Baseball is a great sport. It’s the only game in the world where the defense gives the ball to the offense to score. It’s a game comprised of lots of down time, moments where the athletes are doing nothing but spitting out sunflower seeds while digging holes in the ground with their cleats in anticipation...
Fans of the landmark TV show 24 have their hearts all a’flutter this week as the newest season’of half-season as it were’of the blockbuster show hits the airwaves. Instead of the usual 24 episodes depicting real-time events in the day of the life of action hero Jack Bauer (played with cold-blooded efficiency by Kiefer Sutherland),...
I’ve been known to have an upturned nose when it comes to Christian films. When talking about Christian films, I tend to default to Jay Sherman: I hated it. Let’s just face it. Christian films are terrible-mainly because Christian films are never really attempts to be films. Instead, they are usually overly-priced Gospel tracts. But...
I forgot to check the Rotten Tomato score for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 prior to watching the film so as soon as the the movie was over and the credits came on, I jumped on my phone excited to see an overwhelming flood of good reviews from Rotten Tomatoes. I normally check the site before...
Super-heroes are grounded firmly in fantasy, but even they sometimes need to wake up to reality. Flying through the air, hi-tech gadgets, superhuman strength, foiling criminals, rescuing women and children’it all seems quite glamorous and fun until someone gets hurt. That’s one of the ideas explored in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and it’s an idea...
The Book Thief (2013) is a mostly uninspired and only intermittently compelling movie of tiresome length, confusing and frustrating every hope I had entertained of the original volume’s bittersweet tragedy being skillfully adapted to the screen. Markus Zusak’s young adult novel of the same name was both starkly tragic and sweetly human, relieving its dark...
There’s a certain man vs machine’ tension hardwired in to the premise of TRANSCENDENCE, but the film is actually little more than a poorly-structured science-fiction cautionary tale with brilliant ideas to spare but with a paper-thin screenplay to hang them on. TRANSCENDENCE was made by first-time director Wally Pfister, who die-hard cinephiles will know as...
A Christian filmmaker friend of mine told me how excited he was for the state of Christian film. He has high hopes that Heaven is For Real will make a lot of money at the box office. Even though he doesn’t agree with the aberrant theology of Heaven is For Real, he believes that lots...
