You Are What You See is a good introduction for Christians at their wits' end trying to figure out what to do about popular entertainment. You won't be given a hard-and-fast formula, but you'll come away with some maps and compasses to help you find your own way.
James Bowman has kindly responded to my comments on his assertion that “fantasy is not Art.” ‘Kindly,’ on second thought, might be stretching things a bit, given that he begins by marginalizing those who disagree with him as nothing more than blog-dwelling trolls*: You can imagine the reaction in the blogosphere— which, as you may or may not know, has way more Lewis and Tolkien fans in it than the population at large. I wonder why that is, by the way? I’ll bet there are far more readers of Mr. Bowman’s latest blog entry in the blogosphere than in the population at large, but I digress. After establishing a suitably dismissive tone with those lines, Mr. Bowman begins his defense with the following: I wonder if it is too late to protest that I did not say what Mr Crandall says I said. What I did say was that fantasy — by which I meant the fantasy actually being produced in our culture today, the fantasy of Avatar or The Dark Knight or that which is, in one way or another, merely derivative from Tolkien or Lewis — represents a break with the Western mimetic tradition to which the fantasies
French film director Olivier Assayas has cast the lead actor for his film biography of the terrorist known as Carlos, Ilich: Story of Carlos. Playing the role of the Venezuala-born leftist terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos and as the Jackal, will be Edgar Ramirez, who played a soldier backing Fidel Castro in Che, Steve Soderbergh’s biography of the Cuban communist revolutionary. Sanchez/Carlos is now in jail in France after leading a global terrorist organization that served the Soviet Union’s ends as he worked for Palestinians, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and the Romanian communist government, among others. Director Assayas referred to Carlos as "the most complex and controversial character to emerge from the revolutionary struggles of our time," according to Reuters. What controversy there could possibly be over the man’s actions is puzzling, given that he was simply a murderous thug who served as many of the world’s wickedest regimes as possible. After a film made by a prominent Hollywood director lauding Che Guevara, of course, it was only inevitable that someone would take up the cause of an even more blatant terrorist.
The newly released epic Russian film Admiral exemplifies the nation’s effort to build a post-Communist culture with new heroes embodying traditional ideals. Unfortunately, dislike of foreigners seems to be a big part of the process.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders is back in the news for daring to say what few in the West will admit: that Islam is not a religion of peace. Wilders is about to release a ten-minute film that shows Islam to be “a source of inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror.”
We’re a week away from the opening of The Golden Compass, the new film based on the first volume of Philip Pullman’s "His Dark Materials" trilogy, and the pre-release hype has crescendoed to a deafening roar. The central issue is whether the film will influence innocent tykes to become atheists, and whether that would be a bad thing if it happened. Certainly Pullman has made it perfectly clear in all his public statements and in the trilogy of fantasy novels that yes, he is an atheist, and yes, he would very much like to see all religious belief done away with if such a thing were possible.
In addition to its considerable literary merits, Beowulf is significant as the first Christian epic poem. Composed some time in the eight to tenth centuries A.D. in what is now England, and set in Scandinavia in the fifth and sixth centurues, the poem, whose author is now lost to history (and which is probably taken from oral sources), tells of events in pagan times but explicitly places them in a Christian context and explains their meaning in thoroughly Christian terms. Thus in addition to being a rousing adventure story and epic tale of civilizational struggle, the poem is a fascinating document of Europe’s transition from paganism to Christianity.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer topped the U.S. box office during the past week, performing very well at the box office while garnering generally negative reviews. The audiences are right on this one (as usual).
USA Today has an excellent article in which the author interviews historian Paul Cartledge, author of Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World, about the historical accuracy of the movie 300, which premieres this Friday nationwide. The film was based on the accouint in Herodotus’s Histories, by way of a graphic novel by Frank Miller. Cartledge saw a preview of the movie, and the news is good: The historical record is (pretty much) Book 7 of Herodotus’ Histories. What the movie leaves out is that Sparta didn’t fight the Persians alone but as the head of a Greek alliance that included, most importantly, Athens. Sparta was the greatest Greek military power on land, Athens by sea. The resistance to the massive Persian invasion had to be an amphibious one, both by land and by sea, to counter the Persians’ amphibious invasion. So the filmmakers missed out that Leonidas and his Spartans were attempting to hold the Thermopylae pass by land in conjunction with the allied Greek fleet led by Athens just up the coast. However, there are two points about this Greek alliance: 1. It was tiny — only about 30 Greek cities out of 700 or so who might
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