If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Not surprisingly, if you look for Christian reviews of "ParaNorman," you will see many focus on warnings to stay way from the occult. Sadly, this response misses the profoundly deep moral message behind this film.
Without real places for flies to lay eggs, for example, the flowers of terrible scent have nothing to aspire to. You can't mimic something that doesn't exist. Or can you?
As a fan of The Walking Dead's first two seasons it pains me to write these words, to slam the very show I fell in love with. That being said, am I wrong? Am I misreading these cues?
They know how to pronounce "Cthulhu" and what a TARDIS is. I'm betting some of them speak Elvish, others, Klingon. And they could outlive you in a zombie apocalypse. Why? Because they've read every book on the subject.
They say kids say the darndest things. But my belief is that it's 75-year-old parents who have just discovered a new movie who really blurt out classic nuggets of truth (hell, just look at Shit My Dad Says).
People have been making beer, or at least something resembling beer, since the dawn of civilization.
Not only is The Walking Dead the most-watched drama series on basic cable, American society has gone zombie-mad! Instead of a population of nerds like me watching late night zombie flicks on the Sci-Fi channel, now large swaths of the population are soaking up the living dead.
As bookshelves (and e-readers) continue to groan with knock-offs of Seth Grahame-Smith's knock-off, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it seems worth asking: are zombies and ninjas the only way to make the novels of previous centuries relevant again?
Sociologically speaking, one of the most fascinating aspects of zombies has been their persistence as "the Other," something against which we can mirror our fears.
Even though the Mayan apocalypse didn't take place on December 21, there's a 100 percent chance that a zombie apocalypse will be featured by Hollywood in some upcoming movies.
It's been a long time since battles were won on horses and bayonets. The new face of the enemy may come in the form of an insidious strain of smallpox or a sly computer virus that infects our power grids. But how do you repel a pesky bacterium or a few taunting lines of code -- shoot it with an Uzi?
Tens of millions of viewers around the world are currently sitting on pins and needles in anticipation of what will happen next on The Walking Dead. Who will get munched? What will happen to the Governor? Many viewers will sit through the show wondering, "is this foreshadowing?"
I should have known that appearances can be deceiving. For the past few months, I've been on the road promoting Pendulum:How Past Generations Shape O...
Picture, if you will, a zombie in a field, moving toward its goal -- one (often ungraceful) step at a time. Although this zombie might be missing a limb or two -- or even if it's being shot at -- it just keeps on going. Kind of like the Energizer Bunny -- only with more blood and guts.
Zombie stories invite us to write for ourselves a secular theology of the dead. And to our battered world here in the early 21st century, that elusive theology remains a uniquely appealing one.
