by Dean | Feb 18, 2015 | General
Flirting with Disaster (2010) is a likable Christian novel for young people written by Sandra Byrd, the author of The Secret Keeper, which I reviewed on this site. Keeper is mainly for adults, Disaster can be enjoyed by adults as it chronicles the actions of Savvy Smith, an American girl in London who is 15 years old and fits right in among her English peers.
Ordinary in many ways, Savvy is also devoted to Christ, facing the challenge of paying no mind to what others believe about luck and horoscopes, even when something good happens after a chain-text message is passed on. Sending such a message is “flirting with disaster”—a hackneyed title for this book—since God is forever sovereign over “fortune.” Savvy need not believe in an impersonal force like fortune when she is always surrounded by personal ones, of whom God, the object of her faith, is the most prominent.
Hackneyed title or not, Byrd’s novel is clever and genial. It belongs to a series called London Confidential and, although I likely will not read the other three books in the series, that in no way means the reader of this review should not.
English: mobile phone text message (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 16, 2015 | General
In the 1930s, people had the Marx Brothers for their dose of wild farce. In the early 2000s, they have SpongeBob Squarepants, considerably weirder and even crazier than Groucho and Co. One look at that female squirrel in her Treedome under the sea and you realize that. But this particular wild farce isn’t for everyone: it’s animated—and now on a movie screen, not a TV screen, for the second time.
2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water serves up a plot too fanciful to keep up with and a bad-guy pirate (who runs his ship on Auto Pirate) acted by Antonio Banderas. The cartoon farce rolls on until it is joined by a comparatively tame live action sequence on the beach, and then by some pallid “superhero” action. So the movie isn’t perfect, but it is utterly, delightfully mirthful. And it has a sweetly fey hero in . . . an underwater sponge.
SpongeBob SquarePants (character) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 12, 2015 | General
So the arch-villain in Jane the Virgin is a woman—Rose (Bridget Regan). What a campy show this is! And what’s this about her husband getting killed by wet cement that Rose deliberately pours on top of him?
We love this show for its camp. But in the Chapter 13 episode, we also witness a fairly earnest, somewhat moving account of how a couple confronts the threat of a miscarriage. Yep, I’m talking about lovable Jane and hard-to-pin-down Rafael. Jane, you’ll recall, was artificially inseminated by mistake and wants to keep the baby. It was the mistake of a woman, Dr. Luisa: When women here aren’t making serious blunders, they’re perpetrating evil! There’s Rose but there is also Petra, albeit a sympathetic character now. Not that there’s a real problem with ALL the women, though. Jane is lovable; and so are her grandmother (Ivonne Coll) and, yes, once trampy mother (Andrea Navedo).
By the way, I have written that Yara Martinez (Luisa) has a conventional beauty and Yael Grobglas (Petra) an unconventional beauty. Bridget Regan’s is somewhere between the two.
Adios.
by Dean | Feb 10, 2015 | General
Reality Bites is trashy inanity not even worth reviewing.
Among other absurdities, we are supposed to believe that, after she loses her job at a TV station, Winona Ryder’s Lelaina, the valedictorian of her college class, can’t even handle a job selling hamburgers at a fast-food joint because she isn’t good enough at math (she must settle for working at a filling station instead). More, we are supposed to accept and condone that director Ben Stiller has Lelaina show up at a more or less respectable event wearing an elegant dress without a bra, so that of course her breasts will jiggle when she has an altercation with her boyfriend (played by Stiller himself) and angrily marches out of the building. Or maybe it was the producers who were responsible for this. Either way, it’s crass.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Feb 8, 2015 | General
Lacey Chabert plays Gwyneth—she whom God is pursuing—in Christian Mingle and is wonderful. She delights by handling comedy even more confidently than she did in Mean Girls, and she is “natural” enough for a romance picture, for the role of lovelorn professional. Her acting as varied as it should be, when she innocently declares, “I want Jesus in my life,” it is touching. Unsurprisingly, there is too much product placement in Mingle—that of ChristianMingle.com—but not too much Chabert.
I say again that religious content in Bernsen’s film is very unsubtle, but how much does this matter? Does it matter at all? Unsubtlety here might have its own fascination, particularly since the film, for all its shortcomings, avoids becoming preachy. Christian Mingle is sort of a curio.
English: American voice actress Lacey Chabert, former voice actor of Meg Griffin, a Family Guy character. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
