Paul O'Donnell: December 2007 Archives

When the Chicago Daily Herald recently asked random celebs’ “Which person, living or dead, would you most like to spend the day with?” the no. 1 answer was “Jesus,” though, frankly, the Good Lord has spent time in better company than the crop of B-listers who answered the Herald’s phone call.

Christmas has so powerfully shaped Western culture that it has created yuletide rituals even among non-Christians. Jews, for instance, avail themselves of the only entertainments open on Christmas Day in most parts: eating Chinese food and going to the movies. Now, thanks to Brandon Walker, a music teacher at a Jewish community center in Baltimore, Md, this shadow holiday has a soundtrack. Walker’s You Tube video, “Chinese Food at Christmas” has drawn more than 500,000 viewers since he posted it on December 1st this year.

In the venerable tradition of the Roman Catholic church, firebrand preachers have not been received well. Case in point is Justin Fatica, the Catholic youth minister whose Hard As Nails organization is the subject of a documentary playing this month on HBO. Fatica marches into Catholic high schools bearing full-sized wooden crosses with his “Hard As Nails” legend painted on the crossbeam, boom boxes and rafts of marketing materials, all for the purpose of recruiting teens for Jesus.

It’s an odd idea that we have hopes for TV characters--they’re cartoon characters after all, their lives flattened into two dimensions and squished into half-hour segments with a piquant point or a hastily arranged outcome, the way life doesn’t.

After last week's episode of TNT's "Saving Grace," I was caught hoping Grace Hanadarko was going to get a steady thing going with her stargazing atheist fellow, and we were going to get a steady chat about God’s existence. But this week Grace is back to mixing it up with her partner, not the stargazer. And the show is back to episodic criminal cases that deliver tidy moral packages.

The folks who award the Golden Globes aren’t as uptight as the Oscar crowd—good box office and pretty faces carry more weight at the Globes than political correctness and dignified careers. So when the nominations come out, as they did yesterday, they’re not to be read so much as bellwethers for Oscar than what Hollywood really thinks. What, then, do we think of the stiffing of Judd Apatow in yesterday’s list?

Most of its first season, “Saving Grace” was a police procedural with a little “It’s a Wonderful Life” mixed in: Somewhere down the line, Grace Hanadarko, the hard-drankin’, rough-lovin’ detective was going to come to terms with the angel, Earl,...

To accompany their review of "The Golden Compass," the movie made from Philip Pullman novel that Roman Catholics are calling offensive, The Los Angeles Times has a slide show of recent flicks that offended people of various faiths. Along with...

Remember those M*A*S*H* episodes where Hawkeye or Radar turned over his jeep or sits out a bombing raid in a hut with an old Korean couple, and the character spits out a monologue of self-revelation? I loved those stunts, and...