You can tell I’ve resolved several big projects and am mentally entering Spring Break because I actually took half an hour Monday to answer a question that’s been nagging since the Academy Awards last weekend: Do the Oscars tend to favor movies set in the past? Of course, the antebellum historical drama 12 Years a Slave won … More Best Picture Oscar Winners as Histories
It was the fall of 1993, and I was a freshman at the College of William and Mary. One night I answered a knock at our dorm room door to find a group of three very attractive women, looking through their facebook (note to readers younger than 30: I mean that they were holding a booklet … More What Do Movies Get Right and Wrong about Teaching?
It’s not the most significant thing I’ve accomplished in the 2013-2014 academic year, but in terms of things of which I’m most foolishly proud… Well, there’s playing the role of Severus Snape in a Bethel-themed spoof of the Harry Potter movies, and there’s everything else: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KflAhiHV4jY Watch the whole thing of course, but pay particular attention to … More Just Call Me Alan Rickman
“Following Up” is a kind of semi-rerun that I do from time to time: freshening up an older post with just a bit of new content or reflection. This one goes back to late February 2013: If you’re like me, you emerged from the Christmas special that served as the final episode of the third … More Following Up: Downton and Sherlock
Welcome again Jared Burkholder of Grace College and Seminary, who will be blogging in this space every other Friday. Jared’s first post jumps off from a new book on the martyrdom of eight Jesuit missionaries martyred in mid-17th century Canada. The Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame held its fall Seminar in American Religion … More Historian Emma Anderson and the “Afterlife” of Martyrdom
Few recent movies have received the acclaim accorded to 12 Years A Slave, currently owner of a 95% “fresh” rating at the critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But then few recent movies attempt to immerse audiences in the antebellum experience of a free black man taken into bondage from 1841 to 1853 — working from the … More 12 Years a Slave: Film as History
Just two days after I again lauded Books & Culture as my favorite periodical, this dismaying announcement came over the Twitter from B&C editor John Wilson: The Nov/Dec issue of @booksandculture will be the last unless we raise $110,000 in the next 3 days: http://t.co/VKv0Uy3C3l — John Wilson (@jwilson1812) September 4, 2013 Further details were … More Help Save “Books and Culture”!
I have almost no interest in superheroes. Never owned a comic book; didn’t get remotely excited about The Avengers coming together; and think that the only really great superhero movie was the one where Heath Ledger’s Joker embodied evil — I honestly can’t remember anything Batman said or did in The Dark Knight. But I … More Superman and Salvation
In my two-part series asking which wars had inspired the best movies, I noted that the views of the fans who register their opinions with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) sometimes diverge significantly from those of the film critics whose reviews are aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes (RT). The example I gave in Monday’s analysis of … More The Most Over- and Underrated War Movies
Yesterday I explained that, inspired by the realization that there simply aren’t many movies about the American Revolutionary War — let alone good movies, I spent some time over the weekend going through the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and the Rotten Tomatoes (RT) index of critics to see which modern wars have produced the best … More Which Modern War Has Yielded the Best Movies? (part 2)
The Pietist Schoolman 