Rape, Revenge, and Gender Inequality

Last night, Cap made me aware of some trivia from the recent horror film Midsommar that I did not care for. Here’s the same fact, from IMDb: “After the coerced coitus scene, Christian was supposed to run away in the robe that he had entered in. Jack Reynor [the actor] himself suggested that Christian run out […]

Ralph Breaks the Internet: A Ham-Fisted Moral

Cap and I really liked Wreck-It Ralph. I like video games anyway, I found it satisfyingly twisty, I LOVED Sergeant Calhoun and her crazy figures of speech, and I thought the ending was quite touching. So we were excited to check out the sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet. We watched it one night–and it has […]

When You Feel Small

In his very excellent and moving book C. S. Lewis: Man of Letters, Thomas Howard writes of Lord of the Rings: “We find at work in that world such notions as majesty and mystery and purity and nobility and taboo and heroism and so forth—all of which we tend to attach to ‘antiquity’” (46). Nobility. […]

Making Good Look Good: Top 5 Non-Boring Good Guys

Last week, I introduced the idea that often, “good guys” can come across as boring. I’m not sure if this tendency is a deficiency in the way they are written (i.e., the author’s understanding of what constitutes “goodness” is shallow) or a deficiency in the way we perceive them (as in: being in mental turmoil/moral […]

Are “Good Guys” Boring?

Stephen Koch writes the following about Lucie Manette, the ideal woman in Tale of Two Cities: “She is a flawless paragon of sweetness and love, and the way we know it is true sweetness, true love, is that both are defined by the absolute absence of any conflicting impulse whatsoever. In two plain words, she […]

Resurrecting Tenar: Easter in Earthsea

I recently read Ursula K. Le Guin’s magisterial The Tombs of Atuan. This slow, relatively simple story details the life of a young priestess, Arha, and how a wizard thief comes into her domain, changes her outlook, and helps her escape. There’s not much of a plot to be spoiled—everything I just said is straight […]

Moral Engines, or, Shannon Won’t Shut Up About Mortal Engines

Last week, I posted an analysis of Hester Shaw’s character arc in the tragically underrated film, Mortal Engines. I conceived this post on an analytical high and wrote it in a fervor. And, perhaps due in part to our country’s tragic lack of interest in the film,… got very few hits on it. At the […]

I Loved Mortal Engines and I Don’t Care Who Knows It

When Mortal Engines came out last year, I viewed several trailers and shrugged. Last week rolled around, and I was in the mood for some mindless movie-watching while folding our backed-up laundry piles. So we Redboxed it. I loved it from the first. I could tell Cap loved it, too, by the way he knelt, ready […]

Captain Marvel, Disney Princesses, and Idolatry of the Past

I ran into the following quote in the probably-well-intentioned-but-extremely-problematic book What the Bible Says about Child Training: It is interesting that even with all of the women’s liberation and “politically correct” attack against traditional male and female roles, and although the majority of the boys in this survey expected their wives to work, they still […]

Pride, Prejudice, and the Hard Truth

My Brit Lit class and I had a GREAT discussion on Pride and Prejudice today, and I mean great. Among the questions we discussed was one that I posed to satisfy my curiosity: what makes Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet so compelling, so attractive, so likable? After the one guy in class clarified that we […]