As I watched Magnolia, there were times when I felt overwhelmed, scared, sad, and most of all… just downright filthy, particularly as I found myself relating and empathizing with the characters…
So what is Once Upon a Time? Is it a myth, a fairy tale meant to comfort us, the viewers, by showing us that poor mistreated young women can get the handsome prince to fall in love and rescue them from their unhappy situations? Is it a parable meant to show us that the myths cannot be real but that in truth young women have to make due for themselves? Perhaps it is both of these things at once…
“Beginner’s Suite” is a simple piece played primarily on a piano in 4/4 time. While the notes of the melody stress the downbeat of the 4/4 time signature, the underlying chord changes stress the upbeats, giving the tune a somewhat syncopated feel. This music expresses the growing bond of love between Oliver and Anna. Yet, their relationship slowly dissolves, and as it does, Beginners’ music shifts as well. The melody goes silent, but we still hear the leitmotiv’s underlying chord progression…
Theological reflections on various episodes from season 6 of Dexter.
What might a gangster flick, a sci-fi epic, and a father-son story reveal to us about the poor in South Africa and Chad?
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven caught me as I was learning to use film as a way of understanding culture and ethics. Until I was twenty years old, film was entertainment, but after seeing Unforgiven, I was able to look at films with more appreciation…
Bell is a wise man. He has cultivated skill, the skill of his fathers, in his sheriff’s work. But what profit is there in all his labor with which he has labored under the sun? In the end, all that awaits him is not the reward of his labors, but going the way of his father. Death is all that Bell sees before him in the film’s final scene…
What are we to do with the fact that the world as we experience it belies the cause-effect economy advertised in books such as Proverbs? “The truth” of the world of Proverbs seems to be lies, “joy dies,” and Larry Gopnik doesn’t even have somebody to love…
Without going into all of the details, my pastor would not marry us. Believing that God still wanted this for us, we made the choice to still get married, and subsequently left the church where I was a youth pastor. It wasn’t until after we left that church that I realized the power and my appreciation for this movie…
Change is difficult whether it is personal or cultural or technological—it brings with it losses as well as gains. Hollywood, or at least some major parts of it, seem to be in a period of understandable mourning for what’s being lost, but there is also a bright horizon…
Within the framework of established by Proverbs, the epigram of True Grit fits as one instance of a larger thematic whole: God ensures that a good life awaits the wise and, conversely that a life of evil results awaits the wicked…
There is and was something about this story that hits at the core of my understanding of relationships. For me the film stood as a reminder of fact that the call to love costs something and sometimes requires entering into dark and dangerous spaces…
This is really the heart of the film—a life presented for us to see that hasn’t been airbrushed or Photoshopped. We’re invited to see how the broken pieces of each character have a genesis—how we are all descendants of our past experiences…
A few months prior to seeing the film I had gotten engaged and although I was ready to make that commitment and transition to married life, there was also a part of me that felt like married life would mean the official end to my childhood and the start of true adulthood…
India is a vast, complex, and diverse nation. The proposed perpetuators and enders of poverty in India’s films are similarly complex and diverse…
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…
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.”
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…
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.
