• Entertainment

    Top 10 things I love about the new Star Wars trailer

    I don’t know about you, but the second teaser for the new Star Wars movie got me all verklempt. No kidding. Or maybe it was just something in my eye. Whatever it was, the appearance of Han Solo and Chewey was the coup de grâce. J. J. Abrams is speaking the superfan’s love language. This is an absolutely brilliant preview. It conjures all the feelings of my childhood while pulling my interest forward into new storylines. It is everything you’d want out of a trailer. In fact, these first two trailers are already better than all three of the prequels. They have exorcised my Jar Jar Binks demons. The force…

  • Culture,  Entertainment

    How has “The Breakfast Club” aged after 30 years?

    John Hughes’ classic “The Breakfast Club” turned 30 this year. To put this in perspective, we are as far removed now from “The Breakfast Club” as the “The Breakfast Club” was from James Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause” (let that one sink-in, GenXers). Daniel Drezner asks in The Washington Post how “The Breakfast Club” has held up after three decades. Drezner says that he watched “Rebel Without a Cause” in 1985 and found it completely outdated and unrelatable as a teen-angst drama. He wondered if that’s how teens would view “The Breakfast Club” now. So he decided to watch “The Breakfast Club” with his 14-year old son to gauge whether…

  • Entertainment

    A few thoughts about “American Sniper”

    I saw American Sniper last night. Let me add my voice to the chorus of others saying that this is a great movie. When the credits began to roll at the end, every person in our theater sat in stunned, admiring silence. No one said a word. Eventually, we all began to file out with a lump in our throat and a full heart. The movie was hard to watch. It was very violent but successful in evoking in some measure the real horrors of war. And maybe more than anything, it portrays how wicked Al Qaeda in Iraq really was. Somehow that fact seems to have been lost on…

  • Christianity,  Entertainment

    Tooth & Nail: Do you know this record label?

    Back in the 1990’s, contemporary Christian music (CCM) was at its zenith in terms of sales. Some of it was good, but a good bit of it was kind of not. It just wasn’t the kind of music that connected to younger listeners, especially college students. Enter an off-the-beaten path independent record label called Tooth & Nail. With a shoe-string budget, Brandon Ebel founded the company in 1993 and began signing Christian bands with a more modern sound. It was the kind of sound that the kids were listening to in those days. It was certainly the music that I was listening to back then—bands like MXPX (formerly known as…

  • Christianity,  Entertainment

    My Brief Thoughts about the “Unbroken” Movie

    To understand my thoughts about the new movie Unbroken, you have to know a little bit about my expectations. They were low. Why? Because I loved the book and could not imagine a movie coming close to recreating Laura Hillenbrand’s wonderful narrative. For that reason, I didn’t expect much. So the film didn’t need to be great to exceed my expectations, and it did exceed them without being great. Still, I think you should see it. Here’s why. First of all, let me just say that I am grateful that Angelina Jolie got a fire in her belly about making this movie. The story has been languishing in Hollywood for…

  • Entertainment

    Trailer for the new Star Wars movie

    The trailer for the new Star Wars movie was released yesterday, and it already has over 13 million views on YouTube. The new series will be directed by J. J. Abrams. The conclusion of the matter: The Abrams trailer is already better than all three of the prequel movies. No kidding. As Darren Franich recently described it, This is a trailer that features X-Wings, Stormtroopers, Tatooine, the Millennium Falcon, a red lightsaber, and a red-brown desert speeder—it’s like an Episode IV mixtape, “Now That’s What I Call A New Hope!”

  • Entertainment,  Politics

    If you didn’t get the SNL joke, this post is for you.

    SNL’s opening sketch has been making the rounds over the weekend (see above). It lampoons the President’s executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. It occurred to me that there are probably countless viewers who don’t get the joke because they are too young to remember the source material for this skit. For those of you who fall in that category, this post is for you.

  • Christianity,  Culture,  Entertainment

    My thoughts on “Interstellar”: It asks all the right questions but gives all the wrong answers.

    I saw the movie Interstellar a couple nights ago, and I’m still thinking about it now. It’s a mind-bending meditation on the meaning of life set within an epic intergalactic journey to save humanity. Superficially, it’s a sci-fi flick. But most fundamentally, it’s about metaphysics and theology. Here’s the plot in a nutshell. At some point in the not too distant future, the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable to humans. The food supply is afflicted by blight, and the world becomes a giant dustbowl. America no longer has a military and has ceased to lead the world in innovation and technology. In this dystopian future, the decline of American greatness seals…

  • Christianity,  Entertainment

    The video of Lecrae on Jimmy Fallon

    In case you missed it (I’m not sure you could have!), Lecrae was on Jimmy Fallon last night. Lecrae has the number one record on Billboard right now, so there you have it. A gospel hip-hop dude shows up on late night. It’s a real anomaly. The video above is a web exclusive with Lecrae explaining “How I Wrote That Song.” Below is a link to the full episode. Lecrae sits in with The Roots and performs during intro and outros. FULL EPISODE of “THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JIMMY FALLON”