Anybody who grew up with Jack T. Chick tracts, as I did, and who lived through the anti-D&D; hysteria of the early ’80s, as I did, might get a kick out of this! Read more

And now for some interesting thoughts on a rarely commented-upon aspect of the Harry Potter books — at least, it’s an angle that I had never come across before — courtesy of my friend and fellow Daniel Amos fan Karl Swenson: I am a Harry Potter fan. While I won’t take the time to fully articulate why I like them so much, it is a basic fact that I, who missed the first 3 books completely, have become a complete... Read more

Thanks to Jeff for tipping me off to this report on how Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake has allegedly already blossomed into another back-to-back-to-back trilogy project, just like The Lord of the Rings. I suspect this is just one really elaborate April Fool’s Day joke, but even if it is, it’s still quite entertaining. One thing that does appear to be genuine about the video clip linked at the other site is Peter Jackson’s rather shocking weight loss, accentuated by... Read more

Mark Steyn has some interesting comments on Maria Full of Grace on his website: The publicity poster for Maria Full of Grace shows the face of the eponymous Maria looking up at a hand that’s proffering her mouth a vaguely Communion-like pellet. The sacramental imagery, plus the movie title, plus the character’s name, plus the fact that she’s carrying an unborn baby, and that she works at a rose plantation removing thorns, may lead the casual movie-goer to assume he’s... Read more

My review of Sin City is up, but if you’ve read my original post on the subject, you’ve already got the gist of it. I was reminded of this film last night when my wife decided to watch my DVD copy of Tron (my review). Wow, talk about your all-digital sets! Everyone hypes Sin City and Sky Captain for their use of completely CGI environments, but Tron did it all 23 years ago. The acting suffers at times — though... Read more

My friend Jeff Overstreet has just posted some thoughts on Sin City that another friend of his gave him — and somewhere in there, his friend says: The guy who created -and continues to create- Sin City, Frank Miller, works in a style that can best be described as “camp noir”. He utilises all the sensibility of Chandler with his “knights in dirty armor”, and he surrounds these driven individuals with an absurd universe in which a lot of humor... Read more

Took in an Orson Welles double-bill at the Pacific Cinematheque last night. F for Fake (1976) — which comes out as a Criterion DVD next month — was one of the last films Welles finished, and it’s a remarkable blend of fact and fiction, a very mid-1970s and early post-modern rumination on the relationship between reality and illusion. Welles begins and ends the film by flaunting his flair for magic tricks, and in between, he ponders the significance of art... Read more

Interesting Vancouver Sun article here on the intimate relationship between Mennonites and music, and on the changes that have taken place in Mennonite churches over the past 20 years as worship bands and marketing terms like “seeker-sensitive churches” have taken precedence over traditional musical forms. While I never got past Grade 5 piano myself, my own family has been profoundly involved in music — my mother has played in worship groups and recently started selling harps; my sister is currently... Read more

Beauty Shop opens today, so I might as well toss my own two bits out there. The wife and I caught it a couple nights ago and we both really enjoyed it. I remember liking Barbershop a few years ago and being disappointed in its sequel, so I was happy to find that its spin-off was closer to the spirit of the first film than the second one. In fact, I just might like the new film best of the... Read more

In addition to writing film-related articles, I also write news stories and features, many of them about religion. (I have won a few awards for my news and feature items, but nothing for my reviews — presumably, I would guess, partly because Christian community papers don’t write enough about the arts to make it worth their while to hand out awards in that category.) Two such stories have gone online in the past week — one is a feature for... Read more