Aliens Just Like Us: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) & Under the Skin (2013)
“Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come…
A Statement on Racial Justice
The staff at Reel World Theology mourn the unjust killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the many who came before because we believe that #BlackLivesMatter. We affirm the Imago Dei inherent in all human life. In this,…
A Deluge of Dark Water(s): The Dark Waters of Dark Waters (1944), Dark Waters (1993), Dark Water (2002), and Dark Waters (2019)
When I was a child, I thought I was surrounded by bad guys. This is not a metaphor. I had the creeping suspicion that everyone I knew—my grandma, the dentist, the children’s pastor at my church, my pre-school teachers, everybody—was…
Love Jones (1997) & The Photograph (2020): The Value of Words
Nearly 25 years ago, the producers of the independent gem Love Jones had a modest and honest goal with its romance. They sought to make a modern film about African-American life that did not use violence and/or recreational drugs as…
Superman & The American Way: The Music of Superman (1978) & Man of Steel (2013)
The first Superman comic was published in 1938, kick-starting the superhero genre and introducing the world to a new hero who would eventually come to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way”. There have been many iterations of the…
Gavin O’ Connor’s Miracle (2004) & The Accountant (2016)
“But you looked at me and I could see your mother in your eyes I thought about the things she lost and how she always cries And how your daddy tries to fight the truth with Bombay gin And I…
Hell Is Behind That Door: Suspiria (1977 & 2018) and the Curse of Knowledge
How does one go about remaking Dario Argento’s blood-splattered hallucination Suspiria? One doesn’t. Were one to try they would wreck upon the shoals of its bewildering non-plot and nightmarish visual logic. The most a writer or director can do is…
Whose Playground Is This?: The Florida Project (2017) & The Beach Bum (2019)
Florida was a meme long before the internet. A vacation destination, a retirement home, a place where dreams came true—all the manufactured joy money can buy. For all of Florida’s appealing façade, it often seems that common sense gets trapped…
The Beloved Bombs of Paul Williams: Phantom of the Paradise (1974) Meets Bugsy Malone (1976)
Paul Williams was on quite a roll in the early 1970s. He’d written monster hits for groups like The Carpenters (“We’ve Only Just Begun”) and Three Dog Night (“An Old Fashioned Love Song”) and become a near-regular on The Tonight…
Stories and Myths: Fatherhood in The Road (2009) and Life is Beautiful (1997)
It’s hard to be a father. Or so I assume, not being one myself. Though, having been a kid, I can only imagine how awful I was to parent. There are dirty diapers, temper tantrums, scraped knees, and that’s not…