Everyone’s a critic. At least when it comes to the movies. Everyone watches them, everyone wants to tell the world what they think about them and, in our flooded celluloid market — hundreds of new productions compete annually for time-strapped consumers — most everyone reads about them to figure out what to see.

It’s fitting that bloggers write about movies. Both forms are arguably the most popular in their spheres: blogging the most popular mode of participatory writing, movies the most popular channel of entertainment.

Both mediums also skyrocketed in their early years. Cecil B. DeMille shot the first Hollywood movie in 1913. A decade later, Hollywood was already bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, Charlie Chaplin was a household name and the United Artists Corp. film studio had already been established.

Similarly, though less spectacularly, Jorn Barger started the first blog in 1997. As of today, more than 50 million blogs have been created, nearly 2 million blog posts go up every day and media giants are willing to spend millions to buy and build blog empires.

Moving Targets

So what does all this have to do with the Catholic blogosphere?

It’s a fair question. Hollywood has long been known as a moral cesspool, from the wild party in 1921 that resulted in the death of actress Virginia Rappe and the conviction of comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, to the 2005 seduction of young Katie Holmes by middle-ager Tom Cruise.

Tinseltown is also unfriendly to Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular. You need not have sat through Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ or Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code to see that Hollywoodites have a low opinion of the Catholic faith. They like to hurl insults at us, often gratuitously, when the insults have nothing to do with the plot or character development at hand.

It hasn’t always been this way. Many commentators have noted that Hollywood’s glory days in the middle of the century were downright pro-Catholic, so much so that the essayist Joseph Epstein once wrote about watching movies during the 1940s: “From the movies of those days I acquired a rich mine of misinformation. For a very long time, for example, I believed that the United States was a Catholic country; this was a result of the large number of movies … in which Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien or Gregory Peck played a priest.”

Those days, of course, are gone. We have Mel Gibson, and Nicole Kidman has returned to the Church, but other than that? Hollywood is Ulster Orange, without the Protestantism.

But that doesn’t stop Catholics from going to the movies. Nor should it. As John Paul II saw so clearly, Catholics must take part in, and sometimes battle with, the culture. The fine online magazine Godspy (godspy.com) has made such evangelization its goal, stating in its mission statement: “Because this world matters so much to the Church, Catholics need to do more to engage modern culture.”

We can’t deal with the culture if we don’t see what the culture offers. And perhaps the best way to see the culture is to sit in the movie theater and rent DVDs.

Decent Sites

Many Catholics have taken up the challenge to engage the culture via the Internet. Take film critic Steve Greydanus, for example. He writes movie reviews for the Register and also for his website, Decent Films (decentfilms.com). It is the best Catholic site on the web dealing with the movies.

But it’s also largely a one-man show. Greydanus is gifted and prolific, but he holds down a full-time job unrelated to film criticism, he has a large family to co-raise with his wife and he only has two hands.

If Decent Films doesn’t review a movie or DVD, you may want to try the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ movie page (usccb.org/movies), the Catholic News Service “Movies Area” (catholicnews.com/movies), and the Faith and Film Critics Circle (faithandfilmcritics.com), which runs material from reviewers of different Christian denominations.

In the blogosphere, there is an assortment of options. One of the best is offered by Stan Williams, author of The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue & Vice for Box Office Success. His blog, The Moral Premise (moralpremise.blogspot.com), is updated a couple of times every week. For art reviews of all types, including film, Terry Teachout probably has the classiest site: About Last Night (artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight).

And there are, of course, Catholic bloggers who regularly write about movies, even though the cinema isn’t their primary area of interest: Standing on My Head (gkupsidedown.blogspot.com), Jimmy Akin (jimmyakin.typepad.com), Cause of Our Joy (causa-nostrae-laetitiae.blogspot.com) and Happy Catholic (happycatholic.blogspot.com). And, while not Catholic, the Christian film blog Film Chat (filmchatblog.blogspot.com) is well worth your time.

If you’re interested in movies, check out these bloggers and sites. They’ll explain things about movies you may never have considered. They’ll point out hidden moral lessons. They’ll make you more articulate when discussing popular culture with your non-Catholic friends.

And, most important, they’ll tell you which movies are and aren’t worth your time and money.

Eric Scheske blogs at

The Daily Eudemon

(ericscheske.com).