Michael Swan, The Catholic Register
Michael is Associate Editor of The Catholic Register.
He is an award-winning writer and photographer and holds a Master of Arts degree from New York University.
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February 11, 2007
From Genesis to the Apocalypse
{mosimage}The most important information in the bookends of the Bible, Genesis and Apocalypse, is the stuff that tells us who we are. Identity is one of the most deeply religious questions we can ask.
Published in
Movie News
February 18, 2007
A prisoner of his own mind
{mosimage}The worst thing you can say about a religion is that it is a self-imposed prison of the mind — an identity of limits that deforms the human soul.
Published in
Movie News
October 3, 2004
The Yes Men
{mosimage}The telling moment in The Yes Men comes at the three-quarter mark when intrepid pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno engage in a wistful meditation on satire.
Published in
Movie News
September 22, 2004
Battlefield for the soul
{mosimage}We ask God not to lead us into temptation because temptation is real. If Jesus had to face it in His 40 days in the desert, then there's no reason to believe any of us will be spared such a quintessentially human experience.
Published in
Movie News
July 27, 2004
Thrill-ride to redemption
{mosimage}There's no reason to think a movie that moves so much you may need Gravol with your popcorn is necessarily a good thing, but The Bourne Supremacy is a much better wild ride than you might expect from an action movie sequel whose title seems aimed at 13-year-old wrestling fans.
Underneath the juvenile title is a very adult film that uses the paranoid's paradise conceit of the international thriller genre to probe questions of identity, sin and redemption.
Matt Damon again plays Jason Bourne, a young soldier brainwashed by an ultra secret arm of the CIA to be the American government's assassin. When we last saw him in The Bourne Identity, he had woken up with amnesia and the instincts of a very efficient killer.
Underneath the juvenile title is a very adult film that uses the paranoid's paradise conceit of the international thriller genre to probe questions of identity, sin and redemption.
Matt Damon again plays Jason Bourne, a young soldier brainwashed by an ultra secret arm of the CIA to be the American government's assassin. When we last saw him in The Bourne Identity, he had woken up with amnesia and the instincts of a very efficient killer.
Published in
Movie News
November 2, 2003
A western that parallels events today
{mosimage}Contrary to rumours carried by the better class of newspaper, western movies are not dead and will not die. The west, the frontier, the endless sky, the open plain, the man on horseback, the pistol, the rifle, the Indian, the settler, the rancher and the farmer have a claim on the American imagination because they're there in American history.
Or, never mind the history. Director Ron Howard's new movie demonstrates that the beautiful landscape of mountains and plains is still beautiful - still the best backdrop a movie could ever hope for.
Or, never mind the history. Director Ron Howard's new movie demonstrates that the beautiful landscape of mountains and plains is still beautiful - still the best backdrop a movie could ever hope for.
Published in
Movie News
June 5, 2007
Dark vs. light, Russian style
{mosimage}For those who found the Lord of the Rings trilogy a tad bombastic and perhaps simplistic in its fairyland reduction of the forces of light and forces of darkness into two massively clashing armies, now there’s an alternative — from Russia, with love.
Published in
Movie News
May 11, 2007
Zombie sequel reaps what it sows
When Hieronymus Bosch painted hell in the 15th century it was shocking, thrilling and repulsive. The same was true of the 2002 British horror movie 28 Days Later.
Published in
Movie News
April 27, 2007
Making a choice: to forgive or not
TORONTO - To discover the meaning of forgiveness, film maker Johanna Lunn had to consider the nature of evil.
“In the course of making the film, I really had to ask myself, ‘What is evil?’ I’m forever, eternally an optimist and would maybe secretly like to believe that evil doesn’t exist,” Lunn told The Catholic Register before Forgiveness: Stories for Our Time was to premiere in Toronto’s annual Hot Docs Festival in late April. The film will be shown on CTV May 26.
Published in
Movie News
November 18, 2007
De Palma’s ode to the fruitlessness of war
{mosimage}Director Brian de Palma is obviously outraged, morally scandalized, angered and saddened by the war in Iraq. A Catholic educated in Quaker schools who came of age protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s, de Palma is not the kind of American President George Bush can count on for support.
Published in
Movie News