movie review
A Complex Man’s Complex Legacy: What the Movie Rustin Leaves Out
by John Whitehead The great civil rights activist and thinker Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) has received renewed attention thanks to the recently released movie Rustin. The movie is an engrossing look at Rustin’s role as an advisor to Martin Luther King and the organizer of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Rustin…
Movie Review: Oppenheimer
by Rachel MacNair Oppenheimer is a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” According to its director’s custom, it has three different threads of stories that weave throughout. One tells the story of his early years and the development of the atomic bomb with care for historic accuracy, and the…
Movie Review: Sound of Freedom
by Rachel MacNair The movie Sound of Freedom is causing quite a stir. It depicts the real-life Tim Ballard, who’s portrayed doing Hollywood-movie style rescues to get children out of the grips of pedophilic sex trafficking. As a drama, it’s well done. This would be the approach that would be taken by a movie…
Displaced and Brought Together by War: The Tale of Giovanni’s Island
by John Whitehead The many ways war and its aftermath can devastate people’s lives, but also the bonds that can form among those enduring such hardships, is the subject of Giovanni’s Island, an animated movie produced by Japanese studio Production I.G. Although originally released in 2014, the movie became available in North America for…
The Violence That Didn’t Happen
by Julia Smucker “As long as you can look at them as anything but human, you won’t have any problems.” This is what Richard “Mac” McKinney recalls being told in his Marine Corps training, recounted in the Oscar-nominated documentary short film “Stranger at the Gate.” (You can watch it here.) McKinney describes how this…
Seeing Is Believing: Films to Inspire a Consistent Life Viewpoint
by Mary Liepold I want war, and preparations for war, to be unthinkable. I want abortion to be unthinkable, as well as racism, capital punishment, and all other offenses against human dignity. The Consistent Life Network’s statement of purpose says, “We seek a revolution in thinking and feeling.” In a time of deepening division,…
Hollywood Movie Insights II
by Rachel MacNair See our previous Hollywood Movie Insights post, offering comments on several movies. Never Look Away An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of other awards, the story spans the life of an artist as a boy in Nazi Germany and a man in East Germany. He flees to…
How Disney Princesses Exemplify the Consistent Life Ethic
by Kae-Leah Williamson (reprinted from her personal Facebook note) My best friend Lisa Dawn Tynes and I both adore princesses and mermaids, even though we’re both over 30. She has a fantastic blog appropriately called The Princess Blog that discusses her opinions on all sorts of fairy tale-related media. Some of the most thought-provoking posts…
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
by Rachel MacNair With the initial theater release interrupted by the Covid-19 closing of theaters, this movie was offered online April 3, 2020. The title of the movie, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is based on an intense scene in which the protagonist, Autumn, is being counseled at an abortion facility before her abortion. Those…
A Consistent Day in the Neighborhood
by Andrew Hocking While Tom Hanks plays Mister Rogers in the 2019 movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the plot centers on a journalist named Lloyd Vogel. When assigned to write a short piece depicting Fred Rogers as a hero, he would much rather uncover moral failure and write an exposé. His cynical approach…