Weekend Reads (Feb 12): 2022 Oscars, “Jackass,” “Station Eleven,” Christian Metal
Recommended weekend reading material for February 12, 2022.
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Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.

The 2022 Oscar nominations have been announced, with The Power of the Dog and Dune receiving the most nominations. I’m glad to see Dune pick up so many nominations; I recently watched its first 30 minutes or so and couldn’t help thinking how fortunate we were to get a film like it. I don’t necessarily see Dune winning “Best Picture,” but I’d be really surprised if it didn’t win some of the more technical awards (e.g., production design, sound, visual effects).
The winners will be announced at the 94th Academy Awards on March 27, 2022.
Since it’s Oscar season, here’s your annual reminder that there really ought to be an Oscar category for stunts.
It seems particularly odd that the Academy would give an award for Best Visual Effects but not for Best Stunts. Visual effects could be said to be the flip side of stunts: Both are disciplines designed to make the people onscreen look like they’re doing the impossible. And as much as we may think of everything in action movies being done today “with computers,” this is rarely the case: There are around 150 credits for stunts on Avengers: Endgame. “The VFX guys are on our side,” says Gill. “We work hand in hand with them. With more VFX movies being made, I’m using more stuntpeople than I ever use. The public has become so savvy about what is real and not real onscreen that the VFX people want as much of the footage to be real as possible.” As Lisk-Hann puts it, “It’s weird when films like The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road are nominated for all those Oscars and you’re sitting there thinking, Half of that is us.”
Related: Here are 20 stunts from throughout movie history that deserved an Oscar.
Luke T. Harrington offers an explanation for why the Oscar viewing audience has dramatically shrunk in the last decade, and why it’s foolish to differentiate between film and TV.
The advantages that film had over TV — better picture, relative lack of censorship, the ability to choose what you watch — have evaporated in the last twenty years. The only meaningful difference left is that the cinema screen is bigger, and consumer behavior is going to reflect that. Explosions may be a lot cooler on the big screen, but emotions are just as powerful, regardless of wether or not the single tear rolling down Meryl Streep’s cheek is the size of a house. So it’s not so much that the public doesn’t care about Very Serious Drama; it’s just that there’s no strong argument for leaving your house and spending fifty bucks to experience it.
Visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull died earlier this week at the age of 79.
Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist at Graphic Films in Los Angeles, which created a documentary for the 1964 New York World’s Fair called “To the Moon and Beyond,” shot with Cinerama’s 360 Process and projected onto the overhead Moon Dome; Kubrick saw it and hired Graphic Films director Con Pederson; Trumbull got Kubrick’s number from Pederson, cold-called him and got hired to work on “2001.” Trumbull was initially given a relatively minor task — creating the animated displays seen on the computer screens throughout the ship in the film — but his responsibilities grew and grew as production continued. In the end he was one of four visual effects supervisors on the movie, and his most significant achievement was development of the process to create the film’s Star Gate.
Through his work on movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, Trumbull created some of the most ground-breaking, awe-inspiring, and indelible images in cinema history.
Alissa Wilkinson watched all of the Jackass movies so we didn’t have to, and surprise! She actually enjoyed them.
But whether you envy the guys onscreen or want to shake them a little, if you find yourself settled into the Jackass groove, it’s pretty hard to resist. The obvious affection between all of the guys, who beat on each other, yell at each other, and then hug it out and do it all over again. The excitement of watching guys who you know probably walked away from the stunt on their own power but also are taking it on the chin without any typical stuntman precautions. The eye-bugging realization that they are really going to go there this time; the upping of the ante; the matryoshka-style stunts where you think it’s going to be one prank and then it’s a whole bigger, badder prank. The impulse to do it, and to watch, is in its way a proudly, baldly, loopy celebration of these weird, smelly, gross, hilarious bodies we all have and the world we let them roam around in.
Redeeming Love has been promoted as a faith-based film that isn’t afraid to depict sexual activity. But Cap Stewart isn’t so sure that’s a good thing.
Or, to put it another way, in calling audiences to the purifying and restoring love of God, Redeeming Love required its two main actors to perform sexual acts that only a couple of decades ago would have been considered soft-core porn (or what we might call secondhand porn). Inviting actors to pornify themselves for the camera functionally pushes them away from the purifying and restoring love of God in their own lives.
Stewart also published a follow-up article clarifying some of his points, and further calling for an end to actor exploitation.
My friend Maralee is a big fan of family movie nights.
I’ve watched Star Wars movies turn into long games of Star Wars creative play the next day. Documentaries with my older kids have started insightful conversations about problems in the world. Watching the Olympics together creates a drive to practice and work hard at their own athletic dreams. Movies with adoption storylines become a great vehicle for opening the door to the thoughts my kids are having about their own adoptions. These movies aren’t isolated or isolating moments, but a time we are choosing to be together, sharing an experience.
As China’s power and influence has grown, that power and influence has made itself known in, of all places, Hollywood movies like the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick.
In the original [Top Gun], Maverick’s bomber featured a patch that highlighted the U.S.S. Galveston’s tour of Japan, Taiwan, and other countries in the Pacific, with flags from those countries below his collar. Chinese investors on the new movie pointed out to Skydance executives that those 1986 patches now posed a problem: China has long argued that Taiwan — a self-ruling island off the coast of the mainland — is a renegade province, and has insisted that it will be reintegrated into China. Having a global movie star flaunt Taiwan’s flag on his back undermined Chinese sovereignty. And given China’s decades-long animosity toward Japan, the studio executives reasoned that they should play it safe and erase that patch too.
Related: Last May, John Cena apologized on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform, after he called Taiwan a “country” in an interview with Taiwanese media.
I haven’t had a chance to watch HBO Max’s Station Eleven yet, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. Case in point: This beautifully written piece by Alisa Ruddell for Christ and Pop Culture.
As the show’s writer Patrick Somerville puts it, it doesn’t take a global pandemic for someone’s world to end. A person can lose their whole world with one tragic phone call during a dinner party, an unlucky misstep, a betrayal, an accident, or a diagnosis — a personal apocalypse. Opportunities for forming “covalent bonds” — whether it’s saving someone’s world or just sitting beside them as it burns — surround us all the time.
This may sound biased since I’m CAPC’s owner, but I’ve really been enjoying the site’s TV coverage lately.
One of my favorite releases in 2021 was Daygraves’ Imperishable EP. Andrew Voight interviewed Travis Estes, the man behind Daygraves, about the EP’s inspiration, his future plans, and how his faith plays out in the music.
I think the most succinct way to say it is this: I don’t really have a spiritual agenda here. I just think that if you’re an artist and you’re making stuff that you care about, then the subject matter should be things that affect your life and the things that move you. For me, like I said earlier, I’m a boring dude and I don’t have a wide array of interests. I have, like, three things that I love: I love my family/friends, I love music, and I love Jesus. Nobody wants to hear record after record about how cool my wife is, and nobody wants to hear about the bands that I like. That would be weird. So, I’ve got this other thing that supplies me with an endless number of things to think about, thus an endless number of things to write about.
Suffice to say, I’m really looking forward to hearing Daygraves’ album when it hopefully drops later this year.
Related: My review of Daygraves’ Imperishable EP and some coverage of his earlier releases.
Speaking of Christian metal, Relevant has compiled a list of classic Christian metal album covers.
Christian art, with its millennia-old interest in transcending death and battling the demonic, was a natural fit for the metal genre, and Christian metal acts took to it with glee. You don’t have to be a metalhead to appreciate the craft, skill and demented imagination in some of Christian metal’s most insane album covers. You just need two eyes, a spirit baptized in the waters of rock and roll, and a heart of courage for what might lurk within.
Other Christian metal album covers deserving of “classic” status include The Crucified’s The Pillars of Humanity, Mortification’s self-titled debut, and Vengeance Rising’s Human Sacrifice and Destruction Comes.
I will never not be fascinated by stories about organizations that claim to be pro-freedom, anti-censorship, and against all things “cancel culture” exercising their own forms of censorship and canceling that seem to fly in the face of their aforementioned ideals.
For years, crypto stans have maintained that the blockchain is a powerful tool to fight censorship. You can find any number of op-eds arguing that the immutable nature of the ledger protects free speech, and, relevantly, Bitcoin bros have often deemed it a haven from political correctness — a place where “cancel culture” does not functionally exist. But, it turns out Web2 and Web3 have more in common than some may have thought.
Regardless of whether you find Brantly Millegan’s statements offensive or not, this situation is indicative of what happens when the lofty, utopian claims of tech entrepreneurs and crypto fans run headlong into the messy, convoluted reality that the rest of us inhabit.
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