justice.

Why now? The success of “Twilight” helped show Hollywood that young women wield considerable force at the box office, so studios have understandably started to pay attention. Actresses like Angelina Jolie (“Salt,” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”) and Milla Jovovich (“Resident Evil”) have proven that action isn’t just the sole purview of Y chromosomes. And we may be seeing a generational shift whereby writers and directors raised with an expectation of gender equality bring that sensibility to their filmmaking.

This is a trend I hope to see more of in 2011.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

The Biggest Movie Bad Guy of the Year: The Corporation

Posted on December 30, 2010 at 8:53 pm

I had a lot of fun writing for BNet about why corporations were the go-to villain in the movies of 2010, from “Despicable Me” to “The Other Guys,” “Tron: Legacy,” “Resident Evil 4,” and “Inception.”

What Movie Had the Most Mistakes in 2010?

Posted on December 17, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Iron Man 2 has the ‘most mistakes’, according to a new poll from MovieMistakes with 46 mistakes. Runners-up included “The A-Team” as number 2, and two Leonardo DiCaprio films, “Shutter Island” and “Inception” as third and fourth place, followed by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Kick-Ass,” “The Other Guys,” “Toy Story 3,” “Salt” and “The Karate Kid.”
Mistakes were found by attentive movie-goers in a range of categories including continuity errors and factual mistakes. For example, in “Iron Man 2” Ivan Vanko’s fake passport says Russkaja in Russian. That term is used for females. And In the opening senate scene, the Senator’s jar of water keeps turning around and moving closer/away from the sign with his name on between shots.
Of course no list like this is definitive. The top box office films are the ones with the most identified mistakes because more people see them and more people see them more than once. But it is still a lot of fun to read through for the “gotcha” thrill and for the fun of seeing how passionate people are about movies.

Related Tags:

Understanding Media and Pop Culture

More Madness from the MPAA Ratings Board

Posted on December 15, 2010 at 11:27 pm

Two movies opening up this week get a PG rating. One is “Yogi Bear,” based on the cartoon series for children about a bear who steals picnic baskets. The other is “Tron: Legacy” a high-tech action film that involves peril, abandonment, deaths of parents, and characters who are destroyed by being shattered into billions of tiny fragments.
Does anyone think this makes sense?