Barnabas File

The season has wrapped on Hawkeye , a Disney+ plus series featuring Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), the most human of the Avengers.    The character has come a long way from an uncredited cameo role in Thor (2011) and an enslaved lackey for Loki in The Avengers (2012).  He evolved into a key member of the team and my favorite (next to Steve Rogers—Captain America).   In the series, Barton is coming off a tough patch.  He lost his family for five years in the blip (half of all the life in the universe destroyed) and became a vigilante assassin known as the Ronin during that time.  He rejoined the Avengers to bring all of humanity back but lost his best friend Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) in the process.   As the series opens, his family has been back for a year, and he has taken his three children on a Christmas jaunt to New York City (where they see Rogers , a musical version of the Avengers which is wildly satiric).  In addi...

When it comes to dealing with moral and philosophical issues that impact our humanity and our belief systems, science fiction literature offers a wonderful platform for creative engagement. Unfortunately, thoughtful science fiction films are few and far between.  Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, is one of the few and is worth seeing. Writing about this film is difficult, because it is would be easy to share spoilers that would, well, spoil the film for you.  There is a significant twist that is interwoven throughout the film and, I have to admit, someone had to explain it to me. The protagonist of the story is Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist who is enlisted by the military to interpret the language of a crew of an alien craft that has landed (actually, it never touches the ground) in Montana.  There are twelve of these craft all over the world.  Various governments are working to discover how to communicate with the aliens. ...