There’s courage aplenty on the summer’s movie screens: Hey, there’s Ethan Hunt hopping on the side of a plane! Owen’s battling dinosaurs! Oooh, Scott Lang’s bravely shrinking for the sake of all humanity! Heroes are everywhere—risking their all for everything. And that’s great. Worthy, even. But truth is, sometimes it’s easier to die for something than to live for it. In Ricki and the Flash, the titular character (played by Meryl Streep) is an aging rocker, lost somewhere between a... Read more
A year ago yesterday, we learned that Robin Williams was dead. I remember where I was when I heard–like I think we all remember when we learned about 9/11 or, for those of us a bit older, when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. I was with my son, heading off to play one of our rare rounds of golf. The poor lad had never watched a single episode of Mork and Mindy, and I tried to explain to him how... Read more
Reed Richards feels really, really bad for what he did to Ben Grimm. He tells Grimm over and over that he’ll figure out a way to change him back from the (very angry) mountain of rock he’s become. Grimm knows it’s hopeless, though. “You can’t fix this,” he says. “Nobody can.” “You were my best friend,” Reed says. “Look at me!” Grimm says. “I’m not your friend. You turned me into something else.” The same could be said of Fantastic... Read more
Five years ago today (Aug. 5), 33 Chilean miners were trapped nearly a half a mile underground. For 69 days, they survived in those dark tunnels. And while they were eventually rescued through the efforts of hundreds, perhaps thousands of experts topside, the miners believe their true savior was God. “You have to have faith,” miner Jorge Galleguillos told CNN. “You can never lose your faith. Faith is nourishment … Faith is life.” CNN recounted the story of the Chilean... Read more
It might be a briefcase. A treasure map. A priceless statue of a falcon. A MacGuffin is an object of supersized importance to a movie’s characters—something they would kill or die for—but often are of little importance to the audience. And no franchise has made better use of the MacGuffin than Mission: Impossible. Through five movies, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has chased MacGuffins around the globe, from lists of double agents to dangerous super-viruses to the mysterious and ill-defined “Rabbit’s... Read more
It’s been about three months since the Aurora theater shooting trial began. A jury has already determined that James Holmes, while mentally ill, was not legally insane and, thus, culpable for his heinous actions July 20, 2012. Next week, they’ll decide whether he should die for them. I’m glad I’m not sitting on that jury. Does Holmes deserve to die? Maybe. What he did July 20, during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, is as persuasive an argument as there... Read more
The eye always gave him trouble. It was the price Billy Hope paid for the way he fought—full of unbridled, unmanageable rage. He’d sleepwalk through round after round, taking punch after punch. He had to be hurt, it seems, to let loose his beast, and so the blows rained down on the full of his face like hail blowing sideways. By the time Billy won—and he always won—his left eye was a bloody, pulpy mess … along with the rest... Read more
I’m actually in the mountains of Colorado right now, climbing hills and dodging coyotes. But I wanted to draw your attention to something going on right now in the wider world of Patheos–a huge conversation about the future of religion in America. This week, the focus is on evangelicalism–a branch of Christianity that has been particularly vibrant, and at times rather divisive, over the last several decades. After generations of steady growth is now seeing its first signs of contraction, part of... Read more
Let’s get this out of the way first: Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck was a crass, salacious mess in terms of its content. Schumer’s character, Amy, rolled around in more beds than a Serta mattress tester. She cursed like a Wolf of Wall Street understudy. She was, as the title suggests, a trainwreck: a life predicated on sex, drugs and taking as little responsibility as possible. I didn’t give it a very good review. Plugged In tends to like its protagonists to be,... Read more
So the new Comic-Con trailer for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice has been out for a couple of days now. People are talking about how great or horrible it is, or how nice it was to see Gal Gadot’s fist-throwing Wonder Woman. But did you notice how spiritual the whole thing was, too? Fourteen seconds into the trailer, you see Superman showing up for a hearing on Capitol Hill while scads of people mill around in protest. One carries a sign... Read more
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