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Inspired by a line in the song “Get On Your Boots,” from the new U2 album No Line on the Horizon, Matthew Price put together a collage that proves the profundity of Bono’s lyric:

The conclusion of my two-parter on Neil Gaiman’s Alice in Wonderland tales, Coraline and Mirromask, is up at Image.

If you missed Part One, it’s here.

The Browser: News & links to raise your eyebrows & furrow your brow. New headlines may be added as the day goes on. Stay tuned. (more…)

And you can hear the concert at NPR right now.

Few bands are reaching as high, digging as deep, or writing as poetically as The Decemberists. Treat yourself.

Do you hear Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond singing with the band?

Paste Magazine has “Seven Things About…” the concert.

I’m happy to see Pixar’s new film opening on the kind of platform that the studio deserves. Up is opening the Cannes Film Festival with a presentation in Disney Digital 3-D on Wednesday May 13th, 2009. That marks the first time an animated film has opened the festival. Wish I could be there.

Writer/director Pete Docter was interviewed in Radix (thanks to the CT blog for the link) back when Monsters Inc. was released. Here’s an interesting excerpt:

Radix: How would you say that being a Christian affects how you do your work?

Docter: Years ago when I first spoke at church, I was kind of nervous about talking about Christianity and my work. It didn’t really connect. But more and more it seems to be connecting for me. I ask for God’s help, and it’s definitely affected what I’m doing. It’s helped me to calm down and focus. There were times when I got too stressed out with what I was doing, and now I just step back and say, “God, help me through this.” It really helps you keep a perspective on things, not only in work, but in relationships.

At first you hire people based purely on their talent, but what it ends up is that people who really go far are good people. They’re good people to work with, and I think God really helps in those relationships.

Radix: I know you do a lot of praying, and that’s a big part of the artistic part of what you guys do.

Docter: Yes. You could probably work on a live-action movie that takes maybe six months hating everybody else and you’d still have a film. But these animation projects take three or four years, and it’s really difficult to do without having a good relationship with the people you’re working with.

Radix: Do you ever see yourself making a more explicitly Christian movie?

Docter: Not at this point. I don’t know that that’s really me. I don’t feel so comfortable with that. Even if you have a moral to a story, if you actually come out and say it, it loses its power. Not that we’re trying to be sneaky or anything, but you have more ability to affect people if you’re not quite so blatant about it. Does that make sense?

Radix: That seems right in line with what Jesus’ parables were too. He tended not to come right out and explain, “This is what I was trying to say.”

Docter: To me art is about expressing something that can’t be said in literal terms. You can say it in words, but it’s always just beyond the reach of actual words, and you’re doing whatever you can to communicate a sense of something that is beyond you.

That’s refreshing to hear, as I read through reviews of Cyndere’s Midnight where a couple of Christian book critics are scowling at me for “burying” my faith and refusing to make my themes clear. Personally, I like to let readers discover the themes by thinking for themselves. I like to tell a story and let the audience decide its implications about the world and faith. If I just tell them what it means, then I am presumptuously limiting what the story can convey, and I am depriving readers of the experience of coming to their own conclusions… and that’s the very act that makes a story “stick.” So I cheer once again for Pixar, whose films mean as much to me as any live-action films made for adults.

My notes on Coraline are published at Good Letters, the blog for Image journal. This is Part 1 of a two-part commentary exploring Neil Gaiman’s variations on the “Alice in Wonderland” story.

Yes, it’s true:

In November, Universal Pictures won a bidding war to develop a big screen movie adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, the yet-to-be-released video game from Electronic Arts. Variety reports that Dan Harris, screenwriter of Superman Returns and X2: X-Men United, has been hired to pen the adaptation.

The property is a modern interpretation of the famous poem written by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300’s. The narrative poem describes Dante’s imaginary journey through the nine circles of hell where they see sinners being punished for their sins on Earth. If you want to see what the film might look like (think-Zack Snyder), check out the trailer that was released last month.

Hey, I’m excited by anything that suggests moviegoers will become better educated in great spiritual poetry. And if this goes into production anywhere near the time of Scott Derrickson’s dream project — Paradise Lost — we could have see a resurgence of interest in classic properties for new films. 

But few people know that Dante’s Inferno has already been made… all the way back in 1911. Watch the trailer here. It can be yours from Amazon on DVD for only about 125 bucks. Here’s the trailer:

It was made again with paper cutouts in a film described at Twitch. Here’s the trailer:

And no, none of this has anything to do with this…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFDlwXs307Q

I just came across this over at IFC Daily:

“Whatever you think of the biblical blockbuster, ‘The Robe,’ there’s no question that its phenomenal popularity marked a turning point in movie history,” writes John Hartl at the Parallax View. “Twentieth Century-Fox, which previously treated it rather shabbily on DVD, tape and laser disc, is finally recognizing its significance with a Blu-ray Special Edition that’s loaded with extra features. Among them: a featurette about the history of CinemaScope, a discussion of the script’s political implications, and an enthusiastic introduction by Martin Scorsese, who vividly remembers the impact it had at the time.”

Sounds like I should set aside some time for this one.

Have you seen it? Tell me about it.

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Cast and crew

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Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar knows how to tell a ghost story.

Any attentive moviegoer learns that people are more afraid of what they can’t see than what they can. Most horror movies show far too much and end up only sickening or shocking us rather than really disturbing us. That’s why the Alien franchise has lost its uniqueness. That’s why Jaws is remembered so much more than its sequels. And that’s why Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone disturbs me more than Pan’s Labyrinth. Our own imaginations are far more capable of troubling us than encountering illustrations drawn by others.

The Others is an old-fashioned ghost story, and it feels like one that’s been around for ages. It scares with suggestion, with silence, with whispers and silences. It has that dusty old classic quality to it, with the big mansion on the hill, the two children at the center of the frightful business, and a lot of candlelight. It also gives us the pale and willowy Nicole Kidman as Grace… and Grace may as well have had the last name of Kelly, the resemblance is so startling.

But it takes more than a sense of tangible dread to make a memorable horror flick. Two years ago I ranted about the my frustrations with The Blair Witch Project, because it seemed to me that the filmmakers were being unnecessarily cruel to their audience. Even though they knew how to make us feel fear through subtlety and suggestion, their story was severely malnourished. The movie was so intent on making us queasy with fear that it failed to offer us characters we could care about. We were stuck with only a bunch of annoying individuals whining and turning against each other as the monster closes in. Pretty soon, I felt sick more from having to keep company with those idiots than I did from the frights in the forest.

The Others is an example of a great horror story. It gives us a lot of things to think about, and the phantoms that haunt Grace and her children are not just spooks; they serve a purpose in revealing the movie’s real theme…the often suffocating effects of false religion.

Grace, at the beginning of the film, is caring for her poor afflicted children, who have an allergy to light. They have to remain in near-darkness all the time. Grace is weather-beaten and half-crazed with living in such a difficult circumstance, and her predicament is made more difficult by the fact that her husband never returned from the war. Starving for some kind of light, some kind of relief, she rigorously schools her her children in morality and the Bible. But her Bible teaching is of a rather maniacal quality; in her insistence on the literalness of every detail, she fails to grasp why the Bible says the things it does. As a result, her conversations with the inquisitive and skeptical children get sidelined by arguments about the technical details of Purgatory and Hell rather than the love of Christ. Thus, the children don’t want to serve Christ.

In one particularly hair-raising scene, Grace reprimands her children for not being ready and willing to martyr themselves for Jesus. The troubled youngsters admit that, if pressed by a torturer, they would rather deny Jesus to save their lives, even though inside they would still believe in Him. (I wonder if Amenábar has read Shasuko Endo’s novel Silence, in which the central character is trapped in this very scenario.) Grace assures them of the reality of hell. There is no talk of mercy, no talk of beauty, no talk grace. No talk of the fact that all fall short of the glory of God and we must depend up on his grace as we strive in our own flawed ways for obedience.

Thus, Grace really is “keeping them in the dark.” While they may blister and plunge towards death when the daylight comes in, they are truly starving for examples of warmth, love, and the nurturing light of Christ himself. When Christianity stands resolutely on the foundation of the law, rather than on the example of Christ himself, then we become as cold and legalistic and heartless as those who crucified him.

My guess is that the storyteller is indeed making a rather encompassing attack on Christianity, as there is no sign he distinguishes between healthy faith and unhealthy legalism. But the truth is there in spite of it all, in the symbolism of what transpires.

So far, I have said nothing of the ghosts. Yes, indeed, these children have good reason to call out for God’s help; their house is plagued by phantoms that seem to appear only to the daughter at first. As Grace overcomes her determined denial of their existence, punishing her children for “lying” about the noises in the house, she becomes more and more paralyzed by fear of the things her “rule book” does not explain.

Another tangent here: The Bible, like it or not, is not a blueprint of the invisible world. We are assured that there are powers beyond the reach of our senses that are indeed waging war in the world. In fact, Bible stories themselves confirm that King Saul spoke with the “ghost” of Samuel, and that Jesus stood in the company of Moses and Elijah in the sight of the disciples. Thus, Christianity truly does allow for such things, and while we are commanded not to let our curiosity about such things lead us into temptation, we should certainly allow for stories to take into account the existence of such powers.

As Grace is forced to strip away her own pride and face the phantoms, the story delivers some spine-tingling thrills and all-out bone-rattling jolts. The “twist ending” is rather predictable, hardly as thrilling or satisfying as the conclusion to The Sixth Sense; yet, it suits the story and wraps things up nicely. The rest of the film is very skillfully wrought, with excellent performances by adults and children alike, exquisite cinematography, and sets so gorgeously spooky that you want to go see them and yet you don’t…they’re as shadowy and gothic as Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.

I applaud the director’s restraint. He gives us no gratuitous gore, no unnecessary foul language, no graphic violence (nothing worse than a slap in the face)… and an absence of sexuality so severe that it becomes part of the reason the movie is so cold and stifling. The fact that he has Nicole Kidman in the lead role and keeps her so bound up, so rigidly terrified and methodical in her housekeeping, leads us to believe that part of the reason she clings to legalistic religion is her fear of the sensual, the beautiful, the physical body in which God’s glory is manifested. In a way, Kidman’s performance is all the more effective if you’ve seen her play the flip-side, as the flamboyant prostitute in Moulin Rouge earlier this year (still the most imaginative and dazzling movie of the year so far).

So, while The Others does in the end intend to show Christianity up as silly and ridiculous, it only does so because so many Christians have indeed reduced their faith to a glorification of legalistic morality and a Gnostic aversion to the body, to incarnation, to mystery, to the erotic. Full, healthy Christianity would have led Grace to prayer, to recognition of the reality of the spirit world, and to a journey of faith that might have led to the healing of her children and would surely have set her free to enjoy God’s blessings; she might even have found comfort over the loss of her husband.

Instead, we are left discomforted, with a much less appealing answer. The storyteller’s description of the Way Things Work is appalling, a spiritual reality that would condemn us to living in fear, in constant failure, and with very little hope for relief or redemption.

But still, for the skill on display here, and for the provocation to discuss these things, I highly recommend The Others… one of 2001′s most memorable – and haunting – movies.

Somebody’s heard it.