By now you probably know the sad news: Guillermo Del Toro has left The Hobbit. I will always wonder what Guillermo Del Toro’s version of The Hobbit would have been like.
Almost every movie fan site is full of chatter about this. Whose fault is it? Should Peter Jackson replace him? (more…)
Annie Dillard in The Writing Life says: (more…)
The long, long wait for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life continues, and I’m enjoying every delicious day of suspense.
In the meantime, here’s one of the more substantial articles about it that I’ve seen.
And I love this bit: (more…)
Mercy.
How am I supposed to get any work done when journals like Comment publish very distracting articles like… (more…)
Here’s a simple three-minute explanation of Twilight‘s popularity… (more…)
I wonder what Amenabar will say when he’s confronted with the real history of his subject.
Alejandro Amenabar
The more I read about this film, the stronger my Agora-phobia becomes. It’s just so PC to paint Christians as history’s villains. Imagine what would happen if people started rewriting history and portraying , say, homosexuals… or environmentalists… or African Americans… as responsible for crimes and atrocities that were not really their responsibility. The mainstream media would make quite an event of it, tarring and feathering whoever dared to distort historical accounts to indulge a particular prejudice. But if someone writes historical fiction that looks credible, and casts Christians as the maniacal villains in place of the folks really responsible, mainstream audiences nod solemnly as if this is, and has always been, the way events play out.
The ever-resourceful du Garbandier has pointed to the most thorough take-down of Agora‘s spectacular misrepresentations of its subject that I’ve yet seen.
And this article’s by an atheist who writes: (more…)
This poster says that one woman changed history.
Truth is, it’s the filmmakers who changed history.
Earlier, I posted a link to some strong words about the new movie called Agora.
Here are more cautionary words, showing the distortion of historical details in the film, distortions that portray the storytellers’ prejudice (more…)
It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the “Saw” franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks. Instead of that, we get something that’s truly sadistic: the SATC girls as haggard specters, haunted by their freewheeling ’90s past and stupefied by the demands of work, marriage and/or motherhood. This bloated, incoherent movie mimics an SATC episode in structure — vague social relevance at the beginning and the end, conspicuous consumption in the middle — with virtually none of the wit or panache, and seems devoted to destroying our affection for these characters…
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It’s offensive to an entire audience who came of age with these women and who remain breathtakingly loyal, and out of nostalgic affection may not have the heart to turn away from them. It’s offensive to King’s own creations, toward whom he now seems to feel nothing but contempt. It’s offensive because it keeps cattle-driving a franchise once based on sparkle and economy toward new heights of painful, frantic emptiness. I kept telling myself, over and over, that Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte — the real, flawed, funny, recognizably human ones, not these lobotomized zombie replacements — would never do anything so dumb. (more…)
From Joe Henry’s Facebook page: (more…)
