Category: Movies Page 2 of 7

Steven Greydanus (decentfilms.com) is a film reviewer whose point of view I greatly respect. I commend him to you. He is also a Roman Catholic. His take on Spotlight (a movie we’ve discussed here and here) as a Roman Catholic is worth noting.

Recently, this was posted to Twitter by a Father Kevin Cusick:

Spotlight places in @DecentFilms top 10: I found it a bit shallow on abuse cause, superficial in treatment of Church

Greydanus (@DecentFilms), over several tweets, responded with this:

FWIW, Catholic response to #Spotlight has been positive. http://bit.ly/1RNfhC7

As with any historical film, one can take issue with Spotlight on individual points (I do).

It’s important to recognize that Spotlight presents subjective experiences/opinions of characters…

…who helped expose abuse/coverup. Sadly, these journalists etc. were mostly alienated from the Church…

…because church leaders and others in the Church didn’t take responsibility for cleaning up our own house.

If church leaders had done their job, we would control the narrative. They didn’t and we don’t.

Despite their anti-Church animus, the [Boston] Globe reporters did us a service. The film is their story, not ours.

His full review is here.

In their engaging, sad, and highly personal reflection on sexual abuse in the evangelical church, Marci Preheim and Sarah Taras comment:

If abuse requires silence, deception, and wordsmithing to flourish, then the way to kill it is to bring it into the light.

I can’t tell from reading their post whether that was an intentional or accidental reference to the recent Best Picture Oscar winner Spotlight, but it certainly made me think of it.

For some time my friend and fellow pastor Mike had urged me to see Spotlight. I resisted mainly because I was certain that my movie-going partner, my wife, would not want to see it. I think, though, as well, that a part of me just does not want to be made to feel uncomfortable. And that, for sure, is a problem that is shared by too many.

I was surprised to discover that my wife, in fact, WANTED to see the movie, and we were both glad we did. Spotlight is far and away one of the best movies I’ve seen in quite some time.

In the first place, it is simply a well told story. It follows the journalistic efforts that uncovered the scope of the sex-abuse scandal in Boston telling that story with energy and passion. The film is well paced, sustaining interest from the beginning until the end. Unlike many movies, I did not stop to consider the time. I was engaged the full length of the film.

The movie was written and directed by Tom McCarthy who has been a favorite of mine for a long time. (If you’ve not seen The Visitor, put that one on your list, as well.) This movie is his best.

I was particularly impressed with the acting of Mark Ruffalo. His “it could have been me” speech about 3/4 of the way through was one of the best sustained monologues that I can recall having seen.

The topic is handled deftly and without making it solely a problem of the Catholic Church. That’s important because the abuse of children and the protection of the abusers is NOT a Catholic issue. It may have found a home there, and the sheer size of the church magnifies the scale of the problem, but this is shamefully a problem in Protestant churches as well as the article referenced at the beginning makes clear. The value of a spotlight is that the hidden things must be brought to light, and the light must never be shut off, no matter how uncomfortable we are with what it exposes.

The film is honest enough to say that it was not simply the church that allowed this to go on for so long. There is a human complacency that settles upon us all. We don’t like boats that are rocking, and we don’t want to be the ones doing the rocking. Blame is spread far enough to make us all look deeply at the issues of which we are even now aware, but don’t want to engage. Abuse? Abortion? Poverty? Sexual slavery and trafficking?

It is so often easier, to our shame, to simply close our eyes.

The movie forces us to open our eyes, but is never heavy handed in doing so. One leaves the theater strangely hopeful and blessed for having spent the time.

Spotlight is not likely to be in theaters much longer. If you have not seen it, and cannot see it in theaters, it is available on Blu-ray and DVD.

I managed to make it through the 70s without seeing Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw in Love Story, though it was nominated for 7 Oscars and won 1. If the IMDB summary is any indication, we’ve all seen variations of the same movie “A boy and a girl from different backgrounds fall in love regardless of their upbringing – and then tragedy strikes.”

What makes the movie memorable, apart from the theme song, is the tag line that was everywhere when the movie was released, and survives on the DVD cover:

Love means never having to say you’re sorry.

I’m not sure whether the line is intended to be taken seriously or not. But it’s prominence seems to suggest it is a theme at the heart of the movie. And if the line causes you to shake your head in stunned puzzlement, you are not alone.

It’s that common reaction to the line that lies at the heart of one of my favorite movie scenes. This one is from a movie that came out two years later, What’s Up, Doc? starring the same Ryan O’Neal falling in love this time with Barbra Streisand. It is something of a screwball comedy made memorable to me by this thirty second clip:

I can only add, “Amen.”

[If you can’t for some reason get this clip to play, you can see it in a slightly longer context here.]

In one short span of time in the early 1980s I took my wife to see three movies in close succession. One was that year’s Academy Award winner for best movie, Terms of Endearment. One was a re-screening of the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. The third was Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. In each, a main character dies, two of them by suicide.

I nearly lost my movie choosing privileges after that stretch. It was, however, my first exposure to Kurosawa. Years later, after watching two or three other Kurosawa movies, I watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and began to realize just how influential Kurosawa had been on modern movies. (One movie scholar has called Steven Spielberg a ‘son of Kurosawa’, a title apparently Spielberg is glad to bear.)

These days I have stepped into a gold mine of Kurosawa resources through a friendship with a lover of all things Japanese. My friend has recently supplied me with Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and Throne of Blood.

Seven Samurai I’ve seen before. Many others have as well, though they did not know it. Its American remake was a little thing called The Magnificent Seven. (That film is being remade for release in September of this year.)

Ikiru was a delight beyond measure. Translated it means ‘to live’ and it is a wonderful story of a man, pressed with the possibility of death, finding purpose in living. And yet, its ending is so dolefully Japanese.

I just recently had the opportunity to watch Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s retelling of the story of Macbeth. Of the movies I’ve seen, this one was the hardest for me to follow, and yet, I could not stop watching it. Striking was the performance of the main character’s wife, the one intended to fulfill the role that Lady Macbeth fills in Shakespeare’s play. She plays the role with a steady, unmoving posture, conveying a striking evil manipulation that is full of power and intrigue and, in the end, madness.

Nevertheless, the part of the film that lingers is the ending. This is especially true when one realizes this film was shot in 1957 without any sophisticated special effects, no CGI, and no green screen shenanigans. Perhaps there is a notice in the Japanese credits that says, “No humans were harmed or killed in the making of this film.” If there isn’t, there should be. One wonders how Toshirô Mifune survived to film another movie. Those were real arrows shot by real archers at a real actor.

I spoke recently with an American film buff who had never heard of Kurosawa or seen his films. If you, like he, have not, do what you can to fix that soon.

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[Note: Throne of Blood is available on Amazon to rent for $2.99, as is Ran, Kurosawa’s King Lear interpretation. The latter apparently can be watched for free under a special offer described here.

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[Further note: embarrassingly I realized after this post went live that I had misspelled, consistently, at least, Kurosawa’s first name. That has been fixed (I think!), and the glow of my embarrassment has begun to slightly fade.]

To get me to ignore your message, frame it in crisis terms. I’ve become immune to any appeal suggesting that avoiding this movement or embracing that practice is ushering in the collapse of all the we (generally white Americans) find culturally precious. The claims may be accurate. The sky may be falling. But I’ve grown immune to the screaming.

We see cultural collapse when we are gripped with an unhealthy sense of nostalgia. We are persuaded that the 1950s was the height of safe Christian culture (or, for me for a time, 1860) – conclusions which for obvious reasons will be shared by white men far more than others.

Nostalgia links to our sense of shalom. We long for shalom, and sentiment for a time lost is easier to embrace than hope for a time yet unforeseen. Anything which seems to threaten that nostalgic longing is a portent of imminent social collapse. And for many, the harbinger and possible cause of this collapse is pop culture (rivaled only by, and often seen hand in hand with, the ‘other’ political party). The movies and music and media of our day are eroding our national strength and if not stopped or countered will lead to inevitable loss. So goes the argument meant to make me feel guilty if I don’t buy a ticket to Fireproof.

To argue the case one way or the other seems a bit fruitless to me. Lives are won or lost one at a time through old fashioned love and discipleship. Micro-ministry holds greater hope for the kingdom of God than macro-movements.

That said, pop culture does play a role, but it is not universally negative as some too easily assume. Signs that pop-culture can SERVE the kingdom and not degrade it are not hard to find. The 1999 movie Magnolia could be seen as evidence of our cultural fall with its sex and drug use and gay lead character. But the biblical themes of judgment are rich and the Christian character is the only one who is not coming undone. There is much positive here.

In 2005 Steven Spielberg directed a version of the H. G. Wells classic War of the Worlds. It was not a particularly good movie, but that’s not what matters here. In an interview Spielberg compared this movie with his earlier Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both involved families. Both involved aliens. The difference, he lamented, was that in his earlier movie, crisis tore families apart. In this newer movie, crisis took families which were apart and pulled them back together.

Progression toward shalom, and not away from it, should be celebrated. Not all ‘progress’ is retrograde.

Nostalgia can fix our eyes on the past and blind us to the progress of God’s work in the present. Perhaps it is better to fix our eyes on the kingdom and celebrate it wherever we see its fingerprints, in the present, in the past, and especially in our hopes for the future.