After two acclaimed films in the 1970s, Terrence Malick fell off the Hollywood radar for two decades, moved to France, and lived the quiet life of a recluse. No one knew when or if he would ever make another film. But in 1998 he emerged with a third film, a big-budget WWII film (adapted from a James Jones novel) released the same year as Saving Private Ryan. It’s as if Malick wanted to hold the unresolved tension of his first two films as long as possible, waiting for just the right project to release the catharsis.

Days of Heaven is the second film from Terrence Malick, and probably his most accessible and aesthetically stunning film.

Heaven follows Bill (Richard Gere), a fugitive from Chicago who tries to make a new life for himself, his little sister (Linda Manz), and girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) in the wheat fields of West Texas. Having killed a factory worker, Bill is propelled westward in search of a new start—a redemptive return to Eden.  The trio arrive at a farm and start their blissful new life there as fieldworkers, until the Farmer (Sam Shepherd) falls in love with Abby and an unstable love triangle forms.  From there, the film plays out in the precarious borderlands between love and jealousy, depravity and redemption, and the particularly Malick-ian terrains of grounded earth and infinite sky.

I’ve declared May to be Terrence Malick Month. On my blog at least.

Why? Because something is happening this month that happens only about once every 93.5 months: A Terrence Malick film is being released. The reclusive, mysterious filmmaker has released only five films in his 40 year career. One in 1972 (Badlands), one in 1978 (Days of Heaven), one in 1998 after a mysterious two-decade absence from civilization (The Thin Red Line), one in 2005 (The New World), and then this year. In this case, the film in question is called The Tree of Life, and it’s been a long time since so much hype has surrounded a film that so little is known about.

Over the last few weeks, the “Rob Bell Controversy” has spawned a cacophonous onslaught of blog chatter, banter, pontificating and debate. Everyone has an opinion about Rob Bell and his universalist credentials.  For a while it seemed that if you were an evangelical with a blog, a Twitter account, or even just a Facebook page, you simply had to chime in on the debate. Defenders, accusers, brash and nuanced voices of all kinds bombarded the Internet to the extent that even the New York Times took notice.

I haven’t chimed in with a perfunctory blog post yet, mostly because I want to read Bell’s book first, but also because this whole discursive debacle has soured me a bit on the evangelical blogosphere. It seems so pointless that so much energy and time has been poured into this “debate,” with thousands of bloggers conjuring up 500-1000 words or so on Rob Bell, or giving their 140 character two-cents on Twitter, with the only effect seemingly being a more palpable animosity between various camps, and a bewildered secular public looking in on the silly evangelical bickering and thinking, “who would want in on that mess?”

Watching Lady Gaga’s Grammy performance of her new single, “Born This Way,” was sort of like watching Species while pondering the end of western civilization.

Nothing about Gaga makes much sense. Her meticulously crafted, over-the-top essence is founded on a fetishizing of head-scratching chaos, postmodern meaninglessness  & “just dance” hedonism. Whether she’s sporting a dead-Kermit dress, bloody pieces of cow, or mutated shoulder blade prostheses straight from Syfy’s Face Off, Gaga prides herself on being an outrageous parody of shock-art subversiveness.  In everything she does, Gaga makes a headline-grabbing “statement,” the substance of which is usually just a declaration of the primacy of “anything goes” surrealist circus fun.

On Wednesday night, Friday Night Lights aired its series finale on DirecTV, a few months before the entire season will air again on NBC. After five years and five stellar seasons, the under-rated show ended its run, and in characteristically poetic, elegiac fashion.

I remember back in the summer of 2006 when I first saw the pilot for Friday Night Lights. I was writing a Fall TV preview for Relevant and so the networks sent me all the DVD pilots of their new shows that season (including 30 Rock, Heroes & Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip… remember that one?). I had been a fan of the Peter Berg-directed film version of Lights, but I was admittedly skeptical about NBC’s serialized version. The pilot floored me. The characters were instantly real, recognizable, sympathetic. The solemnly nostalgic tone and uplifting ethos were evident from the get go. Coach Taylor and his motivational speeches. “We all fall.”

Among the most talked about commercials that aired at the Super Bowl this year were the trio of ads from Groupon that mimicked celebrity “cause” PSAs. Groupon’s ads featured D-list celebrities speaking about various causes–saving the whales, Tibet, Brazilian forests–but then calling for humanity to “Save the Money” through coupons discounts on whale cruises, Tibetan curry and a Brazilian wax. You can watch them here, here, & here. The ads were directed by Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) and are hilarious,  effective (at getting millions of people to learn of Groupon for the first time), and strangely insightful into the paradoxically self-interested nature of the wiki-world.