Matt Frost over at American Scene has some interesting thoughts on last summer’s Pixar movie Walle. Specifically he shares some comments about Walle’s creative closing credits.

Also over at First Thoughts the blog of journal First Things, Joe Carter has some helpful thoughts concerning the art of self-defined “painter of light” Thomas Kinkade. Carter writes,

What is so dispiriting about this painting is that rather than being created in order to be challenging or even inspiring, it’s intended only to be comforting. It invites the viewer to enter a world of unnatural nature, a world where the “light” comes from within, and the warmth comes not from the receding sun but from inside the walls of the perfect Anglo shelter.

The cottage is a self-contained safe place where the viewer can shut himself in and get away from the harsh realities of creation, particularly away from other people. The Cottage by the Sea offers a place where the viewer can enter the perfect world of Kinkade’s creation—and escape the messy world of Kinkade’s Creator.

Lastly, the best sentence I read today was the following written by Brian Appleyard which I found via Alan Jacobs. Speaking of the architecture of Britain’s Houses of Parlament, Appleyard writes, “The rest is basically a bad three-dimensional Pre-Raphaelite painting, a Disneyesque evocation of Britain as a land of knights and churches which has come, in use, to resemble two giant pubs stuck in the middle of a truly nasty and extremely pompous club for fat philistines with occasional romantic longings and an inflated sense of their own importance.”

Wow.