by the Night Writer When I told the lads last week that we were going to watch a classic Bill Murray movie that featured a cute, furry animal they were all, “Cool – Caddyshack!” “Oh yeah,” I replied, “And what positive message could I possibly squeeze out of that besides ‘Be the ball.’” There were [...]
Fairy tales are one of the oldest ways mankind has used entertainment to teach the value of good behavior and consequences of bad. Most tales at heart tell of a central character who does either good or bad and either triumphs in the end or suffers gruesome retribution (especially in the original, non-sanitized versions of [...]
I haven’t pulled back from the monthly movie classes with the boys and this month I took us even deeper and darker than where we’ve gone of late (The Dark Knight and The Ghost and the Darkness). Last week we watched two segments of an excellent BBC documentary entitled The Nazis: A Warning From History. [...]
I’ve always been on the lookout for films with strong messages dealing with honor and character in this series for teen-age boys, and the stories can be fictional, factual or a bit of both. It’s a bonus, however, when we have a chance to see something of a historical nature that can also help us [...]
Tonight was “Fundamentals in Film” Night with the teen-age boys and a couple of the dads. We watched a movie, as usual, but first I had to interject some real life — much to the lads’ chagrin. I haven’t blogged about our movie nights for awhile but we’ve been getting together regularly for two years [...]
No, I haven’t set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but the Fundamentals in Film class finally completed the Band of Brothers mini-series last week. There were 10 episodes, plus the documentary “We Stand Alone Together”, in the mostly true-to-life story of E company, paratroopers of the 101st Airborne in World War II. With our [...]
I’ve been leading the bi-weekly “Fundamentals in Film” class for the current group of teenage boys for about a year now, and my focus has been to feature movies with strong, positive male role models demonstrating character, honor, courage and grace under fire (physical, mental, spiritual fire) and especially an ability to put others ahead [...]
I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach with this FiF entry in that I’m not going to delve so much into the character themes in a particular movie, but I do want to call your attention to some treasures you might be overlooking. I was doing some channel surfing the other [...]
Secondhand Lions is both a great addition to this blog series and a well-received film by the young men in our bi-weekly viewing group. The viewing group has largely followed the order of the original class I taught a few years ago while the blog series has gone on to feature additional movies. This week [...]
I had a coach and gym teacher back in junior high school that used to call us guys a bunch of “Yo-yos”. We knew that wasn’t a good thing, but it also seemed like kind of a silly insult. Now that I’m about the age he was, and have deliberately subjected myself to the company [...]
