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Just a quick note that Friday’s episode of “Reel Faith” is now available at the
show’s website. This is our sixth episode, and I think we’ve started to hit our stride. If you missed the broadcast on Friday, check it out online!
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
If the two British twits on the titular train in Carol Reed’s overlooked, entertaining
Night Train to Munich seem to have wandered in from another movie, it’s because they have.
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A |
**** |
+2-2|
Adults
Inception is the most audacious and multifaceted Hollywood entertainment for grown-ups I’ve seen in years: a brainy, bravura achievement inviting comparison to the most inspired work of Hollywood visionaries from Michael Mann and Charlie Kaufman to Ridley Scott and the Wachowskis.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
The first good thing about
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is that it isn’t called
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Oath of the Dragon Ring or
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Nesting Dolls of Doom.
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This Friday I’ll be doing an hour of “
Catholic Answers Live” with Patrick Coffin
and co-hosting the latest episode of “
Reel Faith” with David DiCerto! In both venues we’ll be discussing the latest movies:
Inception,
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and
Despicable Me.
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A few quick notes: After a week back in the States, I’m just about back in the swing of things. (Hope you’ve been enjoying my pilgrimage blogging!)
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Tuesday afternoon after the
papal Pallium Mass, the itinerary includes the catacombs of St. Callixtus and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. I missed the catacombs on my first trip to Rome, so I’m really looking forward to this.
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It isn’t until I actually see the procession of 38 new metropolitan archbishops walking up the center aisle at Saint Peter’s Basilica at the start of the Pallium Mass a little after 9:30 Tuesday morning, and hear the cheers from pilgrims of the 26 countries represented—Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe—followed by the Bishop of Rome, Benedict XVI, that it really hits me: This is the greatest visible display of the Church’s
catholicity that I have ever seen, and perhaps may ever see.
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B |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
To his suburban neighbors, Gru is a grumpy bald guy whose house looks like the Haunted Mansion and whose ride makes the Dark Knight’s Batmobile look like a Prius. He’s the one who makes tasteless “jokes” about killing your dog if it goes on his lawn again and pretends not to be home when girls come around selling cookies. You know the type.
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In my
first update I mentioned someone comparing Assisi to Minas Tirith, Tolkien’s imaginary tiered city on a hill. What I didn’t know at the time is that unlike Minas Tirith, where the lowest level is the widest circle and the royal house is at the crown, Assisi’s crown is at the bottom: beneath the lower Basilica of St. Francis, in the crypt where Francis’s tomb is situated in the midst of four of his famous followers.
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It’s 5am Monday morning in Italy. I’m sitting on a rooftop veranda outside my hotel room in Assisi overlooking the sleeping countryside. The moon is high. Later today we’ll be in Rome.
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In a few hours, my daughter Sarah (age 15) and I will be on a plane headed to Rome. Our archdiocese is leading a pilgrimage, and we’re on it.
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Yesterday I taped the fourth episode of
Reel Faith with David DiCerto. We discussed
Knight and Day,
Grown Ups, and
Jonah Hex, as well as the documentary
Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders. It airs tomorrow, Friday, June 24 at 8:30pm. As usual, you can watch it online at the show’s website, either when it airs or anytime over the next week.
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UPDATE: Hat tip to
Ross Douthat for highlighting an intriguing recent
NYMag.com piece on Hollywood’s originality problem.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
Little things like plot holes and leaps in logic shouldn’t matter that much when a movie like this is working. Watching Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in
Charade is a lot of fun even if you’re not completely sure afterward exactly what happened. If
True Lies works for you, it’s because of how Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis sell it, not because the story makes so much sense. When you find yourself nit-picking plot points and character motivations, it’s a sign the movie isn’t working.
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UPDATE: Over at Image Journal, Jeffrey Overstreet and I are talking about
The Secret of Kells.
Part 1 and
Part 2 are now both available. (Note: Some spoilers!)
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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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Yes! Having joined the 21st century six months ago by adding RSS, Decent Films has now taken its first step into the world of social media by creating a
Facebook page. For readers who use Facebook, especially Facebook users who don’t use RSS, it’s another way to keep track of when I update Decent Films.
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A- |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
At times
Toy Story 3 feels a bit less fleet-footed than its predecessors, though there’s nothing that doesn’t work. Lee Unkrich, who co-directed
Toy Story 2,
Monsters, Inc. and
Finding Nemo, directs with a sure hand. The story is stuffed with wit and invention, such as a couple of premise-bending applications of the Potato Heads’ modular body parts and some hilarious riffing on Ken and Barbie.
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Fraggle fans: Did you ever find yourselves singing along to the “Fraggle Rock” theme song and thinking, “You know, this is a great show, but it could be edgier”?
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In my recent series of Spotlight posts, I’ve highlighted reviews and essays from earlier years of my work that I feel stand out in one way or another. This week I highlight a piece that I’ve come to regard as at least a partial failure: my
essay on The Magdalene Sisters.
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I don’t use Google alerts or otherwise troll for people talking about me online, so it was only happenstance that I happened upon a
self-labeled “rant” about my
Magdalene Sisters essay from a Bill Van Dyk, whose website is called
Chromehorse.net.
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Not long ago the Washington Post printed a
scathing op-ed by the Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor responding to Pope Benedict XVI’s March 2010
pastoral letter of sorrow and remorse over abuse of minors in Church-run Irish institutions such as the Magdalene asylums for girls and similar institutions for boys.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
The new movie, alas, is basically what you’d expect, by which I mean it’s a mess: chaotic, loud, overwrought, mindless, violent, visually incoherent — pretty much an archetypal example of everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today. Was the show this dumb? Does it matter? A movie’s job is not to live down to its source material.
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B- |
**½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
This
Karate Kid may not be competing at the same level as the original, but it respects the tradition, and if it doesn’t really have anything new to say, it still says it in a reasonably engaging way.
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Those three words from Peter Debruge’s
Variety review of next weekend’s Toy Story 3, called out by Peter Chattaway in
blogging the review, perfectly encapsulate what I’ve thought had to be the case about this film since I first heard of it. More broadly, as Peter suggests, it seems a harbinger of things to come from this
“third phase” in Pixar history that this film is ushering in.
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This week Jackie Chan, now 56, eases out of starring roles and buddy pictures into a new role, that of the venerable mentor. I haven’t seen his first stab at such a role, the 2008 fantasy
The Forbidden Kingdom, but with
The Karate Kid it’s possible this role might serve the aging action star better than Hollywood’s previous attempts to shoehorn Jackie into established templates and formulas.
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Out of a few topics I was considering blogging about today, none captured my attention quite like this impassioned email from a young reader who strongly disagrees with
my review of Alice in Wonderland, and the issues suggested by the email, at least in my mind.
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All good things must come to an end, but “The Spectacular Spider-Man” ended too quickly, after only two seasons. In mid-April Marvel effectively pulled the plug on the acclaimed series, long on hiatus. A couple of weeks later, Sony released the eighth and final disc in the series, bringing the story to a satisfying yet not fully resolved conclusion.
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The long Memorial Day weekend traditionally marks the beginning of the American summer movie season, so for Hollywood studios this past weekend’s the dismal ticket sales are clear cause for concern. Dollarwise, it was the worst Memorial Day weekend at the box office in nine years; in terms of actual bodies in seats, it was the worst in fifteen years.
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