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Miyazaki’s whole body of work (less one or two sub-par exceptions) offers unduplicated vistas of imaginative wonder and beauty, images of startling power, admirable and likable heroines and heroes, humanely conceived supporting characters, elusively engaging storytelling, wholesome moral themes, and unexpected sly humor. He is the sort of artist whose work doesn’t just entertain audiences, but wins enthusiasts. For those who haven’t yet discovered him, Miyazaki is a taste well worth acquiring.
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Horror represents a field many Christians approach with trepidation, and rightly so. The horror shelves of bookstores and video stores are very largely a wasteland of mindless, tasteless trash; indeed, there may be no other genre as disproportionately overrun with junk. Yet the grotesque, the macabre, and the frightful have an abiding place in human imagination and culture — a place that Christian sensibility has historically not seen fit to reject or condemn, at least entirely.
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Shaun the Sheep: A Woolly Good Time, the latest one-disc Region 1 collection of Shaun's adventures, debuts on DVD on February 8.
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It was a year of quirky, darkly mature childhood fantasy adaptations. Neil Gaiman’s juvenile horror-thriller
Coraline, Maurice Sendak’s picture book
Where the Wild Things Are and Roald Dahl’s young reader
Fantastic Mr. Fox were each made into unique, challenging films in radically different styles by directors Henry Selick, Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson, respectively.
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Like its protagonist, Saint Joseph Desa of Cupertino, throughout much of his lifetime and most of the film, Edward Dmytryk’s 1962 film
The Reluctant Saint is a modest affair that has attracted little attention, but has more to offer than meets the eye.
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There is even a
Twilight tourism industry, centered on Washington State, where much of the story is set. While Robert Langdon fans get to go to Rome and Paris for the Dan Brown experience, Stephenie Meyer aficionados converge on rainy Forks, Washington to take “Twilighter tours” of locations more or less corresponding to settings in the books, from a Craftman-style house similar to the Swans’ to a locker at Forks High School designated Bella’s locker.
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Miami’s brand-new John Paul II International Film Festival (October 27–November 7) aspires to be a festival with a difference.
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To summarize: What we have is an informal, brief, obscurely worded opinion, in a private letter that may or may not have been written by Ratzinger himself, apparently declining to comment on a book that he may or may not have perused about a series of books he may or may not have ever laid eyes on.
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When Sony Pictures, the production company behind the hit film
The Da Vinci Code and the new sequel
Angels & Demons, reached out to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN management in Geneva saw a high-profile teachable moment for science.
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In a Q&A billed as an “interview” on his own website, Brown writes (in a comment recently highlighted by Carl Olson in
This Rock), “My goal is always to make the character’s [
sic] and plot be so engaging that readers don’t realize how much they are learning along the way.” Or how much misinformation they’re absorbing.
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Jeffrey Overstreet called the
movie year 2006 “the year of the nightmare.” I’m starting to think we haven’t woken up yet.
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For family audiences, 2008 was a good year at the cineplex — but an even better year for DVD releases overall. In fact, in 2008 quality entertainment for families as well as older viewers came by the boxload.
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Wall‑E is more than another confirmation of Pixar’s moviemaking virtuosity and magic touch with family audiences. It’s the crown jewel in a year that had in some respects had a bit more to offer family audiences from Hollywood than other recent years.
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An old witticism has it that Golden Age Hollywood was “a Jewish-owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant America.” If not strictly accurate, the
bon mot contains more than a kernel of truth.
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Chastity is a precious thing, and the struggle to be chaste is both an inevitable part of a moral life and a legitimate subject for narrative art. In part, this quest for chastity may legitimately form some part of
Twilight’s appeal. At the same time, a narrative that wallows in the intoxicating power of temptation and desire, that returns again and again to rhapsodizing about the beauty of forbidden fruit, may reasonably be felt to be a hindrance rather than an affirmation of self-mastery.
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By rights, pulp heroes like Batman and James Bond belong to this world of escapism, not the world of
The Godfather. Bond was even one of the original inspirations for Indiana Jones. (“I’ve got something better than James Bond” was how Lucas pitched the character to Steven Spielberg.) Now, though, the boundaries are becoming less clear.
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You won’t find the gospel in movies like
Hellboy. What you may find is signs of a world that has been touched by the gospel — a world that retains some awareness of sinister forces to be avoided or resisted, of evil that cannot be overcome by therapy or education or communication, that calls for a response from another realm entirely.
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Speaking by phone from New York, producer Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson and heir, suggested that the new film’s more mature tone was partly a reflection of the book itself. “
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written very much to be read aloud,” Gresham explained. “With
Prince Caspian, in [Lewis’s] mind his audience had moved up a few years in age, and so
Prince Caspian was written for them to read to themselves.”
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The most serious problem with
Constantine’s Sword, though, is not its historical distortions. The most serious problem is its out-and-out attack on Christianity as such. It is not merely antisemitism that troubles Carroll. It is not even only Jesus’ death and resurrection. Ultimately, it is the very belief that in Jesus God did something both unique and definitive, something with universal applicability for all mankind.
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No critic can offer a one-size-fits-all approach for all committed Christians. I can’t, and have never tried to, tell anyone what to think or watch, or make definitive pronouncements about good or bad movies. I’m not the Pope; I’m not even the pope of movies. There is no pope of movies. Even the Pope isn’t the pope of movies.
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2007 was a remarkable DVD year for fans of the Vatican film list.
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There were ultrasounds. Disturbing images of post-abortion fetuses. Mention of fetal heartbeat and ability to feel pain. One way or another, over half a dozen 2007 films found themselves reckoning with the reality of life in the womb. It’s fair to call 2007 the cinematic year of the unborn child.
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For Verástegui — a former boy-band and
telenovela heartthrob known to Latino fans as “the Mexican Brad Pitt” — the mission is simple. “Hollywood doesn’t belong to the studios,” he recently told Decent Films. “Hollywood belongs to God. And we need to take it back. And that’s what I’m trying to do, by example first, trying my best every day to be involved in projects that will inspire people to use their talents to do something positive for the world.”
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In 1984, filmmaker Philip Gröning had an idea for a film. He took his proposal to the prior of the Grande Chartreuse monastery, the head monastery of the Carthusian order, high in the French Alps between Grenoble and Chambéry. Gröning wanted to shoot a documentary inside the Grande Chartreuse — not an ordinary documentary, concerned with the transmission of information, but a spiritual voyage into the inner meaning and experience of monastic life.
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The original DVD edition of The Passion of the Christ was a “bare bones” edition featuring only the film itself. This week’s two-disc “Definitive Edition” is packed with extras, from
The Passion Recut (which trims about six minutes of some of the most intense violence) to four separate commentaries.
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It’s a classic. It’s beloved, if for decades only on VHS. It’s got big stars, terrific performances, witty dialogue. Its blend of sex, spectacle and spirituality surpasses anything Cecil B. DeMille ever attempted. So why has
Becket never been restored and brought to DVD in the style it richly deserves?
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When you walk into an average DVD store, “New Releases” dominate the displays. “New Releases,” of course, are generally the movies that played in theaters in the last six to twenty-four months or so. Yet in fact every year many of the most exciting new DVD releases are movies that haven’t played in theaters in years, decades — or even longer.
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It was a grim year at the movies — literally. War, death, dystopia, and other dark and downbeat subjects filled theater screens in 2006. Jeffrey Overstreet (Looking Closer) called it “the year of the nightmare.”
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Thirteen classic Father Brown stories — adapted with gratifying fidelity in the 1974 television series starring Kenneth More — are now available on DVD in a pair of two-disc box sets.
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In blogs, discussion boards, and other fora, a range of criticisms and objections concerning
The Nativity Story have been raised by concerned Catholics. Some of these critiques are thoughtful and worthy of consideration, and raise issues regarding the film that have merit, or are at least defensible. Other complaints are more problematic, resting on misrepresentations of the film or even of Catholic teaching.
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