Articles
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2012-01-18 12:49:57
2011 was a good year for film, and particularly for depictions of faith in film — but not in the Hollywood mainstream on either count.
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2011-12-02 14:50:11
It’s hard to believe that many American children venturing into the theaters to see
Happy Feet Two will have their first experience of Sylvester and Tweety Bird on the big screen in a new computer-animated short, “I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat.” Hard to believe, first, that Sylvester and Tweety are back on the big screen—and, second, that these iconic animated characters that defined Saturday morning for decades and were beloved big-screen icons before that have become pretty much strangers to many of the current generation of kids. How did
that happen?
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2011-10-26 07:18:27
Like Dorothy’s house, uprooted in fairy-tale response to her running away, physical domiciles in one family film after another are displaced, torn asunder, and undergo fantastic, traumatic crises and transformations in visionary mirroring of the upheaval in the characters’ lives. Among the more striking examples of this poetic linking of house and household are Jon Favreau’s intriguing 2005 fantasy
Zathura, Gil Kenan’s 2006 Halloween tale
Monster House, Mark Waters’s smart, scary 2008 thriller
The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Pete Docter’s 2009 Pixar fantasy
Up.
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2011-09-22 13:05:23
In 1998, a former gang biker named Sam Childers joined a church mission trip to the Sudan to help repair huts damaged in the Second Sudanese Civil War. Most of the people on that trip finished their charitable labors and left Africa behind, but Sam didn’t — not completely.
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2011-09-22 13:05:20
The Adjustment Bureau and
Hereafter are among a remarkable number of recent and upcoming Hollywood films in some way invoking themes of spirituality, religion or belief. 2010 was particularly rife with such Hollywood religiosity, quantitatively if not necessarily qualitatively.
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2011-09-16 11:24:49
Everyone knows that
Citizen Kane — celebrating its 70th anniversary with this week’s 3-disc Blu-ray debut — enjoys a bulletproof reputation as The Greatest Movie Ever Made … What isn’t so generally known is that the film’s prominent place in so many film classes — and for that matter, the fact that there
are film classes in the first place — has a lot to do with the work of a revolutionary Catholic film critic and theorist, André Bazin, whose critical theories were shaped by the same tradition of Christian personalist philosophy that informed the writings of Pope John Paul II.
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2011-09-09 08:36:25
“It was just like a movie.” A cliché, yes, but as is often the case, that phrase became a cliché for a reason. The frequency with which those words were repeated in the weeks and months after September 11, 2001 was a striking testament to the role movies have come to play in how we process and interpret reality.
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2011-08-12 14:47:57
What do today’s superhero movies tell us about ourselves? For one thing, we’re more skeptical these days about heroes and heroism. In contrast to the stoic confidence of the typical Western hero — or even of Christopher Reeves’ Superman, who
as late as 1978 could unabashedly say, “I’m here to fight for truth, justice and the American way” — today’s heroes have feet of clay, and have to grow into their heroic roles.
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2011-06-10 12:46:14
Here is a film that not only asks, with unusual insistence, why God allows suffering, but contemplates God’s own answer to that question in the Book of Job, amplified by the sweeping vistas of the natural world available to modern science, the Hubble telescope and Hollywood special effects: God did
all this; who are we to think we can judge or question him? It also asks why a stern, bullying father hurts his children. Is God like that father?
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2011-04-01 15:21:51
Roland Joffé, director of
The Mission and
There Be Dragons, calls himself an agnostic, but he seems to be a remarkably God-haunted one.
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2011-02-28 13:02:56
The royal historical drama
The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as England’s Prince Albert, later King George VI, was the biggest winner at the 83rd Academy Awards, winning four of its 12 nominations in an evening with few surprises and a poorly staged ceremony whose primary virtue was its comparative shortness.
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2011-01-14 09:08:43
Was 2010 “The Worst Movie Year Ever,” as Joe Queenan argued at WSJ.com a while back? Or at least, bracketing art-house and world cinema fare, was it
Hollywood’s worst year ever? For most of the year, it sure looked plausible.
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2010-12-13 12:37:35
Douglas Gresham, Walden Media’s Micheal Flaherty and C. S. Lewis scholar Devin Brown discuss the book and the film.
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2010-12-03 12:40:37
(Newly available on Blu-ray/DVD) Rather than a static motion picture,
Fantasia was originally conceived as a repertoire, a selection of presentations that over time could be augmented by new pieces while old ones were retired, like an orchestra rotating its concert lineup … Ten years ago, amid the wreckage at the end of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, the Disney studio marked
Fantasia’s 60th anniversary with
Fantasia 2000, a film intended to honor in a way the original repertory conception of
Fantasia.
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2010-11-25 01:33:47
12 reasons why
Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is no
Empire Strikes Back … or even
The Two Towers.
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2010-10-08 06:02:38
The Seventh Chamber shows that for Edith it is only by knowing God that we know ourselves; only through Jesus that we know God; and only through the cross that we can know Jesus.
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2010-09-14 12:12:34
Debuting today on DVD, the TV movie
Amish Grace broke multiple network records when it premiered this spring as the most-watched and highest-rated original movie in Lifetime Movie Network history. Inspired by the nonfiction book of the same title about the aftermath of the 2006 Amish school shooting in Lancaster, Pa., the film was produced by the Larry Thompson Organization, founded by Larry A. Thompson, an executive producer on the film.
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2010-09-07 06:30:58
A Town Called Panic may be the most oddball thing you see all year, if you see it, which you probably won’t, although perhaps you should. How can I explain it?
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2010-06-18 08:26:31
Hollywood’s ambivalence about fatherhood is deeply entrenched. Ambivalence, though, is not mere hostility; often it is rooted in a real awareness of the irreplaceable importance of fatherhood, and in melancholy or anger over paternal failure in a fallen, broken world.
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2010-06-14 13:48:02
That the Magdalene asylums represent a phenomenon as deserving of critical scrutiny as the trial of Joan of Arc or the ecclesiastical abandonment of the Guaraní missions, I don’t question. Mullan, however, betrays his subject with smug Catholic-bashing. It’s a tragedy that the enormity of what went wrong at the Magdalene asylums has been trivialized by cheap manipulation.
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2010-06-14 13:48:00
The Ryan report confirms the substantial truth of the sort of stories dramatized in
The Magdalene Sisters. These stories need to be told. But the report also reconfirms my fundamental objection to the
way that
The Magdalene Sisters tells its story, depicting the world of the asylums
solely in terms of unremitting abuse, cruelty and sadism unbroken by any hint of kindness or humane treatment. This is not in accordance with the memories of those who endured the Irish institutions, according to the Ryan report.
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2010-05-29 17:48:04
Alejandro Amenábar’s
Agora is a work of hagiography, and, for that matter, of anti-hagiography. Among its burdens are that Hypatia of Alexandria, the celebrated neo-Platonic philosopher and mathematician, is worthy of veneration, and also that Cyril of Alexandria, saint and doctor of the Church, is not. Neither of these theses is without prima facie plausibility, or unworthy of serious-minded and nuanced exploration.
Agora is serious-minded to a fault, but nuance, while not absent, is lacking.
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2010-05-05 14:44:26
Opening on Mother’s Day weekend, French director Thomas Balmès’
Babies documents the first year in the life of four babies from four different corners of the world: Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo. Balmès, who lives in Paris with his wife and three children, discussed his film over the phone with me.
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2010-04-23 09:38:41
British filmmaker Michael Whyte lives in West London’s Notting Hill area across the square from a Carmelite monastery, Most Holy Trinity. For years he wondered about the building across the square; then one day he inquired about making a documentary there.
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2010-03-01 07:09:18
Miyazaki’s whole body of work (less one or two sub-par exceptions) offers unduplicated vistas of imaginative wonder and beauty, images of startling power, admirable and likable heroines and heroes, humanely conceived supporting characters, elusively engaging storytelling, wholesome moral themes, and unexpected sly humor. He is the sort of artist whose work doesn’t just entertain audiences, but wins enthusiasts. For those who haven’t yet discovered him, Miyazaki is a taste well worth acquiring.
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2010-02-13 07:50:27
Horror represents a field many Christians approach with trepidation, and rightly so. The horror shelves of bookstores and video stores are very largely a wasteland of mindless, tasteless trash; indeed, there may be no other genre as disproportionately overrun with junk. Yet the grotesque, the macabre, and the frightful have an abiding place in human imagination and culture — a place that Christian sensibility has historically not seen fit to reject or condemn, at least entirely.
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2010-02-04 03:55:16
More wordless Aardman animation on DVD!
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2010-01-22 05:53:25
It was a year of quirky, darkly mature childhood fantasy adaptations. Neil Gaiman’s juvenile horror-thriller
Coraline, Maurice Sendak’s picture book
Where the Wild Things Are and Roald Dahl’s young reader
Fantastic Mr. Fox were each made into unique, challenging films in radically different styles by directors Henry Selick, Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson, respectively.
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2010-01-08 05:49:20
Like its protagonist, Saint Joseph Desa of Cupertino, throughout much of his lifetime and most of the film, Edward Dmytryk’s 1962 film
The Reluctant Saint is a modest affair that has attracted little attention, but has more to offer than meets the eye.
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2009-11-20 08:07:51
There is even a
Twilight tourism industry, centered on Washington State, where much of the story is set. While Robert Langdon fans get to go to Rome and Paris for the Dan Brown experience, Stephenie Meyer aficionados converge on rainy Forks, Washington to take “Twilighter tours” of locations more or less corresponding to settings in the books, from a Craftman-style house similar to the Swans’ to a locker at Forks High School designated Bella’s locker.
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