The BBC’s coverage of the papal visit so far has been very good. Jim Naughtie on the Today programme this morning was almost Dimblebyian in his gravity and respect and sense of occasion, and the TV reporters did well too. We should be proud of our national broadcaster, in spite of its many faults. Not all of us are. Some have suggested that last night the BBC gave too much prominence to Cardinal Kasper’s chance remark that landing at Heathrow was like landing in the Third World. But did other broadcasting outlets not give it equal prominence? It’s what we call a “good” story ”“ ie, it was bad news ”“ and it therefore got a lot of coverage everywhere. It was the front-page lead in the Daily Mail and the Guardian, which between them cover all shades of opinion in Britain….

Read it all.

Waiting for “Superman” is a new film about America’s malfunctioning education system by Davis Guggenheim….

…the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently. Today, several decades into America’s long fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously. First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year ”” and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Second, legions of public schools ”” some charters, some not ”” are succeeding while others flounder. These schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party’s most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers’ unions.

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After 40 years of continual declines, the smoking rate in the United States has stabilized for the past five years, with one in every five Americans still lighting up regularly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

Moreover, more than half of all children are exposed to toxic secondhand smoke and 98% of those who live with a smoker have measurable levels of toxic chemicals in their blood stream, setting them up for future harm from cancer, heart disease and a variety of other ailments.

“If you smoke and have children, don’t kid yourself. Your smoke is harming your children,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, CDC director, said in a news conference.

Read it all.

An Ottawa pub has refused to host an Anglican church group’s film night, fearing the movie’s debate over the existence of God may offend religious pub-goers.

The Heart & Crown pub says it decided to pull the plug on St. Alban’s Anglican Church’s showing this week of the movie Collision ”” a documentary featuring well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens and evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson ”” after seeing a pamphlet advertising the film.

“We made the decision to cancel the reservation because, bottom line is, we just think that our business isn’t the forum or the environment for that type of movie,” said Heart & Crown Pubs spokesman Alex Munroe, who admitted he hadn’t actually watched the film.

Read it all.

Google’s YouTube video site is in negotiations with Hollywood’s leading movie studios to launch a global pay-per-view video service by the end of 2010, putting it head-to-head with Apple in the race to dominate the digital distribution of film and television content.

Google has been pitching to the studios on the international appeal of a streaming, on-demand movie service pegged to the world’s most popular search engine and YouTube, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

Read it all.

Check it out to see which film(s) and book(s) were chosen.

This summer I’ve been waiting for the opening of the movie Eat, Pray, Love with an anticipation that is a bit different from my hope that Congress would find effective strategies to address climate change. The difference? I don’t think I’ll be disappointed with the movie’s ending.

I’m a Christian, an environmentalist, an academic and a pop-culture junkie. And I think the three verbs in the movie’s title ”” eat, pray, love ”” might provide direction for the thousands of believers from diverse faith traditions who advocated for a religious response to global warming in three stories that unfolded this summer.

Despite sincere prayer and informed lobbying, people of faith have watched: (1) the Senate’s inability to tackle the real problem of climate change, (2) the lack of progress at the United Nations Climate Change Conference and (3) the failure of the oil spill along the Gulf Coast to create a national demand for alternative energy sources.

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… the film tracks the story of Mohammed Abu Mustafa, a 4-month-old Palestinian baby suffering from a rare immune deficiency. Moved by the baby’s plight, Eldar helps the infant and mother go from Gaza to Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital for lifesaving bone-marrow treatment. The operation costs $55,000. Eldar puts out an appeal on Israel TV and within hours an Israeli Jew whose own son was killed during military service donates all the money.

The documentary takes a dramatic turn, though, when the infant’s Palestinian mother, Raida, who is being disparaged by fellow Gazans for having her son treated in Israel, blurts out that she hopes he’ll grow up to be a suicide bomber to help recover Jerusalem. Raida tells Eldar: “From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem. We feel we have the right to it. You’re free to be angry, so be angry.”

Eldar is devastated by her declaration and stops making the film. But this is no Israeli propaganda movie. The drama of the Palestinian boy’s rescue at an Israeli hospital is juxtaposed against Israeli retaliations for shelling from Gaza, which kill whole Palestinian families.

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You have a history of playing flawed, complicated, broken men. What attracts you to these roles?

Well, they present themselves to me, and those characters make good drama. If people don’t have conflicts, contradictions, and faults, then there is no drama there. My favorite part of all time was probably Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove; I also played Josef Stalin in a TV movie. I also always try to find the vulnerable side and the positive side of the character….

Some people thought The Apostle was mocking Southern holiness or Pentecostal preachers ”¦

Who said that?

Oh, some Christians wished it had been a more positive portrayal of a preacher rather than a man with all these ”¦

Let me straighten these people out. And you can put it in print. My guy [Rev. Euliss “Sonny” Dewey, the title character] killed a guy out of anger, right? But he wasn’t one half as bad as King David in the Psalms, who sent a man off to be killed so he could be with his wife. Every time I read the Psalms I think of that. But on the other hand, I heard that Billy Graham liked the movie, and many, many preachers did. Rev. James Robison of Fort Worth said I could use anything from any of his services to put in the film. So I’m not mocking.

If Hollywood had done this, they would have mocked these people. No, I did not mock these people. I didn’t patronize these people. I’ve been in many, many churches, Pentecostal churches. I could have made these people look bad if I wanted to. So you can tell these people I did not mock these people or condescend at all. Had I done it in a Hollywood movie, we would have patronized these people. That’s why I had to do the movie myself.

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The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times. As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink.

Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?

In the early ’60s they smoldered against the repression of the ’50s; and it may be that we smolder a little against the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times.

All I can say is I sat here wondering if Ms. Roiphe and I were inhabiting the same globe, much less the same country. In any event, read it all–KSH (and you already knew this–the emphasis above is mine).

Though “Ramona and Beezus’s” cinematic creators avoided blatant references to any particular era, the movie’s constant celebration of self-actualization is thoroughly modern. “You don’t worry about coloring inside the lines,” Beezus remarks (admiringly) to Ramona. Mr. Quimby, discovered doodling in a book about new-economy jobs, remarks that “I used to be a creative guy.” This being a movie, we trust he’ll be one again.

The books, though, have a harder edge. When Mr. Quimby loses his job in the film, he turns into an affable, if forgetful, Mr. Mom. In the books, he succumbs to the more realistic depression that often accompanies a breadwinner’s job loss. He sits on the couch, watching TV, smoking heavily and not taking Ramona to the park because someone might call to offer him a job.

In the movie, the great child-care snafu is when Ramona gets sick at school and Mr. Quimby cancels a job interview to take care of her. In the books, he once leaves her, at age seven, locked outside the house in the rain because he’s stuck in the unemployment-insurance line.

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Duvall pioneered this more understated approach to faith in his 1983 film Tender Mercies. His performance earned him an Oscar and the enthusiasm of Christian moviegoers. His character, Mac Sledge, is a once-famous country music star who is broken by drink. He does not find redemption in a fiery born-again experience; indeed, after his baptism he confesses he doesn’t feel very different ”” “not yet” at any rate. His redemption comes gradually, through his love for the Christian woman who befriends him.

Jesus doesn’t fix his problems or make for smooth sailing, either, and he has a crisis of faith when his daughter is killed in a car accident.

“I don’t trust happiness,” the character says. “I never did and I never will.”

His faith survives, but the movie never tells us why.

Read or listen to it all.

I am fried from preaching and teaching this morning and Nathaniel, Elizabeth and I are off to see Inception. You can find the official trailer here–KSH.

Barney Fife and Andy Taylor may not be Peter and Paul, but Chattanooga churches have found TV’s Mayberry disciples often touch on the same truisms as the New Testament leaders.

Local congregations increasingly are using television shows and the movie format to teach spiritual lessons.

“It’s amazing the parallels you can find to New Testament scripture,” said St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church member Bill Steverson, who led the recent study “The Gospel According to Barney,” based on the 1960s “Andy Griffith Show.” “I wondered if the scriptures I found were the ones they were reading when they wrote the (television show) script.”

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Chrystal Johnson didn’t think there was anything unhealthy about her all-consuming fixation with “The Twilight Saga” ”” until she discovered it was sucking the life out of her marriage.

“I found poems my husband had written in his journal about how I had fallen for a ‘golden-eyed vampire,’ ” says Johnson, a 31-year-old accountant from Mesa, Ariz., who became so enthralled by the blockbuster series of young adult novels and movies that she found herself staying up all night, re-reading juicy chapters and chatting about casting news and the are-they-or-aren’t-they romance between the stars of the films, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.

” ‘Twilight’ was always on my mind, to the point where I couldn’t function,” Johnson says.

Anyone who has ever peeked inside a comic-book convention or gone to a late-night screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” knows that some pop-culture fans aren’t exactly known for their moderation. But there are some key differences distinguishing “Twilight” groupies and their seemingly bottomless obsession from that of other entertainment junkies.

Read the whole thing.

I am being taken by the family to Toy Story 3–KSH.

My fear is that Bill Maher’s religious-like crusade to wipe out religion is going to wipe out the Bill Maher I’ve grown to enjoy and respect.

His seething intolerance and disrespect for people with religious faith are becoming as offensive as the racial and sexual-orientation bigotry Maher delights in railing against.

Last Friday on his HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he engaged his political panel in a 14-minute discussion that focused on his belief that religious people are “deluded.” His panelists, including an author who is an atheist, disagreed with Maher, which served to frustrate him.

Maher’s flippant, dismissive and condescending attitude frustrated me, one of his biggest fans. I know the benefits of faith in a higher power. That Maher does not saddens me. But it does not make me think he’s delusional.

This ran a little while ago in the Kansas City Star but I missed it; our local paper ran it on the op-ed page yesterday. Read it all–KSH.

Although most U. S. churchmen have long agreed that in decency’s name the U. S. cinema should be regulated, some liberals have squirmed because the strict regulation which now exists was devised by Roman Catholics, is now in the Catholic hands of Motion Picture Production Code Administrator Joseph I. (“Joe”) Breen. Last week was announced a step, obviously the work of astute Will H. Hays, Presbyterian Elder, which may make U. S. Protestants feel better about the part their churches play in purifying the nation’s pictures. The most potent executive of the Y. M. C. A., General Secretary Francis Stuart Harmon, 41, turned in his resignation, made ready to sit on the board of the Will Hays organization, the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America.

—Time Magazine, November 2, 1936 and the person mentioned, Francis Stuart Harmon, is my father’s father

….maybe a quest for specific answers is the wrong idea. One of the most fundamental questions a human can ask is: “Why are we here on earth?” For people who are religious, the answer usually lies in faith, a confidence in things unseen. We believe in fundamental truths and yet we leave a little room for unanswered questions.

As “Lost” reminds Entertainment Weekly’s Mr. Jensen: How do we live a good life when we may not know the answers to a lot of questions? “In many ways, the characters are modeling back to us successful and unsuccessful journeys of faith,” he says. “They had no faith and gained faith; they had faith and then lost faith.”

The show will leave plot threads unresolved and relationships will not wrap up neatly. But attempts to find meaning in the world are rarely satisfactory.

Prayers do go unanswered. Perhaps enthusiasts should avoid making “Lost” into their own image and leave a little room for faith””in this case, an acceptance of unresolved tension.

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Subtlety is not something we usually associate with television or religion. But for the past six years, ABC’s Lost, which ends its run on May 23, has provided viewers with nuanced concepts that have made it ”” at least for this religious scholar ”” appointment viewing.

Religion has played a prominent role on Lost since the series began Sept. 22, 2004, with Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashing on a remote, mysterious and dangerous island. We’ve watched persistent conflict between a man of science and a man of faith. We’ve witnessed debates about baptism and appearances of the dead.

We’ve often wondered what was going on, but even in our uncertainty, we knew that our bewilderment was part of what Lost was exploring: the question of where our lives are headed, and whether there is any meaning to it. Do we have a destiny, and if so, how do we figure out what it is?

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The more TV a toddler watches, the higher the likelihood they will do badly at school and have poor health at the age of 10, researchers warn.

The study of 1,300 children by Michigan and Montreal universities found negative effects on older children rose with every hour of toddler TV.

Performance at school was worse, while consumption of junk foods was higher.

UK experts said parents could allow young children to watch “some” high quality TV.

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For the most part, “Bob the Builder” is about normal kids’ stuff: teamwork, conflict resolution, taking turns and the like. The show isn’t overtly political””Bob’s catchphrase, “Yes we can!” predates the Obama campaign. Instead, it peddles a slightly hectoring brand of environmentalism. Ever since Bob discovered his inner environmental conscience, he’s been teaching kids about believing in recycling and being kind to Mother Gaia. “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” has become another one of the show’s catchphrases. That’s fine so far as it goes””aside from those evil Republicans, who doesn’t love the planet?

But it’s a little rich having Bob indoctrinate children about “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” while simultaneously prompting these children to beg their parents for plastic Bob the Builder trucks, and latex Bob the Builder balls, and plush Bob the Builder dolls. All of which are manufactured in far-away lands and shipped to our fair shores by the carbon-gobbling container-shipful. Bob the Builder is like one of those evangelists who lectures on the virtues of living green before hopping onto a private jet and flying back to his mansion in Nashville….

There’s nothing particularly pernicious about any of this. Bob and Thomas and “Sesame Street” have plenty of redeeming qualities. And in any case, if you don’t like a particular show you can always find one that better fits your tastes. Even so, it’s a shame that there isn’t more of a place for children’s entertainment that exists solely in its own universe, apart from adult debates and sociopolitical fashions.

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“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is the first book in Stieg Larsson’s millennium trilogy. First published in 2005, the novels are a literary phenomenon selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The film adaptation, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, is setting records as well. It has grossed more than $100 million globally and was the top-grossing film in Europe last year. Here is a look at the film.

[BEGIN VIDEO CLIP “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”] has become an international sensation. Her secrets have captivated millions. The story is a literary and movie phenomenon. This year, meet “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” (END VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me why this — the “Millennium Trilogy” has become such a sensation?

NIELS ARDEN OPLEV, FILMMAKER: Well, I think that if you look at the book first, Larsson wrote a book, the first book he wrote is really a classic investigating story. The plot is nearly Agatha Christie kind of plot–

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

NIELS ARDEN OPLEV: –rich family, far up north, it’s freezing cold, dark, dark secrets….

Please note-Elizabeth and I went to see this last evening. It is a dark, dense, mysterious and immensely powerful movie that it is ONLY appropriate for adult audiences.

This fine interview (best seen after the film) lasts 27 1/2 minutes–watch it all–KSH.

If you have traipsed through a hotel lobby lately; tramped on a health-club treadmill; guzzled a beer at a bar; or nervously anticipated your turn in the dentist’s chair, you likely found your eyes wandering to a video screen. The business of “captive TV,” as it is called, is booming. According to Nielsen, the television audience-measurement people, we collectively viewed a quarter-billion video advertisements in the last four months of 2009. Whatever the exact number, we don’t need Nielsen to tell us that it is getting harder and harder to find a public space free from the tireless and tiresome electronic beckonings of “location-based video.”

The business has grown by boasting several advantages for advertisers. A crowd of people with nowhere to go and nothing to do will look at the screens””plus the ads””grateful for anything to “help pass the time,” as one of the services says in its promotional material. Doctors’ offices, airports and the DMV get to turn the inconvenience of their clients into a revenue stream. The place-based systems also promise to deliver narrowly defined audiences that can be given tailored pitches. How better to market to drinkers than with ads in bars? Then there are the screens in bathrooms, which provide ads that one media company crows are, “perfectly gender segmented.” Perhaps most attractive to marketers in the age of digital video recorders: The passive public viewers don’t have access to a remote control. There’s no fast-forwarding through the advertisements.

Unless you have tremendous discipline and willpower, there’s no ignoring them either….

Read it all.

It’s been two years since HBO aired the final episode of The Wire. Critics praised the TV show for its realistic portrayal of drug culture and its far-reaching influence.

But now a handful of colleges across the country — including Harvard, Duke and the University of California, Berkeley — offer courses built around the show.

Jason Mittell teaches one of those classes, “Watching The Wire: Urban America in Serial Television,” at Middlebury College in Vermont. He’s an associate American studies professor, and he thinks the show’s creator, David Simon, tapped into a crucial American subculture.

Simon is exploring another subculture, post-Katrina New Orleans, in his latest series, Treme, which just debuted on HBO.

Read or listen to it all. If you do not know about The Wire, ou should, it is one of the very best shows to be on television in recent years–KSH.[/i]