Looking Closer
I read this today, and it made a good day much, much better. God bless Donata Wenders. Read more
I read this today, and it made a good day much, much better. God bless Donata Wenders. Read more
Reading is Annie’s superpower, and she’s focused those powers on Through a Screen Darkly. Read more
Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Housekeeping, reviews The Maytrees: Annie Dillard’s books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought. The beauty and obsession of her work are always the integration of being, at the grandest scales of our knowledge of it, with the intimate and... Read more
Donata Wenders has a new book. Who? Donata Wenders is the wife of director Wim Wenders (whose work I celebrate in Through a Screen Darkly). And she Wenders has a new book of photography, arriving under the banner of a rave from that great photography critic we all know and love: Bono. Transformation, transubstantiation: flesh somehow becomes spirit. Donata’s images feel eternal to me, like they were always going to happen. Observed, not posed. Poised for the next world, a... Read more
Doug Cummings turned in his last batch of reviews from the Los Angeles Film Festival today, and they include his response to Danny Boyle’s sci-fi thriller Sunshine. I’ve heard from one of you that Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is the best film you’ve seen this year. Cummings disagrees. I couldn’t have been more disappointed by the film, which I found to be tedious, empty, and a complete waste of time. Sure, it’s got elaborate digital effects, great set design, and a... Read more
At FilmJourney.org, Doug Cummings is blogging about his discoveries at the Los Angeles Film Festival. And, as usual, his assessment of several films from around the world is fascinating. As usual, Doug’s enthusiasm is contagious. I’m grateful for it. It’ll help me prioritize what to see when I actually have time and opporutnity to see a movie (if any of those films are ever actually accessible to folks who don’t go to film festivals). [The rest of the original post... Read more
For the last few years, I have been hoping and hoping for another film by Edward Yang, who directed what has become one of the greatest treasures in my film library: Yi-Yi (A One and a Two). But tonight, Edward Yang passed away. Cancer. The news breaks my heart. He was only 59. (Peter Chattaway alerted me to the news.) I did not know it, but he was sick for seven years. To watch Yang’s work was to see the... Read more
At Soul Food Movies, Ron Reed rediscovers Andrei Tarkovsky’s top ten movies. Wow. That’s a must-see list for all serious cinephiles. Having just seen The Sacrifice, the prominence of Bergman doesn’t surprise me. If I hadn’t known that The Sacrifice was a Tarkovsky film, I might have thought it was Bergman paying tribute to Tarkovsky rather than the other way around… Read more
Many thanks to Christine Chaney, Ph.D., in the Department of English at Seattle Pacific University, for sharing these kind words… Jeffrey Overstreet’s Through A Screen Darkly was a remarkably compelling book for my university students in a recent core course on the arts and faith – for some students even a transformative experience. His powerful and honest testimony about his own life, education, and faith — and the role that film played in coming to terms with all three —... Read more
Angela Walker at ChristianCinema.com has just posted what may be the most substantial interview yet about Through a Screen Darkly. Read more
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