Hello! Today we watched the critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated 138-minute $75 million Netflix dramedy Don’t Look Up so you don’t have to! We hated this. We hated it so much we didn’t have the heart to make a guest watch it. Sam is kind of ranty on this one. If you like hearing him angry, please subscribe. If you can’t do that (we understand!) please leave us a good review on your podcatcher of choice (but especially Apple Podcasts) so that more people can hear us. It’s the environmentally friendly thing to do. Our image on the site is a screengrab via the Frinkiac from the “Treeh ..read more

The opening of The Gospel of John in The Book of Kells. Via Wikimedia Commons We got to have Jeffrey Overstreet back! Hooray! Jeff is the author of the Auralia’s Colors fantasy novels and Through a Screen Darkly, as well as being writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University. We hope you enjoy this one. It’s free, but please subscribe if you haven’t! Jeff, Alissa, and Sam are talking about The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s 2009 animated fantasy feature about the preservation of the great illuminated book of the gospels. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s  ..read more

A large puppet explains the meaning of Christmas to two-time Oscar winner Michael Caine, CBE. Via Disney Plus Details, credits, errata: Merry Christmas! This week’s episode is about The Muppet Christmas Carol, NOT A Muppet Christmas Carol, or Carol. Or Scrooge. Or Scrooged. There are lots of versions of the Charles Dickens novella, which you can see in its original manuscript form here. You can also visit it in person at the home, now museum, of real-life Scrooge JP Morgan! This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing! Subscribe now or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samth ..read more

Free Guy’s Ryan Reynolds wanders around a mysterious world full of power-ups and explosions. Via 20th Century Studios Details, credits, errata: It is a two-episode week! Sam has finally gotten around to editing our episode on Free Guy, a very good one, if we do say so ourselves. The movie is fun! It’s neither a stone classic nor something we feel the need to apologize for inflicting on you, but it is fairly new and we do have to spoil it for you a bit to talk about it, so check it out before listening to the pod if that kind of thing bothers you. This is a free episode, so please consider subs ..read more

From ETERNALS #1 by Neil Gaiman and John Romita, Jr. Via Marvel Entertainment Details, credits, errata: This week’s returning guest is the wonderful Tyler Huckabee, of Relevant magazine! He knows his Jack Kirby upside-down and backwards and he was definitely the guy to talk abou Eternals, Chloe Zhao’s new, much-discussed Marvel movie. It is… okay? There’s a lot of theology in it. This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing! Subscribe now or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you! Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s ..read more

The name “Louise” (Amy Adams) in the alien language of the heptapods. Via https://imgur.com/user/LEPShot Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is Meg Conley, the terrific writer of homeculture, a newsletter about, uh, home culture! It’s very good and you may have seen it around as Meg’s work often attracts the kind of attention that elevates thoughtful writing into the general discourse. Meg was incredibly forthright and insightful about this week’s movie, Arrival, one of our favorites, and very open and honest about her own life in the Mormon church, as well. We thank her for it. This i ..read more

Television static. Via YouTube. Details, credits, errata: For the benefit of our subscribers we have a new Horror Movie Special, this time about Poltergeist, a family-friendly SFX comedy spectacular that is very much a break with some of the weirder and more extreme flicks we love to explore on here. We hope you like it. It is pretty jump-scary, so don’t… Read more ..read more

Via Netflix Details, credits, errata: This week we watched Netflix’s incredible, terrifying show about [SPOILER] and Christian theology, Midnight Mass, which I don’t think I call Black Mass during the episode but if I do, please know that Alissa has already teased me about it and you will only be encouraging her if you do the same. Black Mass isn’t very good, whereas Midnight Mass is. Our guest us the delightful Andy Levy, costar of the only watchable show Fox News ever broadcast, Red Eye (long since canceled, obviously), now ascended to the highest planes of Twitter, where he is very funny Th ..read more

Details, credits, errata: This week Alissa and I watched Dogma, Kevin Smith’s goodhearted, filthy movie about theology and goofy stoners, a film that is very easy to watch but very hard to see! Alissa notes that there’s a YouTube upload and an Internet Archive version, neither of which seem terribly legit but since there’s no way to stream the movie or buy it from the distributor, we do not recommend watching a bootleg version but we also do not have an alternative. Sam mentioned Terry Schiavo, and Alissa mentioned the You’re Wrong About episode on her, which can be heard here. Our theme song ..read more

Baptism near Mineola, Texas, 1935, from the Library of Congress’s prints and photographs division, by Alan Lomax. Via Wikimedia Commons. Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great Vinson Cunningham, theater critic at The New Yorker, essayist, humorist, and all-around terrific writer whose work we heartily recommend to you. We watched P.T. Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, beloved of our hosts but new to Vinson. Vinson is really wonderful and open about his own experience of charismatic worship and we are very ha ..read more