Come on over and check out the new blog, the new neighborhood, and post your thoughts and suggestions.

… in my 10,000th tweet!

But the most rebellious thing I’ve ever heard a rock star say appeared in print in 2001. Robert Hilburn of The L.A. Times was interviewing Bono about why New Yorkers turned to U2 for inspiration after the attacks on America. Bono responded by talking about the anger that fuels most rock music. “Anger is simple. Any artist knows he can do it with a black brush. That’s what rock is at the moment. It’s an easy thing to do: painting in black.”

Then he added, “Joy is something else. It’s much harder to create because you are dealing with something much deeper and much more emotional. It’s a connection with the audience that borders on faith, believing in something together.”

Joy. Imagine that. To strive for joy may be the most rebellious act for any musician in this present environment of anger, attitude, and egomania.

I say all of this so you will understand why I cannot stop listening to …

…the second album from The Welcome Wagon — Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices.

Here’s my review.

In fact, 10,000 Tweets is probably something to be embarrassed about.

But my 10,000th post on Twitter is going to be unusual…

So start following me on Twitter. #10,000 is going to be an announcement.

Well, once in a while, the trailer and even the reviews from my favorite critics let me down.

Thanks to my friend Danny Walter for encouraging me to go see a film that all of the marketing, trailers, and reviews had convinced me to avoid. …

I actually really liked most of Snow White and the Huntsman.

The first half hour had serious problems. As the wicked queen, Charlize Theron seemed determined to strip Al Pacino of his crown as the shouting champion of Hollywood. Her line readings were exactly the kind of overblown hysteria that you would affect if you were in a spoof of fantasy movies. If she didn’t look so fantastic in those costumes, it would have been a disaster. (I found it amusing to imagine that this was Theron’s abnormally youthful character from Arrested Development transported to another dimension where she is given supernatural powers and turned loose upon the kingdom.)

Several incidents had a sort of WTF arbitrariness to them especially the discovery of the White Horse. Good grief. Snow White goes on the run and is immediately blessed with Shadowfax so she can escape, and then just as quickly robbed of that same gift? Bizarre.

The way Snow White and the Huntsman are thrown together in the Dark Forest felt hastily arranged. But once they’re together, they’re agreeable company.

And then, at the very end of the movie, during the inevitable face-off between our hero and the wicked queen, the storytellers clearly don’t know what to do. The clash ends with the most unimaginative of maneuvers. I was really hoping for something that felt meaningful, surprising, clever. Until then several of the standard Snow White plot points had been given thoughtful new twists. The climax falls flat.

Nevertheless, there are many wonderful things in this film, especially when the dwarfs show up.

They show up much later in the film than I expected, but when they do they run away with the movie. They’re noble, funny, endearing, and they have real personalities. Such great casting: Eddie Marsan, Bob Hoskins, and Nick Frost are worth the ticket price, just the three of them. Ian McShane and Toby Jones make strong impressions, and Ray Winstone and Brendan Gleeson are unrecognizable but for their voices. I won’t be surprised if, when Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit arrives, I end up preferring this team of dwarfs (or dwarves, whichever you prefer) over those from the Lonely Mountain.

While the Dark Forest that Snow White must survive feels like a yard sale of familiar big-screen spooks and nastiness, the uncursed forest that she discovers later turns out to be one of the most beautifully realized wonderlands I’ve ever seen in a film. It’s more enchanting than the jungle in Avatar, more inspiring than the big-screen Narnia, even better at representing an uncorrupted world than the elf-country of Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth.

Kristen Stewart, who has taken a lot of flack for her performance here, doesn’t deserve bad reviews. She’s supposed to look like a young woman who has suffered, who is taking on more than she is prepared to carry, who is lonely and a little bit lost. Stewart is just fine. She looks beautiful when she’s in an extravagant costume, but more importantly, she looks real. And that’s what this version of the story needs. The emphasis is on the beauty of her heart, not her glamour.

So it makes perfect sense, contrary to some critics’ complaints, that the wicked queen would be the film’s most arresting beauty visualy… because she’s obsessed with youth and cosmetics-commercial razzle-dazzle.

Chris Hemsworth makes a decent huntsman, although his somewhat Scottish accent comes and goes. (I caught one “Oh, fer-get it!” that was an obvious stumble.)

As fantasy film couples go, Stewart and Hemsworth are much better than Tom Cruise and Mia Sara in Legend, but nowhere near as inspiring as Michelle Pfeiffer and Rutger Hauer in Ladyhawke.

Finally, the closing scene: It has one astonishingly coincidental similarity to the closing scene of The Hunger Games… not just for what happens, but for the presence of a certain actor in that scene. Unbelievable. (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here. But if you’ve seen the closing moments of both films, think about it, and look at the last names of the actors involved.)

Anyway, I’m very glad I saw this on a big screen. Like Ridley Scott’s Legend – which is famously beautiful, and also famously flawed – Snow White and the Huntsman stands as one of the most glorious fantasy films I’ve ever seen *visually*. If the script had been strong beginning to end, it might have landed in my top 10 for the year.

I intend to write a more thorough review one of these days. There’s a great deal here worth writing about.

Miss Bala is riveting, stomach-turning stuff.

Gerardo Naranjo’s film is a nightmarish, no-way-out scenario, made worse if you realize that this is the kind of story playing out every day in the territories bloodied by the Mexican drug war. We get our occasional news summaries which supply vague impressions of corruption, but here’s a story that takes you on a tour down through the circles of hell, as witnessed and suffered by a young beauty pageant contestant.

It follows Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman in a harrowing performance), a quiet young woman of simple and somewhat ordinary dreams — like winning the Miss Baja pageant. When Laura steps into a nightclub to try and find her friend, she is in the worst of wrong places at the worst of wrong times. The nightclub is about to become a gangland battleground, and she’ll become a tool, a forced-labor errand runner for the stone-hearted overlord of the Tijuana drug cartel. She’ll become a victim of sexual abuse, a pawn in a sick game, exploited by criminals and lawmen alike.

Let me be frank: To sit down and watch this film is to volunteer for suffering without the hope of any big screen heroes to show up with the cavalry and save the day. It’s an invitation to receive the witness of a furious and heartbroken artist. It’s a lament for the women who suffer in the country of brutal, bloodthirsty men; women whose best hope is to survive the tyranny and corruption; women who learn to follow the orders of devils and to endure being treated as property and sex slaves.

In a way, Miss Bala shows us how The Hunger Games is happening in our own world, where people are used as pieces in a game that serves the game lords, while the media perpetuates a charade that dares to claim these “players” are valued for their femininity and beauty.

Everywhere Laura turns, there is corruption, until there is nowhere left to go. It’s a picture of hell on earth. It’s a horror film that refuses to employ any element of fantasy that would allow us to dismiss it as a fiction. It’s an ugly blast of truth, exposing one of the world’s worst cancers.

Perhaps it will inspire viewers to do what they can, even if all they can do is pray for Mexico and for all whose choices contribute to the perpetuation of this conflict.

Watching Miss Bala is a very unpleasant two hours. But it may take a lot of art like this to wake the world up to what’s happening, and a lot of willing viewers, including those who have the power to make a difference.

I felt sick and helpless at the end of the film. What can I do about the drug war in Mexico… apart from, well… not buying drugs?

But none of us are helpless, I remind myself. It’s a whole lot easier to sigh and make despairing remarks than it is to pray, to engage in warfare that is as much about powers we can’t see as it is about the powers we can. Perhaps I haven’t been given the power to effect swift and sweeping political change. But I do have the opportunity to pray. I have a feeling that the willful act of entering into this suffering — through art or any other gateway — is itself a way of bearing the burdens of others, and the heartache is itself the beginnings of prayer.

I immediately regretted it. Why? 

I gave up soda years ago as I read more and more about its destructive and addictive influence. When you’re drinking it frequently, you come to believe it tastes really good. When you try it again after quitting, well… to me, it tasted like battery acid with corn syrup for flavor.

Why did I give it up? Here’s a concise summary of the reasons.

I have friends who drink a lot of the stuff, just as I used to do. Sometimes, they’ll go through a liter bottle in a day. They’ll rarely sit through a movie without the largest size soda they can buy. But these same folks will shake their heads over the plight of people who are addicted to drugs or hurting themselves in other ways.

This worries me.

But at the same time, there’s another lesson here, for me specifically: What else am I doing on a daily basis that has similarly destructive effects? What is breaking me down, little by little, almost imperceptibly? What are other people hoping I’ll wake up and realize?

I want to know.

Because it would be foolish of me to get all high and mighty about soda, or drugs, or pornography, or sexual misbehavior, or shoplifting, or any destructive behavior, when I know that I’m probably telling myself little lies about something in my life in order to justify similar folly.

And now… a scene from a film I’ve never seen. Can you name that movie?

Michael: I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.
Sam: Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.
Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?

Richard Chess.

Lindsey Crittenden.

Kelly Foster.

David Griffith.

A.G. Harmon.

Chad Thomas Johnston.

Caroline Langston.

Peggy Rosenthal.

Vic Sizemore.

Bradford Winters.

Tony Woodlief.

Sara Zarr.

This team of writers grabs and holds my attention almost every day at the blog called Good Letters. So it is an honor to participate with them as a contributor, in this daily endeavor hosted by my favorite literary journal, Image (a publication and a community that I can honestly say has blessed and changed my daily life) , and published on the bold, expansive network called Patheos.

Today marks my first film-review publication at Good Letters since it relocated to Patheos and appeared before a larger audience. …

It’s my review of First Position.

I’m thrilled to step onto the Patheos stage, and grateful to their team… especially Timothy Dalrymple, Patheos’s director of content.

So spread the word. Update your bookmarks. Go see First Position. Watch for my reviews to appear hear twice a month. And explore the wide world of Patheos to see what else they have to offer. I haven’t seen anything quite like it anywhere on the Wild, Wild, Worldwide Web.