September 25, 2002

The hugely popular “Left Behind” series of novels continues to frustrate mainstream pastors and biblical scholars who object to an “end-times” theology they consider just as fictional as the books’ genre. The readers are real, however. The tenth and most recent volume in the series, The Remnant, picked up 2.4 million orders in the two months before its July release.

The entertainment business is not usually thought of as a missionary enterprise, but talk-show host and media queen Oprah Winfrey is a woman on a mission. It says so right in her magazine’s table of contents: “This month’s mission . .

Fritz Lang was already the most celebrated filmmaker in Germany when he made the silent movie Metropolis in 1927. His previous movies, playful, magically inventive slices of expressionism, had already investigated adventure, mythology, science fiction--all the genres that he calls upon in Metropolis, which in restored form is playing around the country, offering one of the great moviegoing experiences.

Cowardice in the movies is one of those all-too-human flaws that tends to get under an audience's skin as they sit in the dark and wonder what they might do under similar circumstances. Would I go over the top onto a bloody battlefield or stay frozen in my foxhole? Step out into a dusty western street to face the bad guys or cower in a doorway as someone else does the job? Tell the Roman soldiers that yes, I am indeed one of them, or skulk in the shadows as the cock crows?

Families in spiritual crisis was such a dominant theme among the 26 films in competition at the Montreal World Film Festival that one suspected the selections committee was composed of zealous social workers. An Italian film, Casomai, directed by Alessandro D'Alatri, was especially appealing to the festival's ecumenical jury--three Protestants and three Catholics. It didn't hurt that Casomai features a wedding homily in which a priest brings judgment against forces that undermine family life--naming names, no less.