India is a vast, complex, and diverse nation. The proposed perpetuators and enders of poverty in India’s films are similarly complex and diverse…
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Remember the Titans taught me to see others through God’s eyes. It helped me to understand that the culture at times needs to be challenged and changed for the better. The team’s unity despite its diversity painted a beautiful picture of what community is really supposed to look like…
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Lyrically filmed along the pilgrimage route, the movie is on one level about a place, a several hundred mile long foot path for pilgrims. But like all “road trip” movies, it is not the setting or even the plot that carries the weight of the movie. What is of real importance in the movie is what the characters learn en route, their personal pilgrimage toward insight and wholeness as they travel along “The Way.”
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The following ten films are the films I saw in the theater that have most impacted me and helped me love the world better in the previous year. When I entertain a film and allow a film to entertain me, I am trying to do what Jesus did and rub shoulders with the people of earth so that I may love the world better…
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Besides trying to save the world, Holmes’ motivation for traveling the world in this movie is to save his friendship with Dr. Watson. Faced with the doctor’s marriage, Holmes fears losing his friend…
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So often these days it seems films feature action played out in front of a green screen, and as good as today’s CGI is, it’s not reality, and CGI stunts just lack peril. Ghost Protocol has peril…
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I’ve long been grateful for Jim Henson, for his Muppets and for his graceful search for his “rainbow connection.” In doing so, he approached the joy and happiness we’re all called to. With his weird little camaraderie of puppets, he gave us a clearer picture of what it means to be human than we find in most other places…
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Martin Scorsese seems to just really loves movies. Maybe this love stems from this childhood when because of his struggles with asthma, he spent his days in the local cinema instead of playing outside. The imagination of moviemakers awakened young Scorsese to new possibilities, and in Hugo, every character is awakened by the imagination of another…
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No matter where the tree comes from, what you hang on its branches, or whether you have to water it or reassemble it, putting up a Christmas tree is a ritual thousands of people perform every day this time of year. Lars von Trier’s new film, Melancholia, asks whether that ritual, or any of the countless other rituals we participate in, has any content—or if it is just an empty pattern of life.
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Into the Wild creates common language and a common ground for our culture to stand on when speaking about relationships and community. By encountering the story, I learned a reason why freedom should not be the ultimate objective in life…
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Hoover’s files are full of recordings and correspondences of a sexually scandalous nature. To Hoover, it seems that the most dreadful secrets to keep are those of sexual malfeasance. Hoover felt oppressed by American society because of his sexuality, so he used sexuality to oppress the avatars of his oppressor. Hoover wielded the weapon he knew best, the very weapon wielded against him…
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At times, it would seem that there are simply no words to describe what music is doing with us, for us, and perhaps even to us. For, in the context of filmgoing, music is not simply meaningful; it is also powerful. It is somehow capable of accessing the inner recesses of our basic humanity. A telling example of film music’s mysterious, meaning-making capacity is found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent film, There Will Be Blood…
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In 1996, I was a blonde haired, blue eyed, Northern California daughter of a banker father and a stay at home mother. Mike, my boyfriend and star football player and I, a dancer with my high school squad, set out on a typical Saturday evening date-night. Not telling my parents goodbye, I hurried out of the house and into Mike’s Mustang. Our movie started in 15 minutes…
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What might both the French and American church learn from a children’s movie?
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There may be no artistic medium that more directly engages story than film. And among the film genres, none move their chips more fully onto story than documentary films…
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The Dark Knight helped me understand the sacrifice of Jesus in a new way, and allowed me to wrap my head around it in a manner that became more real…
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In just about every seminary across the country, there is the similar recognition that unless we adopt new measures and new metrics, unless we change the way we go about projecting our endeavors, we will no longer be effective in serving the church. We might not even long be in business. The same sense of a changing scenario holds true for those running hospitals. Even the very best stand-alone hospital knows that within ten years, it will be out of business if it doesn’t reinvent its business model. Does the same go for the church? I think it does…
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I think of the too many people I have lost in my life to one form of cancer or another. These are the names I hold in my hand when I shake my fist at the heavens. Their names are the questions that fuel my doubts of God’s goodness and activity in the world. When I think of the ones I’ve lost though, I also think of the ones who stood resolutely beside them through their illness to and beyond the point of death…
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Higher Ground is full of characters building to moments of revelation, and the film is about the build-up more than it is about the revelatory moments. In this, Higher Ground is monumentally better than almost all other films I’ve seen concerned with the complexities of the Christian life…
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