Recently my good friend Heather (H. B.) Moore received a rather scathing review of one of her books. Apparently the reviewer had bought the audio version  and had it playing in the car during a family trip. She was horrified at the content, which she found offensive, and turned it off because her small children were in the car and shouldn't have been exposed to something that deserved a PG-13 rating. (And what, pray tell, she demanded, was such a thing doing on the shelves of an LDS bookstore?)

This from a book published by pretty darn conservative Covenant Communications. More...

Last Saturday, at the AML Annual meeting, we had the privilege of seeing a public screening of Corianton, probably the first Mormon feature film.  Based on the play by Orestes Utah Bean (if there were ever a perfect name for a Mormon playwright, it would be Orestes Utah Bean), the film was produced in 1931 by Lester Park, who, as it happens, is also Orson Scott Card's grandfather.  It was long thought that no prints of Corianton existed, but the Card family did have one, and it's now been digitally restored and can be seen at the BYU library.  James D'Arc, who oversaw the restoration, was kind enough to allow AML members to see the film.  It's a corker.  Of course, it's old fashioned to our eyes; reminiscient of the early silent Bible epics of Cecil B. DeMille, in particular his 1923 Ten Commandments.  The acting style is one we make fun of today--everyone in the film sounds like Margaret Dumont (Groucho Marx's comic foil), and they do blather on.  And the film really has alarming amounts of skin.  Of course, the story of Corianton is also the story of his seduction by the harlot Isabel, which in the film is accomplished with the aid of numerous half-naked dancing girls, cavorting about in what appears to be a 1931 attempt to capture Native American dance. More...