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Listen Jena, we’ve been married for five years next month, and today you’ve been a mother for eight weeks (if you don’t count those awful pregnancy months). Sunday is Mother’s Day—your first as a member of that celebrated order—and though I always thought Hallmark invented the holiday to sell greeting cards, the truth is much weirder. I present to you seven Mother’s Day facts.
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Listen Jena, I’ve always been a goody-two shoes gamer. I neither shot the stupid lab-coated scientists in Goldeneye, nor harassed the chickens in Ocarina of Time. It bothered me to take too long to finish the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, because I felt that I was leaving April in captivity every minute I was away from the console. It seemed to me then that those yellow pixels carried actual moral weight, and now I wonder if maybe they did.
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Listen Jena, Roger Ebert, the greatest pop film critic, is dead. He was 70. He battled cancer for a long time, still writing great criticism all along the way. Why was he great? Because he never dismissed a film for its pedigree, and he challenged every movie he saw on its own level.
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Listen Jena, it’s a little late for a review of Skyfall, which came out over a month ago, but this isn’t really a review (I totally agree with this critic and this critic). I just want to show you how Skyfall is a master class in what to do now that “it’s all been done” in Bond movies. Skyfall follows every great Bond rule, but not how you’d expect.
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Listen Jena, you remember my joy at first hearing Sufjan Stevens’ “Christmas Unicorn,” a crazy song that embraced the sacred and the silly, renewing the holiday’s appeal in the process. Now, here in January, when nothing near as wonderful as Christmas ever happens, I read Tyler Blanski’s new book, When Donkeys Talk. It’s like “Christmas Unicorn,” but instead of saving Christmas music, this book seeks to rejuvenate Christian history, apologetics, liturgy, and faith. And it’s funny, too.
