Articles on Film and Television
“What are we holding onto, Sam?” Sam: “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The Cinema and the Cave
As I enter a darkened cinema I'm often reminded of Plato's myth of the cave. There people sat chained in darkness watching the shadow images of the real world shimmer across the wall before [...]
Reconciliation Re-Visited
If there is any literary film adaptation worth adding to one’s library it is the Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited. It really is the most perfect screen adaptation of any novel ever. The [...]
A Glorious Bastard
The Witness of Alec Guiness In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing the illegitimate Don John plots to spoil the happiness and prosperity of all. His skullduggery springs from the brooding dark moods, resentment and [...]
Nietzsche, Napoleon and Narcissism
“I’m better than everybody else” is the disturbing theme underlying Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope. Dostoevsky developed the same idea in Crime and Punishment as did George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman. Rooted [...]
A Monastic Response to Islam
“What can man do against such reckless hate?” asks the trapped and helpless Theoden King in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers. He speaks for us all when faced with the orcs of ISIS rising [...]
Peter Jackson’s Vision for Lord of the Rings
For Catholic readers of Lord of the Rings the test for Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of Tolkien’s masterpiece was not the excellence of the special effects, the acting, the directing the cinematography or the [...]