All these 4 movies are worth a watch. I saw Lasse Hallströms “The Hoax” yesterday and was not disapointed . I added 3 other recomendations too!

A super matinée flick. Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, a mediocre author who tries to turn his fortune with an outrageous literary coup – that he is engaged to write the autobiography of reclusive magnate Howard Hughes. Gere captures the chutzpah and nervous opportunism of Irving; he is helped by director Lasse Hallström with unfussy sequences of intoxication, dream and surrealism as the project takes on a terrible life of its own.

Hallström is well-attuned to the natural drama in the story, using period footage and bleaching his shots beige with filters. Yet he really wrings the drama from the situation and has made a nail-biting and often funny film.

Gere has classy support from the versatile Alfred Molina, a grandstanding Hope Davis as his agent and, latterly, the ever-watchable Stanley Tucci (Julie Delpy simply fleshes out a cameo). Worth a watch but not asgood as matchstick men or Criminal as I mention below.

Catch Me If You Can was overlooked by the Oscars, though it did get nominations for the Original Score and Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken).

The Acting is mostly pretty good in Spielberg’s movies and this is no exception. Dicaprio was excellent as Frank Abagnale Jr., a teenager who commits Bank Fraud. This is by far his best performance I have ever seen from him, there wasnt a moment when he was bad. Tom Hanks is good in his role, but this is easily one of his least memorable performances. Christopher Walken is Great as Frank’s father. You could tell immediately Frank was influenced by him.

Overall, Catch Me lacks some of the “stuff” for it to be a Great movie, but its very entertaining and worth your while to see.

The film is a classic con-artist flick, and those are awesome to watch. They make you think, and they’re fun.

John C. Reilly is a terrific character actor, a good choice as a leading man!

Maggie Gyllanhaal was great, and well casted for this part. I think she is a very overlooked actress and in a way follows Johnny Depp’s paths, as a somewhat newcomer to Hollywood, picking films that are more interesting than cliché or stereotypical Hollywood, so to speak.

The film itself though, was well-written, a good John C. Reilly as I said before in the lead, and the rest was well-casted also.

With that, I will say it’s one of the better interesting films I’ve seen in a long time, and will keep it in mind for recommending it to people that I see. See it!

“Matchstick Men” is a film with extremely difficult characterizations and plot twists. Under a different director, and with a different set of stars, this may have been a complete failure. Ridley Scott directs with a level of professionalism that he has built up over the years, but adds some very nice stylistic “heist movie” touches. When it comes down to it, “Matchstick Men” is very much a 60s-70s con/heist film, and has it’s fair share of homage.

Nicolas Cage is wonderful as an obsessive-compulsive man, (amoung other disorders) and does not over-do the symptoms. This is something I appreciate, since I suffer from a milder form of OCD. It’s important to remember that we’re not all Howard Hughes. Sam Rockwell is excellent, and a bit slimy, and Alison Lohman shows her range by playing a dramatically younger character than herself.

This is a wonderful and entertaining film, yet doesn’t fake it’s way through the real emotions. Definitely worth the watch.

Todd Hunter took over the leadership of Vineyard after John Wimber passed away. He has now founded a new organisation called “3hreeisenough.” He is also working with the Emerging Church in different ways.

In an interview with Next-wave was asked about Vineyard and John Wimber;

What was the most important thing you learned from John Wimber (one of the key founders of the Vineyard movement)?

That the Kingdom of God was the main message of Jesus and the main reality in which Christians are to walk and invite others. Christian life is “eternal life” and that life starts now.

I love the way Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message: “real life…life, life and more life to come”. It is life derived from and lived in the Kingdom God by the power of the Holy Spirit—in a way that others experience as for their good, especially the least, the last and missing. And…that pursuing this kingdom life necessitates risk and learning—especially on the part of leaders. There is a reason the disciples sometimes came off as nerds or dummies in the New Testament—they took the risk of walking a totally unknown road—life in the kingdom.

The Danish poet is a fantastic little piece of film history.

This is a Norwegian/Canadian production that won an Oscar for best short subjects animation.

Can we trace the chain of events that leads to our own birth? Is our existence just coincidence

? Do little things matter?

The narrator of The Danish Poet considers these questions as we follow Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet the famous writer, Sigrid Undset.

As Kasper’s quest for inspiration unfolds, it appears that a spell of bad weather, an angry dog, slippery barn planks, a careless postman, hungry goats and other seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all.

Written by my friend Jokim Schnoebbe. He is an expert on C.S. Lewis and Narnia.You can find more info about him on his blog.

The new Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, is coming out this week and is sure to attract new readers to C. S. Lewis’ books. This is a fitting opportunity to address one of the confusions that exist about the literary type of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Time and again, it is referred to as a “Christi an allegory

,” a tag with which C. S. Lewis would not have been happy. As he explains in some of his essays and letters, an allegory is a work in which immaterial realities are represented by imaginary physical objects. For example, the immaterial faculty of Reason may be allegorically represented by someone we call Lady Reason. This Lady—because Reason is clear, undefiled, swift, cold, hard, and sharp like a sword—we could picture as a “sun-bright virgin clad in complete steel,” riding on a horse “with a sword naked in her hand.” This, C. S. Lewis has actually done in his only allegorical work, The Pigrim’s Regress, from which the example of Lady Reason is taken.

Is Narnia, then, an allegory? After all, C. S. Lewis loved allegorical literature, and it is obvious that elements of his Christianity flowed into the Narnian storyline, such as the concepts of Incarnation and Redemption.

Were C. S. Lewis alive, I think he would be very glad if readers were told about his view that the books are not an allegory. C. S. Lewis did not say to himself, “Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia.” His original inspiration was much less theological than that—nothing more than a mental picture. Long before he became a Christian, he had a picture in his head of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. Decades went past, until one day he said to himself, “Let’s try to make a story about it.” At first he had very little idea how the story would go. “But then suddenly,” he later wrote, “Aslan came bounding into it,” and “once he was there he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.”

I cant really say movie of the year since it was released in 2003 but who cares.

Two pre-teen boys are shocked when their father returns home to them and their mother, after being inexplicably away for 12 years. He takes them on a road trip the next day. This movie is exceptional and is one of the most strikingly beautiful films I’ve seen in a long time.

The child actors are so incredible it is almost discomforting. The cinematography is simply breathtaking. The film explores the fear and courage that results when children are suddenly faced with unknown horrors of the adult world.

Andrei Zvyagintsev is truly a gifted film maker and i will shortly write something about his newest movie “The Banishment” too.