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George Lucas’s Star Wars is a peach of a movie. Undoubtedly you already know something about it, either through the mass media or by word of mouth, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. It’s going to be as big as The Godfather and Jaws, if not bigger, and the reasons why it …
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I was browsing through the recent-arrivals shelf at the public library when one of our librarians stopped to tell me how much she liked a film she had just seen on video. A film critic always hates to admit that he hasn’t seen a film, so I was relieved when the movie turned out to …
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Ken Burns’s acclaimed documentaries include The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and, most recently, an account of World War II titled The War. His work has won Emmys, Grammys and numerous other awards and has been nominated for Academy Awards. He is working on a series on the national parks. What is your own religious …
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Every version of the Passion story deviates fundamentally from the New Testament, which contains four divergent Gospels rather than one conflated version. The Gospels also emphasize the life before and the resurrection after the death. The life/death/resurrection proportions, judged by the number of chapters devoted to each part, vary — from a 13:2:1 ratio in …
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In 1964 the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini created a new mode of presenting Jesus in film. His The Gospel according to St. Matthew is a word-for-word rendering of Matthew’s Gospel. It contains no additional dialogue and shows only the scenes described by Matthew. The film was a radical departure from the Jesus genre, which …
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I am always aware that Charlie is playing with Death. He plays with it, mocks it. thumbs his nose at it, but it’s always there. He is aware of death at every moment of his existence, and he is terribly aware of being alive. . . . And he is bringing more life. That is …
Continue reading “Farewell to the Clown: A Tribute to Charlie”
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At the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings, as King Aragorn is preparing to die, he utters his final words to Arwen, his elven queen — words that contain a hint of resurrection: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound forever …
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In mid-June Garrison Keillor departs his weekly public radio program "A Prairie Home Companion" and heads for Denmark, with the hope of returning to the obscurity necessary for leading the literary life. He’s scarcely leaving too soon for that. His recent career has vividly demonstrated how American culture’s omnivorous appetite for novelty can transform a …
Continue reading “Garrison Keillor and Culture Protestantism”
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It has been decreed in my neighborhood that every week all serious work ends at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, when Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” comes on the air. There might be laundry to do or dishes to wash; a letter to write or bills to pay; or perhaps simply a book or magazine to …
Continue reading “Garrison Keillor’s ‘Prairie Home Companion’: Gospel of the Airwaves”
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When the Harry Potter movie is released this fall, long lines at theaters are sure to provoke yet more speculation about the popularity of J. K. Rowling’s novels (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). …
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In 1954, encouraged by new scholarship on Jesus’ life and by the rising tide of church membership and attendance, the Episcopal Church helped finance a film on the life of Jesus, The Day of Triumph. It forthrightly pictured Jesus full-face for the first time since DeMille’s King of Kings (1927). The film portrayed Judas as …
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“Lately I haven’t had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week’s Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times.” That’s how E. B. White opened a short essay in Harper’s …
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Redefining the religious Traditionally the scientific study of religion had been limited to those aspects of life and culture explicitly linked with belief in a supernatural being or forces. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, proposed that the study of religion is concerned with "the traditional acts and observances, regarded by the natives as sacred, carried …
Continue reading “Larger Than Life: Religious Functions of Television”
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In the two decades since MTV captured the restless souls and short attention spans of our youth, it has become increasingly evident that teaching and learning require new strategies. The classroom lecture is dead, reading is an endangered art, and memorization belongs next to exorcism in the dustbin of discarded teaching arts. To engage the …
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My first meeting with Geoffrey Shurlock was in a Hollywood restaurant, on La Cienaga Boulevard in the winter of 1965. At that time Shurlock was head of the Motion Picture Association’s production code office. As a longtime film buff and a critic for a church magazine, I had sought him out for an interview. After …
Continue reading “Movies and Censorship: Who Will Protect Freedom?”
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Thirty years ago, Marshall McLuhan struck the public fancy with pithy and perceptive theories on mass media. Several of his terms are still bandied about. "Global village," for example, crops up on magazine covers and in conversations among cocktail-party sociologists. Unfortunately, the "global village" does not exist. McLuhan’s thinking on the subject began with the …
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The only unique art form to emerge in the twentieth century is the motion picture. While painting, sculpture, drama, poetry, and the her arts have been familiar throughout the centuries of western civilization, only the motion picture is unique to the technologies of recent past. It is the most complete art form, if one is …
Continue reading “On Being Alive to the Arts and Religion: Film”
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Perhaps it was inevitable that a film would be made about the life and death of Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Certainly the late Salvadoran archbishop’s story lends itself to cinematic treatment. In fact, Paulist Pictures’ Romero may be only the first of several films about the assassinated prelate; for example, director Gillo Poncecorvo (The Battle of …
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The film, Scene’s from a Marriage, leaves unexamined the questions of how to redeem community in the larger society; it seems to have gone irrevocably to the devil as it has become technically more nearly perfect. Text: Ingmar Bergman’s film Scenes from a Marriage tells, like the Lenten season, a serialized story culminating in violence, …
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The enormous popularity of The Simpsons, now in its 12th television season, suggests that religious people have a sense of humor — contrary to the usual wisdom in Hollywood. The program takes more satirical jabs at spiritual matters than any other TV show, yet the erratic cartoon family has an appreciative audience among many people …
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“Just When We Need a Hero Most, Here Comes CAPTAIN AMERICA.” So goes an advertisement for a recent two-hour “adventure spectacular” on CBS television. The ad displays recognition of what may be an increasing public demand or need for models of moral heroism. This demand is worthy of notice; the supply of television heroes, however, …
Continue reading “Superheroes, Antiheroes, and the Heroism Void in Children’s TV”
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THE SERPENT’S EGG — the film Ingmar Bergman has been making in Germany since his self-imposed exile from Sweden — takes as its penetrating metaphor for evil a conspiracy of poisoners in the Weimar Republic. It is 1923: inside Berlin’s familiarly seedy cabarets, where feverish jazz flares up and expires, the dancers’ wigs are tinted …
Continue reading “The Birth of Evil: Genesis According to Bergman”
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One of the more urgent tasks facing the church today is the clarification of its posture in relation to the entertainment industry. Traditional attitudes still widely assumed to be valid are, in fact, generally bankrupt, The attempt to force Hollywood to produce “good” films has fallen with the demise of the old Roman Catholic Legion …
Continue reading “The Church Moves Toward Film Discrimination”
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Philip Pullman, the British author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, is an avowed atheist who makes no attempt to disguise his distaste for religion and especially for Christianity. As one of his characters (the scientist and exnun Mary Malone) says, "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all." In …
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The story is told of a bishop who at a conference grew increasingly impatient over the number of ministers straggling back late from a lengthy lunch break. The first report of the afternoon was to be delivered by the Reverend Jones, but he was nowhere to be seen. The bishop exploded with anger, demanding to …
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Oklahoma-raised Bill Bright came to Los Angeles in 1944 and started a business selling candies, fruits and jams. He was drawn to the large First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and there came under the considerable influence of Christian educator Henrietta Mears. Her circle of friends included the men who founded Fuller Seminary in 1947 and …
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The Buddha once remarked that understanding his instruction is like "trying to catch a poisonous snake in the wild": it’s all too easy to get bitten. Among Christian teachings, none are more treacherous than those about Jesus’ Passion (from the Latin paulo, "suffering"). Theological ideas have teeth. In The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson …
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The first of three annual film installments of J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1,500-page epic The Lord of the Rings, directed by New Zealander Peter Jackson, has many fine qualifies. The New Zealand scenery evokes the fantastically real world of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and the tunnely hobbit-homes are finely rendered. The special effects — whether in the …
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GARRISON KEILLOR’S latest book is a collection of poems selected from the ones he has read on his daily five-minute show “The Writer’s Almanac,” which airs Ofl public radio. These are poems, he says, that can make people “stop chewing their toasted muffins and turn up the radio,’ The range extends from classics (Shakespeare, Auden, …
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Kant was right. The mind imposes order. It also tells you how much to tip. I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. God is silent. Now if we can only get man to shut up. Quickly now, who penned those mortal lines? Nineteenth century philosopher …
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The movie Thirteen does not represent every teen’s story, but it does show every parent’s nightmare. It’s the story of an angry girl. Tracy (played by Evan Rachel Wood) is angry at her well-meaning mother, Mel (played by Holly Hunter), whose harried life as a single parent makes her resort too often to responses like, …
