Barbara Nicolosi

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When you 'Wish' upon a sermon: Is there a religion ghost in the latest Disney flop?

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When you 'Wish' upon a sermon: Is there a religion ghost in the latest Disney flop?

Anyone who has been paying attention to the pop-culture marketplace during 2023 knows that even the most secular business analyst would be tempted to think that the Walt Disney Company has done something to provoke the wrath of whatever Supreme Being the Mouse lords are willing to acknowledge.

Marvel at this Inside the Magic headline, if you will: “Disney Chief Predicts Total Disaster for Studio Before End of Year.”

That’s a take that will awaken even the most woke studio boss.

This brings is the the latest Disney box-office flop — “Wish.” At the time I wrote this post, I could not even get any of the “Wish” links to work at the Rotten Tomatoes website — which is never a good sign. If you’re interested in the tomato-past details, see this story at Screen Rant: “7 Reasons Wish's Rotten Tomatoes Score Is So Divisive.”

Is there a “religion ghost” in this drama? Not if you read Variety. This latest Disney nightmare is simply another example of Disney+ being overextended and the American movie audience suffering from lingering COVID-19 fears. Here’s that headline: “Disney’s Bleak Box Office Streak: ‘Wish’ Is the Latest Crack in the Studio’s Once-Invincible Armor.”

Hold that “religion ghost” thought for a moment. Here is the stunning overture of the Variety piece, showing the wider context of the “Wish” crash:

“Wish” misfired in its opening weekend, extending Disney‘s bleak box office fortunes.

The animated musical fable, about the Wishing Star that so many Disney characters have wished upon over the studio’s century-long history, failed to become the de facto choice for families around Thanksgiving. “Wish” opened in third place with a dull $31.7 million over the five-day holiday, a far cry from Disney’s past Turkey Day feasts. Perhaps King Magnifico, the movie’s villain (voiced by Chris Pine), is holding hostage the wishes of Disney executives?

Instead of recapturing the studio’s magic, “Wish” joins a long list of its underperforming 2023 tentpoles, such as “The Marvels,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Haunted Mansion,” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”


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Concerning that 'Barbie' sermon about what it means to be incarnated as a woman

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Concerning that 'Barbie' sermon about what it means to be incarnated as a woman

Hollywood worships big movie franchises, so fans can expect "Barbie" sequels.

One plot proposal quickly emerged from an unlikely source -- Sister Mary Joseph Calore of the Society Devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in St. Cresson, Pennsylvania.

"'Barbie becomes a nun' would be a great sequel," she wrote, on the X platform. Her post contained this pitch to Warner Bros. executives: "Dissatisfied by endless parties and user friends, an eating disorder, spending addictions with clothes and shoes, and cohabitating with the shallow & unemployed playboy Ken, Barbie's sportscar has been parked more and more at an adoration chapel. She is seriously giving thought to draining the pool, putting her condo on the market, cutting her hair and donning the religious habit."

That would be a twist, after a cinematic manifesto arguing that life as a real woman is painful and complicated, but it's better than being an iconic plastic doll.

"This movie should have been silly and fun, but it ended up being preachy and earnest," said Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a former Catholic nun who became a screenwriter and Hollywood script doctor. "I mean, how far can you go with a story about Barbie?"

Writer-director Greta Gerwig's previous work has been impressive, stressed Harrington, who teaches at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. With "Little Women," Gerwig showed the ability to offer a fresh take on a familiar story. Now, "Barbie" will draw intense scrutiny, since she will direct at least one movie in the upcoming Netflix take on "The Chronicles of Narnia" novels by the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.

"Barbie" contains ambitious attempts to mix serious, even if tongue in cheek, social commentary with pop-culture mythology -- such as a shot-for-shot homage to Stanley Kubrick's legendary dawn-of-consciousness scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The big "Barbie" question, noted Other Feminisms writer Leah Libresco Sargeant, is stated in a soundtrack ballad -- "What Was I Made For?"


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Raquel Welch: The bombshell who became a quiet, sincere Presbyterian church lady

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Raquel Welch: The bombshell who became a quiet, sincere Presbyterian church lady

The statuesque film legend didn't call attention to herself as she shared a pew with other conservative Presbyterians in their small church not far from Hollywood.

She was articulate when discussing theology and church matters and, from time to time, would offer advice on finances. She had learned a lot in the movie business.

Raquel Welch wasn't trying to hide, during the later decades of her life when she faithfully attended Calvary Presbyterian Church in Glendale, California. She was simply looking for people she could trust.

"She was careful. … She wasn't going to one of those 2,000-member churches where everyone would look at her. That wasn't her style," said the Rev. Christopher Neiswonger, who grew up in that congregation and attended nearby Fuller Theological Seminary. He now leads Graceview Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in Southhaven, Mississippi.

"She also wasn't trying to stick her thumb in the eye of a Hollywood culture that she knew would denigrate this kind of faith commitment. … She was Raquel Welch, but she just wanted to be part of our church family."

Welch died on Feb. 15 at the age of 82, inspiring waves of tributes focusing on her iconic beauty in "Fantastic Voyage," "100 Rifles," "The Three Musketeers" and dozens of other movies and television programs. The legendary poster from "One Million Years B.C." framed her as a bombshell babe image for the ages.

In a Facebook tribute shared with other believers, Neiswonger called Welch a "wonderful lady and a fine Christian" whose "faith grew more powerful and practical with age. It's often true that the most important things become the most important to us as we've matured personally."

At the end of her 2010 memoir, "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage," Welch described the hard questions she asked after the death of her mother, a faithful Presbyterian, and a sister's struggle with cancer. After decades away from church, Welch offered an "awkward inept prayer" to the "God of my childhood and, lo and behold, he was still there."


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Orson Bean and Hollywood: His wild life had a final chapter worthy of some ink

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Orson Bean answered the same question many times during his crazy ride from Broadway to doing every conceivable kind of work during his decades in Hollywood.

What was this funny guy trying to do, while embracing drugs, edgy politics, sexual healing, hippie communes, experimental forms of therapy and other diversions involving his body, mind and soul?

On one occasion, Bean said he was trying to become the "happiest son of a bitch alive." In another Los Angeles Times interview he added: "I did all this stuff, the drugs, getting my kisser on the tube, because I thought it would make me happy. But it didn't work. I didn't find happiness until I learned to surrender, to give up the crazy pursuit."

Surrender to what? The answer to that question didn't make it into the media tributes after the 91-year-old Bean's death on Feb. 7, when he was hit by two cars while walking in his Venice, Calif., neighborhood. However, the answer has hiding in plain sight in several cable TV interviews, his one-man stage show and an online testimony he wrote entitled "How Orson Bean Found God."

"For most of my life I didn't believe in God," noted Bean. "Who had time? I was too busy with things of this world: getting ahead, getting laid, becoming famous.

"For most of my adult life I've been at least somewhat famous. Not so famous that I had to wear dark glasses to walk down the street, but famous enough that head waiters would give me a good table. I didn't want to be famous for its own sake. I wanted to be famous so as to be happy."

What finally turned Bean's life around was a religious conversion. He went looking for the "Higher Power" in his 12-step program and eventually found peace.

Many Hollywood people who knew Bean were amazed that the final act in his wild life -- from Communist sympathizer to father-in-law of the late conservative raconteur Andrew Breitbart -- didn't make it into news reports.

This was a lot of territory to cover. Bean's work was known by multiple generations -- from "What's My Line" to "Desperate Housewives," from his many appearances on "The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson" to the surrealist classic "Being John Malkovich." Bean was pre-hip, then hip and finally a kind of ironic post-hip.

In the obituaries, journalists "got the blacklist thing in there, of course, because that's still a major sign of status in Hollywood," said Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a former Catholic nun who became a screenwriter and film-studies professor.


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Podcast: Why reporters (and clergy) should heed religious signals in pop culture

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Readers who have followed GetReligion for quite a few years may remember that, in 1991, I left full-time work at The Rocky Mountain News (RIP) to teach as “Communicator on Culture” at Denver Seminary. Basically, I was teaching classes about religious content and trends in mainstream news coverage and popular culture, providing material for apologetics.

In the summer of 1993, when I moved to Milligan College in East Tennessee, I spoke at a national conference for Episcopal church leaders and laypeople, delivering a lecture entitled: “And Now, a Word from Your Culture — Mass Media, Ministry and Tuning in New Signals.” The respondent to my paper, by the way, was Father N.T. Wright, a big-league British intellectual who was beginning to gain some fame in North America. Here is the opening of that lecture:

True or false: It is impossible to talk — in terms of practical details and statistics — about how modern Americans live their lives without addressing the role played by television and other forms of news and entertainment media.

True or false: Most churches have little or nothing practical to say about the role that television and other forms of news and entertainment media play in the daily lives of most modern Americans.

True or false: Most churches have little or nothing practical to say about the daily lives of most modern Americans.

True or false: This applies to my church.

Now, this era of my life surfaced in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), because of two recent posts here at GetReligion. They were, “Old Pete Townshend asks some big questions about rock and what happens after he dies” and “Washington Post offers look at five country music myths and misses a familiar ghost.”

The big idea in the podcast: Every now and then popular culture sends out “signals” addressing subjects on topics that religious leaders simply cannot ignore.


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What's the 'A Wrinkle In Time' news story? Flashback to wisdom from Madeleine L'Engle

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What's the 'A Wrinkle In Time' news story? Flashback to wisdom from Madeleine L'Engle

So what is the story with the new Disney version of the classic, Newbery Award winning novel "A Wrinkle In Time" by the late, great Madeleine L'Engle?

I'm talking about a news story here.

I'm talking about the attempt -- another one -- to make this beloved youth-fiction classic into a blockbuster movie. Why is it is causing discussion, debate and even controversy? Yes, I'm asking this because that's what we talked about this week in the GetReligion "Crossroads" podcast. Click here to tune that in.

Is it news because it appears, to one degree or another, to be a box-office flop? Is it news because, at Rotten Tomatoes, only 40 percent of critics like it? That's bad, but the score from ordinary people in theaters was even lower, to the tune of only 34 percent positive reactions.

Director Ava DuVernay was not amused and argued that race may have had something to do with it, since she -- as a star African-American director -- changed the racial mix of the cast.

It's clear that some of the movie's supporters thought race was a crucial part of the mix, as seen in this NBC commentary: " 'A Wrinkle in Time' isn't a film for critics. It's Ava DuVernay's love letter to black girls." And over at CNN there was this: "Watching 'A Wrinkle in Time' is a political act."

So one more question: Why write a religion column about this book and its author?

That's what I did this past week, for the Universal syndicate. It did that because, nearly two decades ago, I had a chance to spend two hours talking to L'Engle about the crucial themes woven into her book. In particular, I asked her if there were concepts and even quotations from her novel that needed to be in a film adaption of it. Here is a key piece of that column:

It would be hard, explained L'Engle, to grasp this book's cosmic war between life and death, good and evil, darkness and light without two crucial passages.


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Los Angeles Times: Christians finding totally cool new ways to learn Hollywood stuff!

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Let's say you wanted to write a newspaper piece about a big, complex topic, maybe something like Christians trying to find doorways into work in Hollywood. There are two responsible ways to do this kind of news story.

You could take a comprehensive approach and attempt to update the status of the full story, backing up several decades and demonstrating that this is not a new story. You would contact the key players, old and new, and go for a real update on the big picture.

Second, you could do a modest piece that looks at a new institution that is getting into this field, a new school or a new professional program that claims to have a fresh approach. Then you briefly -- three to four paragraphs or so -- mention that there are a host of other people who have been doing this work for (that word again) decades. Perhaps you ask the veterans to critique the current state of this work and evaluate this newcomer in their home turf.

But here is what you do not do, especially if you are writing the The Los Angeles Times, for heaven's sake, which is supposed to "get" Hollywood. You do not write a shallow, barely researched piece about a newcomer on the block and then proceed to ignore all of the professionals who have been working in this field (one more time) for decades.

Alas, this third option is precisely what the Times offered the other day, under this snippy headline: "Selling Stardom: A Christian path to Hollywood."

The story focuses on a program called "Actors, Models & Talent for Christ," which grew out of a talent-search company in Atlanta. Readers are told that it jumped into this new line of work when "owner Carey Lewis became a religious Christian." Here is what passes for the thesis and summary material in this story:


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