So… tonight I learned that Christianity Today reviewed Through a Screen Darkly three weeks ago, and I didn’t know about it until today! How did I miss that? Kind of strange, considering I write for them. But, well… wow! Cool! Many thanks to Eric Miller for this generous, surprising review. Here are a couple of excerpts… (more…) Read more
[This interview was originally published at Christianity Today on November 20, 2006.] In Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious, unusual science fiction film The Fountain (opening Friday), a husband must come to terms with his wife’s mortality. As Tom watches Izzy suffer the debilitating effects of a growing brain tumor, he leads a frantic scientific endeavor to find a cure. But she responds differently, chronicling her feelings in a historical novel about the queen of Spain. Both their daily reality and the novel reflect... Read more
I am finding Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book to be a particularly inspiring meditation on our need to read, taste, chew, and digest the Bible.And along the way, I am thunderstruck by how often the points Peterson is making about how we should read scripture run parallel what I’ve tried to convey about how we should attend to art. I’ve just read a section on the power and essentiality of storytelling. (p. 40) Check this out: Honest stories respect our... Read more
Mentions of Through a Screen Darkly are popping up online. I’m going to keep track of this, partly because I’m curious to see where the book lands, and what happens when it does. And, partly because… well… I wrote the book in hopes that it would inspire further conversation about the power of movies, the rewards of movies, and the dangers of movies. If that conversation’s gonna happen, I want to be there. (more…) Read more
I’m hearing from folks all over the country that their copies of Through a Screen Darkly are arriving in the mail. Isn’t it strange? You can write about anything on the Internet, and it can be read all over the world instantly. But if you put it on paper, and it takes days for it to arrive somewhere in the mail, suddenly everybody agrees that it’s a reason to celebrate! The Internet is great, but as far as I’m concerned…... Read more
This is the work of an artist named Kristopher Orr. Wait until you see the illustration he’s crafted that goes with it… (more…) Read more
I went to see Pan’s Labyrinth a second time last week, and was completely blown away. I nudged it up a notch on my Top 25 of 2006 (breaking the tie with Children of Men). And I’m considering bumping it up another step. It is magnificent. Anne (who I married partly because she has the most impressive fantasy-lit library I’ve ever seen, and she loves fairy tales more than almost any grownup I know) loved it too. And so did... Read more
I just had to chuckle over this abrupt shift from one question to the next in The Stranger‘s interview with David Lynch… The ideas of good and evil as portrayed in your movies lead me to ask if you believe in God. For sure. But… I do, but it’s probably not a man on a throne. My 9-year-old read me this from a magazine yesterday, and I thought of you—the fact that the weight of all the termites in the... Read more
“We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.” – a quote from the Aitareya Upanishad, read by David Lynch before introducing Inland Empire to a Seattle audience On Wednesday night, I took a seat in Seattle’s magnificent Cinerama theater and braced myself as David Lynch took the stage in front of the city’s... Read more
I’ve just learned that Solveig Dommartin, the otherworldly beauty who brought an angel down to earth, and who found wings of her own, in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (my favorite film), died of a heart attack on January 11. She was 45 years old. (more…) Read more
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