There is a move afoot to have G. K. Chesterton canonized as a Catholic saint. There’s a certain irony in this push to sainthood, given the man’s less-than-saintly appetites. He sometimes drank heavily (he allegedly joked that “one pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough”), smoked heavily and ate heavily. Indeed, he weighed so much at the time of his death in 1936 that, when they put him in his coffin, it had... Read more
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little piece on Netflix’ House of Cards and Fox’s Last Man On Earth. I had reviewed an episode of each for Plugged In, and both episodes kinda got religious on me. Weird, I thought. Not often television engages with faith so explicitly. What’re the chances? Pretty good, in retrospect. This March, television’s been on a religious jag. Paige Jennings, daughter of Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth, got baptized on the March 4... Read more
Full disclosure: I missed the end of Cinderella. It wasn’t my fault. I went to a screening up in Denver and watched a good chunk of the movie before the fire alarm went off, sending us—a theater full of moms, kids and one slightly cranky movie reviewer—outside. Turns out there wasn’t a fire, but it didn’t matter: No one could turn off the accompanying strobe lights, and we all know that fairy-tale balls and blinding, Saturday Night Live disco lights... Read more
I’m in the business of watching movies. And if there’s anything I like more than a good movie, it’s a bad movie. Now, I’m not talking about bad as in “salacious and problematic” bad. I’m just talking bad. As a kid, my best friend and I would rent schlocky horror movies and make fun of them all the way through. And when that proved to be too much work, my sister introduced me to Mystery Science Theater 3000, cementing a... Read more
What’s a great way to make a hit movie or miniseries? Base it on a bestselling book. It worked pretty well for Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen and even Christian Grey. But the Bible? Even with the might of Hollywood heavyweight Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank) and his wife, actress Roma Downey (Touched By an Angel) behind it, it’s not an easy sell. A lot of folks thought that this entertainment power couple lost their marbles when they... Read more
Director Neil Blomkamp’s Chappie, about robot who becomes a high-tech version of Pinocchio, officially hits theaters today. He’s a robot who can think and feel—and a far more humane depiction of artificial intelligence than we see in, say, The Terminator. But in a way, this sort of AI actually bothers me more. The raging self-aware machines in the Terminator movies or maybe the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron are bad robots. They may have some sort of cognitive awareness, but... Read more
I think Google is trying to get me to de-convert. It seems that way, at any rate. I check out Google’s news feed just about every day and, since I write a lot about religion, I’ve trained Google to grab religion stories and bring them to my desktop. But oddly, most of them seem to be about getting out of religion, not about religion itself. “Americans are turning away from organized religion in record numbers,” reads the first item on... Read more
Leonard Nimoy died earlier today at the age of 83. He was, according to the obituaries I’ve seen, a man of many talents: poet, photographer, musician. But it was as an actor that most of us knew him first and best—an actor who became famous for one role. Mr. Spock of Star Trek. A few years ago, I wrote a book proposal that probed spirituality from the deck of the Enterprise—a show created by Gene Roddenberry, one of the world’s best-known humanists... Read more
Hollywood is ashamed of its superheroes. I got that vibe watching Sunday night’s Oscars telecast, anyway. Oh, sure, Captain America and Star Lord handed out a couple of Oscars, but they sure weren’t about to receive any. Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy were both shut out in the technical categories. What won the night’s biggest prize? Why, Birdman. In it, Michael Keaton’s Riggan pushes back on his legacy as a famous movie-bound superhero to return... Read more
Oscar doesn’t like religion. That’s what some are saying, anyway. Even though 2014 was supposed to be the year of the Christian film (and in many ways, it was), faith-driven movies have barely been mentioned this awards season. “With one exception, movies that told stories of faith, though big at the box office last year, failed to tickle the fancy of those making the [Academy Award] nominations,” wrote Mark Kellner of The Deseret News. That sole exception was Selma, which... Read more
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