Over the next six weeks, Filmfisher will roll out a series of essays on all six of George Lucas’s Star Wars films. Each piece will be written by Timothy Lawrence as part of a senior film project he is completing at Biola University. We are kicking off this exciting series of essays with a brief…Read On

In an informal poll I conducted among my students late last year, every high school junior I teach claimed to have had a crush on a fictional person. The question both was and was not a trick. In truth, a crush is always a fictional person. While crush is a neologism and not a philosophically…Read On

In speaking with many parents about the kind of movies their children watch, I’ve found that one of their chief concerns is “objectionable content.” For younger children, “objectionable content” means toilet humor, cursing, disrespect shown to parents. For older children, “objectionable content” means nudity, violence, gore, profanity, vulgarity, obscenity, drug use, casual sex and the…Read On

In his fascinating work of collected interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, french filmmaker Francois Truffaut discussed with Hitchcock the possibility of doing a film adaptation of Crime and Punishment. When explaining why he would not, Hitchcock said, “Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function…To really convey [the…Read On

Part I. A certain wistfulness attends God’s mercy. After Jonah preaches Nineveh will be overthrown in forty days, the people don sackcloth and fast. The king asks,” Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?” Who can tell? When St. John the Theologian…Read On

If I could see any film again for the first time, I would choose David Fincher’s The Game. Had someone told me the ending of the film prior to seeing it, I would have counted myself robbed of something irreplaceable. I am not without some sympathy for those who don’t want the endings of their…Read On

“I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.” Jiro searches after perfection, after Plato’s forms, after goodness. Novelty and originality are of no use to Jiro;…Read On

“There is… an undeniable ethical offense in beauty: not only in its history as a preoccupation of privilege, the special concern of an economically and socially enfranchised elite, but in the very gratuity with which it offers itself. There is an unsettling prodigality about the beautiful, something wanton about the way it lavishes itself upon…Read On

The following exchange between Sam (the little Thomas Sangster) and Daniel (Liam Neeson) in Love Actually has, for me, always been at the very heart and center of the film. Sam: By the way, I feel bad I never ask you how your love life’s going. Daniel: Ha! No. As you know, that was a done…Read On

This is the preeminent human question: What is she thinking? Or else, What is he thinking? Or, What does she think of me? What does he think of me? Can I be certain of how she feels? Is she guarding her true thoughts of me? Does she know what I do? What I think about?Read On

It’s a small petpeeve of mine, but in modern young adult fiction the protagonist is often designed to be flattering. They all seem to be misunderstood or lonely or different (re: the virtue du jour: unique) in order to appeal to the vanity of the audience. Two of the most popular stories follow this model:…Read On

Why do people like movies so much? Why will we not shut up about movies? Why do we like making lists of our favorite movies, sharing those lists with friends, and perusing our friend’s lists of favorite movies? Why are movies so easy to talk about at a party? How is it that films are…Read On

From time to time I hear teenage boys mutter, after directing their intellects toward the sticky issue of foreign relations and the Middle East, “Ah, geez, why don’t we just nuke them all?” I could not say for certain how long teenage boys have glibly advocated for the universal destruction of foreign nations, but if…Read On