Tags :: Oddments & Humor

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SDG’s Top 10 Christmas movies list!

I do hope to get back to more regular movie writing in 2025. For now, I hope you enjoy my latest “quick win,” a tongue-in-cheek Christmas movies list I published at All Things SDG.

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The Lion King Chef (a meme essay)

It’s just like the opening act of Favreau’s Chef: Favreau is literally Carl, and Disney is Dustin Hoffman.

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What’s Up, Michael Bay?

What if Pixar’s Up had been directed by Michael Bay instead of Pete Docter? This seems pretty accurate, actually.

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SDG’s Very, Very Little Movie Glossary

This little essay is barely a footnote to Ebert’s book. Still, in the dozen or so years that I’ve been writing movie reviews, I’d like to think I’ve come up with a few witty, possibly even useful terms — Everything Movie, Medieval Grunge and Mythology-Bound among them — that might contribute to movie discussion.

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“Nooooooooooooooo!”

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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If Jesus tarries

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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“They slaughtered hundreds of people!”

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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Jesuitical

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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The Palin-ing of Secretariat

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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“Dude, you HAVE no Quran!”

“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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The apocalypse will be televised

“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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Eat Pray Buy!

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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Lines I Wish I Had Written: Eat Pray Love

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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Infographic: Pixar vs. DreamWorks

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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Edgy Fraggles?

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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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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Tolkien and Lewis, Action Heroes?

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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Review Haiku Riddles!

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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Avatar: What the Vatican Really Said

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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The 12th Day of Christmas: St. Lucy Nativity

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.