There must be something in the water – everyone’s talking about the Vatican Film List! Just after the Criteria crew concluded three years going through the list, Word on Fire has published their own book about it, Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List, with essays on all 45 films by David Paul Baird, Fr. Michael Ward, and Andrew Petiprin. The three authors join the show to compares notes with James and Thomas about their overall evaluations of the list, great religious films made by non-religious directors, what makes a good saint movie, and their personal favorite items on the Vatican Film List. Links Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/products/popcorn-with-the-pope Buy it on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/Popcorn-Pope-Guide-Vatican-Film-ebook/dp/B0CP6H5KV3/ SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

This is the first episode of a series covering the complete filmography of Terrence Malick, who is arguably both the most important Christian filmmaker working today and the most important filmmaker working today, period. What sets Malick apart from a number of other directors whose work deals with a religious search, is that his films are not just about searching indefinitely with no answer, but they come from the perspective of a sincere believer who actually has a positive proposal about life's meaning. Some of his best-known movies in which this positive proposal is evident are A Hidden Life, The Tree of Life, and The Thin Red Line. But we are starting from the beginning, with Malick's first two films, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). In these two films we already see Malick's personality on display: his gorgeous visual style with a heavy focus on the beauty of the natural world, his use of voiceover narration and classical music, his improvisational approach, and the impressionistic rather than plot-driven nature of much of his work. His philosophical interests (Malick spent time as a philosophy professor and even translated a work by Heidegger) are also evident in both films but the second feature, Days of Heaven, is the first to introduce the extensive Scriptural references featured in all of his films since. James and Thomas are joined by Catholic filmmaker and critic Nathan Douglas for this series. 0:00 Introduction to Terrence Malick 32:10 Badlands 1:08:54 Days of Heaven Nathan Douglas's website https://nwdouglas.com/about SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletter DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

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Katy Carl, fiction writer and editor-in-chief of Dappled Things, joins the show to discuss the 1979 film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, directed by John Huston and starring Brad Dourif. Links Katy's short story collection, Fragile Objects https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p136/Fragile_Objects%3A_Short_Stories_by_Katy_Carl.html Dappled Things https://www.dappledthings.org/ SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE at http://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Introducing a director you almost certainly haven't heard of - but who is well worth getting to know. Lijo Jose Pellissery is one of the major artists of a new movement that has developed over the last decade in the Malayalam film industry - that is, the cinema made in Kerala, the region where India's Christians have lived for many centuries. All of Pellissery's films are set within Indian Catholic or Orthodox communities. Indeed, while the director is clearly influenced by Western movies, much of his films' vitality comes from how regionally rooted they are, not just in Kerala but even in specific cities and villages. Pellissery's films show a remarkable level of craft, artistry and experimentation considering their mainstream success in India - indeed, as James Majewski says by contrast with contemporary Hollywood, this seems to be what an "alive film culture" looks like. Within the Malayalam film industry, Pellissery is known as the "Master of Chaos", presumably due to the spontaneous feeling of his scenes, often featuring large, rambunctious crowds, and perhaps also the way situations in his stories tend to spiral out of control. His films keep you riveted in a way that is not manipulative, and they are unpredictable without being dependent on contrived twists. James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre: Jallikattu is an off-the-wall action movie about villagers trying to chase down an escaped bull - framed within quotations from the book of Revelation which seem to indicate that the bull represents Satan. Ee.Ma.Yau (which means "Jesus, Mary, Joseph")) is about a son struggling to provide a good funeral for his father, but constantly being frustrated by his own limits. Pellissery's most recent film, Like an Afternoon Dream, is a slow, surreal drama - arguably a ghost story - about a man who suddenly takes on another man's identity. Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles: Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305 This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org  Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com  

The Age of Innocence may come as a surprise to those who associate Martin Scorsese with movies about gangsters. Based on Edith Wharton's novel, it's a sumptuous period romance set in late-19th-century Manhattan high society. Intriguingly, Scorsese described it as his "most violent film", though not so much as a punch is thrown: the violence portrayed is interior and social, not physical, in this depiction of a romance thwarted by the constricting social norms of the upper class. Scorsese faced the challenge of depicting a society in which, as the narrator puts it, "the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs" - and so the director cannot rely on characters stating things outright. His great accomplishment is that the film nonetheless reaches an operatic pitch of emotion, keeping the viewer on seat-edge. This is done not only through outstanding performances (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder), but also by camera movements conveying repressed passion, by light and color, and by the gorgeous Elmer Bernstein score. For all that, if the film merely depicted the cruelty of social norms and mores stifling forbidden love, it would be of limited interest. Yet as the story develops, it doesn't allow itself to be reduced to a critique of the past. Indeed, though not without ambiguity, it shows the value of strong social rules and institutions - because often, if we follow our passion, we destroy ourselves and others. Donate to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Today it's taken for granted that we as Christians are called to "engage the culture" in order to evangelize. Often "engaging the culture" means paying an inordinate amount of attention to popular commercial entertainment in order to show unbelievers how hip we are, straining to find a "Christ-figure" in every comic book movie, and making worship music as repetitive, melodically banal, and emotionalistic as possible. Past a certain point, "cultural engagement" begins to seem like a noble-sounding excuse to enjoy mediocrity - and Christians, unfortunately, are as much in love with mediocre entertainment as anyone else. The novel doctrine of "cultural engagement" is just one subject covered in Joshua Gibbs's challenging and entertaining new book, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity. Joshua joins Thomas Mirus for a wide-ranging conversation about how we choose to spend our free time and why it matters. Topics include: The dangers of artistic mediocrity The importance of boredom Why streaming has been terrible for music The different kinds of Christian "cultural engagers" Uncommon and common good things and how both are threatened by the mediocre How the "special" apes the holy The meme-ification of art Links Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity https://circeinstitute.org/product/love-what-lasts/ Gibbs, "Film As a Metaphysical Coup" https://circeinstitute.org/blog/film-metaphysical-coup/ Thomas's favorite episode of Gibbs's podcast, Proverbial https://shows.acast.com/proverbial/episodes/how-to-buy-a-bottle-of-wine www.GibbsClassical.com SUBSCRIBE to the Catholic Culture Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-catholic-culture-podcast/id1377089807 DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is one of those works of art whose reputation has suffered from its circumstances. Its release in late 2006, two years after The Passion and six month after Gibson's infamous DUI, more or less coincided with the director's blacklisting from Hollywood. Thus Apocalypto tends to be overlooked by critics, despite having been hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Spike Lee. Apocalypto has also been attacked for its portrayal of "first peoples". Set in Mesoamerica immediately before first contact with the Spanish, it features a protagonist from a small forest tribe who is captured by Mayans for the purpose of human sacrifice (depicted as the mass-scale brutality it was) and must try to escape back to his family.  Gibson's depiction of Mesoamerican peoples is sensitive and sympathetic but not PC. Rather than sneering at how terrible a pre-Columbian civilization could be, in portraying the Mayans Gibson wanted to make us reflect on the decadence of the modern West and in particular the American Empire. The film is about a culture of death not unlike our own. Filmed, like The Passion, in a language most people have never heard, Apocalypto is a stunningly ambitious recreation of a lost civilization, but also a thoroughly entertaining chase movie. Gibson is known for his singular approach to cinematic violence, and Apocalypto gives ample opportunity to discuss the specific artistic choices that are overlooked when we wave off all movie "blood and guts" as the same. Links Essay by the film's historical consultant https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288187016_Relativism_Revisionism_Aboriginalism_and_EmicEtic_Truth_The_Case_Study_of_Apocalypto DONATE to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

0:00 The prosecution 39:15 The defense With the release of his new film Asteroid City and with memes imitating his cinematic style going viral on social media, Wes Anderson is having a real moment in the zeitgeist almost thirty years into his career. In Asteroid City, Anderson drives further into the immediately identifiable and somewhat polarizing style he has cultivated for the past decade, characterized by meticulous framing, camera moves and blocking, a certain color palette, and deadpan writing and acting. One is always aware of the director's hand tightly controlling a cute, harmonious little world of his own creation. The Criteria hosts look at Anderson's career and try to figure out what he's trying to achieve by making his movies so aggressively, well, Anderson-y. James Majewski calls it downright decadent and pretentious, style for its own sake to the point of self-parody. Thomas Mirus is concerned that the increasingly airless and emotionally closed-down aesthetic may be a reflection of Anderson's belief that life has no discernible meaning, and so there is nothing much to do other than create aesthetic illusions (an idea explicitly alluded to in more than one of his films). Nathan Douglas defends Anderson's style as sincere, in service to something more than shallow visual pleasure. But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair. DONATE to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Jim Caviezel’s latest project, The Sound of Freedom, is a harrowing but thrilling look at the fight against the global sex trafficking of children. Caviezel's intense but nuanced performance plays well into both the serious subject matter and the film's mainstream appeal. The film's spiritual relevance is increased by the choice to include not only protective fathers, but a repentant exploiter among its protagonists.  Though the film isn't about Hollywood, one of its best scenes offers what may as well be a portrayal of how the entertainment and modeling industries sexualize children. The impact is all the more unsettling for how subtly and tastefully the scene is handled. Though they praise the film, Thomas and James express some reservations about the “you must see this movie for the cause” style of promotion.