Those are ideas that The Circle plays with, but it ends up asking complex questions that result in apparent artistic incoherence. How do we use technology that benefits us without being enslaved by it or by those who control it?
Articles published in Culture
Critical reflections on art and culture.
Life
Given the name “Life,” the title of this new outer-space science-fiction thriller, I was looking for a grand artistic gesture. I wanted a movie about all the vast complexities involved in the purpose of life itself.
The Shack
What The Shack lacks for in clarity, it makes up for in boldness. It deals head-on with the vexing questions of why a good God allows evil to exist and why people have to suffer.
Take Long Looks at Anything
It’s billed as a true-crime podcast, but that’s like calling Dylan a gospel singer; while a section of the story revolves around the crime that McLemore mentions in the email, it’s really only a couple of records in a lifelong catalog.
“Beauty and the Beast”
There are two movies here, neither of which get along well with the other. There’s the Disney musical with the melodramatic love story. And then there’s everything in and about the Beast’s castle.
Logan
When I was a grown-up, I watched Logan, and again I remembered being a kid who watched those cartoons, in part to root for Beast and Cyclops and Wolverine, and in part to deal with a dark and dreary world.