Third Way Cafe (Media Matters)

Media Matters

Here at Third Way Café, we believe that media matters! What you watch on TV or at the movies, listen to on the radio or Internet, video games you play, advertising you are bombarded with, and news you access - all affects you and your family. In this Media Matters section we offer fresh weekly reviews and background articles on the media. We also encourage you to browse to other sections of Third Way Café where media issues are addressed, and welcome your feedback.

Weekly Reviews

Check out Christian/Anabaptist perspectives on movies, TV, pop culture, music, books and radio. These weekly postings are written by a variety of authors on a rotating basis and are available to you on this site or as a free email subscription. Offer your own analysis and feedback in the comment section.

Latest Reviews:

Movies
Top Ten Films of 2009
Third Way Cafe Media Matters Reviewers Best Films of 2009

Our Media Matters reviewers have done it again: brought you not only their picks for top 10 films of the year (in keeping with the Oscar awards’ move to having ten nominees for each category for the first time this year), but handy short descriptions that you can use to make your own queue for Netflix or other list, or even use in choosing flicks to use for youth or other film discussion groups. Then, go to our Poll to register your own favorite films of 2009.

Movies
Crazy Heart
Transcending Wreckage

After panning across the wide, southwestern landscape, over rust-colored canyons and the meandering road, Crazy Heart begins with Bad Blake's name on a bowling alley marquee—“country music star” spelled out above it like an epitaph. It's an appropriate place to introduce a man succumbing to his own hard living. Bad's worn his riches back to rags, and it shows.

Movies
Two films: A Single Man and An Education
Similiar themes, excellent films

Two of the best films of 2009 are adapted from previous works, set within one year of each other in the early 1960s, include stunning performances by their lead actors, and address remarkably similar themes.

Be a Critic - Media Articles

Articles, essays and tools to help you and your family be more aware of trends, how to critique, analyze and consume (or not!) current media. Check out the ones that interest you. Forward them on to friends. Discuss them in your Sunday school classes or around the office cooler. Send us your own ideas as well.

Movies

Analyze This
A Film Critic's Look at the American Western - [7/15/2009 7:00:00 AM]

What distinguishes a good film from a great one? Truly great films speak to real life situations. They tap into the dominant cultural mood and give it definition. Great films rely on superior acting to bring complex multi-dimensional characters to life. These characters, in turn, don’t remain static but develop.

The Making of a Movie Critic
Movies - [6/20/2007]

I am a movie buff, not an expert, but definitely an aficionado. Now I am a movie critic. How did that happen? I’m glad you asked.

Questions for Your Own Film Night - [2/10/2006]
Interested in hosting your own film night? Consider these questions, provided by Vic Thiessen, representing Mennonite Church Canada Witness and Mennonite Mission Network at the London Mennonite Centre, as ways to start a discussion.

Why I Write About R-rated Movies - [2/10/2006]
On occasion while writing movie reviews, I have received criticism for including reviews (actually brief comments, for the most part) of R-rated films. Often the comments are not detailed criticism but dismay that we mention such films in any kind of positive light.

Dialogue With Film - [2/10/2006]
As the film industry prepares annually for its Academy Awards, some religious groups are suggesting that Hollywood has nothing to offer the faithful. But Vic Thiessen, executive director of the London Mennonite Centre, believes that the movie medium’s tremendous power to influence lives, thoughts and even beliefs makes film-watching vital to understand the modern world, even if the messages do not always fit into Christian theology.

TV

How to Lower the Amount of TV Your Family Watches
Cut the Cord - [4/18/2006]
Do your kids still spending too much time on the couch? It doesn't have to be that way. Instead, use the following tips to pull your family away from the tube to enjoy more family fun.

Be Careful Little Eyes What You See: Impact of Horror Films - [2/9/2006 7:00:00 AM]

I first began to suspect I had been traumatized by some childhood experience when I began researching children in crisis while I was in college and after.

What Are Your Kids Watching? Christian parenting in a TV-and-Net world - [2/9/2006]
Something didn't feel right. We were set to sign the lease on a new apartment—a much larger one. Raising four kids in a 44-story highrise in Hong Kong is not for the squeamish, and I looked forward to the additional space. But something kept nettling me.

Vast Pig Trough - [2/9/2006]
I used to watch TV frequently with our children. Then they grew into teenagers and now spend less time watching TV.

Media-Wise Parents - [2/9/2006]
"I like to think of myself as a hip mom, but I have to admit I’m appalled by the sexuality and vulgarity in today’s music and movies. Other than throwing out the TV, how can I protect my teenager from all these media influences?"

Images From Soap Operas: How Do They Play into Attitudes Towards Americans? - [2/9/2006]
How many Americans are aware that the most sophisticated tools of modern communication are being used on a daily basis in a vast program of disinformation about this country and its people that is beamed into almost every country on earth?

Don’t Have a Cow, Man! - [2/9/2006]
When The Simpsons creator Matt Groening was a Boy Scout, he stole a Gideon Bible from a hotel room and underlined all the dirty parts. Confronted by a furious scoutmaster, Groening (pronounced graining) recalled in a recent interview with My Generation magazine, "I prayed to God and said, ‘I know you'll forgive me for not believing in you.'"

How to Watch Television with Your Grandchildren - [2/3/2006]
To older people the world we thought we knew seems to be continually disappearing and electronic media are a large part of the new vistas that continually emerge. In contrast to the relative simplicity of our own childhood, many of us view the media playthings surrounding our grandchildren with awe.

Music

Absorbing the Rap Culture Shock - [2/10/2006]
The summer before my senior year in college, I worked as an investigator for the DC Public Defender Service, spending most of my time driving around the streets of Southeast DC looking for crime witnesses. My investigative partner used this opportunity to seize control of the radio and force me to listen to Rap and Hip-Hop ceaselessly, assuring me that it would make us “cool with the clients.”

Advertising

How to Keep Kids From Wanting Too Much - [2/10/2006 7:00:00 AM]

When it gets down to the second week of December, most of us forget about creativity and ideas of having an “alternative, simple” Christmas and just haul out the charge card.

Pop Culture

Popular Media: Turn Them To “Kingdom Advantage” - [2/10/2006]
Movie fare for my 1960’s church youth group consisted of films designed either to save your soul or to prove the scientific veracity of the Bible. Even to this teenager growing up in a sheltered religious environment, they seemed hokey and unreal.

Techno-faith - [2/10/2006]
If Jesus had had access to the Internet, would He have needed 12 disciples? Or could He have used just one guy with good typing skills and a high-speed data line? Paige Braddock posed this question in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution recently.

Books

Code Word: It’s fiction - [2/10/2006]
In January I joined hundreds of thousands who have read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I did not, however, join the many who have kept it at the top of the best-seller list for months; I borrowed a copy.

Internet

Virtual Experience - [2/10/2006]
I like technology. It's my career, first for 13 years with IBM and then at a Mennonite university. I love the hectic pace, the complexity, the rapid change. My career has consisted of helping people acquire and use technology. I like to think I've helped my clients become more efficient, creative and effective.

The Intimacy Fix: Is There a Way to Escape Internet Porn's Compelling Lure? - [2/10/2006]
It was the fourth one of the day—a disclosure from a pastor related to Internet pornography!

Media Addiction - [2/10/2006]
We are accustomed to hearing about alcohol and drug addiction, but what about addiction to entertainment and media? Media and entertainment addiction is essentially the compulsion for, devotion to and/or obsession with one or more types of media or entertainment. The addiction can be hard to recognize due to the fact that today's culture heavily endorses media and entertainment.