Some friends of mine on the East coast have made an indie and will be screening it around in the next few weeks. It has done very well at film festivals around the world. I haven’t seen it yet, but the folks behind the project are kindred spirits on the importance of craft and excellence in cinema, so I look forward to seeing it soon. Here are some of the review blurbs: “Graceful, intelligent filmmaking… Strathairn is remarkable.” –Warren Etheredge,... Read more

I’m working on my speech for Orlando, and came across these very clarifying thoughts from Heidegger’s essay “The Origin and Work of Art”: To make a work of art means to set up a world. and The work (of art) is not the reproduction of some particular entity; it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of that thing’s essence. In other words, art doesn’t bother with telling you literally how things look. Or, in a story, to describe the entire... Read more

EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeek! Dawn of the Knitted Dead! Excellent. Read more

Movie theme: It is possible to be slimy and unprincipled in many little things, and still make a courageous stand for principle when your big moment comes. Yeah….. uh, no. This is a stylish, studio star-vehicle of the same nature of most of the projects on which (the beginning to seem really overpaid) George Clooney is building his career. It’s well-acted (except for Clooney who never manages to transcend himself) with Tilda Swanson and Tom Wilinson turning in notable efforts.... Read more

…that I will be giving soon to a Christian women’s group. The title is “Living as a Disciple in the Media Age” and I have been wracking my brain to try and put some kind of new spin on this title, which has been my speaking bread and butter for the better part of eight years. Basically because I loathe and fear repetition, I’ve been all over this topic hundreds of different ways from hundreds of different podiums (and one... Read more

This is hysterical. Check it out. But not while you’re eating! Read more

A former English professor, Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco recently gave a wonderful presentation on the great Catholic writer (and patroness with St. Paul and Emily Dickinson of this blog!), Flannery O’Connor. Major hat-tip to Whistpers in the Loggia for finding this. (They have a link on their site to the whole speech in .pdf.) Take it away, Your Excellency: “My days as a teacher of college English are long past, and now I am a Roman Catholic archbishop,... Read more

Periodically, I like to share queries from my email bag, as well as my responses to the same in the hope that it will be generally instructive for those who are about to send me – or some other citizen of Hollywood – a similar query. I promise that each of what follows are prototypical of scores of inquiries I get every year. (And especially this week, as EWTN is airing a show I taped at Franciscan University this past... Read more

I gave a talk this weekend to the San Diego Christian Writers Guild. The talk was on heroes in storytelling and in society – why we need them and what they should look like. Lots of people asked me for my notes, and as I only had my computer with me, I told them I would post the notes here. Sorry if what is here is too sketchy. It may be that this was one of those talks where you... Read more

My comments here are going to seem too strident mostly because of Let Down Syndrome. For months, I have been eagerly anticipating Ken Burns’ new doc on WWII, The War. I was thrilling that the experience of watching the piece would bring me back to the really perspective changing wonder that I experienced in Burns’ classic The Civil War. The first two episodes of The War had a huge audience of other people like me who were hoping and longing... Read more