Just when I had almost purged the memory from my mind, the “pregnant man” re-emerged in the pop culture zeitgeist, and reminded me (as if I needed reminding) that the world is on the brink of losing whatever shred of rational bearings it still has left.

Ballast is a beautiful picture of the durability and persistence of humanity. At first glance it looks like some sort of cruel examination of poor, hapless black people beat down by the system. It is that, in part, but there are no victims or villainous oppressors here, and there are no excuses. The characters are flawed, frustrated, but determined to somehow forge ahead.

I’m not sure that Clint Eastwood intended it to be, but Changeling is in my mind one of the quintessential films of the “George W. Bush lame duck” period in American pop culture. That is: the period of intense malaise and disillusionment that started around the time of Katrina and is just now beginning to subside.

Synecdoche is about a lot of other things, too: fate, free will, fatherhood, love, theater, Artaud, cruelty, death, dreaming, and the housing crisis. It’s also about life—contemporary life—and the ridiculousness of our unfailing searches for macro significance at the expense of our micro happiness.

[Note: Last week Focus on the Family shared with us a sage and sobering letter from the future: 2012 to be exact. Perhaps because the news was too depressing to share, they neglected to also release the sequel--a letter from 2016 (after Obama's second term as president), written by someone named Ryan Hamm. I have that letter here. It's your Christian and civic duty to read it...]

One of the hardest things for a film to do, or a book (or any art, really), is to portray a truly good character who is also believable and human. It is a lot easier to portray truly wicked, depraved characters who are believable (i.e. The Joker, or anyone in The Departed). It is totally refreshing, then, to see a film like Happy-Go-Lucky, which is basically a study of one person’s commitment to living a happy, upbeat, glass-half-full life in contemporary London.

I really want to vote for Obama. There are a myriad of reasons why it would thrill me to cast my vote for him on November 4. He is such an attractive and inspiring figure, and I'm not just saying that because it's the standard line about Obama. It's true.

These songs alternate between a sort of shiftless urban malaise and a midwestern harvest-time sturdiness.

People who frequent this blog know very well that Terrence Malick’s The New World is high on my list of the happiest things on earth. It’s a film that I’ve probably watched 20 times over the past three years, each time relishing anew the truth, beauty, and catharsis it offers. Imagine my utter glee, then, when it was announced that a new director’s extended cut of the film was to be released this fall on DVD. I was beside myself.

Why are evangelicals so unconcerned with a church building that is aesthetically pleasing? What happened to the Christian commitment to build beautiful cathedrals and sacred spaces that architects 1000 years from now will look back upon for inspiration?

It’s true (at least for those of us who have DirecTV!). Television’s most undervalued show began its third season last night on the 101 channel on DirecTV. Fear not, it will be on NBC as well… just not until sometime in early 2009. I admit it: I pretty much bought DirecTV so I could watch the first run of FNL’s new season. That’s how much I like this show.