Tags: Oddments & Humor
Tomorrow
Star Wars finally comes to Blu-ray in three editions: The Original Trilogy, The Prequel Trilogy, and The Complete Saga. Good news for
Star Wars fans, right? If you’re a
Star Wars fan, though, you may already know—or, if you didn’t know, you might have guessed—that George Lucas wouldn’t be content to release the same old twice-retweaked versions of the films released on DVD in 2004.
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This past Saturday, May 21, a
major supernatural event predicted last week by Jimmy Akin occurred around 6:00 PM. Jimmy and I both witnessed it, as did many other people, although Jimmy was
right there and got a much better view than I did.
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I’ve gotten a number of queries about the fevered discussion about Opus Dei’s murderous history and sinister influence in the Church related by filmmaker Roland Joffé in the
press conference I reported on a couple of weeks ago.
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Blaise Pascal was a great critic of Jesuit casuistry, and coined the pejorative adjective “Jesuitical,” meaning “crafty; practicing equivocation or overly subtle rationalization.” That may not have been fair to the Jesuits of Pascal’s day, but the image of the sly, deceptive Jesuit stuck.
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Here is a strange thing.
Secretariat, a quietly faith-laced Disney movie from Christian director Randall Wallace (
We Were Soldiers) and Christian screenwriter Mike Rich (
The Rookie), has bizarrely been catching politically tinged flak even more violent than last year’s inspirational sports film,
The Blind Side. It also has an ironic if not improbable defender: Roger Ebert.
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“Outrageous and grave,” “contrary to the respect due to all religions,” “contrary to the teaching of Jesus Christ,” “insensitive,” and “foolish and cowardly” were among the many words that world Christian leaders addressed to would-be Quran burners. Jacob Isom, a 23-year-old skateboarding enthusiast from Amarillo, Texas, had something even more succinct to say: “Dude, you
have no Quran!”
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“Not with a bang but with a whimper” was T. S. Eliot’s revisionist idea of the world’s end in
The Hollow Men. He was almost right. Not with a whimper, but with a million whimpers, each more feeble and bathetic than the last, is the way we seem to be slouching toward oblivion.
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Will the new Julia Roberts movie
Eat Pray Love encourage viewers to buy into spiritual ideas? Or will it just encourage them to buy?
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Okay, so this is like, what, the third shout-out in as many weeks to reader Victor, but his combox quip in my NCRegister.com review of
Eat Pray Love deserves the widest possible audience.
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Props to reader Victor for highlighting this
infographic from a few years back analyzing the differences between the creative processes at Pixar and DreamWorks.
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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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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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Word that
Eagle Eye co-writer Travis Adam Wright has been tapped to script a planned adaptation of James A. Owen’s fantasy series
The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica has kicked off a flurry of coverage on Owen’s series, which casts the Inklings—J. R. R. Tokien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, as well as Owen Barfield and Hugo Dyson—as heroes of epic fantasy adventures weaving together Arthurian legend, Greek mythology and the writings of other British writers, not to mention the writers themselves—among other things.
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A couple of days ago over at the
Arts & Faith message board, for reasons I won’t recount, someone started a thread called “Review Haiku,” dedicated to three-line, 17-syllable movie reviews. Merriment ensued.
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A priest friend, frustrated by dodgy media coverage, recently sent me his own translation of the entire
L’Osservatore Romano review, as well as of a segment that ran of Vatican Radio.
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One of the top questions I’m getting about the new Decent Films is how I’m going to be using the blog. My hope is that the blogging format will allow me to be flexible: to post short movie reviews and commentary, notes on DVD releases, and perhaps occasional personal tidbits of the sort that I have often posted in the past at my friend
Jimmy Akin’s blog — though generally, I think, with a film-centric focus here.
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