Putting the "View" in Review: Writing critically about movies
Websites featuring reviews and discussion of film (and other pop culture media) from a Christian perspective
Christianity Today Movies
Looking Closer
Film Chat
Church of the Masses
Reveal Arts
The Phantom Tollbooth
Noteworthy sources of mainstream reviews
Rotten Tomatoes
Entertainment Weekly
Arts and Letters Daily
The New York Times
The Los Angeles Times
Books and websites about the theory of criticism and cultural engagement
Why a website about movies? (Christianity Today)
What is Hip? (Christianity Today)
Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard! (The Believer)
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S Lewis (Cambridge)
From Lewis:
Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth, and Evil in the Movies by Jeffrey Overstreet (Regal, available in February 2007)“No poem will give up its secret to a reader who enters it regarding the poet as a potential deceiver, and determined not to be taken in. We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything. The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone.”
From Overstreet:
"Here's another quote the makes me think about the movies:
'The world speaks of the holy in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.' - Frederick Buechner, A Room to Remember
I love those words as well.
All films are about the striving for redemption, because all films show us a broken world, and communicate brokenly, imperfectly. But the beauty that draws us is the same beauty we're longing to regain. We recognize brokenness because we know we're living in paradise lost. Thus, even those who deny the presence of God cannot help but remind me of him, because in their various portrayals of chaos or tragedy or human striving, they reflect back to me that sense within all of us--that things are not as they should be, and that we have an indwelling sense, a memory, of the ideal from which we have fallen. The scriptures say, "We have eternity written in our hearts."
Thus, I am fascinated as fascinated by films that explore the darkness as I am by those that focus on the light. We can learn about holiness by its absence, and we can come to recognize our own failings when we look into brightness and beauty.
Many of my well-meaning religious colleagues tell me that I should bar myself from watching movies in which certain misbehaviors and evils are portrayed. And if I write a positive review of a film in which people use foul language, or employ violence, or behave with reckless sexuality, I'm sure to receive email telling me I am leading moviegoers into trouble.
If wrongful behavior is being celebrated and condoned by a film, then certainly, it's not very healthy to spend time meditating on such reckless deception.
But all great stories — most certainly including the stories of the Bible — reflect back to us human beings like ourselves engaged in despicable things. Great artists don’t ignore or censor darkness in favor of some "purified" illustration. They don’t focus on delivering what will make me comfortable. I need to be able to look at the world in all of its depravity, so that I can remind myself that God is there, too, moving in mysterious ways, redeeming fools and crooks like me, offering comfort to the lost.
Films like Babel, Gosford Park, Magnolia, Secrets and Lies, and Crash remind us that the world is full of hatred and violence and sexual depravity. But they also move us by those bright, fleeting glimmers of grace, tenderness, and sacrifice that can take place in the darkness.
If I am confined to only see those sugar-sweet, sentimental, happily-ever-after stories that sanitize their portrayals of the world, I'm looking at a false world, a dishonest dream, and one that will only serve to lead me into denial and separatism.
I want to live in the real world. And there are a lot of discomforting, troubling, but profound films that are helping me to do so."
posted by lisa ann @ 6:23 PM
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