March Madness Disney Pixar Bracket: Christian Edition

Strap in, folks. This is a long one.

Round 1
The Lion King vs Tarzan: The Lion King
Arth broke down the Christian themes to be found in The Lion King. Tarzan, on the other hand, is a bit too Darwinian for this contest.

The Princess and the Frog vs Lilo & Stitch: Lilo & Stitch
Aliens are better than voodoo.

Tangled vs Big Hero 6: Tangled
It’s a prodigal princess story.

Frozen vs Moana: Moana
I know, Polynesian gods. But it’s also about having the courage to do what you’ve been called to do.

Aladdin vs Hercules: Aladdin
Magical lessons about material possessions are better than polytheistic gods and idols.

The Little Mermaid vs Pocahontas: The Little Mermaid
In one, a non-Christian girl convinces a Christian man to talk to trees for guidance. In the other, there’s a witch, but she’s definitely evil.

Mulan vs Zootopia: Zootopia
A parable of racism is better than Eastern religion ancestral spirits.

Beauty and the Beast vs The Nightmare before Christmas: Beauty and the Beast
I haven’t seen Nightmare before Christmas (I know, shame on me), but I’m just going to assume the movie with a living skeleton protagonist has something not-cool for Christians in it.

Up vs Brave: Up
Magic again.

Toy Story vs Toy Story 2: Toy Story 2
The second movie expands on the Christian-compatible themes set up in the first one.

Coco vs Cars 2: Cars 2
Yeah, I know. But I haven’t seen Coco. All I know is it’s about a version of the afterlife that is definitely not the Christian one.

Toy Story 3 vs The Good Dinosaur: Toy Story 3
The trailer alone disqualifies the Good Dinosaur. Millions of years a-no!

Ratatouille vs A Bug’s Life: Ratatouille
Honestly, I have no real argument for this one. Ratatouille is just better.

Finding Nemo vs Inside Out: Finding Nemo
“Look around you! We’re inside a whale! We’re going to be digested! Do you know what that means?”
“Of course I do! Digestion runs very deep in my family!”
Love that movie.

Monsters Inc vs Cars: Monsters Inc
Childlike faith and unconditional love cast out fear.

The Incredibles vs Wall-E: Wall-E
Watch this.

Round 2
The Lion King vs Lilo & Stitch: The Lion King

Tangled vs Moana: Moana

Aladdin vs The Little Mermaid: The Little Mermaid

Zootopia vs Beauty and the Beast: Zootopia

Up vs Toy Story 2: Toy Story 2

Cars 2 vs Toy Story 3: Toy Story 3

Ratatouille vs Finding Nemo: Finding Nemo

Monsters Inc vs Wall-E: Wall-E

Round 3
The Lion King vs Moana: The Lion King

The Little Mermaid vs Zootopia: Zootopia

Toy Story 2 vs Toy Story 3: Toy Story 2

Finding Nemo vs Wall-E: Wall-E

Round 4
The Lion King vs Zootopia: The Lion King

Toy Story 2 vs Wall-E: Toy Story 2

Final Round: The Lion King vs Toy Story 2
Toy Story 2 is the most Christian-compatible of all the Pixar movies, but the spiritual parallels in the Lion King are clearer.

So the winner is The Lion King! Woot.

Everyone else is, of course, welcome to share their brackets. If you base it on personal preference it’ll probably turn out different from one based on a Christian worldview.

When the Uprising happens five years later (Pacific Rim: Uprising)

Back in 2013, a little movie came out called Pacific Rim. The—wait, hold on! 2013? [Checks watch.] Good grief, I’m getting old.

Anyway, the premise for the first Pacific Rim centered around giant monsters punching giant robots, and giant robots returning the favor. It was big, it was fun, and it felt like a live-action anime.

I mean, I liked it.

Not everyone did, but I thought it was good.

To be fair, the first Pacific Rim did a lot. In the span of ten minutes, it built its world from scratch, and spent the rest of the movie in that world.

But, that was five years ago, and Pacific Rim: Uprising is in theaters. It’s set some time after the first movie (ten years, I think), tracking a new cast of characters who hop into their mechs to take on the giant monsters one more time!

…But was it good?

Now, talking sequels/prequels/spin-offs is always a challenge, because you automatically compare it to the original. Don’t believe me, look at Star Wars. But, while Pacific Rim: Uprising is a sequel, it is a drastically different tone from the original. Probably because the director changed.

Production-wise, it was good. The characters were interesting, and it had a lot of funny moments. The story was stronger than the previous movie, I will definitely give it that. My main complaint is that the cinematography was bad. Too many whip-pans for my liking.

In short, I wouldn’t exactly recommend Pacific Rim: Uprising. At least not in theaters. Maybe when it comes out for home release. And goes on sale. And gets packaged with the first Pacific Rim for a combo-pack.

Other things I liked: you know, my feelings towards this movie are pretty meh. I feel like I’ve already said everything I liked and didn’t like about the movie. Then again, I went in pretty blind and recommend doing the same.

 

Let’s Connect:

@Isaac_Trenti

@CorrelationBlog

Please Stand By: Did It Live Up to (My) Hype?

Ever notice how the more hype there is for something, the more disappointing it’s likely to be? It doesn’t happen every time, of course. Some things do live up to the hype. But I’ve been disappointed quite a few times as well.
Readers of the blog may have seen me geeking out a couple months ago about Please Stand By. I was also hyping about it on social media (follow us on Twitter: @noahspud and @CorrelationBlog). I finally got around to actually seeing it last week. In this case the hype came mostly from myself. How did the final product compare?
Let me try to break it down piece by piece.
PLOT
Maybe I watched the trailers too many times, but most of the events of the movie are pretty much there in the trailers. The other 90 minutes didn’t really add much to the plot, except for the ending – and I did really like the ending.
CHARACTERS
Dakota Fanning was just as good as I thought she would be, and her character, Wendy, was just as relatable as I expected. I loved her sense of humor – never let it be said that autistic people don’t have a sense of humor or sarcasm. Ours might just be a little cleverer.
Alice Eve plays Wendy’s big sister, Audrey. Like so many relatives of people on the spectrum, she struggles to understand and connect with Wendy. By the end of the movie, she’s…better at it, I guess? If there was more depth to her character, her development would matter more. But there isn’t, so it doesn’t.
THEMES/MORALS
It’s definitely about autism. Wendy’s particular areas of interest are Star Trek and writing. Scottie, her psychiatrist, also struggles to understand and connect with Wendy until she starts to understand what Star Trek and writing really mean to her. Patton Oswalt plays a policeman who connects with her the same way – by speaking Klingon.
So the moral is about connecting with neuro-diverse people and trying to see the world through their eyes. But again, you could get that moral by watching the trailers.

This was a fun movie. It’s not bad. But the only things it really has going for it are Dakota Fanning and the ending.
If that has piqued your interest, you might want to go to New York to see the movie with Dakota Fanning herself. Check this out.

Are Video Games Getting Too Violent?

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to address this topic at all, but it crossed my desk a while back, and has been rattling around in my brain for a while now.

The topic of violence in video games is a tricky one to dance around. Video games have been around for over sixty years (if we’re counting the applications that predated home consoles and arcades), and they have come a long way.

But now the debate of their content has resurfaced, as it usually does from time to time. In fact, we tackled something similar to this on this blog last year. I figured I should interject my opinions on the topic.

Are video games getting too violent? I’d argue no. Not really. Video games are violent, yes, but if we get into the semantics of what “violence” is, video games have been there for years.

Take 1978’s Space Invaders for example. It’s a very simple game. Fly left to right, shoot the invading aliens and destroy them. Wait. That sounds pretty violent. Let’s fast-forward a few years.

It’s 1985. Super Mario Bros. is released. You run around as a plumber, crushing cartoony creatures beneath your boots and throwing deadly fireballs at them. Good grief! We played this?!

What I’m getting at is that violence—in whatever form it takes—is a core gameplay mechanic of almost every video game. And I can argue this. The only games I’ve come across that are “violence-free” are the digital ports of board games, sports games, and a few mobile games. And even then, they still can have elements of violence.

And the games I own are no less innocent. I have a shelf full of video games and all of them have some element of violence. And my collection covers the ESRB rating board from E to M.

But are video games getting too violent? I still say no. The graphics of the games have gotten better, which has allowed for violent video games to cover a wider range on the ESRB rating system. (Remind me how Star Wars: Battlefront II and Injustice got the T rating and not M.)

Really, the question of if a video game is too violent comes down to the person playing it. The rating systems are there to help the player decide if the game is worth playing.

 

Let’s Connect:

@Isaac_Trenti

@CorrelationBlog

Travelers: 12 Monkeys meets Person of Interest

The sci-fi show Travelers is part 12 Monkeys, part Quantum Leap, and part The Adjustment Bureau, all awesome.
On the show, the apocalypse started in 2016 with an anti-matter bomb. Then a super-crop ruined the world’s environments, the super-flu broke out, and an asteroid hit. A few centuries later, some nerds in an underground bunker built a time machine that could email people’s minds into past people’s brains, overwriting them, creating secret agents to fix problems before they turn into world-ending disasters.
The future has thought of the ethical concerns. They pick people who are going to die and overwrite them about a minute before it’s going to happen. The Traveler chooses not to inject himself with heroin or fights off her would-be murderer or whatever and reports for future-fixing duty, but also assumes the life of his/her new “host.” The result is a lot of characters acting normal when they’re not – as I mentioned last week, I like that.
On that note, as interesting as the sci-fi plot is, the characters are easily the best thing about this show. They each have private struggles to deal with, some that come from being “out of time” and some that their hosts were already going through.
The next best thing about the show is how cinematic it is. I only notice stuff like directing and production when it’s really bad or really good, and this was definitely good.

*Broad plot spoilers beyond this point.*

The Travelers are always talking about the Director who gives them their assignments from the future. It’s a lot like the Adjustment Bureau: “trust in the Grand Plan” and “it’s in the hands of the Director.” The God metaphor is made as clear as it can be without outright saying “some people in the 21^st century believe in God, but I believe in the Director.”
Then at the end of Season 1, it’s revealed that the Director is an artificial intelligence supercomputer. That’s when the show goes a little Person of Interest. Super nerds are like religious zealots, hackers are like doubting Thomas, and the series villains are people who don’t want to trust a machine to play God. It’s a really good God metaphor. I just hope the ultimate conclusion doesn’t involve ignoring “God” in favor of free will when the show comes back.
I wish I could say more good things, but spoilers.

The Crimes of Grindelwald Trailer Response

Yesterday, we got a trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the latest in the Harry Potter fran—er…sorry. Wizarding World franchise. We’ll see how long that name lasts.

I mentioned a long time ago that Harry Potter is one of the two fandoms that have gotten hate from Christians. (The other being Pokémon.) Unlike Pokémon, though, Harry Potter got a very substantial defense. As such, I’m not going to defend it. I don’t have to.

And…I don’t really want to. I don’t like Harry Potter that much. At least, not as much as I used to. I appreciate its existence as a titan of a book franchise, and the movies were good enough to watch. It’s also a fandom that a lot of my friends are in.

So, yeah. New trailer for a new movie. Will I go see it?

Probably not. I mean, I saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them when it came out,  and it felt like an episode of Doctor Who, so no complaints there. But I have a feeling the new one won’t be able to replicate the magic.

Oh, and I took the Pottermore quizzes. I’m a Gryffindor. If that means anything.

 

Let’s Connect:

@Isaac_Trenti

@CorrelationBlog

Stranger Things: The Nerd-teen Eighties

I watched Stranger Things mainly so I could write a post about it. Usually when I do something like that I end up with something to write about. In this case, I didn’t see anything all that Christian-compatible. Even when there’s a chance that ghosts are a thing, no one talks about hell or heaven or God. All I saw was a show that did not live up to the hype.
*Unavoidable Spoilers Incoming*
I mean, Season 1 was cool. It’s a fun mix of E.T., X-Men, Stephen King, and D&D – basically the Nerd-teen-Eighties for the modern mainstream audience. But it pushed “suspension of disbelief” a little too far. I know middle school sucks, but were the bullies really bad enough in the 80s to yank a kid’s teeth out or force someone to jump off a cliff?
And even in E.T., parents and younger siblings sometimes went into the kid’s room and almost discovered the Secret. In this show, the only family member who does that goes into the room hiding no secrets. How convenient.
Then there’s the main plot. A monster is killing people and animals. Sometimes it drags them to its home dimension first. A pre-pubescent kid manages to outrun and hide from this monster on its home turf for almost a week. When it does catch him, he’s the only one it doesn’t savagely kill. (On that note, why does everyone make such a fuss about Barb? No one forgot her. She served her purpose to the story just fine.) Then it turns this kid into the new host for the Dark Overlord of Monsters, because Season 2 needs a plot.
On the subject of Season 2…so Jean Grey Jane needs to hide from the government. The show replaces her with… Skateboard Girl. She has a brother who does nothing but increase the show’s sexual tension quotient. They also add Bob Newby, Superhero, who was doomed from the moment he kissed the World’s Unluckiest Mother and probably doomed her kid in return. “Yes, young man, don’t run from the Monster that you’re pretty sure isn’t just a nightmare. Yell at it. That’ll work.”
Apparently people didn’t like the “Jane in Chicago” episode, but that was what I had been waiting for the entire show. It was the superhero origin story.
Verdict: This show is phenomenally well-made and well-acted, but I was disappointed with the plot.