The Return of Decent Films Mail!

Despite a technical glitch that’s preventing it from showing up on the homepage or the Recent page, Mailbag #21 has been published to the Mail page and is in the RSS feed, so it’s official. Hopefully the glitch will be fixed before too long.

Why the long delay? Well … in 2010 I published four Mailbags in the early months of the year … but then in summer “Reel Faith” absorbed most of whatever spare time I had left, and then some. And then from the fall into this year I was hard at work on academic projects — mostly the entries for the New Catholic Encyclopedia, as well as another entry for the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science and Social Policy, on film and Catholic social thought.

During this time, I regret to say, my correspondence lapsed considerably. I’ve tried to go back and respond to as much neglected email as I could, but some of it may have fallen through the cracks. To anyone I missed, I apologize, and once again I’ll try to do better in the future. I hope you’ll write again.

This new mail column seems to have a running theme: fans of various films, from Tangled and Thor to Harry Potter, Star Wars and Source Code, taking issue with criticisms I’ve leveled against those films. Their rebuttals, and my replies, are presented for your consideration in Mailbag #21. Enjoy!