With my last day and a half turning into something of a wash, the last session I attended was a Sunday morning panel sonsored by the ethics section entitled Hooray for Hollywood? Ethics and Entertainment. The session was presided by Elijah Siegler from the College of Charleston, and the panelists included Barbara Barnett from the [...]

Rounding out a long Saturday, I attended the Forum on Sports and Religion: Perspectives on the Pigskin, sponsored in part by Mercer University Press. The panelists included Joseph Price from Whittier College, Greg Sapp from Stetson University, Christopher Anderson from Drew University, Marc Jolley, director of Mercer University Press, Craig A. Forney from Arizona State [...]

The second session I attended was also sponsored by the Religion, Media, and Culture Group and was entitled Sleeper Cell: Viewing Religion, Race, and Terrorism in a Post-9/11 World. The session focused on the Showtime original series, Sleeper Cell, that ran for two seasons from 2005-2006, and the panelists included Kamran Pasha, one of the [...]

This year’s American Academy of Religion conference offered much in the way of religion and popular culture with session topics ranging from video games to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’ll provide some highlights from the sessions that I attended, starting with Born Digital and Born Again Digital: Religion in Virtual [...]

The career path of a filmmaker or actor is often an interesting thing to track. The choices of what films to direct or what roles to play reveal something of the filmmaker or actor’s artistic abilities, desires, or, in some cases, financial necessities. I doubt that many directors have experienced the creative arc that Chinese-American [...]

It has been well over a year since I read the news that the Coen brothers would be filming Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. While that year went by fast enough, it was an excruciating wait. Fortunately, the wait paid off this weekend as the film opened to limited release in the U.S. [...]

Given the changes that Chris Weitz is making to the adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the religious controversy surrounding the film’s release might be more exciting than the film itself. I am exaggerating here and am anxiously awaiting the film’s release. However, until it arrives in December, I will just have to amuse [...]

I have never really been a big fan of Ben Affleck’s acting. I enjoyed him in Dogma but only because of Kevin Smith’s irreverent script, and as much as I love comic book films, Daredevil‘s read leather cat-suit, though appropriate, was simply a campy distraction. However, I certainly cannot say the same about Affleck’s directing. [...]

Thanks to Alexander Carpenter for pointing me to this article, Seven Degrees of Bob Dylan . I am anxiously awaiting the Bay Area release of the new Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. I am intrigued by the director’s (Todd Haynes) use of seven different actors (from Cate Blanchett to Heath Ledger) to play different [...]

There are many striking elements to George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank. William C. Mellor’s stunning cinematography consistently captures the claustrophobia and mental/emotional degeneration of two and a half years in an attic. Unfortunately, Mellor does not employ his skills to shed light on the horrors of the Holocaust. Cynthia Ozick’s focus on Otto [...]