Sunday Best: Emmy Winners 2026

  

Perhaps I am getting older or more mature or perhaps my tastes are changing, but I don't have the same excitement that I used to for award shows.  I used to look forward to the Golden Globes, the Emmys, and most especially the Oscars.  But now they seem like an afterthought.  I still consume a great deal of media (perhaps too much).  But my desire to see the industry award itself is waning.

My biggest takeaway from watching the Emmys didn't have to do with any of the actual awards.  I didn't think that Marishka Hartigay was a terrible host, but she wasn't very good either.  And as with the proliferation of streaming networks, most of the shows that were nominated were ones that I did not watch.

BIG WINNERS: Widow's Bay

This is a show I do not watch, but it cleaned up that night.  It won a total of 13 wins.  The lead actor Matthew Rhys not only won for this show but for a limited series that night as well.  While I can't speak to how good the show is, I was happy to see Stephen Root win an Emmy.  I'm old enough to remember when he was doing guest spots on the original Night Court and he has been working regularly in television since.  I especially like how he referenced Harrison Ford.  It also like Katie Dipold (the showrunner) is now out of Hollywood jail after writing the 2016 Ghostbusters movie

MICHAEL J. FOX'S SPEECH

As a child of the 1980's I was very moved by seeing Michael J. Fox accept his award.  I loved how he began his speech by acknoledging the award's namesake Bob Hope and ending his speech thanking him.  

TOM PELPHREY'S SPEECH

I do not know this actor, but I was moved by how he began by thanking God for his life and his sobriety.  His speech had the tone of true gratitude, especially when he turned his attention to his family saying they were the crown jewel of his life.  I especially loved how he spoke to his unborn child growing inside of his wife.  It was a very pro-life moment.

HUMOR?

I always wonder who writes the jokes for these shows and how they almost always come to the unfunniest punchlines.  The only standout was John Mulaney who probably wrote his own material.

IN MEMORIAM

I don't know how these awards shows keep screwing up the In Memoriam part of the evening.  Sometimes they leave off names they shouldn't.  Sometimes they choose the wrong song/singer.  But this time, it was the fact that Chuck Norris was left off of the list.  Not only was he a cultural icon, but his show Walker, Texas Ranger was a huge hit that ran for several years on CBS.  

Thoughts?

Film Flash: Runner (2026)

 

15 words or less film review (full review to follow soon)

Simple-concept, low-budget action film executed well.  Actors have great chemistry.  A fun watch.

Film Flash: By Any Mean

 

 

15 words or less film review (full review to follow soon)

An intriguing movie with good performances that just sort of ends out of nowhere.

Sunday Best: 50 Most Beautiful Moments in Cinema - #5-#1

     

This is a continuation of this series started here and continued here and here and here and here.

You can go there to see numbers 50-31.  You can also check it out to remember the ground rules and criteria for choosing.  A brief recap:

1. A moment can be only about 2 minutes (unless it is an unbroken shot).  

2. Only one moment per movie.

3. All the context matters.

4. The subjective element of beauty is real.

5. Beauty only.

So, with those in mind, I will now share #5-#1 of the most beautiful moments in cinema.

I will provide Youtube links to the videos rather than embed them here.  I would imagine that because this is critical commentary it qualifies for fair use, but I'd rather not take that chance.

You can click any of the links below to see the clips (most of them should be timestamped to begin at the moment referred.

SPOILERS FOR ALL THE MOVIES BELOW

5. The Wizard of Oz - "Munchkin Land"

There are many reasons why The Wizard of Oz has endured as one of the most beloved movies of all time.  But I don't think people talk enough about the fact that it creates cinematic magic.  We see a lot spectacle in movies, but there are not as many that fill you with a true sense of wonder and awe.  And this moment is one of those rare occasions where the world opens up.

We've spent the entire movie in the black-and-white world of Kansas.  As with any monochrome movie, eventually you forget that the world is plain and drab.  But then Dorothy opens up that door and the most vivid, dazzling colors pour in and overwhelm you.  Every child who sees this for the first time feels absolutely transported to another world.  It is a moment of cinematic magic, where we feel as though the plainness of our own world could give way to a hidden magic just around the corner.  The music rises slowly like a dream as even Dorothy herself is transformed, releasing the magic inside of her.  It is a truly masterful shot that never ceases to create a sense of wonder.

4. Casablanca - "Last Shot"

Most of this movie plays out a lot like a film noir.  The use of light and shadow, even with the romantic elements, hit at dark overtones.  Rick's morally ambiguous character leads us to believe that this movie is going to have a dark and tragic end.  But his utter selflessness makes the ending feel earned.  Rick sacrificed romantic love in favor of agape, the highest form of sacrificial love.  He's ready for Louis to turn him in for eventual execution.  But Rick's heroism awakens the patriotism of the venal but charming Louis.  As the two walk off, we hear the patriotic French theme rise.  We then have (to paraphrase When Harry Met Sally) one of the greatest last lines of any movie: "Louis, I think this is the beginning a beautiful friendship."  It is a deceptively simple line, but it does a lot in that one sentence.  It is telling the audience that this is not a sad ending, but a happy beginning.  It is reminding us that there are still beautiful things in this world besides romantic love.  And that these two are about forge a friendship by fighting against evil together.

And as they walk the damp runway, the lights reflect on the ground as they walk into the mist.  Our heroes are walking off into the stars themselves.  They are mythic heroes stepping out of the darkness of Casablanca and into the stuff of legends.  It is a call to bravery and heroism.  It is a call to also be a friend of Rick and join back into the fight.

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - "You Bow To No One"

I love movies.  But as much as I love them, there are few moments that truly take my breath away.  And Peter Jackson was able to do that with this moment.

People often complain that the ending to Return of the King is too long.  I disagree.  I think when you spend so much time with these characters, you need to give them the proper goodbye.  This is the final scene with Aragorn, Arwen, Legolas, and Gimli.  In particular, we just watched Aragorn fulfill his destiny as king and have his emotional reunion with Arwen.  We take our last look at Eomer, Faramir, and Eowyn.  But then we come to the hobbits.

The moment is set up as you would expect.  The four hobbits are seen from a high angle: small folk in the larger world, the humans hovering over them.  But with a look of utter compassion and love Aragorn delivers that unforgettable line, "My friends... you bow to no one."  And as the camera descends with him, we as the audience also genuflect.  Then we get the swelling of the Shire theme just as we see the entire people take a knee.  And then the camera floats from a high angle to a low angle close up of Frodo.  The people of Middle Earth will never be able to repay him for the sacrifice that will eventually cause him to leave forever.  But this moment is a moment of acknowledgment and reverence.  When we honor the heroes who gave everything for us, we know that we can never pay them back.  What we have to give is poor recompense.  Frodo will never be fully healed in this world.  But what we can give is our honor.  

I have never seen a movie that captures this sentiment like I do here.

2. The Sound of Music - "Opening Shots"

If you said to me that The Sound of Music is the most beautifully filmed movie of all time, then I don't think that I can argue with you.  I don't think I have ever seen anything quite like this.  There are several musical films, many of them great.  But few take permanent residence in the minds and hearts of people as this movie.  One of the reasons is that director Robert Wise made a film that was so gorgeous to look at that it felt it was casting a spell on you.

I recently watched the movie again with my wife and I kept pointing out the fantastic use of color, framing, depth, motion... almost every frame of this movie is like a painting.

But the most beautiful shot is that opening shot of Maria.  The wide arial shot fills you with the open, majestic grandeur of the mountains.  But by themselves, they are lacking because there is no one in that space to appreciate it.  And as the camera pulls in on Maria, we see her spin around as if taking in every beautiful vista around her as the music swells and then she hits you with that declaration "The hills are alive with the sound of music!"  In the stage play, you have to feel that life through the enthusiasm of the character.  But here we have not only Maria's ecstasy, but Wise envelops you with the beauty of those mountains and hills.  You feel everything about this moment.  When she sings that she wants to "laugh like a brook as it trips and falls over stones on its way..." Wise shows you the beauty of that little brook and how it calls to you its laughter.  I don't think I've ever seen a movie that better embodies the Canticle from Daniel 3 where all of nature blesses the Lord!

The moment not only shows you the beautiful, it immerses you the beauty of God's creation.

1. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope - "Tatooine Sunset"

It is 35 seconds long.

And yet it is the most beautiful moment in all of cinema.

It actually amazes me that this moment is in the movie.  George Lucas is notorious for cutting scenes that are powerful but don't push the narrative forward.  And if you watch the original Star Wars, you could cut this moment and not lose anything in the story.  But Lucas understood the utter importance of this moment.  It is so important that the endings of the Prequel and Sequel Trilogies are direct homages to this moment.

And it is also strikingly simple.  It is made up of only 3 very simple camera angles: a wide on the Lars Homestead, a medium on Luke, and a reverse on the twin suns setting.

So why would this be the most beautiful moment in cinema?

First of all, look at the composition.  When Luke walks out of the hut, he's moving out of darkness and he heads towards the light.  The bottom half of the screen is washed-out sand, but the top half is full of red, yellow, and purple.  And he is walking away from the only home he has ever known.  He looks out with his eyes to the horizon, the limitless future.  As he stands there, Luke is bathed in light.  His call to adventure is a bright light illuminating him.  The shot of the twin suns is one of the most beautiful in all of Star Wars.  There are a lot of flashy special effects in the saga.  But Lucas uses a simple camera trick to make the twin suns look like they were naturally photographed.  To that original audience, Lucas pulls off an amazing magic trick: he makes something otherworldly and extraordinary like twin suns look natural, almost mundane.  But at the same time, he makes that which is mundane feel extraordinary.  In other words, this fantastic world feels real in a way that you don't feel in other movies.

We must also talk about the music.  The use of the John Williams score is perfect.  It starts as a small voice of discontent that we feel in Luke.  But then as he looks out, it swells to a powerful and painful longing.  CS Lewis talked about "joy," as a deep, painful ache that happens inside of the person when they experience something truly beautiful.  It is because the beautiful thing makes you desire the eternal, otherworldly beauty of the transcendent God.  When Luke looks out, he feels something like joy and the score makes the audience feel it too.

But above all, these 35 seconds convey the universal feeling of all human beings.  When we are young, there comes a a time when the wide world calls to us.  It can be scary, but it still calls.  Luke looks out at the larger universe and he hears the call.  It is something all of us have felt when looking at a sunset or the ocean or the wide planes or rolling hills.  It isn't just a moment of admiration: it is a call for us to become.  Become what?  That is the adventure.

And all of that is communicated without words in those 35 seconds.  I'm not even sure most people would put it into those words.  But some of the deepest lived truths are things that we experience rather than articulate.  And that is what Lucas has done with this moment.  He wanted pull back the curtain on this world and have us touch not a world of fiction, but a world of truth, a world of myth.

9/11 - 25 Years Ago Today

      

25 years ago today.

I have no words to describe the horror of that day.  

Today is about the 3,042 people who were horribly and viciously murdered by wicked men.

The best thing to do today would be to remember the dead.

Here is a link to the names of the murdered.  In your charity, perhaps look at the list and pray for a few of them by name.

Let us never forget.

Never.

Film Review: The End of Oak Street

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature

Violence Mature

Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

This movie has all the elements that should make it a fun, summer blockbuster.  But in this case the movie is less than the sum of its parts.

The End of Oak Street takes place in a suburban community in 1982.  It centers around the Platt family.  Denise (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring novelist who is ready to leave her husband and children at the drop of a hat.  Greg (Ewan McGregor), is an amiable guy who is delivering pizzas to make ends meet.  The teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is incredibly smart with big dreams of college.  And finally Brian (Christian Convery) is a typical, not-that-bright junior-high kid who has a crush on the new transfer student Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis).  The cracks in the family are subtle at first but then become more pronounced under stress.  And this stress occurs when the entire neighborhood gets mysteriously transported several hundred million years into the past where they must not survive surrounded by prehistoric life.

I will say that the movie does pack within it some genuine thrills.  Oak Street makes the dinosaurs genuinely scary and a real threat.  The Jurassic series tends to make them more and more cartoonish, but this movie uses them as monsters who inflict gruesome deaths on the residents of Oak Street.  The design on the dinosaurs is also much different than what we've seen in the past, comporting to what modern paleontologists think they looked like, feathers and all.  Some of the action sequences move with real energy and thrills, with very decent camera work besides.  Speaking of the camera work, writer/director David Robert Mitchell seems very enamored of use deep focus shots so that it becomes part of this movie's signature style.  The special effects are as good as anything else out there right now.  The early scenes where the family begins to realize their threat have some moments of fun, escapist entertainment.  The performances are all decent from the main cast, where none of them break the spell.

But even with all of these pieces parts in place, the movie never becomes more than these disparate elements.  It apes the feel of 1980's movies, particularly that of Spielberg, but it cannot create the same sense of wonder awe.  Go back and watch something that is supposed to be a straightforward monster movie like Jaws and Spielberg fills you with that wonder and awe even as they are looking over Ben Gardner's broken boat.  Oak Street has a lot of spectacle, but it never feels weighty enough to dig deep into your heart.

But the real place the movie fails is the writing.  This is a shame because with just a little tweaking of the script, the movie could go from mediocre to very good.  The main problem is that the movie places Denise at the center of the movie as its main hero and she is incredibly unlikeable.  We are meant to sympathize with her domestic dissatisfaction where she already has a bag packed to leave, but can't bring herself to do it when she looks at her children.  The movie never gives you a rational reason for her to be this upset.  Before the movie begins, Greg lost his job and began delivering pizzas to make ends meet.  In one scene he parks in the driveway and begins to take the pizza delivery sign off of his car.  When his son asks why he does it since he needs to put it back on again in the morning, Greg says, "It embarrasses your mother."  Denise gives no support or sympathy to her husband who is clearly scrapping to provide even though he feels like a failure.  They don't give her enough of a reason to resent him.  At one point we see him secretly take a drink from a hidden bottle, which might hint at an alcohol issue.  But even though this would ground her resentment of him, the movie dismisses it completely.  

Greg is a decent guy, but he is fairly ineffectual.  He is kind even to his annoying neighbors, even when Denise is strident.  He tries to be optimistic for the kids while Denise thinks pessimism is the best way to prepare their children for potential disaster.  The movie wants you to side with Denise on this, but she really offers no better alternatives.  

The children also make incredibly stupid decisions.  Audrey sneaks into the garage and turns on the car so she can listen to "Valerie" by Steve Winwood (this is the first hint that she has same-sex attractions).  Not only is she playing music that could attract dinosaurs, she is doing it with the car's headlights turned on, wasting precious battery power.  I kept shouting in my head, "TURN OFF THE HEADLIGHTS!"  Brian is also very foolish.  One night he sees his dog outside runs out with his bow and arrow and tries to catch him.  Aubrey sees him and instead of getting her parents, she also runs after him.  Everything bad that happens to this family in the rest of the movie is because of that boy's stupidity.

Speaking his bow and arrow, we see him walking the neighborhood with it at the beginning of the film.  We think we are getting a set-up/payoff here, but there is none.  When he sees his crush, he goes to shoot the dinosaur attacking her, but fails miserably.  Instead Aubrey saves her with her knife skills, thus starting an attraction between them both.  So I guess the point was to subvert expectations, but this trope got old back in 2017.

There are also moments that are so contrived that they make no sense.  In one scene, a gigantic snake comes in through a second-story window and slowly makes his way downstairs and sneaks up on Denise.  In doing so, the snake passes up three potential victims.  There is no reason for this to be done except to create artificial tension.  Besides this, the scene provides nothing to the plot.  It could be completely removed from the film and it would make no difference to the story in any way.

And while the movie highlights the marital problems, it does show how marriage can be a blessing in times of crisis.  There is one touching scene where Denise and Greg are huddled-down in danger and you can see their bond grow closer because they need each other.  There is also an incredibly odd and off-putting scene where the two share a laugh while watching two giant dinosaurs mate along the side of a house.  I suppose that is something positive to take in terms of the value of marriage, but it seems buried underneath everything else.

The real problem with the writing, though, is the ending.  I will not spoil it here, though I may have to write an entirely separate post about it.  But the characters make a decision that, on the surface, seems to hit all of the correct emotional notes.  But the moment you start to think about it with any real application of morality, the implications get more and more morally confused to the point where you wonder whether the decision may actually have been evil.  Because it deals with time travel, there is a lot of intentional ambiguity, but instead of giving you the proper catharsis, it instead leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

What is so frustrating about The End of Oak Street is that it has all of the ingredients of an incredibly fun sci-fi family film.  But it fell apart at the writing stage, which is the stage where most of the flaws are most easily fixed.  Instead, we got this creative-concept film hampered by unlikeable and unintelligent characters.  Perhaps if we could go back in time, we could fix those problems and therefore we would hope that this wouldn't be the end of Oak Street.

Labor Day Prayer to St. Joseph 2026

    

(repost)

Happy Labor Day!

I remember during the early days of the pandemic, I was so worried that the school where I teach was going to lose enrollment and shut down.  As often as I complain about the toil of work, I am reminded how ungrateful I am for the privilege of working in a Catholic school (or to have a job at all for that matter).  It is truly a blessing to be given labor to help build up the Kingdom of God.

As I have written before, I credit St. Joseph for all of my jobs.  I pray that, like him, I can be a good worker and provider for my family and work the best that I can to be a model of moral manhood.

I pray that St. Joseph bless all the work of our hands that we all build up the Kingdom of God together.

Oh, St. Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of God. I place in you all my interests and desires. Oh, St. Joseph, do assist me by your powerful intercession, and obtain for me from your divine Son all spiritual blessings, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So that, having engaged here below your heavenly power, I may offer my thanksgiving and homage to the most loving of Fathers.

Oh, St. Joseph, I never weary of contemplating you, and Jesus asleep in your arms; I dare not approach while He reposes near your heart. Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me and ask him to return the Kiss when I draw my dying breath. St. Joseph, Patron of departing souls - Pray for me.