An intriguing question posed to me in another forum:

Who is the worst Disney villain? Mother Gothel in Tangled is bad (kidnapping, brainwashing). The evil Queen from Snow White?

For me, I think it’s Scar in The Lion King. He kills his brother and sets it all up for Simba to be screwed up for life. His minions are also pretty bad.

Most people overlook Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, but he is pure evil. Frollo in Hunchback has no redeeming qualities either. Just thinking out loud (obviously).

Hm. Some thoughts:

To start with, Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty not only declares herself to be the “mistress of all evil,” but transforms into a dragon embodying “the powers of hell”—and the...READ MORE

Sometimes, occasionally, shouting loud enough about outrageous behavior gets results.

In that connection, I’m pleased to report that a few hours ago, responding to vociferous criticism from many quarters of the Internet, including this blog, CBS belatedly updated an odious photo gallery from Monday’s March for Life—captioned with verbiage referring vaguely to “activists on both sides of the abortion issue, but originally displaying only photos of the tiny pro-choice counter-demonstration, without even a single photo of the March for Life—adding numerous photos of the March itself.

Although criticism of CBS’s original photo gallery ranged far and wide, the earliest whistleblower I’m...READ MORE

Final Update

Rounding out my coverage of the 2012 March for Life, I’ve added photos (taken by my companion at the March, Rob, father of Ben and Theo in the photo to the right). Rob has a good eye and captured some nice images; enjoy them. (Also, shout-out to my home-office blogging assistant Suz for managing my texts from the field, doing some necessary clean-up and fact-checking, and handling the actual posting.)

In a strange echo of John Boehner’s comments about the defense of life and the defense of liberty, Rep. Rand Paul was prevented from speaking at the rally—when he was detained by TSA agents after refusing an enhanced pat-down and missed his flight as a result. While TSA...READ MORE

At last, a horror film for disaffected Catholic traditionalists embittered against the Church for post-Vatican II changes; who see the Church itself, not just the larger culture, as compromised by modernism, and impeding orthodox clerics from carrying out true spiritual work.

Not, of course, that that particular demographic was clamoring for a horror movie to call their own. Other than Mel Gibson … and E. Michael Jones … I’m not sure how many disaffected traditionalist Catholic horror-movie fans there are out there, although as worldviews go radical traditionalism does seem eminently suited to the perverse paranoia and melancholy permeating the genre. At any rate, if I considered Pope...READ MORE

Following up on my “Still Christmas” post on Advent and Christmas family traditions, Christmas movies are an important tradition in many households. For me, Christmas movies are an especially important way of marking the continuing Christmas season. In general, I would rather watch Christmas movies with my kids after Christmas day, rather than before, as a way of celebrating the Christmas season.

The one Christmas classic I’d really like to watch before Christmas, alas, is one that hasn’t been made yet. I mean a Christmas classic about the real meaning of Christmas, the birth of the Lord Jesus. There have been movies made about this, notably The Nativity Story, but nothing that rises to...READ MORE

All Advent long, observant Catholics and other Christians hold the line against premature Christmas, holding off on decking the halls and singing Christmas carols during what is meant to be a time of preparation.

Now, as the world is busily dismantling what’s left of its Christmas trappings, it’s time for Christians to double down on the continued celebration of the Christmas season, which continues through the Christmas Octave (to January 1, the eighth day after Christmas, and thus the day of Jesus’ circumcision, celebrated as the feast of Mary the Mother of God) until after Advent to the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. (This year that means that Christmas runs through January 9, and...READ MORE

Next >

 
It’s been well over a decade since Steven Spielberg directed a family film. Now he has two out in the same week—both based on juvenile literary source material, and both European-set period pieces, redolent of nostalgia of one sort or another.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is Spielberg’s response to a decades-old vote of confidence. Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist who created the globally popular adventure comic book hero Tintin and spent over half a century writing and illustrating Tintin’s adventures, died in 1983, but not before seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark and pronouncing Spielberg the right director for Tintin.

I’m not sure why Spielberg waited three...READ MORE