Someone let me know: were airports even locales of such sweeping romance before 1942? Before Michael Curtiz made Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart turn them into these ancestral temples of elemental amour? This altar for confessions of love of the deepest degree? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the 1942 masterpiece Casablanca sees Rick Blaine as a night club owner in Casablanca–the thriving city in Morocco, and the last stop for those fleeing the Nazi spread across the... Read more
Drawing out the spiritual application of any given text is always an interesting endeavor because there are always so many layers to the development of any given film, book, or other piece of media. Avatar: The Last Airbender, for example, is famously derived from Asian cultures and mythologies, but there’s a lot here to be seen from a Christian eye. This makes sense. Even if the series is using eastern iconography, it is still being told from the western lens... Read more
I’ve actually wanted to write about this film in this space for a while, but I’ve had a difficult time doing so. This is in part because I have struggled to find the right lens through which to spiritually discuss the movie. There are a number of ways to read this film that are directly applicable to the idea of spiritual living: the relationship between faith and truth, the corrupting power of wealth, the sheer heavenly quality of the film’s... Read more
Well, folks. It’s that time of year again. And by “that time of year,” I of course mean, that time in which we all just stress and strain at how on earth Toy Story 4 won The Academy award for Best Animated Feature. It’s not like there weren’t better alternatives, including Disney’s own Frozen II which was not even nominated that year. Unlike Toy Story 4, Frozen II didn’t completely contradict the ethos of its predecessor. But there were also... Read more
“I could love you if you’d let me.” So sings Don Baker, one of the protagonists of 1972’s Butterflies are Free. Despite flying mostly under the radar, the film has a lot going for it. Like a lot of films adapted from stage plays, the narrative is very dialogue driven, which makes for a lot of really sharp, entertaining banter. There are maybe three locations and four or five speaking roles, with a healthy majority of the dialogue seated between... Read more
There was something like a sixteen-year gap between when I was first traumatized by Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds as a kid and when I finally revisited it within the last year or so. And what stood out to me most with this recent revival is the way that the film never really left me. There was very little to “rediscover,” as it were, because I found that I remembered almost all of the film down... Read more
If there is any part of the human condition more constant than the search for happiness, it is the fear that one will never find it. This is the hanging question for the titular character in Federico Fellini’s 1957 masterwork, Nights of Cabiria. For reference, the movie begins with Cabiria’s lover pushing her into a river and taking her purse while leaving her to drown. This is a window into the life of our protagonist, the spunky yet tender-hearted Cabiria,... Read more
Today we’re going to do something a little different and venture more into something a little more avant-garde than the films we usually talk about. Don’t get scared. This is actually where most of the really fun film discussion is. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life invites the viewer to explore the boundary between reality and human perception. The film follows an unnamed protagonist as he wanders through various dreamlike scenes in search of truth. The entire film is rendered through animation,... Read more
A year or two back, a film review channel I follow made a point in one of their videos that the romantic break-up is a mainstay of pop culture (Rachel and Ross can break up or just evade reconciliation a good six or seven times over the run of FRIENDS) while there isn’t really a cultural touchstone for processing the dissolution of a friendship. And now I wonder if Martin McDonagh also follows this channel because his recent film (and... Read more
A couple weeks back we discussed From Here to Eternity and doing the right thing even under pressure, and I’d like to use this space here to follow up on some of those same discussions. For this installment, we turn our attention to Cameron Crowe’s 1996 film, Jerry Maguire. Our titular sports agent begins the film with a one-track mind that values visible signifiers of success at all costs. This makes him both a servant of a cynical system that... Read more
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