Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The Vocational Theology of Toy Story (Andy Shurson, September 17, 2025, Christ & Culture)

The first movie revolves around the rivalry of Woody and Buzz as they fight for the top position in Andy’s room and in his heart (Andy is the boy in Toy Story, not the author of this article). The tension grows as the pair ends up in the torturous hands of their kid neighbor, Sid. As the movie grows to the climax, Woody escapes Sid’s clutches, but Buzz gets stuck in the fence. In that split second, Woody must decide: does he abandon Buzz, capitalizing on the moment over his rival, or does he save Buzz, jeopardizing his reunion with Andy? As Woody turns back to help Buzz, we see how Woody’s understanding of life in Andy’s kingdom has changed. Woody no longer views Buzz as a threat who will take away the gaze of his master. Woody sees Buzz as a friend and neighbor who also belongs to the master.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The Gospel According to ‘The Office’: What Dunder Mifflin Teaches Us About Grace, Forgiveness and Cringe-Worthy Community (Taylor Berry, Jan. 27th, 2025, Relevant)

At its core, The Office is a masterclass in relationships—and not the glossy, Hallmark-movie kind. It’s the unfiltered, frequently cringe-inducing reality of human interaction. Grace and forgiveness weave their way through the fabric of this show, often hidden beneath layers of awkward pauses, office pranks and absurd team-building exercises led by Prison Mike.

Think about it: How many times does Michael completely mess up—offending, embarrassing or downright traumatizing his employees—and yet, they stick around? Whether it’s Pam forgiving Michael for outing her pregnancy at a company meeting or Jim patiently enduring Dwight’s endless shenanigans, The Office is a celebration of second chances. It’s about extending forgiveness not because it’s deserved, but because community only works when grace abounds.

Biblically speaking, isn’t that the whole deal? “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” says Romans 5:8, a verse Michael probably would have butchered during a motivational speech.

The characters on The Office mess up in spectacular fashion, yet time and time again, they’re welcomed back into the fold—reminding us of the gospel’s radical, all-encompassing grace.

A GREAT LISTEN:

Lux Radio Theater 44 01 24 Casablanca

Host Cecil B. DeMille introduces Alan Ladd and Hedy Lamarr as the stars of the Lux production of Casablanca, about the leader of the Nazi resistance and his wife who seek to escape the Nazis with an exit visa held by the owner of a cafe.

Show notes

OTHER THAN DR. NO:

The Ultimate Bond Film Turns 60: “Goldfinger” launched the 007 franchise into global fame—and remains unsurpassed. (Christopher Sandford, September 12, 2024, Modern Age)

First released in the U.K. in September 1964 with a U.S. release to follow in December, the film’s other primary takeaway images are those of a nude young lady killed by being smothered in gold paint, a mute Korean assassin with an unusually lethal bowler hat, and an all-female flying circus, overseen by a blonde-framed vision named Pussy Galore, spraying nerve gas over Fort Knox, all accompanied by a breezily melodramatic title song belted out by Shirley Bassey with the young Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin fame, on guitar.

All rich stuff, you may think, if just a touch on the outré side. The contemporaneous reviews used words like “outlandish,” “ludicrous,” and “absurd, funny, and vile” to describe the film, except for Roger Ebert, who called it “chilling,” and praised Sean Connery—the yardstick by which all his successors as Bond would be measured, often to their disadvantage—for conveying a “verisimilitude” and “sleek assurance” in the role, alongside a gift for deadpan comedy. Revisiting the film years later, Ebert wrote: “Connery . . . had something else that none of [his heirs] could muster: steely toughness. When his eyes narrowed and his body tensed up, you knew the playing was over and the bloodshed was about to begin.” Connery’s performance surmounted even one or two plot twists and chunks of expository dialogue that may seem a touch heavy-going to us today. The title character’s essential game plan is to profit from the economic chaos that will ensue after he’s detonated an atomic bomb over Fort Knox, thus rendering America’s gold reserves radioactive for a precisely stated fifty-eight years. “He’s quite mad, you know,” Bond remarks to Pussy Galore, just in case anyone watching might have considered it a viable get-rich-quick scheme.

I have to say that I’m with Ebert on this one. It’s not just that Connery is perfect as Bond, with a vitality and a humanity (not to mention that widely mimicked Scottish burr) his inheritors in the role could only approximate, some more competently than others. Strange as it may seem, Goldfinger itself, like many of the author Ian Fleming’s tales, wasn’t pure invention. It was inspired by the swashbuckling exploits of the Anglo-Canadian spymaster William Stephenson (1897–1989), whose wartime scheme to relieve the collaborationist Vichy French government of its bullion reserves held on the island of Martinique had come to Fleming’s attention as a young operative with British naval intelligence.

WON’T COP OUT:

Shaft: Power Moves (Amy Abugo Ongiri, Jun 21, 2022, Criterion)

Shaft would be a different and more confrontational kind of project than Parks’s earlier work. He had been hired by MGM to bring Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 detective novel of the same name to the screen. Tidyman, who was white, himself had been commissioned to write the novel by Ronald Hobbs, one of very few African American literary agents working at the time, and the book contains many of the elements of Parks’s film in its commitment to the urban milieu of New York City and to creating the character of John Shaft as a strong, independent African American man. The studio had originally wanted to revise Tidyman’s novel to make the characters white, but Parks insisted on not only casting the character of Shaft as African American but also emphasizing and enhancing the Black cultural aspects of the novel.

Parks famously wanted to create a film that would allow audiences “to see the Black guy winning.” As modest an ambition as this may seem by today’s standards, it was shockingly bold in 1971, when positive images of African Americans in visual culture were virtually nonexistent. Hollywood had gently stepped into the terrain of Black representation with stars like Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, but the roles that they were offered were constrained at best and insulting at worst. With Shaft, Parks would deliver something unlike anything that Hollywood had seen before: a Black superhero.

THOSE DISAPPOINTED BY gOD:

The God-Haunted World of ‘Chinatown’: A look back at the neo-noir classic on its 50th anniversary. (Hannah Long, June 22, 2024, The Dispatch)

Whereas the god of Genesis pronounces creation good in its inception, reflecting himself, Chinatown reverses this. Every authority is fundamentally compromised or selfish. Women are liars; men are boors; fathers abuse their daughters; the police lack honor; there is no appeal to heaven. Even the act of life-giving is poisoned by power.

The makers of Chinatown were not unique in their cynicism. In the 1960s and ‘70s, screenwriters were bent on subverting the studio system rules and tropes established by the last generation. But like every rebellious teen, those anti-mythmakers fit into their own tradition. There are as many films portraying the seedy underbelly of Hollywood as there are lauding its glittering promise. From Norman Maine in A Star is Born walking into the ocean to Norma Desmond madly gyrating into the camera in Sunset Boulevard, disillusion and impotence are deep parts of the California myth. While Chinatown distills the trope with such clarity and feeling that it has become the platonic anti-ideal, it doesn’t create a new thing.

In fact, chucking the Christian myth actually means restoring a far more conservative vision, the “restoration of order”—but an ancient order. In Chinatown, time is cyclical, choice is an illusion, gods are ruled by their appetites, and the world will go on thus forever. It’s not the world of Yahweh, but the world of Zeus.

And yet, despair is the tribute that unbelief pays to faith. Chinatown wouldn’t be half as sad, or remotely as great—and it is very great—were it not a film that expected a good city and a righteous builder.

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

UNIVERSAL DARKNESS: On the definition of film noir. (Stanley Fish, 6/10/24, The Lamp)

Next year I shall be teaching a course in film noir for the first time, and I thought it might be useful to set down my thoughts about the genre. Definitions and lists of characteristics are not hard to come by. Many websites will tell you that film noir movies were shot in sharply contrasting black and white, made liberal use of flashbacks, and flourished between 1940 and 1958 with a number of “neo-noir” films, some in color, appearing even to the present day; that film noir heroes or anti-heroes are cynical, world-weary, bitter, and vulnerable to the seductive wiles of sensual and duplicitous women; that these men and women play out their doomed lives in a landscape of corruption, betrayals, double crosses, and plans gone awry; that everyone and everything in the film noir universe is at the mercy of chance, accident, and a general, even miasmic, malevolence; that these movies were especially appealing in the context of the pessimism generated by World War II and a post-war malaise brilliantly documented in a film that is not noir but has noir touches, William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

But for my money, this list of noir elements casts too wide a net. As far as I am concerned, it’s not noir unless at its center is a moment when a line is crossed and someone, almost always a man, starts on a path that leads inevitably not only to his own destruction but to the destruction of everyone and everything he touches. It is tempting to speak of this moment as a choice, but it is better characterized as a slide, a slide from what had been a more or less ordinary existence to a toboggan ride down to hell with no hope of a reversal of motion. Edward G. Robinson’s Barton Keyes (Double Indemnity, 1944) puts it best when he says of the lovers-murderers he has not yet fully identified, “It’s not like taking a trolley-ride together where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.”

The Hays Code gave us great art.