Which, if any, of these films are actually worth seeing?

Critics weren’t bowled over by any of them. The best reviewed of the lot was “Hail, Caesar!”, the least acclaimed Coen film since 2008’s “Burn After Reading.” Audiences were more negative and box office was disappointing. At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed it; I might almost be the ideal audience for this film, though it doesn’t seem to play as well for everyone as it does for me.

That goes double for “The Young Messiah,” a film few critics found as compelling and creative as I did.

Read it all.

On the surface, Hollywood is a land of loose morals, where materialism rules, sex and drugs are celebrated on screen (and off), and power players can have a distant relationship with the truth. But movie studios and their partners have quietly ”” very quietly, sometimes to the degree of a black ops endeavor ”” been building deep connections to Christian filmgoers who dwell elsewhere on the spectrum of politics and social values. In doing so, they have tapped churches, military groups, right-leaning bloggers and, particularly, a fraternity of marketing specialists who cut their teeth on overtly religious movies but now put their influence behind mainstream works like “Frozen,” “The Conjuring,” “Sully” and “Hidden Figures.”

The marketers are writing bullet points for sermons, providing footage for television screens mounted in sanctuaries and proposing Sunday school lesson plans. In some cases, studios are even flying actors, costume designers and producers to megachurch discussion groups.

Hollywood’s awareness of its need to pay better attention to flyover-state audiences has grown even more urgent of late, as ultraliberal movie executives, shocked to see a celebrity-encircled Hillary Clinton lose the presidential election to Donald J. Trump, have realized the degree to which they are out of touch with a vast pool of Americans. Tens of millions of voters did not care what stars had to say in support of Mrs. Clinton.

Read it all.

You can listen directly here or download it there.

Jediism, the worship of the mythology of Star Wars, is not a religion, the Charity Commission has ruled.
The commission rejected an application to grant charitable status to The Temple of the Jedi Order.
It said Jediism did not “promote moral or ethical improvement” for charity law purposes in England and Wales.
In the 2011 census, 177,000 people declared themselves Jedi under the religion section, making it the seventh most popular religion.

Read it all.

Read it all.

It has never been easy to put a Muslim character on American screens.

Even in this TV renaissance, most characters are on shows that rely on terrorism ”” or at least, terrorist-adjacent ”” story lines. Other kinds of Muslim characters are woefully absent across the dial. Could that change now, after a divisive presidential campaign that included vows by Donald J. Trump to stop Islamic immigration? Or will it be more difficult than ever?

Less than two weeks after Election Day, five showrunners gathered in New York to discuss the representation of Muslims on TV. Howard Gordon, a creator of “24” and “Homeland,” has faced these issues the longest; after “24” emerged as a lightning rod for its stereotyped depictions, he engaged with Islamic community groups to broaden his understanding. (Mr. Gordon is an executive producer of the rebooted “24: Legacy,” debuting in February.) Joshua Safran is the creator of “Quantico,” an ABC series about F.B.I. operatives.

Read it all.

Cosmopolitan and Buzzfeed recently discovered that the church Chip and Joanna Gaines attend, Antioch Community Church, is led by a pastor who does not support same-sex marriage and who believes that homosexual practice is a sin. In other words, Chip and Joanna Gaines attend a historically Christian congregation on the matter of sexual ethics.

Now, not all Christians will agree with some of the statistics cited by the Gaines’ pastor, his linking homosexuality in most cases to abuse, or his portrayal of the “gay lifestyle.” But there is nothing newsworthy about a Christian church teaching that male-female marriage is God’s original design and that newly invented definitions fall short of God’s intention for human flourishing.

What is newsworthy is the religious undertone of the Cosmopolitan article. It reads like a heresy hunt. The magazine has “uncovered something many fans will likely want an explanation for””a startling revelation that has left many wondering where Chip and Jo stand.”

Buzzfeed is seeking clarification from HGTV, hoping (apparently) to hear the Gaines recant their pastor’s heretical beliefs. Until then “their silence speaks volumes.”

Read it all from TGC.

A senior BBC presenter has criticised the corporation’s attitude to religious programming in a rare intervention by an insider.

Roger Bolton of Radio 4’s Feedback says: “Just six months after the Archbishop of Canterbury called in these very pages for broadcasters to take religion seriously, it seems the BBC is doing anything but.”

Bolton spoke out after the BBC decided to drop the post of Head of Religion and place corporate responsiblity for religion and ethics under Factual Scotland “to simplify the existing mangement structure”. James Purnell, the former Labour minister who is head of radio and education at the BBC, is to take responsibility for religion as part of his remit.

Writing in the Radio Times, Bolton says this will threaten the coverage of religion on the BBC.

Read it all.

With Steve Coogan and traveling companion Rob Brydon, a movie about friendship and food which has been on our list for some time–very witty indeed; KSH.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Britain’s shallow, celebrity-obsessed culture could leave as toxic a legacy for future generations as the pollution of the planet, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth has warned.
Today’s children are growing up in a culture with few if any real “heroes”, he said, while ideas of “nobility” and even “honour” are quietly disappearing.
The result could be as damaging to the nation’s “moral and imaginative ecology” as the destruction of the environment, he argued.
Britain is in danger of become a more “boring” and “mean-minded” place as a result, he added.

Read it all (another from the long line of should have already been posted material).

If you could live out your deepest, darkest fantasies, what would you do? Who would you become?

That’s a question explored in Westworld, a TV reincarnation of Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie, in which rich customers visit a Western-styled theme park filled with humanoid androids. In the original film, Yul Brynner starred as a malfunctioning robot whose relentless pursuit of his victims made for compelling viewing. The TV show, which debuted this month, is equally enthralling and not simply because the updated CGI is breath-taking. The storyline has also been described as ”˜sinister and spectacular’.

Against astonishingly beautiful backdrops, rich ”˜guests’ fulfil their fantasies as they interact with androids, known as ”˜hosts’. The producers’ take on this is that when humans are given this kind of freedom, they will stoop to the lowest forms of depravity. Not just sex, but rape. Not just murder, but torture.

Read it all.

As local pastor Stan Prior eloquently delivered his motivational message Sunday morning, a 10-year-old child reportedly somehow snuck into the service with his parents. While the church would normally let the infraction go with just a warning, on this fateful Sunday, the child exposed Prior’s sermons as simply rehashes of Disney movies.

As the pastor began by telling the audience a phrase he’d learned over his years of biblical study: “Hakuna Matata.” “It means no worries,” he said thoughtfully, but the child stood up and said, “Hey, that’s from The Lion King!” before ushers rushed over and wrestled the young troublemaker to the ground, taking him and his parents into the green room for questioning.

Read it all.

I finally got to Ground Zero Rising: Freedom vs. Fear hosted by Jim Cramer; its very worthwhile–put it on your list.

Mr. Wilder’s rule for comedy was simple: Don’t try to make it funny; try to make it real. “I’m an actor, not a clown,” he said more than once.

With his haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress, he aspired to touch audiences much as Charlie Chaplin had. The Chaplin film “City Lights,” he said, had “made the biggest impression on me as an actor; it was funny, then sad, then both at the same time.”

Mr. Wilder was an accomplished stage actor as well as a screenwriter, a novelist and the director of four movies in which he starred. (He directed, he once said, “in order to protect what I wrote, which I wrote in order to act.”) But he was best known for playing roles on the big screen that might have been ripped from the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Read it all.

While the filmmakers treat the Messiah with utmost reverence, he offers only a mix of platitudes about peace and forgiveness. This watered-down Christianity mirrors the sentiments of today’s fearful-to-offend evangelicalism, which often seems more concerned with wooing new followers than offering a complete understanding of Christianity’s demands and rewards.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus tells a young Judah. Later, he pacifies an angry mob of Jewish-nationalist Zealots with more boilerplate, telling them that violence against the oppressive Roman regime won’t solve anything. A few scenes later, an impressively costumed Morgan Freeman, playing the wealthy Sheikh Ilderim, who becomes Judah’s chariot-racing patron, also points out that violence isn’t the answer. If you’ve got Morgan Freeman, who needs Jesus?

Christ’s specifically salvific role, which made him the center of Christian theology for the past 2,000 years, goes missing in the film. As portrayed in “Ben-Hur,” he is neither the Messiah, nor the king whose kingdom is not of this world. Jesus’ death on the cross has no particular religious significance here. The Passion is depicted as almost accidental, as Jesus is swept up in Pontius Pilate’s broader purge of Zealots. Jesus’ death serves as nothing more than an opportunity to set a good example by forgiving his enemies.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Here are mine–I would be interested in what you come up with for your list-KSH.

#fav7films Notorious
Ordinary People
The lives of Others
Last of the mohicans
In the heat of the night
Some like it hot
Jean de Florette1/2

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) August 16, 2016

One of the 40 million copies sold of The Purpose Driven Life ended up in the large, paddle-like hands of Michael Phelps.

In between winning Olympic golds, Phelps made headlines for very different reasons: repeated DUIs, parties and pot, weight gain and rehab. A couple of years ago, fellow athlete and friend Ray Lewis (aka “God’s linebacker”) gave the champion swimmer Rick Warren’s bestseller.

“I basically told him, ”˜Okay, everything has a purpose, and now, guess what? It’s time to wake up,’” the former Baltimore Raven said in The Washington Post.

In an ESPN special, Phelps said the book “turned me into believing that there is a power greater than myself and there is a purpose for me on this planet” and “helped me when I was in a place that I needed the most help.” It spurred him to reconcile with his dad.

Read it all from Christianity Today.

The world that Disney presents to us is one in which all the sharp edges of real life have been smoothed away. For this reason the Magic Kingdom can never truly be the happiest place on earth in a biblical sense. Unlike Jesus, who entered the real, broken world in order to redeem it, the best Disney can offer is a fantasy of a world that never was. It is a nice place to visit but you really can’t live there.

It is common practice for churches to do with their past what Walt Disney did with his. Churches have a tendency to reimagine the past and make it their ideal. It’s not such a problem for a theme park, but it is a real obstacle for a church, especially when that reimagined world becomes the model for its mission. Churches have often spent decades trying to return to a past that never really existed. The “Christian America” churches try to bring back was not that Christian. The fondly remembered pastor of that golden age was not that golden. Those hallowed church ministries were not as effective as we remember, or if they were, they would no longer be effective today. The sweet fellowship of yesteryear was not that sweet.

Read it all.

In the following years, the director said, his initial idea of telling Liddell’s story in a film expanded into a more personal project devoted to understanding Liddell’s life in China. He and his collaborators consulted with Liddell’s daughters, who live in Canada, as well as the Eric Liddell Center in Edinburgh. They tracked down survivors of the camp ”” most were children at the time ”” and interviewed Chinese people who had lived nearby.

Eventually, in addition to making “The Last Race,” they also produced a documentary and compiled a book using the material they had gathered.

The film first shows Liddell, played by Joseph Fiennes, trudging into an internment camp in 1943, then flashes back to the eastern port of Tianjin and his years in the city as a teacher and missionary after his Olympic victory. After the Japanese invade, he sends his pregnant wife (Elizabeth Arends) and their two daughters to Canada.

At the camp with hundreds of other civilians from Allied countries, including Americans, British, Canadians and Australians, he becomes a quiet but steadfast leader, helping to obtain food and supplies for other prisoners with the assistance of some sympathetic Chinese.

Read it all.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing….

Read it all.

Professional filmmakers, many in Nashville, Tennessee, are beginning to make big profits on faith-based low-budget feature films. The production values are high, and the Christian stories are appealing to large audiences, especially when the movies marketed through churches. Correspondent Dan Lothian says Hollywood is paying attention.

Read or watch it all.

Gérard Dépardieu, the larger-than-life French star who once boasted that he sometimes drank 14 bottles of wine a day, says he has now given up the booze.

“I haven’t been drinking for some time now. I really no longer like drunkenness,” the 67-year-old, who is currently starring of the new Netflix series Marseille, told le Parisien newspaper.

Read it all.

”˜To Your Credit’, the local churches’ grassroots movement and the Archbishop’s initiative to create a fairer financial system, has released the first of a series of four 10-minute films on ”˜Money, Debt and Salvation.’ Six theologians will offer reflections on money and debt.

The Archbishop features in the first of the series, in a call to ”˜challenge the sovereignty of money’.

“Credit and debt is one of the key issues that people face because it’s pervasive, it’s everywhere”¦ The reason it’s so important is because the knock-on effect of credit and debt going wrong is so destructive. People’s lives are torn apart, their families are damaged.

“It’s a prophetic thing to get stuck into these issues because we have to challenge the sovereignty of money and finance over every aspect of our life. And to say in quite a revolutionary way, no you’re not in charge, human beings are the ultimate value.

Read it all (requires subscription).

This is a murder mystery set against the amazing backdrop of the Shetland Isles, UK, with a good cast and clever plots. We enjoyed it a lot.

The entire congregation of Mechanicsville Baptist Church reportedly joined as one on Monday in intercessory prayer, begging God to keep their teaching pastor, Warren Blake, from seeing the upcoming slate of spring and summer blockbusters.

“We come today solemnly asking for a great miracle,” intoned Deacon Fritz Foster to the grim-visaged assembly. “We have suffered so much from Pastor Warren seeing popular films these many long years, and we ask that this great burden be taken from us, that we may have a sermon, just once, free of movie quotes and references.”

LOL–read it all.

Elizabeth and I finally got to see this movie last night–I cannot say enough good things about it. Put it on your list, it is deeply moving, tender and evocative. You the find the movie website here.