Championship Mercy in Win or Lose (2025)
Pixar has always been a master engineer of, as Roger Ebert calls films, “machines that generate empathy.” Starting from their earliest SIGGRAPH short films, even the few clunkers of the nearly 30 (count ’em!) films they’ve released drip with empathy.…
A Tale of Two Heroines: Revisiting the Past with Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939)
In the year 1939, two blockbuster movies burst onto the big screen in brilliant technicolor, forever changing the face of American film: Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. On the surface, the heroines of both films have…
Onward to a Fatherly Love
Since the first generation of young men in the digital age grew up and started becoming parents, dad culture has been on a significant upswing. Helped along by the proliferation of social media by uniting the like-minded Xennial/Millennial generation, their…
S07 E06 – A Christmas Story and Magic in the Margins
On this Christmas episode of the Reel World Theology Podcast: As we do every year, we take a look at a Christmas classic. This year we are compelled to talk about a movie that has varying degrees of appreciation among…
The Pains of Being Human: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018) & The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)
We all live with the weight of our life’s choices. Some of those choices we seem to forget about by moving on with our lives. Others linger with us for a long time, perhaps even the rest of our lives.…
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…
Reel World: Rewind #038 – The Dark Crystal
On this episode of Reel World: Rewind… Journey into “The Age of Wonder” with co-host Josh Crabb and returning co-host Blaine Grimes as they discuss Jim Henson’s 1982 visionary classic, The Dark Crystal. Using the bookends of the forthcoming Netflix series…
Aladdin (2019): Phenomenal, Cosmic Powers; Identity-Giving Loving Space
The luckless Aladdin, whose luck turns around; his beloved Jasmine, a princess far above his station; and Jafar, the dark vizier consumed with a dark purpose. The story would hardly be complete without identities concealed and then discovered; what else…
Reflections on a Sense of the Self: Toy Story (1995) and Us (2019)
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” – Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis One of the first films that comes to mind when thinking of explorations of…
Reel World: Rewind #035 – Beetlejuice
On this episode of Reel World: Rewind… It’s showtime! With the release of Tim Burton’s Disney’s live-action Dumbo, it seemed very appropriate to return to Tim Burton and actor Michael Keaton’s first collaboration, 1988’s Beetlejuice. Co-host Josh Crabb is joined by…