Arts & Culture

BY NOW THE sins of Facebook, as a social media platform and megacorporation, are well-known. You’ve got invasions of privacy, data breaches, viral falsehoods, livestreamed rapes and murders, and the list goes on.

Well, a few months ago, the volunteer technology committee at the Catholic parish where my wife, Polly, works as social responsibility minister did something about it. They asked their parish council to consider taking the congregation off Facebook entirely and no longer using the platform as a medium of communication. When Polly told me about this, I was a little surprised. Maybe I missed something, but, amid the sporadic calls to “Delete Facebook” in the wake of the company’s various scandals, I hadn’t heard of a religious community actually implementing a boycott.

Once you think about it, the arguments for boycotting Facebook are pretty obvious. When we lend our eyeballs to that platform, we bring it advertising dollars, helping to fund its corrupt and dangerous practices. And what’s worse, the company’s business model makes every person or organization with a Facebook page a recruiter for the company and turns every posted detail of our lives into a product (consumer data) that the company can sell to commercial and political advertisers. When a congregation encourages parishioners to log onto a church Facebook page and share what they find there with interested friends, the church places its members and friends at risk of having personal information exposed to bad actors.

IN BONG JOON-HO'S Parasite, being upper class means loving Western culture—and its colonialism.

Spatial metaphor structures the award-winning dark comedy from the Korean director. Families and living spaces are the primary characters and settings for the film. The poor Kim family lives in a cramped basement apartment, and the rich Park family lives high up in the hills of Seoul.

(Warning: Spoilers)

In the first half of the movie, the Kims’ son Ki-woo is hired as an English tutor for the Parks’ daughter, and the Kims scheme to get each member of their family employed by the Parks. Their plot runs smoothly, and the Kims relax at the Parks’ luxurious home while they are away. But the movie’s clean narrative line drops when a third family and their living arrangement are revealed. The former housekeeper returns to expose a subterranean bomb shelter in the Parks’ home where her husband has been living, unbeknownst to the Parks.

The former housekeeper and her husband sit even lower in the class hierarchy than the Kims by living completely below ground.

AT THE END of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s landmark drama “Fairview,” the audience faces a deep and enduring question: “Are we able to look through another’s eyes? Or are we merely reflecting on what we’re willing, what we want to see?” To bring us to the point where we’re able to make this query, Drury takes us on a ride through a landscape of African American theatrical tropes, sometimes familiar and sometimes unsettling, so that we are better able to face ourselves, as discomforting as that is.

The beginning seems fairly rote, as a family gets ready for a birthday party in an immaculately white living room. We could be in the home of the Huxtables, chuckling along with the laugh track. Beverly, the perfectionist mother who wishes for everything to be just right for Grandma’s celebration, hovers over all, brushing on the finishing touches.

But, if you look and listen closely, there are cracks that begin to show: the odd wavering of the soundtrack and teenage daughter Keisha turning to address the audience in a moment of Brechtian shock. Then we find that we are not seeing TV-perfect domestic bliss. Keisha comments on the beautiful perfection and longing for her bright future, standing at its threshold, just waiting to seize the day.

HISTORICALLY, THEOLOGY HAS worked a lot like Reaganomics. Those with access to academic ivory towers get to theorize about God and spiritual meaning. Often, watered-down versions of these theories reach the rest of the population through pastoral care professionals and the few thinkers and writers who strive to make theology accessible.

One of the primary goals of activist theology, described by theologian Robyn Henderson-Espinoza in their new book Activist Theology, is to reverse this flow of meaning-making. The work of activist theology “is to invest in community, so that knowledge production is not top down from the academy but begins on the ground to move to the middle and tip the top.”

What does it mean to “tip the top?” Ideally, a revolution.

This starts with recognition of how social and political systems of oppression are supported by what the author calls “theologies of white supremacy” and Christian supremacy. There is a long history of theological systems that have exposed these issues, such as queer, womanist, mujerista, and liberation and black liberation theologies.

There’s no such thing as an objective critic, or objective criteria by which any of us could judge a movie. The question is whether the critic, or the audience, is able to be honest about the criteria they are using. So I’ll say something I’ve said before: By my sights, the purpose of art is to help us live better, and the best cinema occurs when technical and aesthetic craftsmanship operating at their highest frequencies, and a humane concern for the common good, kiss each other.

Today, the United States and Iran are two countries on the precipice of war with ruling elites who quote Rumi.

Contains mild spoiler.

Let’s start with what works.

RIAN JOHNSON'S FILM Knives Out wastes no time setting up the murder mystery that powers its plot. In the very first scene, famed mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found in the library of his mansion, his throat cut. Harlan’s family is shocked. His Latina caretaker, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s closest confidant, is devastated. The police think it’s a suicide. Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) thinks otherwise.

The mystery of Harlan’s death may be the plot of Knives Out, but as the story progresses, it’s clear that the film is actually about something else.

Bootstrapping—the idea that one can achieve success purely through hard work and determination—is touted in most areas of public life, from business to education to politics. White Americans particularly love to claim that we’ve risen from tough circumstances while making it harder for less-advantaged populations to do just that.

In Knives Out, the bootstrapping myth is everywhere. Harlan’s children are proud that their dad built a publishing empire. Harlan’s daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) tells Blanc that she, too, created her own business from the ground up. But, of course, those stories aren’t the whole truth. Linda would be nowhere without the hefty loan she got from her father. Harlan himself may have worked hard for his success, but as a white man, there’s no doubt his path was easier than it would have been for others.

That damage of war has been put on full display in films before, leaving many audiences wondering about the purpose of war films. Many films often placed strictly into the categories of being anti-war or glorifying war but 1917 evades easily falling into either category. When addressing this categorization, screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Caines made sure to note that she had no desire to glorify war.