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Spotlight: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

This week, coinciding with the theatrical release of Shrek Forever After, a pair of DreamWorks Animation productions get budget one-disc DVD rereleases (under $10). Despite the explicit marketing tie-in (“From the studio that brought you Shrek”), both films are traditional hand-drawn cel animation with nothing to connect them to Shrek in look or in spirit.

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“No Movies Please, We’re Catholic”

I would like to think that the time and energy I’ve devoted over the last ten years to Catholic film criticism—work I’ve always seen as an apostolate to families and individual moviegoers, especially Catholics but also non-Catholics and non-Christians—has contributed in a small way to the kingdom of God. I’m still a little taken aback at how some Catholics seem to feel in effect that the whole endeavor is basically pointless, since movies are such a complete wasteland that there is little or no value in trying to discern good from bad and it would be better simply to wash our hands of the whole business.

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Lines I Wish I Had Written: Babies

Could Thomas Balmes’ Babies, now playing in barely-limited release around the country, be the year’s most important movie? Jeffrey Overstreet thinks it just might, and while I’ve already excerpted the lines below explaining why in a previous blog post, his comments are worth a dedicated blog post.

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Lines I Wish I Had Written: Robin Hood

Quoting generously from my longish Robin Hood review, Carl Olsen of Ignatius Insight Scoop adds:

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Don’t Count Out Babies!

Defying early box-office nay-sayers, Focus Features’ life-affirming documentary Babies opened over Mother’s Day weekend with significantly better ticket sales than originally estimated, thanks to what the website Box Office Mojo is calling (in the idiom of the movie beat) “a huge Mother’s Day bump.”

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Spotlight: Battlefield Earth

Roger Ebert has sold two books of negative reviews, and at his website you can peruse the “Your Movie Sucks™ files,” consisting of recent reviews awarding less than two stars.

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The Trouble With Trailers

Have movie previews gotten to be too much? Parents have been complaining for years about inappropriate coming attractions playing before movies aimed at younger or more innocent viewers—and it’s getting worse.

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What is Peter Bart Smoking?

The celebratory media frenzy over the 50th anniversary of The Pill has reached even the pages of Variety, where past editor and current vice president and editorial director Peter Bart has written a strange essay called “‘Sex’ and the summer franchise” (subscription required) that somehow contrives to link a blip in summer movie patterns to five decades of contraception.

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Avatar and Religion Redux

Last week Peter Chattaway blogged an essay on Avatar and religion originally written for Anglican Planet (which is an awesome name for an Anglican periodical on so many levels, although I know nothing else about it).

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Decent Films Radio: Kresta & CA Live, 5/7 & 5/14

A couple of busy weeks on the air: Next Friday, 5/7, I’ll be doing an hour of Kresta in the Afternoon from 5pm–6pm EDT. Then the following Friday, 5/14, I’ll be back on Catholic Answers Live from 6pm–7pm EDT. (See homepage Spotlight for “listen live” links.)

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Spotlight: Dogma in Dogma: A Theological Guide

Rereading my ten-year-old essay “Dogma in Dogma” today, it occurs to me that I was basically trying to beat Kevin Smith at his own game, to treat Dogma in more or less the same way that the film treats dogma.

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Crazy Heart in 3D?

Roger Ebert, a long-time opponent of 3D and a skeptic of most 3D movies, has an essay in Newsweek explaining why. His opening salvo is typical both of his views on the subject and of his lucid, vigorous writing style.

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“Houston, We Have a Problem.”

Those words, uttered by Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell in Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning Apollo 13, plastered across posters for the film, have become a ubiquitous part of the English lexicon—even though they’re not exactly what the real Jim Lovell actually said. According to Wikipedia, Lovell, repeating his fellow Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert, actually said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” All rightee then.

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Spotlight: Miracle

Miracle is one of the better sports movies of recent years, dramatizing one of the most memorable American Olympic victories in the last 30 years. My review is this week’s Spotlight piece. (This post is a bit belated, as I’ve been snowed under by deadlines, but the homepage Spotlight was updated on Monday on schedule.)

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Filming Carmelites: No Greater Love

In 2009, two films were released with the title No Greater Love. One, with shades of Fireproof, is an Evangelical-produced drama about marriage woes and recovery. Forget that one. The one I’m interested in suggests shades of Into Great Silence, Philip Gröning’s transcendent cinematic portrait of Carthusian spirituality.

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The Great Mouse Detective: Rise and Fall of the Mouse

From the beginning the rodents were always there, tiny sidekicks running around in the periphery of Disney animated features, starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White’s woodland attendants included chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits as well as raccoons, bluebirds and other critters — everything but mice, it seems, though there is at least one mouse in the picture, an irritable little fellow in a mouse-hole in the Dwarfs’ house who objects to the sweeping squirrels using his hole as a dust-bin.

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Parents’ Concerns and the Media

Last week the US bishops conference released a survey inquiring about parental concerns about inappropriate media content and its effect on children. Called Parents’ Hopes & Concerns About the Impact of Media on their Children, the survey suggests that most parents are concerned about their children being exposed to inappropriate content, and that many are interested in parental control technology such as the V-chip.

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Spotlight: Touching the Void

This week’s Spotlight piece is another older review you may not have read, for a film you may not have seen: Touching the Void.

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Babies Are Back!

After the population-collapse anxieties of Children of Men, all the unwanted-pregnancy movies of 2007 and a slew of recent apocalyptic disaster films, is Hollywood moving toward a posterity state of mind?

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Bug Fix: Win/IE Quick Search

Note for Win/IE users: A bug in the quick search in the header has now been fixed. (You can still upgrade to a better browser.)