Avatars and Mad Hatters are already performing before American audiences in 3-D, and Shrek is coming soon. Now, a national Catholic television network is throwing priests into the mix.

CatholicTV debuted 3-D programs Tuesday in an effort to reach younger people and to make the faith message more vivid. The network posted several 3-D shows on the Internet, released its monthly magazine in 3-D – complete with glasses – and said it will eventually broadcast some programs in 3-D.

CatholicTV’s director, the Rev. Robert Reed, said he’d been planning to introduce 3-D well before the success of James Cameron’s movie “Avatar” or the 3-D “Alice in Wonderland.”

“It’s a way for us to show that we believe the message we have is relevant, and we’re going to use every possible avenue to bring that message to people,” said Reed, whose network reaches 5 million to 6 million homes nationwide through various cable providers.

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For six decades, Elmore Leonard has been sitting at his writing desk, first in Detroit, then in the suburbs, creating robberies and murders for books and movies. Hollywood has tried many times to translate Leonard’s work from page to screen: Get Shorty, Out of Sight, two versions of 3:10 to Yuma. Leonard has written several screenplays too, and worked on the recent, short-lived ABC television series Karen Sisco.

Tonight, another television network ”” FX this time ”” takes a shot at bringing Elmore’s World to life. Leonard himself is an executive producer of Justified, but he says there are a whole bunch of those, and he doesn’t have script approval.

But Leonard’s happy. He’s met the writers, and they’re keeping their source close at hand.

“They said, ‘We all have this little plastic bracelet on that says WWED ”” What Would Elmore Do?’ ” Leonard says. “It seems to me that they sound like my writing.”

Read or listen to it all and put FX’s “Justified” on your list for possible television shows. We thought the first show as very good indeed–KSH (Hat tip:Elizabeth).

When the “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell recently predicted the departure of the contestant Jermaine Sellers, the young singer shook his head in disagreement. “I know God,’’ he replied, pointing upward.

Two days later, when Mr. Sellers failed to make the cut, he still had faith. “What God has for me is for me,’’ he said. “In God there is no failure.’’

Mr. Sellers is not alone in his belief that God pays attention to reality television contests. New research shows that most Americans believe God is directly involved in their personal affairs, and that the good or bad things that happen are “part of God’s plan,’’ according to a report in the March issue of the journal Sociology of Religion.

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To the young Tom Hanks, history was as dull as an algebra equation. For Hanks ”” a classic baby boomer, born in 1956 ”” World War II was just a string of long-ago muzzle flashes in black-and-white. Yet he did have a more direct connection to the global cataclysm. His father had been a U.S. Naval mechanic (second class) in World War II. But Amos Hanks wasn’t the type to tell his son tales of bravery and sacrifice. “Growing up, I always knew Dad was somewhere in the Pacific fixing things,” Hanks says. “He had nothing nice to say about the Navy. He hated the Navy. He hated everybody in the Navy. He had no glorious stories about it.”

Occasionally, Hanks enjoyed a war thriller like Battle of the Bulge, but he much preferred the Three Stooges, James Bond and any film with Sophia Loren. Like a lot of Americans, he found memorizing historical facts boring. Because his family was directly related to Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of the 16th U.S. President, he routinely recycled the same short paper he had written about her for easy classroom grades. “My idea of American history was just a course you were forced to take,” Hanks says, laughing.

Yet over the past two decades ”” from his movies Saving Private Ryan and Charlie Wilson’s War to the HBO miniseries he has produced, From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific, which begins March 14 at 9 p.m. ”” Hanks has become American history’s highest-profile professor, bringing a nuanced view of the past into the homes and lives of countless millions. (HBO is owned by TIME’s parent company, Time Warner.) His view of American history is a mixture of idealism and realism, both of which have characterized all the work he has produced; he’s a Kennedy liberal with old-time values, the kind that embraces Main Street on the Fourth of July. The success of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers turned him into a Tom Brokaw”“like spokesperson for the Greatest Generation. When he visits Johnson Space Center in Houston or Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he is feted as if Neil Armstrong had entered the room. He’s the visual David McCullough of his generation, framing the heroic tales of explorers, astronauts and soldiers for a wide audience. (McCullough’s John Adams has sold about 3 million copies; Hanks’ John Adams brought in 5.5 million viewers per episode.) And in the history world, his branding on a nonfiction title carries something like the power of Oprah.

But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance….

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This is a good description of the lovely piece that aired Saturday and which I happened to catch by accident. It moved me to tears. I am stunned that NBC does not have it on their webiste. Did any other blog readers happen to catch it–KSH?

Gerry Adams’s appearance on Channel 4, in a programme following the footsteps of Jesus in the Holy Land, won’t be screened for a week but it’s already caused a stir. Victor Barker, who lost his son in the Omagh bombing, is aggrieved, on the grounds that it makes the Sinn Fein leader seem like a “genuine, peaceful person”. That’s understandable. Yet there will be lots more people with no connection to the Troubles who simply don’t like the idea of someone with IRA connections talking about Christ at all.

You have to wonder whether they’ve ever come across that remark by the Man Himself, to the effect that he came for sinners, not the righteous.

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The Church of England’s general synod has voted to back a motion expressing “deep concern” at what it believes is a cut in religious TV programming.

But the synod drew back from singling out the BBC, instead backing a motion aimed at all mainstream broadcasters.

It called for more programming that “imaginatively marks major festivals”.

The BBC said it had increased its coverage in recent years, while Channel 4 said religious programmes were “at the heart of its schedule”.

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Walt Disney Co. no doubt expected kudos for breaking racial barriers in its holiday hit, “The Princess and the Frog,” and that praise has come from some quarters. But the entertainment giant also finds itself receiving stinging criticism from conservative evangelical Christians on a Web warpath. Hollywoodjesus.com said the animated feature’s preoccupation with voodoo, black magic, bloody amulets and Ouija boards was “too dark and extreme for this kind of kids’ film.” Christiananswers.net rated the movie “Offensive”; citing a Tarot card reading, soul transfer and implied reincarnation, the site called the film “demonic.” A reviewer for the respected magazine Christianity Today charged that the movie was “disturbing,” with a “hollow, thoughtless core.” These and other essays provoked furious debate involving hundreds of Internet responses, likely echoed in evangelical moms’ groups in churches nationwide. Disney declined to respond directly to the criticism, saying in an email to me: “The Princess and the Frog is a lighthearted musical fairytale set in New Orleans during the jazz age featuring Disney’s first African American Princess, which audiences and critics around the world have enthusiastically embraced.”

What is most interesting about the current controversy is that it’s not new. It’s been going on for more than 70 years, beginning with the release of Disney’s first full-length animated movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” in 1938. Reviewers at the time voiced similar worries about the dark magic in that groundbreaking feature.

Walt Disney always called himself a Christian, but his biographers agree that he was skeptical about organized religion and rarely set foot inside a church. He insisted that any narrow portrayal of Protestant Christianity (or any religion, for that matter) in his animated features was box-office poison, especially in lucrative, overseas markets. More broadly, Walt’s fear was that explicit religiosity might needlessly exclude young viewers, while a watered-down version might at the same time offend the devout. Yet the studio’s founding genius also understood that, from the ancient Greeks to the Brothers Grimm, successful storytellers have needed supernatural intervention agents to resolve plots. So, Walt decided, Disney’s cartoon protagonists would appeal not to Judeo-Christian religion but to magic, which was more palatable around the ticket-buying world…..

Read the whole article.

It’s horrible””or, cynics might say, fortuitous””timing for Ms. Sarandon, who has been busy promoting “The Lovely Bones,” in which she plays the glamorous grandmother of the dead teenager who narrates the film. In Alice Sebold’s book, on which the movie is based, Grandma Lynn wears lots of makeup and a secondhand mink and swoops in to rescue a family collapsing into grief and despair. Along the way, she endeavors to stop her daughter from blowing up her marriage via an affair with a brooding detective. “I know something is going on that isn’t kosher,” she tells her daughter. “Capisce?”

Capisce, we do. Ms. Sarandon, whose seemingly golden “domestic partnership” with Mr. Robbins was the stuff of Hollywood legend, is desirous of preserving marriages on screen, but not so much in real life. She famously declined to wed Mr. Robbins, the father of her two sons, because she worried such a stuffy and archaic ritual might harm their relationship.

‘”I won’t marry because I am too afraid of taking him for granted, or him taking me for granted,” she once said. “Maybe it will be a good excuse for a party when I am 80.”

Read it all from today’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Journal section.

The image that has most stuck with me since seeing Avatar””and there are a lot of amazing visuals””is one of a human’s weak and broken body cradled in the arms of a giant, strong and healthy alien. It’s a stirring and powerful juxtaposition. Struggling to breathe and crippled from the waist down, this body is the model of human frailty””useless, expiring and fragile””held in the powerful arms of a 9-foot Na’vi like a diminutive child.

This moment highlighted for me how inadequate, brittle and broken the humans are in Avatar. They bleed. They die. Almost every main human faces some physical limitation in the movie’s runtime. But what is fascinating is how they all compensate for their bodily deficiencies and mortality by hiding within other bodies: giant metal attack ships, robot suits and even genetically-altered Na’vi bodies. These examples are just the physical ways in which Avatar’s humans compensate for their frailty. They also compensate with insatiable needs to possess more, know more, gain more and mean more. Ironically, it seems to be this reaction to weakness that spurs their violent aggression.

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ESPN and Discovery Communications announced plans Tuesday to launch the industry’s first 3D television networks.

The sports programmer will introduce a 3D network this summer, while Discovery is joining forces with Sony and Imax for a 3D network to launch in 2011.

The announcements represent a potentially game-changing addition to the TV landscape, which only recently fully embraced another technological shift to high-definition programming.

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The Church shares the concerns of a range of organisations, including consumer bodies and health promotion groups, that suggest the blurring of the line currently separating editorial content from commercial messages is not in the interests of the public, and may damage trust in the integrity of broadcasters.

“Retaining trust in broadcasters’ integrity and editorial balance is key to maintaining strong relationships between audience and broadcaster, which in turn has both civic/societal and economic benefits,” argues the Church’s submission. “For this reason, the Church of England is opposed to changes to the current regulatory regime, even outside public service content and news and current affairs.”

Read it all and follow the link to the full document also.

See how many you can guess and how many you have seen.

Guess before you look and see how many you have actually viewed.

Fox Network refused Wednesday to agree to an offer by Time Warner Cable to enter arbitration with the Federal Communications Commission to resolve an ongoing fee dispute.

Fox and Time Warner Cable have been locked in a public battle over how much the cable giant should pay News Corp. for the right to deliver Fox networks into its subscribers’ homes.

Talks are still ongoing, but if a deal is not reached before the Dec. 31 deadline, all of the Fox-owned broadcast networks and some of its cable channels could disappear from some Time Warner Cable subscribers’ televisions on New Year’s Day.

Serious corporate brinkmanship–read it all.

Ever slap down $10 for a ticket for a film so foul you choked on the popcorn? It’s time for payback. Film critic Bob Mondello has caught the worst offenders of the past 10 years.

First, some ground rules. The film has to have burned a big enough American audience to be worth talking about ”” at least 4 million people at, say, $7.50 a pop, or roughly $30 million. That excludes Paris Hilton’s The Hottie and the Nottie, which only made $27,000 in the United States ”” though it made $1.5 million in Russia.

Second, to recognize the singular dreadfulness of each movie, we’re breaking the list into categories.

Read or listen to it all.

Dickens and Disney’s Tiny Tims both hope that those who feel pity for a poor crippled boy in church “”¦ will think of Him who made lame men walk” at Christmas time.

This was a lesson that Dickens meant for adults, as well as children.

There is no separating the generosity we owe to others from the generosity God has shown to us by sending his son to give us new hearts. Christmas shouldn’t just bring out the best in us once a year; it should transform our lives””as it did for Scrooge. Dickens knew where he wanted to end his story, and finished it accordingly:

“Some laughed to see the alteration in [Scrooge] but he let them laugh … he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed that knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!”

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It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

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An interesting list from the (London) Times.

Falsani , the author of the book The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, says that though the brothers’ films ”” full of violence and deceit ”” might not hew to traditional views of right and wrong, taken as a whole, they paint a clear picture.

“People say their worlds are chaotic, but I see a definite rhythm to good and bad,” Falsani says. “If you do something, there is an effect. When you make a choice and you make the wrong choice, you’re going to get it in their world. And then sometimes, as in the case of A Serious Man, even if you don’t make the wrong choice, you still might get it.”

Set in the Minnesota town where they grew up, in 1967 ”” the year that Joel would have made his bar mitzvah ”” A Serious Man is, according to Falsani, the Coen brothers’ most self-referential film, and also their most overtly religious.

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“As a writer, you’re always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk,” Dan Harmon, the creator of “Community,” said about the word “douche.” “This is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years ”” a thing that sounds like a thing you can’t say.”

It is not simply that the language is becoming more raw on broadcast networks but that the language, violence and sex that formerly was restricted to the 10 p.m. hour has migrated to earlier time slots.

Recent research by Barbara K. Kaye of the University of Tennessee and Barry S. Sapolsky of Florida State University found that in 2005 television viewers were more likely to hear offensive language during the 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. hours than at 10 p.m. Technically, there has not been a “family hour” since 1976, when the United States Supreme Court struck down the imposition of such a policy by the Federal Communications Commission. But broadcast networks observed the practice long after that.

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I served my CPE internship in a VA hospital where the two wards I was to help care for had many mentally ill people on them. My supervisor said, early on in the program, “Kendall, the mentally ill are the lepers of modern day society.” It rings ever more true the more distance I get from the remark. During that summer you cannot imagine how FEW of the patients on these wards who struggled with this kind of sickness were visited by their family members. Watch it all–and note particularly her response when she is asked about how she sees her sister–KSH.

See how many you have seen. I am also interested in what you make of their top 5 and if you disagree, then which films would you include that they do not? KSH.

Watch it all.

Watch it all.

…they never tell you how to save your money. No one tells you. We’ve been trained to spend money since we were born with all these commercials with toys and G.I. Joes and Transformers. But there’s so many things in the supermarket, there’s so many things on television that automatically when you turn it on are saying “Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!” And no one’s ever saying, “Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! Save!”

–Donald Faison on MarketPlace Money last night

This local program won an Emmy award recently and just taped a whole program on the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. Those of you who have Comcast and can get it, here are the times:

* Weekdays
* 11:30am
* 5:30pm
* 8:30pm

* Weekends
* 9:00am
* 3:30pm
* 8:30pm

I believe it will start airing this Saturday and it will run for about a week. The show lasts 1/2 an hour. Guests include Al Zadig, rector of Saint Michael’s, Barbara Mann, of the Episcopal Forum, Peet Dickinson, Dean of the Cathedral in Charleston, Father John Johnson, an Episcopal priest who taught at General Theological Seminary in New York and who is a Jungian analyst, yours truly, and Adam Parker, religion writer for the local paper, the Post and Courier. The show is hosted by Andy Savage who is a very high profile local lawyer.

This show is entirely focused on the upcoming Special Convention and the reason for the growing tensions between the diocese and TEC’s National leadership and its theology.

Children should be banned from watching television until they are 2 years old because it can stunt their language development and shorten their attention span, according to new Australian recommendations.

The guidelines warn of the damage done by sitting inactive for hours and advise that reading, drawing or solving puzzles should also be kept to a minimum.

For children aged between 2 and 5, time in front of the TV screen should be limited to an hour a day, according to health experts, in the first official guidelines on children’s viewing habits.

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[ELEANOR] BEARDSLEY: The affair died down again until this week, when on a late-night political talk show Marine Le Pen, daughter of far-right Nationalist Party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, dug out a copy of Mitterrand’s 2005 autobiographical novel and read excerpts set in the brothels of Bangkok….

Ms. LE PEN: …Mr. Frederic Mitterrand, culture minister, describes his pleasure in sexual tourism, all the while knowing the perversity of the system. It’s in black and white right here, and this man’s a minister.

BEARDSLEY: Soon, everyone was reading the same excerpts online, although no one had bothered to notice them in his book for the last five years.

Le Pen called for Mitterrand to resign, and in a bizarre political matchup, members of Mitterrand’s Socialist Party joined the far right in attacking him, and no one missed the ironic connection between l’affaire Mitterrand and l’affaire Polanski.

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In olden days when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking” there was a morals clause written into an actor’s film contract. The purpose was to restrain an actor from engaging in public behavior that might offend the audience and harm ticket sales.

Today, lewd and crude behavior can boost ticket sales and TV ratings and what passes for a morals clause deals with sexual harassment in the workplace.

Which brings me to David Letterman’s recent disclosure that he has had sex with female subordinates who worked on his show. Much of the coverage has mentioned that this was before his marriage to his live-in girlfriend of more than a decade with whom he fathered a child. Some wish to draw a moral distinction between fornication and adultery. It is something like the line Whoopi Goldberg tried to draw on “The View” between rape and what she called “rape rape” while discussing director Roman Polanski’s 1977 sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl. Hey, if Woody Allen (a signer of the petition for going easy on Polanski) can marry his adopted daughter when he was the lover of Mia Farrow, who is to say any line exists between anything?

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