Just a quick note.
Hey there, just a quick note to say that, yes, things have been pretty slow here lately, but I hope to be back up to speed pretty soon.
The biggest reason for the slowdown: I moved, with my family, to a new home! This was our first move in over nine years—which was the longest I had stayed in any one place since becoming an adult—so I was a bit out of practice when it came to the packing and the dolly-pushing and the storage-locker-renting, etc. Plus, all of our kids are in their mid- to late teens now, so they had more stuff to pack, too.
Add to this the end of the school year, and all the various activities around that, and I didn’t have as much time to focus on the Substack as I would have liked.
But, I hope to get back to the writing fairly soon. I was nearly half-way through my chapter-by-chapter analysis of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah when real life got in the way, and I look forward to finishing that, plus I hope to finish my episode-by-episode analysis of The Chosen’s third season before the fourth season premieres, whenever that might be.1 And I have ideas for a few other things, too.
In the meantime, a new Indiana Jones film came and went while we were moving, so I figured I’d link to a few things that I’ve written about that series in the past:
My article on the first four movies for Books & Culture (September 2008).
Four bonus paragraphs that I had to delete from the article for space reasons.
‘Harrison Ford asks: “Is Indy a believer?” “Where in Bible?”’ (Feb 28, 2013).
‘Spielberg and Lucas on Ark of the Covenant traditions’ (Dec 3, 2013).
‘A few questions about the fifth Indiana Jones movie’ (Mar 15, 2016).
My interview with John Rhys-Davies, in which I asked if he would reprise the role of Sallah in the next Indiana Jones film (Mar 15, 2020).2
For what it’s worth, I did get around to seeing the new film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a few days after our move, but I’ve been too busy settling into the new home and getting to know our new neighbourhood to do any real writing about that film—and it’s been fading from the box office so quickly that I’m not sure how “relevant” anything I say would be right now. Maybe when it hits streaming…?
In the meantime, I’ve been itching to write something about Sound of Freedom and its phenomenal box-office performance (back in April, I said that that film and its distributor were something of a “wild card” this year, and they turned out to be far, far “wilder” than anyone expected), plus I’ve got a few other things in the works, too.
So, hopefully I can find a few moments to get into all that. Stay tuned.
Rumour has it Season 4 will premiere in early 2024, but I have to assume that something will be ready before that, by the end of this year. The Chosen has released something new every Christmas since 2019—the second half of Season 1 in 2019, the first Christmas special in 2020, the second Christmas special (with bonus episode ‘The Messengers’) in 2021, the first few episodes of Season 3 in 2022—so it would be highly unusual if they didn’t release a new episode or holiday special or something in that vein for Christmas 2023.
At the time, Rhys-Davies said, “There’s been no word of it whatsoever. . . . To be honest with you, I don’t think they’ve got a script yet, and I think that’s really the cause of the delays. Getting a really good script is the whole basis of the thing. The last one [i.e. 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull] didn’t really work. I did get asked to do a tiny bit in that one, but I thought the character actually deserved a bigger part than just appearing at the wedding at the end.” Rhys-Davies ended up getting two scenes in Dial of Destiny, and he had slightly more to do than just show up at a wedding.