In July, I thought: Okay, enough resting on my laurels after a busy June, I need to post more on my Substack in August. Oops!
So as we pour out the final sip of summer, some brief reflections on what I’ve done and seen this month…
KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
Just what you’ve been waiting for: a 39-year-old man’s thoughts on KPop Demon Hunters! I was fully prepared to ignore this: not because I’m too good for animation — we know that’s not true — but because Netflix is constantly dropping some buzzy new streaming exclusive and a very small fraction of them are actually worth your time. But I heard enough good stuff that I decided to check it out last weekend, the night before my school year starts in earnest. Great decision! It’s a fun, thrilling, gorgeous-looking fantasy/action/musical with an aggressively catchy soundtrack. They use that Spider-Verse style of cel-shading animation that I’m still not sick of even though everyone’s doing it, and the action scenes are beautifully-composed, kinetic, and funny. No surprises there, you could get all of that from the trailer. But I was surprised by two things. First, while the film largely posits pop music fandom as salvific, it’s also aware that it can be mutually parasitic and exploitative. Second, it’s surprisingly insightful about the nature of sin, and the cycles of shame and insecurity that keep us trapped. That’s very Ignatian, as my friend Andrew Milewski wrote for The Jesuit Post. Another friend,
, drew connections between the film and the spirituality of St. Teresa of Avila over at NCR. It’s sort of shocking to see the standard self-actualization message of popular animated films get any kind of fresh spin, especially one as confident and entertaining as this one.My kids are, as you might imagine, obsessed with the soundtrack so I expect to have these songs stuck in my head until 2027. We haven’t hit up a sing-along screening yet, but hope springs eternal. Seeing how much of a sensation KPop Demon Hunters is, you really have to wonder why Sony sold it to Netflix instead of releasing it straight to theaters, where they would have made (based on current evidence) a ton more money. It almost seems like the theatrical experience is still a moneymaker and going all-in on streaming is tantamount to the movie industry shooting itself in the foot! Crazy!
Disney Descendants/Zombies: Worlds Collide Tour
Speaking of earworms, our house has long echoed with the made-in-a-lab pop melodies of Disney’s Descendants and Zombies franchises. If you are unfamiliar, these are both film series under the Disney Channel Original Movie banner, aimed primarily at tweens and aspiring tweens. Descendants is about the teenage children of famous Disney villains (Maleficent, Jafar, etc.) living in an apartheid state until they are given the chance to go to high school with the children of princesses and heroes, subsequently breaking down barriers and revolutionizing their society. Zombies is about the teenage children of zombies (created 50 years ago after a power plant accident, but now able to control their hunger for brains) living in an apartheid state until they are given the chance to go to high school with their picture-perfect human peers, subsequently breaking down barriers and revolutionizing their society.
What does it say about American society that we keep generating children’s media about apartheid states? Probably nothing good!
Anyway, these movies are fun and light and structural inequality is overcome by star-crossed romance and big dance numbers, which is beautiful. Currently, the stars of the most recent entries in each series have been crossing the country on the Descendants/Zombies Worlds Collide Tour. We took our nine-year-old daughter last week when it came to Philadelphia and had a great time. It’s a concert very much by and for theater kids: lots of dynamic lighting and set elements, costume changes, mash ups of songs. At one point Dara Reneé (Uliana in Descendants: Rise of Red) rises from the stage on a black skirt-pillar like Elphaba at the end of “Defying Gravity.” There are skits and prop work and video clips. The kids are consummate performers, working their way through choreo and scene changes that would have killed me at their age. As a parent/high school teacher, however, it was hard to ignore that these are kids: Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires star Freya Skye is 15, for instance. They all talk about it being a dream come true, and a number of them get to perform/advertise their solo recording work which seems like a win/win, but you wonder if they’re okay.
My daughter, of course, did not wonder this because she’s nine and was simply thrilled to see the real people from movies she loves singing and dancing in front of her. She had broken her leg a few days earlier, so this was a real balm.
M. Night Shyamalan at Lincoln Center
Film at Lincoln Center is running a career-thus-far retrospective on M. Night Shyamalan, and I got to go up last weekend for one of the nights. They’re screening 12 of his films over the course of the series, each paired with another movie (chosen by Shyamalan) that resonates thematically and/or formally with his, all at double-feature pricing. I got to see Split (2016) paired with Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) in 35 mm.
The movies were spectacular, of course. Split is one of my favorites in his filmography, the movie that confirmed the Shyamalanaissance. It’s a stunning showcase of Shyamalan’s formal excellence and beautifully shot by It Follows and Us cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (I’d only ever watched it on my TV before; I can’t describe how fantastic it looked on the big screen). Anya Taylor-Joy and James McAvoy are both incredible, her performance the ideal of restraint, his of excess. I’d never seen Cape Fear, but haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. DeNiro is as frightening and charismatic as evil itself, and it’s amazing how even when Scorsese’s letting his hair down and having fun, he’s still pondering religious terror and the conflict between sin and grace. Incredible to watch this with an audience who weren’t afraid to laugh.
Between the films, Shyamalan himself came out for a Q&A, which was very funny and generous and insightful. He spoke about the importance of trusting your artistic voice, and that some ideas (like Split) aren’t going to make sense to people until they see it in action. I was especially moved by his reflection on how he’s made all of his movies in Philly in order to balance the work he loves with never missing time with his wife and kids (although he also joked that now that all of his kids are adults, he’s allowing himself to start screenplays with “EXTERIOR: PARIS”).
I did work up the nerve to ask him a question about the spiritual element of his superhero trilogy (Unbreakable, Split, Glass) and he spoke a bit about dissociative identity disorder (which McAvoy’s character has in Split) and how, the theory goes, it’s the result of a child’s brain protecting them from trauma by constructing an alternate reality where that trauma didn’t happen. He remembered thinking that was beautiful, despite being dark. “I don’t know if that answers your question about faith and belief, but it’s how I see the world,” he said. I couldn’t really respond from where I was sitting, but I thought that was a pretty good answer.
Ignatian Creators Summit 2025
The highlight of my month (and the summer) was the annual Ignatian Creators Summit, a gathering of Jesuit-inspired artists organized by the Jesuit Conference of the US and Canada. I always find the Summit very consoling, because it’s a chance to spend time with people who speak the exact same language that I do: that is, Ignatian spirituality and creativity. I wrote about this in regards to last year’s Summit for NCR.
The Summit is different every year thanks to a an ever-changing roster of attendees and schedule of events. This year we made origami and took pictures and did improv games and some fool got up and rambled about finding the sacred in movies. There’s never an official theme, but like any meaningful retreat, the retreatants tend to identify a theme for themselves. My experience of the Summit this year was all about seeing. In the creative and spiritual life, I think that’s the operative sense: you can’t practice either without a keen and active awareness, the ability to notice, to pay attention. You don’t just observe but you interpret, extrapolate, riff. Faith and creativity are both about uncovering and naming the invisible, and that requires being able to really see reality.
Some people are, I think, born with a greater predisposition to doing this than others (“nerds,” I call them) but it’s a skill that anyone can hone. Unfortunately it’s a skill that is actively discouraged by our mercenary society, which insists that it’s not that deep and you can’t make any money off of that and this is just the way things are. We’re meant to receive meaning, not make it. The goal of life is to not have to think hard, or worry, or delve.
But I think we’re happier, richer, and more human when we pay attention. We can appreciate the divine in the minutiae of our lives and daily interactions, in the confounding and often tragicomic movements of our personal history. We can be surprised by awe when we see the sunlight on a building or (40th birthday draws a second closer) a cool bird. And once we see, we may feel compelled to communicate what we’ve seen to others, even if our expression of it never quite matches the real thing. The effort is worth it, because it brings the visible and the invisible a little closer together. And in the end, you’re just trying to remind others of something they already know, buried under all of the layers of anxiety and distraction and want: that reality is suffused with the sacred, and every moment of living, breathing attentiveness is a prayer.
Minneapolis
It feels strange to write about anything else after the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. As a parent and a teacher I’m horrified and sad and wrestling with despair. I may have more to say in writing, but for now know that I’m joining you in prayer and action and hope.
That’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll post more regularly in September, but regardless I hope you all enjoy the tail end of summer!
Loved all this, John. Now, I need to see Split. I have seen Cape Fear but it's been a long time, and your read on the MCs true evil character is giving me a lot to think about as I write a piece on dissonance, horror, and the Catholic imagination. It was great to meet you at the summit. I'm hoping I can keep paying close attention even, as you say, in this world that discounts such close-reading of life.