Beyond "Darkly": Christians in Hollywood Ponder Next Steps
I recently visited Biola University to speak about Through a Screen Darkly during their 2007 Media Conference. While I was there, I talked with several industry movers and shakers, and then wrote about the questions challenging Christians in Hollywood today.Read more
"Darkly" Inspires a Small-World Connection
Jessica Poundstone, a friend of mine quoted in Through a Screen Darkly, had quite a surprise when her quote made its way to the attention of the very person she was talking about... Bill Frisell.
You gotta read it to believe it.
"Darkly" Goes Past the Popcorn
Greg Wright recently noted Through a Screen Darkly in a commentary at Past the Popcorn.
Context is everything. And no movie—no single tale in Scripture, even—can possibly tell the whole story of God’s redemptive plan. Even Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, that R-rated Christian audience-pleaser, only manages to tell a portion of Jesus’ story. The best that we can hope, especially of human story-telling, is that one fragment of the Gospel — a vision of man’s brokenness, perhaps, or a parable-like illustration of love or forgiveness—comes through loud and clear, leaving the audience hungry for more. A movie can, on occasion, be an opportunity for a modern-day Philip to answer the question, “Can you explain this to me?”
In his new book, Through A Screen Darkly, Christian film critic Jeffrey Overstreet explains in terms that might be a little more accessible.
“Sticky seat cushions, talkative teens, annoying big screen commercials—it’s all worth enduring for those occasional moments of revelation,” he writes. “It’s like waiting through a season of disappointing baseball just to be there at that magic moment, when the angle of the pitch and the timing of the swing meet with a crack that will echo in your memory for days. And yet, unlike a home run, this occasion on the big screen doesn’t merely change the score. It changes you.”
A Two-Part Interview at Christians in the Arts
Leanne Benfield Martin is featuring a two-part interview about Through a Screen Darkly at her blog: Christians in the Arts.
Here are some of her challenging questions...Read more
Professor Paul Kuritz says...
I've just discovered the blog of a fellow named Professor Paul Kuritz. Because he just just discovered Through a Screen Darkly.
Thank you for that review, Professor Kuritz!
Decemberists and Diamonds
Anybody planning to be at the My Brightest Diamond / The Decemberists show in Seattle tomorrow night?
I'll be there. Send me a note so I can watch for you.
Another "Children of Hurin" Review
I've heard The Lord of the Rings described as a defense of Western Civilisation before... and explained as a justification for all kinds of things, including Western shows of military force. But this review of The Children of Hurin takes a different perspective.
J R R Tolkien was the most Christian of 20th-century writers, not because he produced Christian allegory and apologetics like his friend C S Lewis, but because he uniquely portrayed the tragic nature of what Christianity replaced. Thanks to the diligence of his son Christopher, who reconstructed the present volume from several manuscripts, we have before us a treasure that sheds light on the greater purpose of his The Lord of the Rings.In The Children of Hurin, a tragedy set some 6,000 years before the tales recounted in The Lord of the Rings, we see clearly why it was that Tolkien sought to give the English-speaking peoples a new pre-Christian mythology. It is a commonplace of Tolkien scholarship that the writer, the leading Anglo-Saxon scholar of his generation, sought to restore to the English their lost mythology. In this respect the standard critical sources (for example Edmund Wainwright) mistake Tolkien's profoundly Christian motive. In place of the heroes Siegfried and Beowulf, the exemplars of German and Anglo-Saxon pagan myth, we have the accursed warrior Turin, whose pride of blood and loyalty to tribe leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the forces of evil.
Tolkien's popular Ring trilogy ... sought to undermine and supplant Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle, which had offered so much inspiration for Nazism. [1] With the reconstruction of the young Tolkien's prehistory of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose: to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is the pagan's tribal identity. Tolkien saw his generation decimated, and his circle of friends exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace the cult of Christ during World War II. His life's work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West.
That's just how it starts.
Christians in the Arts: An Interview
Leanne Benfield Martin interviewed me last week, and today she has published the first part of that two-part interview.
Thanks, Leanne!
Looking Closer's Film Forum: "Jindabyne"
Jindabyne is the first dramatic feature film I've seen in 2007 so far that has greatly impressed me.
My review will be up at Christianity Today when it opens wider than the current limited release. But for those of you who have a chance to see it, make sure you do: It's riveting, complex, and deeply rewarding if you have the patience for it. I've been reading several reviews that get to the reasons for my enthusiasm. It's not as satisfying as Ray Lawrence's 2001 drama Lantana, but there is a great deal to consider and discuss here... not to mention Laura Linney's finest dramatic performance.
I'm especially taken by Kristi Mitsuda's interpretation: "Aside from obvious intimations about the differences between men and women (feminine emphasis on emoting, masculine prizing of pragmatism) wafting about the story at large, the film goes provocatively further. Jindabyne suggests that such casually cruel neglect as that displayed by the otherwise solid-seeming mates arises from a culture wherein a man calling a woman a 'bitch' is acceptable."
Kenneth Turan: "With the recovered body as the catalyst, what has been papered over explodes onto the surface with devastating results. Slowly, painfully, the different agendas of husbands and wives, men and women, white and Aboriginal communities vividly reveal themselves. It is here that Jindabyne's unhurried pacing and Lawrence's singular technique really pay off. We live on the fault line along with these characters, and it is an experience that is not easy to shake off."
Andrew O'Hehir says, "There are moments when the racial undercurrent of Jindabyne begins to gum up the narrative and overwhelm Lawrence's subtle, compassionate and even spiritual treatment of these people and this place. But I wish one-tenth of the films I saw were made with this much craft and integrity, this much intuitive understanding of where to put the camera, how much of the story to explain in words (not much) and how much to trust his outstanding cast to carry the film with their voices, faces and bodies."
And Ella Taylor writes, "Jindabyne moves slowly and deliberately, its dialogue as spare and lanky as Carver’s own pared-down prose. The austere beauty of the landscape, shot in natural light and heightened by a keening native score, offers both a lament for what’s been lost and a painfully halting hymn to the faint possibility of reconciliation and community."
UPDATE: 5/4/07
Darrel Manson (Hollywood Jesus) says, "But the film really isn’t about things dying in the outside world. It leads us to consider the death that happens within us. Death of love. Death of dreams. Death of community. Death of trust. The specters of these deaths can indeed haunt us. We may be able to keep them hidden away for a while, but in time they will torment the lives in which they have not been released. Jindabyne is the scariest kind of ghost story—the kind that deals with the ghosts we all have to face."
Looking Closer's Film Forum: "Fracture"
Fracture
Ryan Gosling. Anthony Hopkins. You would think those would be two great reasons to run out and see Fracture. And yet, the current reviews have discouraged me from rushing out to see it.
See for yourself...
In The National Review, Peter Suderman says it's "another plodding exercise in legal proceedings and implausibly mangled plotlines. Primal Fear and Fallen were at least diverting, but this time around, Hoblit and his writers didn’t even have the decency to learn why the genre works the way it does. They’ve simply stuffed their film with familiar scenes: the one where the hero gets frustrated and throws something on his desk, the one where the hero’s work causes trouble in his love life, the one where the creepy killer coyly teases the hero with clues; and countless others you’ve no doubt seen since you were old enough to stay up and watch L.A. Law. One of Hopkins’s pointless tics is that he builds large, needlessly complex contraptions that move steel balls around in circles. When one of the characters asks another what, exactly, it is, he gets this hapless reply: “It’s… a machine. It does… stuff.” This seems to be a fairly accurate representation of the writers’ approach to the screenplay."
Greg Wright (Past the Popcorn) isn't terribly impressed either. "Based on the audience reaction at the screening I attended, I’d say that Hoblit not only accomplished exactly what he wanted with Fracture—I’d also say that audiences will probably find just what they need here, too. Still, I found Fracture, entertaining though it may be, just a little too smart in the pants for its own good."
At CT Movies, Todd Hertz writes, "What fuels the movie is that it's crafted well, and not just the acting. The directing, musical score and cinematography are top notch, making Fracture a thinking thriller where the thrills are supplied largely by scenes of talking. Still, some will be bored by this; while the beginning simmers and the ending triumphantly trots across the finish line, the middle drags because the screenplay loses its story focus."