Featured Articles

Troubled Angels: Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium

To be healed is a powerful motivation. In his short play, The Angel That Troubled the Waters, Thornton Wilder brings a startling clarity to the tension between the desire for healing and the knowledge that …

Imagining the Multiplex

What if going to a movie theater felt more like a trip to The Getty? That’s a question I asked myself this summer as I walked the grounds of the most beautiful site for art in …

Graphic Novelist Doug TenNapel Joins Faculty

Earthworm Jim creator Doug TenNapel joins HBU faculty

Houston, TX — Noted animator, game designer, and graphic novelist Doug TenNapel is the newest addition to Houston Baptist University’s Cinema & New Media Arts program. For nearly …

This is Not the Lone Ranger You’re Looking For

The Lone Ranger opens on the unfinished Golden Gate Bridge and pans to a floating red balloon, then to the child seated in a Ferris wheel, arms reaching for the toy. A woman in silhouette beside …

The New World

That Terrence Malick is an enigma need not be overstated. Much has been made and speculated over regarding the director’s almost J.D. Saliger-like reclusiveness and the notoriously mysterious twenty year gap between his second and third …

Much Acclaim About Almost Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is easy bait for would-be Shakespeareans. The low-hanging fruit of the comedies, it is the most translatable to a modern audience because of the simplicity of its plot and characters. In some …

Scarface

THE WORLD IS YOURS … proclaims a marquee atop the Goodyear Blimp. The phrase clearly strikes a chord with Tony Montana since he has it inscribed on a giant, Atlas-like globe and sets it as the …

Stepping Back: The Key to Star Wars

“One of the things that I’m doing in these films, to give it a little bit of a reality, is to give the shots a kind of documentary feel, where things float off the shot. I …

The Forgotten Virtue of Star Trek

“Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it’s not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that …

Why Star Trek Endures

In the realm of science fiction, there is a big divide between Trekkers and Star Wars fans. I consider myself the latter, and always enjoyed the more mystical, quasi-religious elements of Star Wars to the technical …