Eric Rohmer, leading director of the French New Wave, died in January at age 89. During a career that spanned fifty years, he gained international acclaim and some box-office success. But he died having been loved for the wrong reasons… . Continue Reading »
Creation, a film about Charles Darwin’s personal life, is not a rant against God or even a story of the heroism of one man crusading for science against religion. Surprisingly, the movie is not polemical. It doesn’t bother to argue against religion, nor does it spend time arguing for the . . . . Continue Reading »
On second viewing, the Pixar movie Up , appealing enough in its first viewing, definitely got better. The things that annoyed me, didn’t; what I thought were flaws, weren’t. Such as: The fast-paced first ten minutes were my favorite part of the movie the first time around; . . . . Continue Reading »
“I have hidden your Word in my heart,” Psalm 119:11 The above quote gives us the leitmotif of the movie, The Book of Eli. Eli is the messenger of God, who carries the Logos in his “heart” and represents the last hope of mankind. As the movie opens mankind has engaged in what the . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter’s review of Avatar is a must-read: Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that . . . . Continue Reading »
Carroll again: He explains that much recent film criticism takes its cues from the effort to maximize aesthetic satisfaction. This is evident in the respect given to “transgressive” films that overturn “what are called the codes of Hollywood filmmaking”: “Within . . . . Continue Reading »
In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences. Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but . . . . Continue Reading »
Evan Almighty is amusing in spots, but often cheesy, preachy, and predictable. But it does have one of the best put-downs of liberal theology I’ve seen anywhere. On God’s instructions, Evan Baxter has built a gigantic ark in the empty lots near his new DC-area home, endured the ridicule . . . . Continue Reading »
The wife and I have a Netflix deal where we get two movies, mail them back, and get two more. I don’t know who came up with the idea but surely the dude’s a millionaire . . . talk about convenient! However, in the spirit of complete disclosure you sometimes get a disc that is so used . . . . Continue Reading »
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