A Guy in the Pew

You might have noticed that I have not blogged since the election. I have my reasons (and hope to explain those reasons soon), but I think that I can safely blog about a new movie Taking Chance that will be aired on HBO next month. It is a movie based on a blog post, and it should make for some compelling television. The trailer is above. The military blog, BlACKFIVE explains: Four and a half years ago, I was asked to post "Taking Chance" by LtCol Michael Strobl. It evoked one of the strongest reactions on BlackFive that I have seen since starting the blog in mid-2003. The story also gave me the honor to get to know some of the friends and family and Marine brothers of Chance. . . . It sure seems like HBO stayed true to LtCol Strobl, and, more importantly, Lance Corporal Chance Phelps. Thanks to LtCol Strobl, we all miss Chance. Read it all here . The blog post that inspired the movie is here . It is well worth reading.

Writer Tobias Wolff has a beautiful essay in the New Yorker that makes the point that art and poetry are often the means by which we come to faith. He tells the story of seeing a Bergman film, “Winter Light,” at a local church, with a friend while a student at Oxford. He begins by telling the story of the film, and the aftermath in the church: Tomas, a Lutheran pastor and widower, is suffering a crisis of faith, barely going through the motions of his ministry; indeed, he can’t even find the heart to treat his lover, a schoolteacher, with kindness. One of his parishioners has become obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. At his wife’s urging, this man, a fisherman, comes to the pastor for reassurance, some blessed word of hope that he can grasp as a lifeline, but Tomas can offer nothing but the bleakness of his own despair. The fisherman commits suicide. Yet Bergman takes care to show that Tomas and the fisherman are not alone in their suffering, and that others, equally ...

Here is a round-up of blogger reviews of Prince Caspian. Ross Douthat has mixed feelings, noting that this was the weakest of the Narnia series: I'm still sorting through my own thoughts before I buckle down to write my NR review, but after spending some time marinating in the Narniaphile reaction , I think that to the extent I liked the movie, it was largely for the same reasons as Frederica Mathewes-Greene : The filmmakers took what is easily the weakest of the Narnia novels, rejiggered the narrative and altered the plot, and produced an entertaining, swashbuckling medieval war movie set against a Narnian backdrop. To the extent that I disliked the movie, meanwhile, it was for the same reasons as Steven Greydanus : In the course of making a poorly-constructed book into an entertaining fantasy adventure, the filmmakers largely purged the original story of its most distinctive thematic elements, and the results owe more to Braveheart and Lord of the Rings, in certain ways, than t...

I posted this at the Lead earlier today, but thought it would be of interest to readers here as well : The film adaptation of C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian , part of the Narnia series of children's books, was released to somewhat mixed but largely positive reviews. Here is Christianity Today 's take: Lewis wanted to give his readers—including Christians who had unthinkingly bought into modernity—a taste of the spiritual realm that animates our physical world. And since he believed that the pagan, pre-Christian man had a greater aptitude for the spiritual realm, and was thus easier to convert, than the secular, post-Christian man, Lewis wrote the Narnia books to introduce his readers to a "baptized" form of paganism. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the original book version of Prince Caspian , in which the Christ-figure Aslan literally dances with the Greco-Roman god Bacchus. But Adamson and his co-writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, show no inter...

Bishop Smith reviews Beowolf and gives it a thumbs down: Last week I had the opportunity to see the hit movie Beowolf. As a sometime medievalist and Anglo-Saxon period history buff, I looked forward to this special effects treatment of the earliest English writing. As pure entertainment, I would give it an A, but as history or literature, an F would be generous. The story as told by Hollywood has only the slightest resemblance to the great 8th Century poem. What was intended as a epic portrayal of the struggle of good and evil has been turned into a predictable sentimental love triangle. Gone is the poetry,the mystery; what remains is bland dialogue and Angelina Jolie as a naked water demon in stilleto heels. What was especially disappointing was how Hollywood has turn a Christian story into an anti-Christian polemic about how the age of heroes has been replaced by simpering Christian whimps. It is hard to believe that the writers ever even read the original story! But my biggest sadne...