[Beliefnet, January 7, 2005]
On December 26 the tsunami hit, and on the 27th I set out on a long car trip, circling through the south and visiting family. So while most of you were being continually hammered by new and terrible information, I was getting it in small, amazing pieces - a headline on a motel newspaper, a TV broadcast in a diner. The numbers mounted in a way that seemed unreal, artificial. At first it was twenty thousand feared dead, then seventy, and all of a sudden someone told me the toll was nearing 140,000.
[Today's Christian, January-February 2005]
Q. I was widowed a few years ago and totally devastated by my loss. I am so tired of feeling lost and lonely. Lately I've been wishing I had someone to talk to in the evenings. Though I have no desire to remarry, I would like at le ast to have some companionship with the opposite sex. But these thoughts make me feel so guilty and disloyal to my late husband, though I know he has gone to a beautiful, wondrous place where matters of the heart no longer hold any meaning.
[Dallas Morning News, December 22, 2004]
In this corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Leonardo DiCaprio, adorable star of “Titanic,” “Catch Me If You Can,” and now, “The Aviator.” In the other, we have - oh, pick a name. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, even Jimmy Stewart, for cryin' out loud. Notice any difference?
[National Review Online, December 19, 2004]
When I got home from seeing “Lemony Snicket,” I read through “The Bad Beginning,” the first in the 11-volume series about the unfortunate Baudelaire children. What with small pages and large print, it took about an hour. There I discovered that thing more precious than gold in publishing circles: a unique authorial voice. Daniel Handler, writing under the pseudonym “Lemony Snicket,” narrates in a quietly morose, worried tone, recounting events that go from bad to worse and then worse again. The Baudelaires -- Violet, Klaus, and baby Sunny, who bites -- were left parentless by a fire that destroyed their home, and have been placed in the care of a distant, evil relative, Count Olaf.
If you've never read any of these books, you think you can write it yourself from here. You can't.
[National Review Online, December 10, 2004]
Director James L. Brooks works hard; in such films as “Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News,” and “As Good as it Gets” he's laboring all the time to tickle your heartstrings and wring a tear from your funnybone. When it all comes together, that's entertainment, buster. But with “Spanglish,” you get the feeling a whole other movie was left on the cutting room floor.
It's a shame, because the point this movie is trying to make turns out to be a good one: parents should make sacrifices for their children, noble self-discipline is good, impulsive self-indulgence is bad, and breaking up a marriage, even a desperately unhappy marriage, is very bad.
[Beliefnet, December 13, 2004]
In this tense post-election climate there's a tendency to look for suspicious messages in everything but the stickers on grocery-store produce. That's the only way I can explain a writing assignment that included these instructions: “I need you to go to a movie and find out whether the shark is gay.”
Now, sharks have done some memorable things in American movies, but this would be a first. Granted, they're usually engaged in disrupting social norms, but not in the size-twelve-high-heels way.
[Touchstone, December 2004]
Recently a friend drew my attention to an exchange of letters between a mid-twentieth-century novelist and a lady. The lady thought the novelist was naughty and proceeded to lecture him about the unseemly content of his books. The novelist - and we can imagine bright, eager eyes over a mischievous grin - replied by thanking the woman profusely for rescuing him from error, and concluded by begging her to send a photo so he could see what true Christian charity looks like. A very satisfying put-down, in my friend's opinion.
It got me thinking, though. For one thing, this wasn't a fair fight.
[National Review Online, December 3, 2004]
This is about the saddest movie I've ever seen. Everyone in the movie is sad, everybody cries, everybody (at one time or another) looks like they were knocked down by a garbage truck and dragged down an alley. This is also a movie that has a lot of sex-talk in it; not much action, but about as much explicit description of sexual activity that a script can contain. There might be a connection.
The title “Closer” is intended to mean intimacy, I think, as in “Come closer.” But it might also mean the closing events that happen in relationships; lovers run into a moment that is a “closer” and they can't go any further.
[Included in The Sacred Way by Tony Jones, Zondervan, 2004]
The first thing we sense about an icon is its great seriousness. Compare an icon in your mind a great Western religious painting, one that moves you to deeper faith or even to tears. You’ll notice that there is a difference in the *way* it moves you, however. A Western painting—which is undeniably going to be more accomplished in terms of realism, perspective, lighting, anatomy, and so forth—moves us in our imaginations and our emotions. We engage with it like we do a movie or a story.
[National Review Online, November 22, 2004]
A few years ago I was browsing in a thrift shop and came across a curious volume titled “Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique.” What's that got to do with “Kinsey,” the new film about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey? We'll get to that in a minute.
First, let's look this specimen over merely in terms of its cinematic qualities, and set aside the sexual content. If this was a biography of any research scientist, we'd surely give it a solid A for visuals: costumes, lighting, props, cinematography, all contribute to a rich sense of environment and mood.
