This year’s Oscars may have been passed out, but for some churches across the country the major motion picture season is just getting started.
Frustrated with the movies Hollywood has been releasing, more and more congregations are making their own feature films.
One is Friends Church here in Yorba Linda, a Quaker congregation with an evangelical megachurch worship style where members are finishing production on a film called “Not Today.”
Television writer-producer Jill Soloway turned off her electronic devices for 24 hours last Saturday and spent the morning playing with her 2-year-old son in her yard in Silver Lake.
“It was excruciating and kind of wonderful. I struggled with a feeling of anxiety that there was something in my inbox I needed to tend to,” she said. “Then came a moment when it felt like a holiday. Holiday means holy day. What a huge gift.”
Soloway, executive producer of the Showtime series “United States of Tara,” and a self-described smartphone junkie, was taking part in the “National Day of Unplugging,” organized by Reboot, a group of urban media professionals who try to reconnect with Jewish tradition in a way that is meaningful to their hectic lives.
The aroma of freshly popped popcorn and the crack of soda cans opening while the “Gladiator” soundtrack blares through the speakers are a signal that it’s guys night out at Cornerstone Church.
Tonight’s feature is “Open Range,” a Western that pits those who believe in free access to water and grass for everyone’s cattle against “barbed wire” land barons, who used the fencing to block cattlemen from moving their herds.
But “Open Range” isn’t just a drama about late-19th century range wars, said Kevin Miles, founder and director of the Caledonia-based Go the Distance Ministries and sponsor of the movie series.
“The King’s Speech,” the period drama about King George VI of Britain and his vocal coach, won best picture and three other trophies at the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night. But in many ways the Oscars played out like the more populist and less prestigious Golden Globes: veering in multiple directions as voters sprinkled their attention among a half-dozen pictures, with no film walking away with a commanding sweep.
“The King’s Speech” did not make its presence felt until late in the night, with an unexpected victory for Tom Hooper as best director. David Seidler won for his original screenplay for this film, while Colin Firth took the best-actor prize.
“I have a feeling my career’s just peaked,” said Mr. Firth, who went on to joke that he was “experiencing stirrings” somewhere in the upper abdominal region, “which are threatening to transform themselves into dance moves.”
In the long history of movie making, actors and actresses have won Oscars for playing many different sorts of roles: gangsters (Marlon Brando in The Godfather) and kings (Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII); peasants (Luise Rainer in The Good Earth) and princesses (Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday); real-life geniuses (Paul Muni in The Story of Louis Pasteur) and fictional serial killers (Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs).
A few of the golden statuettes have also been presented to performers who played outstanding Catholics, even saints, or appeared in films that centered on Catholicism.
Presented chronologically, here is a roster of Academy Award winners in the categories of best actors and actresses, and best supporting actors and actresses, who were rewarded on earth for portraying those who had their eyes on heaven….
Read it all and take a guess and see how many you can get first before looking.
Caught this on the morning run today–very enjoyable. Watch it all.
For those of you with access to HBO, Laurence Fishburne’s one man show (it is based on a play) entitled Thurgood [for Thurgood Marshall whom Fishburne portrays] is simply splendid–KSH.
A new television series includes the research expertise of Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar at the University of Exeter.
Channel 4’s series The Bible: A History intends to show how the Bible has played a major role in shaping people’s ideas about the world.
In the second episode Dr Stavrakopoulou is interviewed by presenter Rageh Omaar about Abraham and his role in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The interview focuses on the biblical claim that God promised Abraham the land of Canaan, the land now claimed by Israelis and Palestinians today. Dr Stavrakopoulou’s research focuses on the worship of the dead as divine ancestors, illustrating how the graves of ancestors marked the territorial claims of their living relatives. Her research suggests that the tomb in Hebron where Abraham is supposed to have been buried represents an ancient attempt to exploit this territoriality in favour of ancient land claims asserted by biblical writers. It goes onto to suggest that these claims continue to be asserted and contested by some Israelis and Palestinians today who claim direct descent from Abraham.
Read it all and you can find a lot more information about this over here.
Our film critics are not on Pixar’s payroll. Nor are they getting any under-the-table perks from the animation studio. There’s a much less sinister reason that a Pixar movie””in this case, Toy Story 3””tops our Most Redeeming Films list for the third consecutive year: We think their movies rock.
It’s not just the astonishingly good animation. It’s the phenomenal storytelling, the depth of character development, the keen insight into the human condition””even from the perspective of plastic playthings. One of our critics confesses that he cried at the end of TS3 all three times he watched it””and will likely do so the next three times. That’s what Pixar films do to us.
Were these acts of God, or is there a scientific explanation for events that seem to defy reason?
For an hour every Wednesday night (10 p.m. EST), that divisive question is the focus of “Miracle Detectives,” one of prime-time television’s first forays into exploring the miraculous.
The show features two investigators””one a believer, the other a scientist””who seek answers to “mysterious incidents that seem to transcend logic.” It’s one of 17 programs on the new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which debuted New Year’s Day.
The film opens with a passage from Job, as spoken by Penny in a voiceover. That’s not necessarily a popular decision in secular moviemaking.
We wrestled with that. There was a discussion about whether this movie should be called Secretariat at all. You want the title to be compelling, intriguing, something that draws people in. I consulted some friends and said I’d love a passage like Chariots of Fire, something that feels biblical and powerful and iconic. They came up with that quote from Job, and it works really well. It’s a great setup for the movie.
At a time of new beginnings in Washington, and as a new year starts, some thoughts on leadership that begin with two questions. First, why is it a good thing that the captain of the USS Enterprise was this week relieved of his duties? Second, why is the movie “The King’s Speech” so popular and admired? The questions are united by a theme. It is that no one knows how to act anymore, and people miss people who knew how to act.
The whole family here went last evening–it was simply stellar.
For better and worse, this is one of those movie years when there’s widespread agreement among the early awards-givers and, presumably, among critics putting together their ritual 10-best lists. It’s better because the movies winning consistent favor are really good, and worse because they’re so few in number. While the pickings haven’t been slim, they haven’t been bountiful either.
My choice for the year’s best movie is “The Social Network.” If that means I’ve succumbed to a herd mentality, so be it; herds can stampede in the right direction. The film’s ambition is what I admire most. It grabs onto a genuine phenomenon in contemporary life and tells us things we didn’t know about it.
A whisker-close second is “The King’s Speech….”
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
With Facebook, [Mark] Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook””if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large””this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed””and been ashamed of noticing””that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX
When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?
Google is expanding its feature film streaming service, says a source who’s been briefed on the product. The service will likely be an expansion of the current movie rental/streaming test launched by Google earlier this year. Announcements should be made in early 2011, says our source, and will be heavily marketed.
Ex-Netflix executive Robert Kyncl, who was hired by Google earlier this year, is negotiating studio deals, says our source. The service will initially focus on top tier films and to focus marketing efforts there, including pairing with Google TV. A deeper library will be added over time. Existing rental titles are certainly not new release top tier films.
Elizabeth and I went to see this movie last night. Intriguing to watch how they do a motion picture without the access to normal “motion” in terms of the story line. James Franco was fantastic–KSH.
Its official ”“ Spain and Portugal will need to be bailed out soon. How do I know? In one of my favorite TV shows, Yes Minister, the all-knowing civil servant Sir Humphrey explains to cabinet minister Jim Hacker that you can never be certain that something will happen until the government denies it.
–From Michael Pettis.
Walt Disney Co. has begun rolling out its plan to spur digital movie purchases by removing the technological obstacles that thus far have stymied growth.
The studio has quietly launched Disney Movies Online, which lets consumers buy or rent digital versions of Disney and Pixar films and watch them on the Internet. The site was conceived as a bridge to gently transition the family entertainment company’s mainstream consumers from the physical to the digital world. It debuted in May without fanfare.
How much without fanfare? Disney still isn’t promoting the site beyond including the Web address on a sleeve inside DVDs and Blu-ray packages. There isn’t even a link to it on the company’s main website.
The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s oft-quoted observation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men’s jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.
Tonight, CNN will show a documentary called “Almighty Debt” that focuses on the financial standing of African-American families. There are a number of thought-provoking moments throughout the show, but the one that really takes your breath away occurs when DeForest B. Soaries, Jr., the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, N.J., declares that debt is a bigger threat to blacks than racism.
Set against the backdrop of post-9/11 paranoia, with a lead character who has lost his wife and daughter in the destruction at ground zero, Rubicon seems almost designed to fan conspiracy-theory flames among those who believe despite all indications that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were an inside job ”” a government conspiracy. Bromell knows that all too well.
“There are a lot of nuts out there,” he says ruefully. “Thomas Pynchon beautifully said in, I think, V, that what we got when we lost religion as a unifying glue in our culture was paranoia. Because we have to have something that suggests there are secret workings going on, and if we decide it’s not God, we have to put something in there. And he may be right: It’s less terrifying to look out into the world and see conspiracy, no matter how kooky it sounds, than to look out in the world and see nothing.”
And frankly, he thinks there are elements of society and the government whose activities could, broadly speaking, be described as conspiracy.
You can read about it here where the introduction begins this way:
How has religious belief shaped American history? What role have religious ideas and spiritual experience played in shaping the social, political and cultural life of what has become the world’s most religiously diverse nation?
For the first time on television, God in America, a presentation of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE, will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States. The six-hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization and interviews with religious historians, will air over three consecutive nights on PBS beginning Oct. 11, 2010.
Read the whole thing at the link and you can watch a preview there also.
The documentary “Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today” is a historical artifact with its own torturous past, quite apart from the momentous events chronicled within its frames. Commissioned as an official U.S. government record of the trial in 1945-46, when 21 high-ranking members of the Third Reich were prosecuted for war crimes at an International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, the 78-minute film by Stuart Schulberg was completed in April 1948.
By then, though, fears of a new war, this one with the Soviet Union, led the government to shelve the project. Over the years, attempts to revive it went nowhere. The negative mysteriously vanished. Without the efforts of Sandra Schulberg, who has supervised the reconstruction of her father’s labors by relying on a German print of the original, it might never have been seen again. Not until this September, when it premiered at the New York Film Festival, did the documentary receive a public screening in this country. (The film just concluded a limited-engagement run here at the Film Forum, and will be screened Friday in New York and Washington, D.C., before traveling to venues across the U.S.)
Which member of the cast of Fringe is a very accomplished classically trained musician who served as a choirboy at Grace & St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore City?
We’d really rather take a taxi.
American adults walk less than adults in some other countries with lower obesity rates, according to a new study in the October issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.
Researchers compared 1,136 U.S. adults wearing pedometers with adults involved in similar studies in Australia, Japan and Switzerland. The mean number of steps Americans take in a day is 5,117, compared with 9,695 for Australians, the walking leaders among the four countries. The USA’s 34% adult obesity rate is more than double Australia’s 16%.
“It did surprise me how sedentary U.S. adults are,” says David Bassett, the lead author of the study. “The additional walking seems to have an enormous public health benefit for those (other) countries.”
Before Stephen J. Cannell, television’s heroes tended to be square-jawed, flawless, never-a-hair-out-of-place kind of guys. But the creator of series such as “The Rockford Files” and “The A-Team” changed that.
“His characters had weaknesses — they were fallible human beings,” said David Chase, who worked early in his career with the prolific producer on “The Rockford Files.” “That was the beginning of viewers seeing a TV protagonist as someone like themselves.”
The Rockford Files was one of my favorites growing up. He will be missed–read it all–KSH.
Tony Curtis, a classically handsome movie star who earned an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in Stanley Kramer’s 1958 movie “The Defiant Ones,” but whose public preferred him in comic roles in films like “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Great Race” (1965), died Wednesday of a cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas area home. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by the Clark County coroner, The Associated Press reported.
As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).
But behind the pretty-boy looks could be found a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability….
“To me,” Mr. Allen said, “there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful….”
Q. The ideas of psychic powers and past lives, or at least people who believe in them, are central to your latest film. What got you interested in writing about them?
A. I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t. I’ve known people who have put their faith in religion and in fortune tellers. So it occurred to me that that was a good character for a movie: a woman who everything had failed for her, and all of a sudden, it turned out that a woman telling her fortune was helping her. The problem is, eventually, she’s in for a rude awakening.
Q. What seems more plausible to you, that we’ve existed in past lives, or that there is a God?
A. Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get.