Michael Coren had a piece in the National Post a couple days ago about C.S. Lewis, motivated in part by the upcoming film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He describes the story as “a delicious mingling of childhood fantasy, Christian metaphor and sublime story telling,” and goes on to say: “As pure literary fantasy, the books are an unrivalled success. Yet they also succeed as Christian metaphor. Neither clumsy nor didactic, Lewis colours secular magic with... Read more

Barbara Kay has just written an interesting column in response to Maureen Dowd‘s call for more female op/ed writers. Dowd notes that “Men enjoy verbal dueling,” while she, “As a woman,” wants “to be liked — not attacked.” Whether she means to or not, Dowd implicitly acknowledges that the problem may not be editorial hiring policies so much as the fact that there are just far, far more men willing to debate the contents of columns such as hers than... Read more

Just in case anybody didn’t notice — and you probably didn’t — The Passion Recut, a.k.a. Mel Gibson’s attempt to milk just a little more money out of his death-of-Jesus movie by trimming out some of the more gratuitous violence, was a flop this past weekend, grossing only $223,789 in all of North America, for a ranking of #28 and a per-screen average of $234. At, say, seven bucks a ticket, spread out over three days, with at least four... Read more

I don’t subscribe to the Victoria Times-Colonist, so I am not absolutely 100% sure that this is the right article to link to, but my sister, who studies music at the University of Victoria, tells me one of her performances has just been reviewed in a newspaper for the first time ever. The pertinent paragraph, from a review of a concert last Friday night, runs like so: Two pieces by John Cage — Bacchanale for prepared piano and Ophelia for... Read more

I caught The Upside of Anger a few nights ago, and I know this is an absolutely trivial thing to mention, but something about the opening scene caught my eye and tainted my view of everything that followed. The film begins at a funeral that takes place on a rainy day, with a crane shot coming towards the circle of people sitting and standing around the gravesite. Then we get a series of close-ups and/or medium shots. And then we... Read more

I loved the original Star Wars trilogy as I was growing up, and I still adore the first two films in particular. (The third has its moments, but only moments.) The prequels, on the other hand, have been an overblown bore, and Lucas has shown a remarkable ability to elicit very bad performances from otherwise good actors. But the one thing that has remained remarkably good across the entire series has been John Williams’s music. And now comes this bit... Read more

I never did write a review, as such, of Million Dollar Baby. However, I just finished writing an essay that looks at that film in the light of a couple of other recent Oscar winners that touch on euthanasia. (It’s not really a “spoiler” any more that Clint Eastwood’s film gets into that subject, is it?) And I really, really wish I had had more space to get into the parallels between Million Dollar Baby and Eastwood’s previous multiple Oscar... Read more

Hi there. I have been thinking about starting a blog for quite some time now. Many of my friends and colleagues have them, and for years I have been writing blog-like posts to the various e-mail lists I subscribe to and the odd message board here or there. Truth be told, I actually prefer e-mail, but I find it’s often a pain to search through listserv archives, so I’ve been pondering my alternatives. Last summer, one of my priests (I’m... Read more