Somewhere back around 485 BC, a Greek physicist-philosopher named Parmenides postulated the theory that a void in nature cannot exist. Although the veracity of that statement has been a source of argument ever since, it hasn’t stopped anybody from using the idiom ‘nature abhors a vacuum' to express the idea that empty or unfilled spaces are unnatural and nature will rush to fill them whenever they occur. I’ve no idea if that’s true in every case, but I couldn’t help but notice that during my recent hiatus, reviews of bad movies started popping up all around the Catholic blogosphere.
For instance, no sooner does D.G.D Davidson get back to blogging over at the Sci-Fi Catholic than he decides to go see the low budget ‘found footage’ thriller Apollo 18, only to find “that the most entertaining part of the movie… was sitting next to a NASA buff who could tell me everything Apollo 18 got wrong.”
Meanwhile, Matt Archbold takes some time at the National Catholic Register to discuss the dismal box office failure of the first self proclaimed overtly pro-atheist movie, The Ledge, a movie so wretched it couldn’t even “pull the atheists out of Catholic comboxes for even 90 minutes.” Riffing on Matt’s thoughts, Carl Olson at Ignatius Insights reaches the conclusion that not only are so many atheists “rebels without a cause… now, apparently, they are moviemakers without an audience.”
Drawing in a much larger audience, but apparently being only slightly less stinky, is Shark Night 3D, which gets a thorough going over at Fr. Dennis at the Movies. Amidst all the redneck carnage, the good father does manage to find two insights in the film, but not without asking himself, “Am I reading _way too much_ into this film?” (Maybe, Father, but that’s just the kind of thing we appreciate around here.)
Now, after all that, if you’ve still got room for a little more bad cinema, then head on over to the Word On Fire blog. It seems that while Fr. Robert Barron has been busy watching Woody Allen and getting the Catholicism project out the door, the task has fallen to Fr. Steve Grunow to sit through the reboots of both Conan (where he ponders the Christian alternative vision to Nietzsche (even though the movie doesn’t bother to do the same) and Fright Night (in which he notices a tiny bit of subtext regarding the banality of suburban ennui).
Surprised that Word On Fire would waste time of B-movies? Don’t be. Heck, even the venerable First Things is getting into the act with Ethan Cordray asking THE question of our time, “What’s with all these dang zombies?”
You know, if all these nice folks keep up these kind of viewing habits, I’m gonna be out of a job. If all this encroaching on my territory continues, I might just need to get ready to defend myself. Fortunately, inspired by the movie Priest (Seriously? I thought the only thing Priest inspired was vomit.), the Den of Geek’s Nick Horton decided to spend a day training as a Christian style warrior monk. And while the “monks” doing the teaching are a bit suspect, the Tower Manuscript from which the sword and buckler techniques were derived is quite real, having been penned by a German cleric sometime in the 1300s. So it looks like I’ve got some practicing to do. See you later, assuming I don’t skewer myself between now and then.
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