Category: Uncategorized

Latest reviews, both about thoughtful films for adults in limited release:

Moon, a science fiction throwback to the philosophical sci-fi of the late 1960s and early 1970s (2001: A Space Odyssey and its ilk), starring Sam Rockwell and directed by first-time filmmaker Duncan Jones. (Yes, he’s the son of David Bowie.)

Summer Hours, French director Olivier Assayas’s extraordinary family-drama meditation on legacy and loss, the meaning of art and the relentless march of time, and the fragmentation of families and erosion of culture in an age of globalization.

Although both films are philosophically freighted, both engage the world of ideas in a way organic to the spare, small-scale stories they have to tell — stories about the personal dilemmas of a small number of characters (in the case of Moon, a very small number). Both well worth tracking down.

SDG here with a heart-rending yet uplifting real-life story about life imitating art in a beautiful act of kindness from Pixar, makers of Up.

HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie.

From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.

After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.

The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie.

Colby died only seven hours after experiencing Up.

Up‘s story of bereavement and hoped-for adventures that would never be must have had shattering poignancy to that dying girl and her family. The story reports that Colby’s mother later said she had no idea how close the film would hit to home: “I just know that word ‘Up’ and all of the balloons and I swear to you, for me it meant that (Colby) was going to go up. Up to heaven.” (Colby’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church.)

The overlap of the film’s themes and Colby’s circumstances was especially brought home by one of the bits of Up memorabilia the Pixar employee brought to the family: an “Adventure Book” much like the one Ellie leaves Carl with, with its blank pages. “I’ll have to fill those adventures in for her,” Colby’s mom said. (Another point of contact: Colby’s parents are divorced, like Russell’s parents. But where Russell’s dad seems to have dropped out of his son’s life, Colby’s dad came to the house after the screening and was with his daughter when she died.)

A family friend reported that the Pixar employee “couldn’t have been nicer … His eyes were just welled up.”

A heartbreaking detail: A few days earlier, Colby’s mother had asked a hospice company to bring a wheelchair so that Colby could see the film in the theater. But the wheelchair never arrived, and Colby quickly became too sick to get out to a theater, necessitating Pixar’s supererogatory intervention. (By the time the movie came to Colby, she was in too much pain to open her eyes and look at it, so her mother gave her scene-by-scene commentary. She did, however, respond to a query about whether she enjoyed the film by nodding her head yes.)

By the way: “Pixar officials declined to comment on the story or name the employees involved.” Beyond class. That’s all I can say.

READ THE (HEART-RENDING, UPLIFTING) STORY.

Live within driving distance of New Jersey? A heads-up on two Catholic conventions in the NJ area, one of which I’ll be speaking at (I may stop in at the other too, though I’m not a speaker).

The first is the Sacred HEART Homeschooling Convention. It takes place on Saturday, June 20, a mere ten days from now, at my own home parish of St. John the Evangelist in Orange, NJ.

I’ll be speaking on homeschooling (and parenting generally) in a new media age. My friend and fellow parishioner Damon Owens, well known for his work with NFP, theology of the body and chastity on EWTN and other venues, will be speaking on marriage and the family in the Catholic faith, society and Catholic pedagogy.

We’ll be joined by Mary Daly of Ye Hedge School (the good Mary Daly, not the now-retired Boston College nutjob), Martha Nowik of Pierre Toussaint Homeschool and Dylan McDonald of the Family Cloister Learning Center.

Even if you don’t homeschool, it’ll be a great conference. There’ll be tons of vendors with lots of goodies and other stuff. Plus, you’ll get to see one of the most beautiful churches around.

And hey, today is the last day to get the early-bird registration rate. So, register now!

There’s also the Catholic Writers Conference on August 5-7 in Somerset, NJ.

There are a lot of featured speakers — Mark Brumley of Ignatius Press, Claudia Volkman and Tom Hoopes of Circle Media (which publishes my paper, the National Catholic Register), Regina Doman of Sophia Press, Sister Maria Grace of Pauline Books and Media, Lisa Wheeler of the Maximus Group and Matthew Pinto of Ascension Press publisher, among others.

So, if you’re a Catholic writer — or want to be one — register now!

I’m on Kresta right now, and Catholic Answers Live 6–7 Eastern / 3–4 Pacific), talking about Up, Star Trek, Night at the Museum and other stuff. Listen online!

P.S.S. Okay, show’s over.

UP! UP! UP!

Great day for UP!

Wake every person, pig and pup, till EVERYONE

on the EARTH is up!

That's from Dr. Seuss's Great Day for Up, but it also encapsulates my enthusiasm for Pixar's latest film (which has a bit of Dr. Seuss influence, or at least bits reminiscent of Dr. Seuss).

I don't just mean my enthusiasm for Up. I mean my enthusiasm for their latest film — whatever it is. In any given year, Pixar weekend is one of the most reliably exciting times to be a critic.

There may be better films in any given year, but no filmmaker, no franchise, no creative team, no factor I can think of more reliably translates to very high quality than the Pixar logo. No other film event more consistently stands among the year's top highlights than Pixar weekend.

Last year it was WALL-E; the year before, Ratatouille. Before that, Cars, a rare middling effort from Pixar that still stands solidly with the best of their competitors' work.

In 2005, alas, there was nothing at all — no Pixar weekend all year long. They also missed 2002 (and prior to that they averaged only a film every two years). But in between 2002 and 2005 they produced the dazzling Finding Nemo and the even greater The Incredibles, probably one of my top 25 films of all time. So you gotta cut them some slack.

Next year, Pixar weekend will bring us Toy Story 3. The following year, for the first time ever, we're slated for two Pixar weekends: Cars 2 and The Bear and the Bow, the latter being the first Pixar film with a female protagonist. (Cars 2? Who was clamoring for a sequel to Cars? When oh when will Brad Bird revisit The Incredibles?)

Being a film critic isn't all free movies and, well, free movies. You try giving up your cozy evenings at home to schlep to the city and sit through the likes of Angels & Demons and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian month after month.

And that's not all. Then you have to write about them! Which means you have to think about them! Sometimes, if you're not careful, you wind up thinking about them a lot more than the filmmakers did. And then reviews like this (or, even worse, discussions like this) are the unfortunate result.

Pixar, though, makes it all worth it.

How do they do it? How do they keep doing it? Magic? I have no idea. I just want them to never stop.

My review of Up

SDG here with two new Angels & Demons pieces: my review of the film, and an essay on the relationship of religion and science in the story. (A third piece, fact-checking Angels & Demons, went up last week.)

And that's it. I'm done. I'm Browned out. I'm grateful for the trip to Geneva and Rome, but after five different pieces for four different publications, reedited into three pieces (so far) for Decent Films, plus various radio appearances and a spot on EWTN, now that I've actually survived to opening day, I never want to hear, say, read or write the name "Robert Langdon" ever again. Ever.

Especially since Brown's upcoming third Langdon thriller, The Lost Symbol, is all about Freemasons and is apparently set in Washington, DC.

I've been to Washington, DC.

Heck, my family and I toured the West Wing, had lunch in the West Wing mess hall, and climbed up the elevator shaft at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. 

Of course, I bet Langdon will wind up jumping out of Air Force One with nothing but a propeller beanie and splashdown in the Reflecting Pool. And then find the hidden code in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence … that … Nicolas Cage already found in National Treasure. Hm.

(Oh, dang. Catholic Answers Live at the end of the month. I'm not done yet. Once more into the breach…)

SDG here with two new Decent Films pieces for the second week in a row (woo hoo!).

One is about why Star Trek is worth getting excited over. Whether you’re a Trekkie or a skeptie, the new film will probably offer you something to cheer about.

The other is an essay fact-checking Angels & Demons (both the book and the movie). Turns out a bunch of stuff Dan Brown says is really truly true actually isn’t. Who knew?

P.S. Comments, suggestions, corrections and expansions to the fact-check article are welcome. (Masked Chicken and any serious science types: I would particularly welcome your insights to my comments on the story’s science. [Dan Brown’s story, I mean.])

P.P.S. Next week I’ll have my film review of Angels & Demons, as well as another piece focusing on anti-Catholicism in the book and the film.

SDG here with a quick Decent Films update. Things have been slow lately, but May is going to really heat up.

This week I have two reviews, both pretty lukewarm, but still reviews I had a certain emotional investment in writing that I think makes them kind of interesting. Battle for Terra is up at Christianity Today Movies, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine is up at Decent Films.

In the next couple of weeks I’ll have some very NON-lukewarm coverage of two other movies, Star Trek and Angels & Demons. Star Trek is coming next week, Angels & Demons on the 15th.

Angels & Demons in particular I’ll have a bunch of coverage for — pieces written for Catholic World Report, Our Sunday Visitor, Christianity Today and the National Catholic Register, as well as the actual review of the film.

The last Friday of the month, the 29th, we’ll have the latest Pixar, Up. (I’ll be doing Catholic Answers Live that day; listen for me on Kresta the next couple of Thursdays.)

Hat tip to Jill Stanek, by way of Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things Blog, for calling attention to Wikipedia's deletion of its former article on the "Culture of Death."

Patrico writes:

“Culture of Death” can still be found as a subheading under “Culture of Life,”
so that might have something to do with it—but the website often has
entries that discuss terms with their own entries elsewhere.

Yeah, Wikipedia still features a “Culture of Death” subhead in the “Culture of Life" article — as a subsection under the heading "U.S. Politics."

Um. No, Sorry, Wikipedia. "Culture of Death" is not a subset of "U.S. Politics." The term was coined by a global figure, Pope John Paul II, to describe a global cultural phenomenon.

If you want to subsume "culture of death" and "culture of life" into one article, that's your editorial look-out. But don't marginalize the concept further by pretending that it's all about the United States. For one thing, it's America-centric. For another, it looks like glaring editorial bias.

P.S. Jill Stanek has screen grabs of older versions of the "Culture of Death" article, and someone else referenced the Wayback Machine. Doesn't Wikipedia have a way to directly reference previous versions of articles? Or does that go away if an article is deleted entirely?

In the combox for part 2, a reader writes:

But where might the concept of natural law come in — that is, the idea that certain moral laws are written on all people’s hearts, such that they cannot authentically claim that they didn’t recognize the wrongness of a certain action?

It would seem to me that such persons would have to actively “bury” the natural law in order to not recognize the wrongness of such actions — and it is that choice to “bury” the law that is sinful and extends sin to the actions that follow.

Natural law is assumed throughout my comments on conscience and authority. If there were no natural law, we would have no basis for arriving at judgments of right and wrong — we could only have blind intuitions, authoritative declarations or some combination of the two. Morality would seem totally random to us; we could have no insight into why something was right or wrong.

The possibility of “burying” or suppressing innate knowledge of right and wrong is of course always an ever-present factor to be contended with. To the extent that one is culpable for the false conclusions one arrives at, one has deliberately avoided reaching, or has at least sabotaged, one’s “last best” judgment about the right thing to do.

To that extent, one is culpable for misforming one’s conscience and therefore to that extent for the false judgments one arrives at — what is called “vincible” ignorance — and the sinful acts one commits in that state.

However, the disfiguring effects of original sin upon the faculties — what Catholic theology calls concupiscence — are also an important factor impeding us from coming to a knowledge of the truth, even the truth written on our hearts. Because of this, it can be difficult or even impossible for us to ascertain the extent to which our own acts of suppression, as opposed to the innate brokenness of our fallen condition, are responsible for our flawed knowledge of moral truth.

So, while it’s true that the moral law is written on our hearts so that we have knowledge of the truth, it’s also true that our intellects have been darkened by original sin, and this darkened condition is part of the concupiscent weakness that, even after original sin is washed away by baptism and we are reborn in Christ, makes it hard for us to attain, understand and retain spiritual truth in the fulness of its beauty and integrity.

This is why we need proper formation, as well as the illumination of regeneration, to help compensate for, correct and transcend the limitations of our broken ability to interpret correctly the truths written on our hearts. Ignorance of this sort, for which one is not culpable, is called “invicible” ignorance.

Thus, for example, we can’t necessarily say with confidence that a Protestant raised in a culture where acceptance of contraception is unanimous, or a Muslim raised with acceptance of polygamy, etc., is personally culpable for suppressing his conscience on these points — i.e., that his ignorance is vincible rather than invincible. Unanimous cultural consensus carries significant moral authority, and in the absence of adequate formation the truths written on our hearts may not come across with sufficient clarity to the darkened intellect to empower the individual to challenge his culture.

Or again they may, by God’s grace, for a particular person. But it’s for God alone to judge that in a particular case a person is necessarily culpable for burying the witness of his conscience. Even when it comes to more disturbing practices or institutions (female genital mutilation or male castration, for instance, or even human sacrifice), ascertaining the moral culpability of individuals is not for use to judge.

I’m not denying that individuals in such cultures, or some individuals, may know somewhere deep down that these things are wrong, and may be culpable for suppressing such knowledge of the truth as they may find written on their hearts. I’m saying that concupiscence complicates things, and only God can can ascertain the vincibility or invicibility of particular errors, the culpability or inculpability of a particular person’s failure to discern truths written on our hearts.