[Ed. note: A very, very welcome guest post from Nicholas Olson] The very moment everything was taken away from Job, he knew it was the Lord who’d taken it away. He turned from the passing shows of time. He sought that which is eternal. Does he alone see God’s hand who sees that He gives? […]
My derth of posting is due to an attempt to rescue my yard and garden from an encroaching forest. To that end… From the Mysteries of Lisbon DVD liner notes, Ruiz says: “While I was shooting Mysteries of Lisbon, I often thought about Linné– a garden is a battlefield. Any flower is monstrous. In slow motion, […]
Here I am hunched over another impression of the brain with its wads of flat batting and weird yarn, thinking how can I read these films without a light board— (continue…) “Interpreting the Film” is a tragic poem about a different type of film, but a slight shift in the semantic domain of the word makes […]
For me, it all begin with Jeebus, who was made manifest to the world in the fifteenth episode of the eleventh season of The Simpsons. In this episode, titled “Missionary: Impossible,” Homer flees a mob of angry PBS telethon hosts by hopping a cargo plane to hide out as a missionary in Microasia.* Realizing the gravity of his situation, Homer gets on […]
“Cult” as a label has recently re-entered national conversation on the heels of conservative voters trying to figure out how to best think about Mitt Romney’s Mormon religious affiliation. The ensuing confusion expressed at times in this debate is a good example of how fluid and misunderstood this term often is. For recent generations, the […]
There is often talk of framing our cultural experiences in terms found commonly in Christian spirituality. On account of this, we find film and theology groups that are structurally identical to group bible studies. We reserve watching certain films for certain spots on the Christian calendar, like annual Easter screenings of Gibson’s Jesus film. In […]
(Ed.: Today we have a welcome guest post from Nicholas Olson, who pens The Moviegoer.) Audiences were largely unsure about what to make of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love when it was released almost a decade ago. Part of the quizzical reaction was that it was not a standard Adam Sandler film. Even critics found […]
One problem I have always had with year-end list making is that it forces me to break up the little thematic and emotional connections that develop between films, directors, and genres over the course of a year of new cinema and rank films according to a different metric. Rather than a list, I would like to […]
I have always wanted to put an annual list of my favorite filmwriting together, but never actually get around to it. If I did make such a list for this year, Darren Hughes’ commentary on the Toronto International Film Festival at Senses of Cinema would be somewhere on it. His description of Low Life is thrilling […]