For you Millenials, Gen Zs, and whatever, I'd recommend putting aside your anime for a couple of hours and watching a real movie.
While the breakout from Stalag Luft III is the most famous prison break, it was nowhere near the biggest or most successful. It occurred at Stalag 315 in Epinal, France, on May 11, 1944. Stalag 315 housed over 3,000 Indian, Sikh, and Gurkha soldiers, mostly captured in Dunkirk and North Africa. On May 11, the Eighth Air Force carried out a 67 bomber raid on Epinal, and some of the collateral damage was the prison. About 70 prisoners were killed, but over 1,000 prisoners made a break for it, and about 500 made it to Switzerland. Unfortunately, their story hasn't received the attention of the Stalag Luft III escape. As with the Great Escape, some of the prisoners were summarily executed upon recapture.

Here are some of the other major prison breaks.

For a movie based on the life of a saint, it is decidedly non-religious. I suppose this was focus-tested at some point along the way, but it really detracts from the movie. God is maybe mentioned once. Jesus is not mentioned. The only prayer in the movie is one scene where the nuns say grace before a meal, and it is done in a very non-Catholic way. The characters are almost archetypes. //

Also interesting is the subtext of the position of recent immigrants as portrayed by David Morse in the role of Archbishop Michael Corrigan. They are so interested in not making waves and blending in with native New Yorkers that they ignore the plight of immigrants like their parents suffered. Cabrini's persistence and goodness come through. I think Cabrini's actions are straight from the Parable of the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1-8). In a society that is increasingly paralyzed by inaction and indecision, seeing what one person, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, can accomplish is a tonic. //

The opportunities for the Christian faith to be effortlessly incorporated into the movie were limitless. Cabrini never prays and never contemplates her pain in terms of sanctifying suffering. She never has doubts about her mission or her abilities. She never prays for guidance or assistance. All of this is very un-Catholic, particularly in the context of a nun. At one point, the Archbishop tells her he often wonders if she is acting out of her religious calling or from ambition. It's a question that needed to be explored and answered but ended up as a toss-away line in the script. //

The decision to make a film that doesn't fit into the "Christian movie" genre results in attributing Cabrini's work to her efforts rather than to the greater glory of God. That is unfortunate.

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a spiritually empty, imaginatively bereft upscale spectacle, engineered for fans of Kamala Harris and subscribers to The New Yorker //

Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.

What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.

One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.

Take a look at the fastest, smallest, and silliest aircraft to appear in the James Bond franchise.

And while the sci part of the sci-fi equation may be questionable in Scott's 1982 original, the production design felt so right to audiences that it has overshadowed almost every future-set movie since. Even if – with only two years to go – our world looks nothing like Blade Runner's vision of 2019, Scott's vision remains the benchmark for The Future.

William Gibson invented the future. He also coined the term "cyberspace", which earned his place not just in literary and sci-fi but also nerd history. His world of elite hackers, shady super-corporations and unfathomable artificial intelligences inform almost all modern speculative fiction.

Gibson didn't invent Blade Runner. He was just breathing in the same post-industrial silicon fumes as its director Ridley Scott and futurologist production designer Syd Mead, who also shaped the look of Aliens and Tron. A heady mix that stapled Blade Runner to the pantheon of film and ensures we're discussing it today.

johnwalker

If you enjoy classic movies and find yourself bored with the endless series of sequels and reboots from present-day Hollywood, each striving to be more woke, transgressive, and aligned with the momentary obsessions of the “creative class”, the good news is that we’re living in a golden age when hundreds of film classics which not long ago you may have been lucky to see screened once in a decade or two at an art house or on late night television, interrupted by bottom-feeder advertisements, are now just sitting there on YouTube and other streaming services, completely free, waiting for you to enjoy them.

This post collects, in the comments, films you may want to check out. For each, I provide a YouTube player to watch the film and commentary from Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). With the exception of a few films which are included because they’re “so awful they’re good”, most of these films are rated 7/10 or better for quality on IMDB.

The movies are listed in no particular order.

Don’t forget the popcorn!

Tossing aside Godfather, we’re on pretty thin ground for fabulous Hollywood trilogies. This is entirely to be expected. Hollywood doesn’t make trilogies because stories need to be carried over three films. Hollywood makes trilogies because film number one hit big and the studio wants to crank up the money machine. Hollywood Film Trilogies, almost by definition, are not creatively necessary, merely financially desirable. In the history of film, Rings is very nearly unique because it was conceived as a trilogy — it was understood going into the production that the arc of the story would take three films. Comparing this intentional trilogy to other, basically unintentional film trilogies is comparing apples to oranges. //

Until 2005, at least, Rings is literally sui generis.

Indeed, in all the cases above, the film version of the story is the definitive version — the original text is, at best, complementary to the film. This is because the film is the better telling of the story. And it’s not simply because some stories are better told as films for visual purposes. It’s because the texts did not best express the story. It doesn’t mean the books are bad — Baum’s Oz books, for one, are a delightful read. It simply means the story is more completely serviced in film.

As is the case with The Lord of the Rings. Director Peter Jackson is famously a huge fan of the Tolkien books, but based on the movies (and the various commentary I’ve read from and about the man) I think it’s more accurate to say he’s a huge fan of Middle-Earth — he seems very nearly enamored of the work other artists have done in the place as he is with Tolkien’s prose.

After The Return of the King was released, I wrote two longish essays about the film trilogy, one attempting to explain where it sat in terms of film history, and a second, somewhat more controversial, in which I posited that the film trilogy was better than the book trilogy, in terms of storytelling. Rather than to repeat the points made in those essays, I will simply link to them here, for your perusal at your own convenience. Likewise, because I assume my audience of readers has seen these films, over and over and over again, I won’t spend any time substantially revisiting the plot or themes of the trilogy. You know it, you’ve seen it, you can whistle “Concerning Hobbits” unprompted.

Instead, allow me to present a series of five thoughts about the The Lord of the Rings, both the individual movies, and the production itself.

Director Ridley Scott has achieved the impossible—making Napoleon Bonaparte boring. //

It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.

This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.

This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.

Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.

So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.

Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring. //

Ultimately, the film feels like a disengaged fifth grader’s petulant history project. It takes pains to note when and where each event takes place, as if to say, “Hey, audience, see this? It actually happened, please care about it,” without allowing the events to breathe.

This slavish obsession with accuracy seems an extreme overcorrection from “Gladiator,” where Scott butchered the historical record but captured the heart of Roman virtue. Here, Scott has preserved the history only by carefully excising the drama and passion that audiences expect from a blockbuster film. //

As if an afterthought, the movie serves up two spectacles of battle: Austerlitz and Waterloo, but manages to remove any real drama from those famous conflagrations. In each case, the audience has no sense of why the battles are important, what Napoleon and his opponents are trying to achieve, and why they should care about the men dying before their eyes.

By contrast, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” provides a masterclass in battle storytelling. The Battle of Helm’s Deep delivers an awesome spectacle of fascinating siege tactics, setting and fulfilling audience expectations, and making audiences care by placing the main characters at the heart of the action. Viewers have a stake in the twists and turns of the battle because they have gotten to know and care about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and Gimli (John Rhys Davies), who are intimately involved in the fighting.

By contrast, audiences in “Napoleon” see nameless, faceless soldiers fighting in ranks they don’t understand, with Napoleon in the distance commanding things. The film has spent no time explaining why the battle matters, what the ramifications are for France if Napoleon loses, and why viewers should care about those doing the fighting. All we know is that this is a massive battle, and Napoleon is in control, so we should just watch and eat our popcorn.

The problem with this approach is that it tosses all the drama out the window. //

I got the sense that if someone could just sit down with Scott and tell him, “Hey, here’s why Napoleon’s important, and why he’s actually interesting,” perhaps we would have got something a little more like “Gladiator” and a little less like “Real Housewives of Revolutionary Paris.” ///

History should be taught as drama; to do that, one has to connect with historical people, understand why they matter, and the consequences of their action or inaction. Then the dates and events make sense.

Cinematography and a conservative bent are not enough to redeem this historical falsification of Napoleon’s life. //

Still, it is sadly not enough to redeem what could have been a glorious film about an epochal man’s rise and fall. Ridley Scott tries to tell an interesting story about Napoleon but falls flat in both respects. The story is bland and spastic, with seemingly random jumps between unrelated scenes that confuse more than clarify. The movie treats its central figure with scorn, making it an uncomfortable experience for the average viewer and a positively infuriating one for the historically inclined. The battles are enjoyable but are not worth the price of admission. You’d be far better off waiting for it to come to streaming or skipping it altogether.

The Great Man deserved more than this falsification of his fascinating life. The audience does, too.

Disney has abandoned heroism. In fact, instead of just ignoring heroes, Disney has taken the extra step of eviscerating established ones. Since 1981, Indiana Jones, like Superman and John Wayne, has been a symbol of America and the American man. He is smart, tough, and a fighter who does the right thing. Disney’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” turned him into an old, feeble man who cowers in the corner while his goddaughter saves the day. Not even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” did that.

Luke Skywalker was the most optimistic character in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, a warrior who defeated the emperor, saved the galaxy, and rescued his father’s soul from the Dark Side. Disney Luke is a paranoid, cynical, broken old man who has to be coaxed back into the good fight by a Mary Sue and then dies, not in a blaze of glory but by concentrating too hard. There are other examples: fat Thor, an emasculated Nick Fury, and the growing host of “diverse women of color” who have taken the place of the traditional hero and, more often than not, have to fight — surprise, surprise — a straight, white man. If you are an example of the SWM, Disney wants you to know that you are either a villain or a comically castrated clown.

Part of the reason for this new campaign against heroes is that Disney is now thoroughly behind what YouTube’s Critical Drinker has simply dubbed “The Message,” the current web of racialism, rainbow mafia, DEI, and general hatred of Western civilization. //

It may come as a shock to Disney executives that people resent it when they are blamed for not seeing a movie that doesn’t deserve to be seen. This then creates a doomsday loop: The more failures Disney has, the more it will blame what’s left of its audience, whittling down that audience even more.

Disney is not just chopping away its audience but also its brand. And that is the foundational issue in all of this. Since 1937, Disney has been a name not just loved but trusted. //

But now, the sleeping giant of the American public is awake, and it knows those days are gone. And once that trust is gone, it may prove impossible to win back. That should be the nightmare keeping Disney’s leadership up at night.

We picked 20 time-travel movies and rated them by scientific logic and entertainment value.

No film from Angel Studios makes it to the big screen without the approval of the Angel Guild.

Over 21 films a week are submitted to the Angel Guild, “and then the guild goes through those and they’re picking their favorites and they’re greenlighting them and then Angel Studios can only pick from the list that they greenlight,” explains Jeff Harmon, chief content officer for Angel Studios. //

Neal Harmon: Once we started thinking about the media and storytelling, from perspective of our own children, we said, “We’re not happy with where the world’s headed and how are we going to solve this problem or has someone solved this problem?” When we realized no one had and that there were other parents that were interested in solving this problem, we decided to do something about it. //

Neal Harmon: The core premise of Hollywood is two things, from our perspective.

One is that if you collect a group of people and have them work together in storytelling, that you’ll create a vibrant community that can tell stories better than anyone else in the world. We think that Hollywood actually is performing well on that premise, like that they tell a story better than anyone else in the world.

The second thing is that Hollywood has consolidated the decisions of what stories to tell into very few hands.

Jeff Harmon: Gatekeeper model.

Neal Harmon: Gatekeeper model, yeah. And that’s what’s different, is Angel’s fine with the craft of Hollywood and the capability, but then the gatekeeper and the decision-making we feel like has lost its way, it’s trapped in a bubble. And we’ve flipped the power structure so that the Angel community, the Angel Guild makes the decisions, rather than a few elite decision-makers.

Jeff Harmon: We don’t make the decisions. We can’t pick a film unless it goes through the Angel Guild first and the Angel Guild is over 100,000 people—

Neal Harmon: And growing. //

You can join it by investing or you can join it by subscribing, so anybody who goes to angel.com/guild can join the guild.

They get a vote on the content that goes to theaters. They get two free movie tickets to every single movie that comes out. //

Neal Harmon: And why are we doing it this way instead of the way Netflix does it? We have learned that the community aspect of watching films creates an experience that shapes culture. It becomes part of the culture.

There’s lots of things that have come to Netflix that nobody hears about. They hear about it if they’re on Netflix, but they don’t become part of the cultural conversation the way that “Sound of Freedom” did. “Sound of Freedom” is arguably the most talked about story in this decade. And that’s what the Angel Guild wants. That’s what we all want, is we want to shape cultures.

Peter Paradise @byPeterParadise

Home Alone is a Christian movie about Kevin finding faith.

He starts the movie in a non-praying house, making an evil wish to Santa (an idol) for his family to disappear.

While at first he enjoys his time without his family, he has a yearning in his heart to be reunited with their love.

He consults a Santa impersonator asking for help, but comes to realize that this is a false god who can’t help him.

Disheartened he enters a peaceful and beautiful church where he encounters old man Marley, a patriarch who has inspired fear in him in the past. Marley approaches Kevin w/pierced hands, asks Kevin if he has been good, and tells him a version of the prodigal son story.

Kevin returns from the church, changed. He makes dinner and prays to God at home before his final confrontation between good and evil. The home is defending us now a Christian household.

Kevin’s victory is not just over the robbers but his sinful nature, and by conquering that he is reunited with his family and gets to experience the true meaning of Christmas.

https://t.co/pDb4UrUyr6 //

Sherman McCoy @wasphyxiation
·
Nov 12
The discourse about the Home Alone house has me thinking about the movie. Easily one of the most sincere and least irony-poisoned movies ever made. This is why it's become an enduring classic

Pandora's Promise

Pandora's Promise is a 2013 documentary film about the nuclear power debate, directed by Robert Stone. Its central argument is that nuclear power, which still faces historical opposition from environmentalists, is a relatively safe and clean energy source which can help mitigate the serious problem of anthropogenic global warming.

View Pandoras's Promise on Youtube. https://youtu.be/KMutoR8YTlQ

View Pandora's Promise at Netflix. https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Pandora-s-Promise/70267585

To watch Killers is to observe the slow progression of what Mollie calls a “wasting illness” (in literal and metaphorical terms) that surrounds her family. It’s the creeping, insidious, nature of sin devastating a community in real time, like an invasive weed gradually suffocating the life out of a thriving garden. //

The film ends with a brilliant, unexpected coda, set several years after the movie’s main action. It’s a scene of a true crime radio program recording that dramatizes the story in auditory form. We catch the end of the broadcast, as radio actors and sound-effects artists narrate the “what happened to” fates of the key players in the Osage Murders case.

The scene is brilliant narratively for how it informs the audience about where Hale, Ernest, and Mollie end up. But it’s also brilliant thematically, as a commentary on the importance of how stories get told in different forms, across generations. We’re watching a live radio program, filmed for a movie, adapted from a book, about a true story.

Most meta of all, Scorsese himself appears in a cameo, as a radio performer who reads the newspaper obituary printed after Mollie Burkhart’s 1937 death. After reading the obit, Scorsese’s character notes, as he looks soberly into the audience, that “There was no mention of the murders.”

It’s the last line of the film. It speaks to the ways we’re prone, in our fallenness, to whitewash history and edit out the uncomfortable episodes and the sins of our ancestors, even as (like Ernest and others in Killers) we’re prone to concealing rather than confessing our present sins. Our instinct to hide sin is as old as Eden. //

When future observers look back on our generation’s telling of the Christian story, may it never be said that “There was no mention of _____ [insert unpopular or difficult biblical teaching].” Let’s tell the whole truth, even if it means the audience dwindles. And let’s rejoice that the whole truth includes not only the guilt of our sins in the past but also the grace of Christ in the present and an unfailing hope for the future.

It’s really not fair that I can give them a pass for using a 747 in the first place, yet be offended by which variant was depicted. Here I am complaining because they used the wrong kind of the wrong plane.

Still though, if you’re going to show a plane at all, at least show one that actually existed at the time. Not bothering to do so is laziness. The choice of going with a 747 instead of a DC-8 can at least be argued on dramatic grounds. Going with a model that hadn’t been invented yet is simply incoherent.

You mean to tell me that with the millions of dollars lavished on the production of a major film, that Affleck and company couldn’t have gotten hold of an actual, chronologically correct 747 (it would have been the -200 variant) for a couple of simple runway scenes? At least a few 747-200s are still flying, and I’m sure the owners (cargo companies mostly) would have been happy to lease one out for a few days. Dozens more are mothballed in the deserts of California and Arizona, within driving distance of Hollywood, any one of which could have been painted up in the appropriate colors.

Speaking of which…

Earlier on, I was impressed that they got the period livery for British Airways exactly right, including the typeface used in airport signage. There’s also a very quick shot of the tail section of an Iran Air 747. Here too, though you don’t see it for more than a second, the livery is correct.

But then, with Swissair, they blow it. The colors shown, with the black and brown striping and the full red tail, weren’t used until 1980. They’ve got the wrong plane and the wrong paint job.