A Country Chat With Garth Brooks
On March 27, the first part of my two-part blog on Garth Brooks appeared here. Today, I’d like to give you a behind-the-scenes look into the questions and answers that occurred at this “pep rally” to dedicate a new teen area at a Denver hospital. What follows comes from two different interviews—one where I had a […]
The Phenomenon That Is Garth Brooks
There aren’t a lot of musicians these days that can sell out arenas. But as of last fall, and coming out of “retirement,” Garth Brooks proves that he’s still a major force in the music industry with huge concert venues selling out in mere minutes. I saw that first-hand last week in Denver where my […]
The Drop Box Drops Today
Focus on the Family in conjunction with Kindred Image release their new documentary The Drop Box today through Fathom Events. The film is an intimate look at the work of Pastor Lee Jong-rak, a South Korean minister who for decades has manned a “drop box” to collect unwanted babies. It runs in select U.S. theaters […]
A Conversation with Teen Screen Expert Dr. Kathy Koch
Each year around early December, Focus on the Family re-airs a dozen of its most popular radio broadcasts (out of 260). On that short list of what we call the Best of the Best was a two-day broadcast by Dr. Kathy Koch. Not long ago, Kathy and I were both asked to speak at the […]
ClearPlay Streaming: The Reason My Film Editing Days Are Over
When my kids were growing up, my wife and I were not only intentional about what movies they watched, I found myself going to some bizarre extremes to follow through on that intentionality. For instance, my daughter asked about seeing the movie Titanic when she was in middle school. With its nudity and two sex […]
Great Art and Great Messages Make Great Films
“I have a dream!” Of course you know I just borrowed those four famous words from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., during this, the anniversary month of his birth. But it’s true, I do have a dream. As a film critic, I have aspirations of a day in which filmmakers in Hollywood would only […]
Luke Zamperini Speaks Out About Unbroken
With Angelina Jolie’s film Unbroken, about the life of Louis Zamperini, set to release on Christmas Day, it seemed timely to offer you a conversation I had a few days ago with Louis’ 61-year-old son, Luke. Even before seeing the film, I was a huge Louis Z fan. His remarkable story—that of being an Olympic […]
Not Too Wild About Wild
In conjunction with the release of The Good Lie back in October, I interviewed Reese Witherspoon about her role in that film and her thoughts about how it might raise awareness of the plight of Sudanese refugees. You can read it here. It was a great conversation about a movie that was quite positive in […]
Not Cool to Cuss (Back Then or Now)
Head football coach Rex Ryan of the New York Jets was recently fined (again) a whopping $100,000 for swearing. Surprised? Yes, even in this day and age of supposed “everyone can say whatever they want whenever they want,” there still is a sense that some things are still out of bounds in the NFL—at least […]
Are Sharks Circling Christian Films?
A few weeks ago, my grown daughter Kelsey called from her home in Hawaii to tell us about an encounter with a 15-foot whale shark. She works on a whale-watching-snorkel-swim-with-the-wild-dolphins boat on the Big Island, so it’s not a total surprise she and the crew would have this chance meeting. But sightings like this are […]