I first read a Scholastic edition of A Wrinkle in Time around 1980 when I was probably about nine or ten years old. It may have been the first science fiction title I read. I remember reading Wrinkle into the wee hours, imagining an evil-driven dystopian society on Camazotz where Dr. Murry was imprisoned for...
Tag: Film Review
Dunkirk: An Exercise in Missing the Point
Editorial Note: The digital download of Dunkirk releases today and the DVD releases next week. This is Pastor Steve Sanchez’s original review from his blog, Stone the Preacher. —————————————————————————————————————- I recently saw the excellent film Dunkirk yet was saddened when I learned the filmmakers got everything right except for the true hero of the story....
“Jurassic World:” A Sequel That Knows It’s a Sequel
One of my vivid movie-going memories comes from June 1993 when I saw Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park on opening night. 22 years ago, nobody had ever seen a computer-generated dinosaur, much less a whole mess of them. They were vivid and life-like. They convincingly interacted with human actors. They even seamlessly melded with full-scale animatronic...
Audacity: The Audacity of Love
Anyone who has read my reviews of Christian films knows that generally, I’m not a fan. The writing is usually very bad, the acting is often even worse, and they usually look (and sound) like they were shot in a church gymnasium. They are often sappy, unrealistic, and so obviously evangelistic that they shouldn’t really...
“Tomorrowland:” Disney Goes Postmillennial
The Hunger Games. Mad Max: Fury Road. Left Behind. Wait, Left Behind? What’s a Christian work of fiction doing among those secular entertainments? Well, they all have one overriding theme: Pessimism. In The Hunger Games the world ends and afterward we all end up hunting and killing each other. In Mad Max: Fury Road the...
How To Love The Fool: “Debating Dillahunty”
There’s a principle present in the new documentary Debating Dillahunty that can be encapsulated in the famous song from the Disney classic Mary Poppins: A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. In Debating Dillahunty, the medicine is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the sugar is Sye Ten Bruggencate. Anybody who is even...
“The Battle of the Five Armies” Ends The Hobbit With An Exclamation Point
Peter Jackson so placed his indelible artistic stamp on his Lord of the Rings trilogy that when he decided to film the first Middle-Earth book, The Hobbit, comparisons were inevitable. The books themselves don’t invite such comparisons; J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings. However, in Movie-Land, prequels are the new...
“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1:” An Excellent Half-Movie
When adapting a trilogy of books, it probably doesn’t make much sense to make four movies. The final book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was split up into two movies, and both movies taken together are much more successful than their individual parts. Since Mockingjay, Part 2 is still...
‘Saving Christmas:’ More Scrooge Than Santa
We’ve been on a bit of a hot streak at Gospel Spam lately. We’ve gotten a few free screeners, an angry phone call from a producer of a bad Christian film, an interview with an Academy Award-winning director, a serious film maker’s request to review a script and a request for an interview with The...
‘Interstellar’ Is An Engaging But Imperfect Star Trek
There’s space opera, there’s fantasy, and then there’s science fiction. Interstellar definitely falls into the latter category. The film involves huge sequences involving spaceships, wormholes, alien planets, and hair-breath escapes’but everything is kept grounded in something resembling reality. The setting is in the future, but everything looks pretty much familiar. There’s public schools. There’s corn...