A few years ago, Mary Finucane started noticing changes in the way her 3-year-old daughter played. The toddler had stopped running and jumping, and insisted on wearing only dresses. She sat on the front step quietly ”“ waiting, she said, for her prince. She seemed less imaginative, less spunky, less interested in the world.

Ms. Finucane believes the shift began when Caoimhe (pronounced Keeva) discovered the Disney Princesses, that omnipresent, pastel packaged franchise of slender-waisted fairy-tale heroines. When Finucane mentioned her suspicions to other parents, they mostly shrugged.

“Everyone seemed to think it was inevitable,” Finucane says. “You know, it was Disney Princesses from [ages] 2 to 5, then Hannah Montana, then ‘High School Musical.’ I thought it was so strange that these were the new trajectories of female childhood.”

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Have you heard the one about the comic who took on the establishment that loves him? Frank Skinner, the comedian, has accused atheists of threatening humanity. Interviewed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Skinner, a practising Catholic, urged fellow believers to stand together against secularists who undermine religion.

Even if it had been Dr Rowan Williams issuing this call to arms, the audience at Canterbury Cathedral would have stopped fanning themselves with their programmes, sat up and taken notice: turning the tables on, rather than turning the other cheek to, atheist bullies represents a sensational departure from the script British Christians have recited for generations.

But the man advocating that we “stop giving in” to atheists is a popular entertainer, the football-loving king of “laddish” humour. The issue is no longer a surprising rethink; it is a breathtaking act of subversion.

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When companies I love (as a customer) and admire/enjoy writing about (as a journalist) do something that seems downright crazy to both sides of my brain, like splitting up a well-known brand and its useful and well-loved website, I tend to wonder if I’m missing something.

Netflix’s announcement that it would split into a streaming-only business (called Netflix) and a discs-by-mail business (called Qwikster) caught me by surprise. It’s easy to miss a lot of things when you’re surprised, particularly when the surprise drops after midnight on the east coast, and you stay up all night writing and talking about it.

When this happens, it’s best to look for smart people with different opinions from yours, who’ve probably also had more sleep than you have.

Read it all.

Even with the armor that 10 years’ distance provides, there is no way to prepare emotionally for a confrontation with the facts of the 9/11 terror attack. That confrontation is the unavoidable result of the anniversary observance, and its most essential one. It is, one could say, the heart of the matter. There will be many speeches on the anniversary, plenty of tributes to the meaning of the day, and plentiful testimony about the universal lessons to be drawn from this occasion.

And yet no testimony could be as fitting as the hard facts of that September day a decade ago””the one, a Smithsonian documentary declares, that changed the world. Of the numerous television films produced in commemoration of this 9/11 anniversary, the Smithsonian Channel’s stands out for the clarity and strength of its narrative (delivered by Martin Sheen), and its focus. A heart-shattering focus, often enough as it takes in the pictures so well remembered, but so expertly deployed that those images seem here more immediate, the stories they tell more abundant. Here again are the scenes of people escaping the inferno of the World Trade Center just in time””crowds of dazed men and women dragging strangers alongside them into the safety of the street.

Read it all.

You may find the website here.

Elizabeth and I both thought it was very good–KSH.

DeVon Franklin was on track to become a mover and shaker in Hollywood when he hit what he calls “development hell.” For a time, his upwardly mobile career path was stalling, if not dying altogether. His employer, MGM, was about to be sold, and Franklin, then a junior exec, thought he’d lose his job.

When Sony Pictures bought MGM in 2004, Franklin survived the sale and continued his climb. He’s now vice president of production for Columbia Pictures (a division of Sony), where he has overseen such projects as The Pursuit of Happyness, The Karate Kid, and this summer’s Jumping the Broom. Franklin, 33 and single, chronicles his story in Produced by Faith: Enjoy Real Success Without Losing Your True Self (Howard Books, 2011). His book encourages fellow Christians to use “faith as a professional asset,” with chapters on “Writing the Script,” “God’s Green Light,” and, yes, “Development Hell.”

Actor Will Smith, one of Franklin’s oldest friends in Hollywood, says Franklin “lives his life the same way he makes his movies: with commitment, humility, and a work ethic that demands respect.”

Read it all.

The male archetypes populating contemporary movies don’t line up with reality, yet they offer clues about what the men of our dreams look like, or at least what moviemakers are trying to sell us. What do men want? What does it mean to be a man? How does a man relate to other men? And perhaps above all, how does he relate to women, who increasingly occupy a separate sphere on the big screen even as they appear to have more room on television, for themselves and in their relationships with men? There are no simple answers to these questions, but following many grueling, air-conditioned, popcorn-fueled hours of research, we have assembled enough data to offer an abridged field guide to the Hollywood male animal.

Their categories are: the big baby; the brave boy; the bachelor; the husband; the hero; and the wimp. Read it all–KSH..

“Koran by Heart” simultaneously embraces and subverts a familiar documentary genre. As several critics noted when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, it follows the formula of cute, precocious kids under win-or-lose pressure that was popularized by the 2002 film “Spellbound” and “Mad Hot Ballroom” in 2005.

Unlike a spelling bee or a dance tournament, though, the International Holy Koran Competition, held annually in Cairo, has consequences beyond triumph or tears. In Mr. Barker’s supple, subtle hands, the contest provides a means of exploring the tension within Islam between the kind of fundamentalism typified by rote, literalist instruction and the modernity outside the madrasa’s door.

“I was interested in Islam as a force in the world,” Mr. Barker, 48, said in a Skype interview from his home in the Los Angeles area. “The struggles, the conversation about modernity within the faith. It’s not what most people are aware of. I was looking for a way to put a human face on the religion and on the struggle. And as a filmmaker, I was looking for a way in.”

Read it all.

Wow–watch it all.

“This is the happiest day of my life!” So says Maci Bookout, according to a recent cover of OK! magazine, where the 19-year-old Teen Mom star and rumored bride-to-be flashes a beauty-queen smile. Sharing cover space with Bookout ”” and sporting a bikini, plus a baby on each hip ”” is Leah Messer, 19, whose dream wedding was featured in last spring’s season finale of Teen Mom 2. (One month later, she filed for divorce.) Elsewhere in the celebrity mediasphere, one might find Teen Mom’s Farrah Abraham, 20, staging a photo op for paparazzi on a Florida beach, or Abraham’s castmate Amber Portwood, 21, posing for photographers outside her latest court hearing; she was recently sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to felony domestic battery against the father of her child.

A spin-off of MTV’s popular reality series 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom recently entered its third season. With more than 3 million viewers each week, it’s the network’s top-rated show after Jersey Shore, and its subjects provide endless fodder for the tabloids.

Ugh–read it all.

Mr. Schwartz weathered painfully dismissive reviews to see his shows prosper and live on for decades in syndication. Many critics suggested that they were successful because they ran counter to the tumultuous times in which they appeared: the era of the Vietnam War and sweeping social change.

Give or take a month or so, the original network run of “The Brady Bunch” coincided with two major upheavals in American society. The show, about a squeaky-clean blended family in California, began in 1969, shortly after Woodstock, and ended in 1974, soon after President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Schwartz’s work may have been seen as lighthearted entertainment, but some scholars of popular culture took it very seriously. David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, authors of “Prime Time, Prime Movers,” in which they advance an auteur theory of television, considered Mr. Schwartz an innovator who made a “surgical strike into the national psyche.”

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As a child growing up just south of Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell used to sit on the front porch, listening to adults tell stories about the Civil War as they passed still summer nights in Clayton County. Those stories went on to help inspire one of the most famous novels of all time ”” Gone with the Wind, which was published 75 years ago this month.

Mitchell “used to pretend that she was asleep,” says Peter Bonner, who runs a tour company in the area. “[She would] lay there on the porch and stick around and hear some of those great stories. Later, she said, ‘I sat on the fat slippery laps of my great-aunts and heard what would become Gone with the Wind.’ ”

Read (or much better with more content listen to) it all.

…like that of his contemporary Telly Savalas of “Kojak” fame, Mr. Falk’s prime-time popularity was founded on a single role.

A lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, Columbo was a comic variation on the traditional fictional detective. With the keen mind of Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe, he was cast in the mold of neither ”” not a gentleman scholar, and not a tough guy. He was instead a mass of quirks and peculiarities, a seemingly distracted figure in a rumpled raincoat, perpetually patting his pockets for a light for his signature stogie.

He drove a battered Peugeot, was unfailingly polite, was sometimes accompanied by a basset hound named Dog, and was constantly referring to the wisdom of his wife (who was never seen on screen) and a variety of relatives and acquaintances who were identified in Homeric-epithet-like shorthand ”” an uncle who played the bagpipes with the Shriners, say, or a nephew majoring in dermatology at U.C.L.A. ”” and who were called to mind by the circumstances of the crime at hand.

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A former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, said that the BBC had some “hard questions to address”, after broadcasting the programme. “Its own guidelines state that the portrayal of suicide has the potential to make this appear possible, and even appropriate, to the vulnerable.” He also argued that “the BBC has an obligation to provide a balanced presentation of the moral issues of the day,” but “so far, there has been little evidence of such balance in this matter.”

In a statement, the BBC said that it ac­know­­ledged that suicide was “an exceptionally difficult issue”, which “should be portrayed with the utmost sensitivity”. It argued that there was “a clear editorial justification” to broadcast the programme, which “does not encourage suicide and does not breach BBC guidelines.

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On Monday the BBC, which has been accused of becoming a ”˜”˜cheerleader’’ for assisted suicide, defended its decision to show Mr [Peter] Smedley’s death in the film.

Sir Terry hopes it will persuade the Government to think again about the law and advocates a system in which doctors are able to prescribe take-home suicide kits to enable terminally-ill patients to choose the right moment to end their lives.

Mrs Smedley said… last night that she did not want to discuss her husband’s death.

Read it all.

Living can be brutal. The other Dignitas customer in the programme ”” not filmed dying, but discussed up to the final handshake ”” is a 42-year-old man who tried suicide twice, failed, and took the journey to certainty. Again, earlier than he truly needed to. The window of opportunity, he saw clearly, would close as he travelled down “the narrowing alleyway” of disability….

The actual nature of the Dignitas experience….is grim. Even discounting the disgraceful fact that 21 per cent of its customers don’t have a terminal disease but depression, and that the Swiss authorities seem unwilling to intervene, there is something horrible ”” a condemned-cell atmosphere ”” about the process: the files, the signatures, the insistence that you practise drinking the stuff in one long draught “and do not sip”, the dreary environs, the anti-nausea drug taken beforehand so that Mr [Peter] Smedley observes how odd it is to be told “ten minutes more”.

Read it all (requires London Times subscription) and you may find a lot more articles on this there.

As the story goes, [Terrence] Malick began working on the idea for the film 30 or perhaps even 40 years ago. Reportedly, he spent years studying the origins of the universe and related science and technology with scholars. (A Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Malick taught philosophy at MIT before he started making films.)

Several critics have called “Tree of Life” Malick’s magnum opus, the culmination of all his artistic endeavors. Roger Ebert called the film “a form of prayer,” that created a “spiritual awareness” in the film critic, while eschewing “conventional theologies.”
Malick isn’t talking about his intentions. Notoriously private, he does not grant interviews and kept “Tree of Life” shrouded in secrecy from its inception until its recent screening at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film begins with a quote from one of the more confounding books of the Bible: Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”

Read it all.

Perhaps it is because both my parents were teachers, but this is my favorite scene from the movie. Watch it all–KSH. (It ties in with the finale as those of you who know the movie well know; it can be found here).

What has helped make her all the things she is? It’s the two things she’s not: a wife and mother. A lot of ambitious women will say they had to make a choice: They could be a CEO or get married and have kids but most assuredly not both. With Oprah it seemed a whole other matter entirely. She’s like the religious leader who forswears marriage and children to better serve her flock. Perhaps she made a sage choice. Unlike many wives, she tended to get the last word. Unlike many mothers, she had countless followers always willing to take her suggestions””be your best self, find your own power””as commandments.

Oprah’s final show made it difficult to avoid ecclesiastical comparisons. “Amazing Grace,” she told her rapturous audience, “is the song of my life.” “This was what I was called to do,” she said at another point. She also referenced the hand of God and the presence of God, offering prayers of gratitude “for the privilege of doing the show,” talking about her “yellow-brick-road of blessings,” and signing off for the last time with hands raised in benediction and a fervent “God be the Glory.” Even the heavenly host might find this host a tough act to follow.

Read it all from the Op-ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal.

Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Excitement filled the air. Hopeful entrepreneurs drove fast cars to their shiny workplaces, where they discussed the boundless possibilities arising from the technological explosion unfolding before their eyes. They progressed in leaps and bounds towards their utopia: a self-stabilising network of human beings who could be free of state control and country borders.

Whence came that dream? And whither did it lead? In his new series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, British documentarian Adam Curtis, famed for his incisive and sometimes controversial socio-political works, marries his indisputable knowledge of economic and political history with insights into the way that computers have shaped not only our world, but our world view.

Read it all.

To be surrounded by the most concentrated beauty the world has to offer and yet be chronically depressed is to confront the sad reality that material bounty may bring fleeting pleasure but nothing resembling peace of mind. To realize that you may have the world while still feeling as if you have nothing is to experience a closer encounter with the void than most of us are likely to have.

As his depression deepened [Yves] Saint Laurent was joyful only twice a year, on the days a new collection was shown, usually to wild acclaim, according to friends interviewed in the film. Within 24 hours that joy had evaporated. Saint Laurent was so attached to his favorite objects that to part with even one of them would leave “a black hole” in his life, recalls Pierre Bergé, his partner (in business and in life) for a half-century. But the pride of ownership went only so far.

—Stephen Holden in “The Passions and Demons of Yves Saint Laurent”, a review of the documentary just out

When the wartime epic “There Be Dragons” opens in theaters today, it will cap a remarkable evolution in the popular representation of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic society whose founder, Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, is the hero of the new film.

Set during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, when Escrivá was a young man (he died in 1975 and was canonized Saint Josemaría in 2002), “There Be Dragons” was conceived by Roland Joffé, the Oscar-nominated English director and self-described “wobbly agnostic,” who is hardly one to carry water for a group like Opus Dei. But Mr. Joffé offers a human and sympathetic portrait of Escrivá and, by extension, of Opus Dei.

That is quite a change from the sinister portrayal of Opus Dei in the 2006 film adaptation of Dan Brown’s thriller, “The Da Vinci Code,” which included a murderous albino monk in its cast of caricatures. Yet the cinematic shift is more than an artistic choice. At a deeper level it symbolizes a genuine evolution for Opus Dei, an often insular movement that many in the church once considered the bogeyman of the right.

Read it all.

[Ellen] Barkin graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, even though her teachers advised her parents to take her out of school because she wasn’t “pretty enough” and had “very little talent and no spark.” It took her years to recover from that assessment, but once she did, she was cast in Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and found enough spark to burn up the screen with Dennis Quaid in “The Big Easy” and Al Pacino in “Sea of Love.”

–From a profile of Ms. Barkin in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine (my emphasis)

ABC’s “This Week” celebrates Easter with a trio of religious leaders. The Rev. Franklin Graham, Pastor Tim Keller and the Rev. Al Sharpton are the scheduled guests.

Perhaps some of us may consider recording this–KSH.

I’m obviously biased, but I was very impressed with the quality of the film and the acting, and highly recommend it to you. It is rated PG and with the exception of the brief scenes around the attack itself, is appropriate for the whole family.

After viewing the film, I became aware that Bethany Hamilton’s faith in Christ and the faith of her family generated some controversy on the set. “I think to get anything in the film was a battle,” said Sarah Hill, Hamilton’s youth pastor at North Shore Christian Church (and played by Carrie Underwood). Hill was on the set often, and went on to say:

“Basically, what you’re doing is you have all these people who want to make a movie about Bethany and they don’t know the Lord and they don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus. For what we have in the movie it was such a battle.”

Read it all.

Check it out–it is on the front page of the local paper.

Was there a point early in your career when you thought you could change minds through film?
I guess I did. When I was younger, naive. I thought, Maybe The Candidate will affect young people. The point of that film was that we select people by cosmetics, not substance. I thought maybe that point would get through and they would demand more of their candidates. But I’ve come to feel that [film] is not going to change anything.

Do you wish you had acted more in recent decades?
Yes. I segued into directing because I wanted more control of the story. But I started as an actor. I am an actor. I think a lot of people think that I don’t [act] anymore or that I’m more involved in Sundance. But it’s not true.

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It may seem odd that Madonna, who is not Jewish, is the public face of Kabbalah. It was the Berg family that repackaged an esoteric body of Jewish thought”””the secret life of Judaism,” in Scholem’s words””into a universal self-help theosophy open to Jew and Gentile alike. In the process, the Centre stripped Kabbalah of much of its Jewishness. The website states it plainly: “Kabbalah is not a religion.” Yehuda Berg, though himself a rabbi, has said that he doesn’t consider himself Jewish, and in a cover blurb for his 2002 book, “The Power of Kabbalah,” Madonna underscores this point, writing that Kabbalah has “nothing to do with religious dogma.”

So what does the Kabbalah Centre have to do with classical Jewish mysticism? Not much, according to critics. The great Talmudic scholar Adin Steinsaltz has likened the connection to “the relationship between pornography and love.” Allan Nadler, a professor of Jewish Studies at Drew University, is even less charitable: “The Bergs hijacked an ancient, highly secretive Jewish tradition and popularized it as pseudo-mystical, New Age nonsense.”

Read it all.

Holy Wood Acting Studio had its grand opening on March 25 to begin its mission to create talented actors with the “emotional and spiritual maturity” to endure the challenges in their careers.

“The opening of Holy Wood Acting Studio represents a new era for the entertainment industry, an era where actors will not only thrill audiences with amazing performances, but also inspire them through moral, intellectual, and spiritual integrity,” the Culver City, Calif. studio said in a statement.

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Nobody should object to the making of films on the ongoing traumas of the 21st century ”“ and some docudramas have been nuanced and even poetic. The Hamburg Cell stands out. Written by Ronan Bennett and directed by Antonia Bird, it is an exploratory journey into the heads of three of the 9/11 bombers. Impressive too was Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4), about two highly educated British Muslim siblings, a brother and sister, and how anti-terrorist legislation devastates them. The problem is, there is almost nothing else. When the IRA were terrorising the UK, Irish characters and storylines weren’t restricted to that one political conflict to the exclusion of all else.

Where is the soulful, female Muslim singer, the wily, kebab millionaire, the two-timing Pakistani cricketer, the Arab heartthrob? They do all exist, but these roles are not written into scripts. The industry does not admit or nurture Muslim talent either ”“ writers, actors, directors, producers, editors ”“ and cannot see them as worthy professionals.

Read it all.