[National Review Online; May 16, 2008]
Every once in awhile, a movie improves on the book on which it is based. In my bold opinion, Prince Caspian , the second Disney film drawn from C. S. Lewis’s beloved Chronicles of Narnia, is such a movie. Criticism of C. S. Lewis is rightly taboo, but facts are facts: Prince Caspian , the book, is a dud.
[Again; Spring 2008]
Back when I was attending seminary—this was an Episcopal seminary, in Virginia—every time I went to chapel I’d see this Scripture painted on the back wall around the window: “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel.” I had plenty of time to study those words (especially when the sermon was boring). As I read and reread that saying of Jesus, I thought about what it takes to spread the Gospel. What tools do you need?
First, obviously, you need to know what you’re talking about. You must be thoroughly familiar with your faith, with its teachings and practices, with the Scriptures. You need information, knowledge stored up in your head. As St. Peter says, “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the faith that is in you” (I Pet 3:15).
[Christianity Today Online, April 25, 2008)
Summary: In this comedy a single thirty-something organic foods executive can’t sustain a pregnancy, so she hires a ditsy surrogate to carry her baby to term.
Stars: **
Rated PG -13
Genre: Comedy
Released: April 25, 2008 by Broadway Video
Directed by: Michael McCullers
Runtime: 96 min.
Cast: Tina Fey (Kate), Amy Poehler (Angie), Greg Kinnear (Rob), Dax Shepard (Carl), Romany Malco (Oscar)
Baby Mama
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
When Chinese food was first becoming popular in the US, some decades ago, a saying quickly became a cliché: it tastes great, but an hour later you’re hungry all over again.
Some comedies are like that. As long as you’re in the theater, you could be laughing more or less continuously.
[from The Lost Gospel of Mary, Paraclete Press, 2007;translation and footnotes by Frederica Mathewes-Green] The Akathist [Annunciation] Hymnof St Romanos the Melodist
Oikos 1
An Archangel was sent from heaven to cry “Rejoice!” to the Theotokos; [1]
and, O Lord, as he saw you taking bodily form
at the sound of his bodiless voice,
he stood still in amazement [2]
[ChristianityTodayMovies.com; March 7, 2008]
Stars: 2
Cast: Frances McDormand (Guinevere Pettigrew), Amy Adams (Delysia LaFosse), Ciaran Hinds (Joe), Lee Pace (Michael), Shirley Henderson (Edythe Dubarry)
***
Miss Guinevere Pettigrew does have quite a day. It begins on a blustery London morning in 1939, as Miss Pettigrew awakens on a bench in a London train station. She had lost her job as a governess the day before, and no job prospects are in sight. She gets a meal in a soup-line but it is knocked out of her hands; she collides with a stranger, and her suitcase spills across the sidewalk. With nothing left to lose, Miss Pettigrew forms the bold plan of trying to pass herself off as the applicant sent by an employment agency to be social secretary to nightclub singer and social luminary Delysia LaFosse. (The film is based on a 1938 novel which was reissued in England in 2000, making the author, Winifred Watson, a minor celebrity at 94.)
[Books & Culture, March/April 2008]
On the road, shuttling between airports and motels, I sent my daughter an email: “I’m on my way to Branson, Missouri. They say it’s like Las Vegas, but for Christians over fifty.” She wrote back, “I can’t even begin to imagine what that means.”
I could; I imagined it would be laughable and hokey. (You could point out that I am a Christian over fifty and should get off my high horse, but I would only blink at you.) This little town of 6,000
[ChristianityTodayMovies.com; February 29, 2008]
[Cast: Jessica Lange (Arvilla), Kathy Bates (Margene), Joan Allen (Carol), Tom Skerritt (Emmett), Christine Baranaski (Francine)]
Oh boy, a movie about a 1966 Bonneville convertible! That’s the car my sisters and I learned to drive on. Ours was silver with a black interior, purchased brand-new off the showroom floor with every possible extra. We called it the Batmobile. It’s in retirement at Louisa’s place now, but I like to think of it as resting up.
I went to see the cinematic “Bonneville” filled with hopeful nostalgia, but, I regret to say, it’s a really crummy movie. Though the car appears in the film, it’s mere eye candy for a story about three middle-aged women (“middle,” that is, if you know lots of 120-year-olds). They’re using the spiffy vehicle to make a road trip from Pocatello, Idaho to Santa Barbara, California. Though road-trip movies have been overdone, it could still have been enjoyable, especially as a comedy retaining down-to-earth, wisecracking Kathy Bates. But “Bonneville” is also burdened with a *serious* plot element, one that feels contrived and manipulative.
[First Things; February 5, 2008]
Even if you go around with one or several fingers stuffed into each ear, you will not be able to exclude the words “Hannah Montana” from your field of consciousness. No American citizen is permitted to be unfamiliar with the words “Hannah Montana.” What you are permitted is to be uncertain of what the words mean. Unless you made the decision to have a seven-year-old granddaughter about now, without taking sufficient forethought for the consequences.
I’ve resisted learning about the Hannah Montana industry until recently, despite the acquisition of my own seven-year-old granddaughter, herself a Hannah.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 30, 2008]
There was a time, back in May of 2006, when The da Vinci Code movie was just about to come out, and then did come out and cause a lot of consternation among Christians of every description, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—controversy about this whole phenomenon, the terrifically popular pop novel, The Da Vinci Code, and the high profile Hollywood movie that was made of that book. And a lot of worry about how can we respond to something that seems to be grasping the imagination of so many people, when you can hardly engage it; the basic ideas are so preposterous that it doesn’t have any historic grounding, you don’t know how to grapple with it.
I love movies like this. But, sad to say, I didn’t love this movie. I hoped I would, but one clunker after another kept accumulating—a hackneyed character here, a stupid line of dialogue there—until it was sounding like a sneaker in a dryer.
That’s too bad, because this format has been the foundation of some terrific, thought-provoking films. You take a sizeable number of characters, most of whom have never met, and set their stories in motion. As the multiple plots unfold, each character is being drawn closer to the center, where a resolution awaits that, in the best of these films, can be simultaneously unexpected and inevitable. Let’s coin a term and call them “drawstring” movies, a subset of the genre known as “ensemble” films.
