junk to waste time

In case you missed any of this, I will help you waste more time surfing the internet.

• My favorite filmmaker, Michel Gondry is making another brain twister, this time with Jack Black. Read about Be Kind Rewind.
• Bob Robinson is back in the blogosphere making up for lost time due to serious illness. Excellent recent posts include his dissection of Mark Dever's overreaching defense of substitutionary atonement as the only proper theory. His rose flower bouquet analogy alone is worth the read. He also dismisses Christian America and World Magazine's fantasy world, which is less Christian than it is Fox News.
• My friend Andy Crouch has a timely observation on the culture wars.
• The President of Iran takes Bush to task for not being more like Jesus (as I have heard the Islamic world hates us because we are not enough Christian, not because we are too Christian).
• An article in CT by a Vietnam Vet and Christian that killed someone in combat discusses the plight of veterans who kill. I wish he had said more, but it is a mainstream Christian mag.
• From NPR, comes this 3 or 4 minute confession of a priest hoping that parishioners, after seeing the Da Vinci Code, do not come looking for him. He is sick of the inane questions. It is funny, refreshing and quite true for anyone in the ministry. listen

BTW, I am not looking forward to this film. I could care less about the heresy, they hype or the box office receipts. All I know is that it is a Ron Howard production (enuff said).

I am nauseous thinking of the goofy church marquee tie-ins and sermon series surrounding a book that offered a tired heretical mess in a pretty package with sex and death (I do think it steals from Holy Blood, Holy Grail which I read in grad school), which is what the film will offer (see Tom Hanks in an Oscar worthy performance because he grows his hair long -if Tom Hanks loses weight, talks funny or grows facial hair, we think he needs another freakin' Oscar on his shelf-solving the riddle of the ages. See Ron Howard awe us with technology but not pacing, character development or vision).

Also, Ron Howard is the Tom Ridge of filmmakers, an overhyped hack with no original talent of his own, usually pandering to the crowd and only saved from public humiliation by attaching himself to big-time movie stars and great actors (i.e. Dangerous Mind and Cinderella Man were not even remotely true to historical events, yet saved by great acting, but not Oscar worthy/ Apollo 13 was saved by a story even he could not ruin/ Far and Away sucked in an epic fashion/ Ransom was a brutal misanthropic mess/ The Grinch sucked/ EdTV was cute but trite/ Splash and Cocoon 20 years ago were his best work).- yes I will eventually get around to watching it