Wesley Baines on God and “Logan”

Posted on March 19, 2017 at 11:57 am

I didn’t like Logan much. But I am very much in the minority among critics and audience members and I have really enjoyed reading the thoughts from people who were able to see more in the film than I was. Wesley Baines has a lot of insight on the spiritual qualities in the film in his essay on Beliefnet, “Finding God, Redemption, and Purpose in “Logan.”

This is the point where much of Christian art fails. Too much of the time, it tends to zoom in on the aftermath of a life touched by God, and even then, only on the stories that continue to go well after this point. The abusive father gets saved and is re-accepted by his family. Or the promiscuous guy gives up his sex life for God. Everything’s okay. Everything continues upward.

But these aren’t truthful stories, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find God there. No—God is most present in those stories which start at the bottom, and sometimes return there over and over. Look at the history of the Israelites in the Old Testament. Really—go look at their story as a whole with open eyes, and you’ll see a natural patterns of ups and downs, of falling away from God and drawing back to Him, of rock-bottom death to beautiful life.

That’s actually a pretty good description of Logan. This is a world of negatives. This is a world that allows room for heroism, and depicts it as the beautiful rarity that it is.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

More About Beauty and the Beast (Spoiler Alert!)

Posted on March 18, 2017 at 10:35 pm

Have you seen “Beauty and the Beast” already? Then enjoy this look at the Easter eggs, movie homages, and hidden details.

And I really enjoyed this discussion of plot holes/omissions in the original that are solved in the live-action remake.

MAD’s Al Jaffe on More than 50 Years of Cartooning

Posted on March 16, 2017 at 3:39 pm

Vanity Fair pays tribute to MAD’s Al Jaffe, creator of the iconic “fold-in” and the snarky “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” noting that he is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest-running cartoonist. I was happy to see that he told one of my favorite stories, about one of the legendary trips the MAD artists used to take together every year.

The first trip we ever took was to Haiti. All the Mad artists and writers, we went over to Haiti.

That’s a weird place to take a company retreat.

It was, sure. It was ostensibly about bonding as a group, everybody getting to know each other a little better. But the second day we’re there, Bill rents a bunch of Jeeps, and he tells us “We’re going to visit someone.”

That’s all he tells you?

We have no clue what’s happening. So we all get in these jeeps, and we drive out to some neighborhood in Haiti, and pull up in front of a house. Bill knocks on the door, a guy answers, and Bill says to him, “We’ve all come here to find out why you canceled your subscription to Mad.”

No he didn’t!

He really did. This guy was Mad’s only Haitian reader, and Bill didn’t want to lose him. So he brought the entire staff to his doorstep. We all just started begging, “What can we do? Come back to us!” He eventually said yes. And the guy next door, his neighbor, he became a subscriber too. So we left Haiti with two new Mad readers.

What Movie Did International Fans Select as the All-Time Best?

Posted on March 16, 2017 at 3:16 pm

Far from scientific, but still fun to read about: A survey, conducted just after the Oscars, collected responses to a single, fill-in-the-blank question from more than 10,500 movie watchers spanning five different languages in the UK, Europe, Japan, and the U.S., which were then machine translated and analyzed in minutes by OdinText, a text analytics software platform. The movie they picked: “Titanic.” Number 2: “Star Wars” (all of them).

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

The Mindy Project: Imagine Mindy as a White Male

Posted on March 15, 2017 at 3:42 pm

Mindy Kaling’s “The Mindy Project” has a sharp season ender as Mindy, applying for a job, gets to see how her life would be different if she were white and male. The white male version of Mindy is played by “Veronica Mars” bro Ryan Hansen, and as the white male version of herself, Mindy learns (as Eddie Murphy did in his famous SNL sketch) that in a job interview, no one asks a man about balancing work and home responsibilities. New York Magazine’s Vulture column notes:

When you’re privileged, “Your life is so carefree, you start wondering why other people don’t just help themselves. Because you think life is just as easy for everyone else.” But Mindy misses being interesting and different, so she wishes to go back to being an Indian woman. Plus, she gets to bond with Dr. Lee over fettuccine at the hospital. A perfect little lesson in privilege and allyship, wrapped in a sweet, sitcom form.