It’s been a great year for women in movies. Check out the year’s 15 top-grossing films, and you’ll see that a majority of them—from Inside Out to to Pitch Perfect 2 to Mad Max: Fury Road—feature strong women in leading roles. Time, Forbes and io9 have all noted what a great year it’s been for girl power, and all I can say is, it’s about time. How Hollywood ever got the idea that blockbusters have to be anchored by men... Read more
If there’s anything the Tim Tebow phenomenon has taught us, we Christians love our Christian football players–so much so that we’re quite forgiving of their readily apparent shortcomings. So maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that there are so many Christian football movies out there. Some, like Tebow, have some weaknesses in their game. But that doesn’t necessarily stop ’em from pulling out a win in the closing minutes. I reviewed two such movies–23 Blast and When the Game Stands Tall–just last... Read more
You can count the things that American Ultra’s Mike Howell loves on three fingers: his girlfriend (Phoebe), his drugs (marijuana, mostly), and Apollo Ape. Sorta like Athena, Apollo Ape sprang from Mike’s fertile, somewhat stoned mind. Every spare minute he’s got (and he’s got plenty), Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) draws his prime primate and sketches out Apollo’s madcap adventures—on a spare napkin, in a notebook, on the wall. You could argue that Apollo’s life is more fulfilling than Mike’s own. Well,... Read more
To mark the sad anniversary of Robin Williams’ death, Esther O’Reilly posted last week the first three of her top five performances by the much-missed actor and comedian. Now she’s back with her top two selections. Both surprised me a little—and they might surprise you, too, as she alludes to in her introduction. But it makes me want to watch both again. *** To reward all you patient readers for bearing with my ramblings, I’ve put in a link at... Read more
GQ features former-fake-conservative-blowhard-turned-Late-Show-host Stephen Colbert in its newest issue. And Joel Lovell’s cover story, “The Late, Great Stephen Colbert,” might be one of the best things I’ve read all year. (But be warned: Colbert’s language can get a bit salty.) I’ve always known that Colbert could be funny. I’ve suspected he’s kinda brilliant. I knew he was a Christian—sometimes becoming an unlikely defender of the faith. I never thought he might impact my own. But I think he did. Colbert... Read more
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
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