An Absentee Father’s Legacy to His Movie Critic Son

Last updated on: February 28, 2013 at 6:11 am By Christian Hamaker

Review of Try to Tell the Story by David Thomson By CHRISTIAN HAMAKER The worldview of most well-known movie critics is anything but Christian. While that doesn’t invalidate their opinions about how art works, it raises the question about the presuppositions those critics bring to their analysis of films and filmmakers. David Thomson has written about motion pictures for the New Republic and other publications, but he may be best known for his books about movies, most notably A Biographical... Read more

Life, Above All

Last updated on: February 27, 2013 at 6:07 am By Kendrick Kuo

Review of Life, Above All, Directed by Oliver Schmitz By KENDRICK KUO Rating: 7/10 Life, Above All is not a film for the faint of heart. This gut-wrenching South African film, adapted from Alan Stratton’s novel Chandra’s Secret, is a fictional thread in a very real piece of South Africa’s fabric—namely, children orphaned by AIDS. Chandra is a 12-year old girl, living with her mother and two younger siblings fathered by another man who is an alcoholic that returns to... Read more

Percy Jackson and the Absent Father

Last updated on: February 26, 2013 at 6:12 am By Paul D. Miller

Review of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan by PAUL D. MILLER The Lightning Thief (2005) is a perfectly serviceable young adult fantasy novel. It is the sort of book you read without much concentration for a few hours’ or days’ pleasant diversion, one that makes few demands of you. As brain candy, I quite liked it because it was blissfully free of the sort of weighty distractions that seem obligatory to the genre. It has... Read more

Argo: A Hollywood Feel-Good Fantasy

Last updated on: February 24, 2013 at 8:50 am By Paul D. Miller

Argo, directed by Ben Affleck by Paul D. Miller No wonder Hollywood loves Argo. It is a movie about how movies save the day. Argo has already won Best Picture at the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild, the BAFTAs, and the Critic’s Choice–and probably the Oscars, by the time you read this. All for good reason: it is an excellent film–funny, suspenseful, intelligent, and thrilling in fine balance. But is it really better than Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty? Hollywood... Read more

The Schaeffer’s Ghost Oscar Roundup

Last updated on: February 22, 2013 at 6:19 am By Paul D. Miller

BY PAUL D. MILLER The Oscars are on Sunday. Here is a wrap-up of coverage from Schaeffer’s Ghost on some of the nominees. For Best Picture, we reviewed seven of the nine nominees–all except Argo (the current favorite to win) and Silver Linings Playbook. Kendrick Kuo found Beasts of the Southern Wild, a coming-of-age story set in an impoverished Louisiana-coast slum, “a film of art that is to be savored and appreciated, more than to be enjoyed,” and judged that... Read more

Which Short Films Will Get Oscar’s Nod?

Last updated on: February 21, 2013 at 6:54 am By Christian Hamaker

By CHRISTIAN HAMAKER It’s a well-established truth that Oscar-nominated films in the Best Picture category are about Important Topics, and thus demand long running times. Sometimes those running times are justified, but it’s not unusual for a Best Picture nominee to wear out its welcome well before the final credits roll. This year, eight of the nine films nominated for Best Picture clock in at more than two hours. While the masses flock to see films in the major categories,... Read more

I am what I am, is that all that I am?

Last updated on: February 20, 2013 at 6:15 am By Coyle Neal

Review of Who Do You Think You Are? By Mark Driscoll By COYLE NEAL Mark Driscoll may not know it (or heck, maybe he does), but when he wrote a book about searching for personal identity he stepped directly into one of the fundamental philosophical questions of the 20th century: who am I? When philosophers pitch this question, “identity” is usually paired with some form of the word “authenticity.” The idea is that we should be searching for our identity... Read more

Looper, a third view

Last updated on: February 19, 2013 at 6:09 am By Kendrick Kuo

Review of Looper, Directed by Rian Johnson By KENDRICK KUO A bit slow in coming, but I finally had the opportunity to watch Looper on a recent flight and came away with some different thoughts than Coyle and Alexis Neal, who reviewed this film here and here. They viewed the film as anchored in unconditional love as a transformative force. I also differed from Christian Hamaker, who ranked it as his second favorite film of 2012. I was not a... Read more

Gilead and the Calvinist Desire for Christ

Last updated on: February 18, 2013 at 6:26 am By Justin Hawkins

Review of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson By JUSTIN HAWKINS Marilynne Robinson’s authorship of Gilead is the most convincing argument for reincarnation that has ever entered my mind. That is not because the book is in any way about Eastern religion; it is not. Rather, it is entirely from the perspective of an Iowan pastor in his seventies. But Robinson makes his perspective so rich, so full of Christian joy and pathos – in sum, so very real – that one is... Read more

NO to Utopianism

Last updated on: February 15, 2013 at 6:17 am By Kendrick Kuo

Review of NO, Directed by Pablo Larraín By KENDRICK KUO NO more dictatorship. NO more executions. NO more torture. NO more censorship. NO is a Chilean film depicting a plebiscite that occurred in October 1988 to decide whether Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte should stay in power for another term. During the 27-day campaign, daily 15-minute advertisements on national television were allocated for each side—the No and the Yes campaigns. NO follows the life of René Saavedra (played by Gael García... Read more