5 blogs that make my day and make me think

One of the fun things about having a blog like this is discovering some of the other blogs out there that link to the things you write — and one of my favorite discoveries has been Carmen Andres’s In the Open Space: God & Culture, a fun potpourri of spiritual ruminations, pop-culture analysis and, um, local weather reports. (Just kidding … sort of. I actually like the photos.)

Anyway, Carmen tagged this blog a short while ago as one of “5 blogs that make my day and make me think”, and ever since, I’ve been meaning to thank her for the nod and pass the meme along by listing five of my own favorite blogs. (Has it really been 12 days since she tagged me? Gadzooks, how time flies.) So, here goes:

Thank you, Carmen, for the nod.

And the five blogs that make my day and make me think — not counting Carmen’s, since I’ve already linked to it here — are:

1. The Looking Closer Journal. I’ve known Jeffrey Overstreet for over ten years now, and it’s amazing to see how far he’s come, from posting his reviews online and trading e-mails on favorite singer-songwriters like Steve Taylor and Sam Phillips to writing an entire book on film appreciation and a couple of fantasy novels, besides. He’s also got a wonderfully catholic taste for the arts in all their myriad forms: highbrow, lowbrow, written, visual, musical, whatever, you name it, it’s there, etc.
2. Hollywood Elsewhere. In some ways, especially politically, my sensibilities couldn’t be further from those of Jeffrey Wells — but he’s such an entertaining writer, so gifted at coming up with off-the-wall yet spot-on metaphors, and so candid with his opinions on things, that I feel obliged to open nearly every post of his when they show up in Google Reader. And there are a lot of posts. (His is one of those blogs that only puts the first couple of sentences in its RSS feed.)
3. Spout Blog. There are lots of movie blogs out there, but something about this one feels just a little more off-beat than some. Let’s just say that sometimes they say things that I only think — or they give words to ideas that I had but didn’t know how to articulate. Case in point: When it was revealed that Bryce Dallas Howard is going to replace Charlotte Gainsbourg as John Connor’s wife in Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, Karina Longworth wrote: “Good thing the daughters of men who were famous in the 70s are interchangable!” Yes, exactly.
4. Crunchy Con. Rod Dreher — a former film critic and, like me, a convert to Orthodoxy — mainly covers political and cultural issues here, but he touches on other issues too, and he strikes me as one of the less predictable, more independent thinkers out there.
5. Rightwing Film Geek. Victor Morton’s film blog would probably rank even higher if he updated it more often, but I’ll take what I can get. There aren’t all that many people who share conservative political views and an interest in foreign and arthouse fare, and I appreciate Victor’s esoteric tastes, as well as his attention to detail in some of his reviews. My eyesight is still recovering from the blinding, epiphanous light that was his analysis of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

There are lots more I could mention — and I really, really need to update the list of links to the side of my blog — but this should do for now.