I mentioned a movie in the sermon yesterday, one starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray, called Get Low.
I recommend the movie, and if you want to read a great review of the film’s merits, you can do so here. Mike is the pastor of Orlando’s University Presbyterian Church.
Well written, thoughtful, redemptive. Very good.
A couple more items worth noting from this week’s news:
Winners or near winners of the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search have, as this article says,
…gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.
Natalie Portman is, it seems, a pretty smart gal in spite of the fact that she fell for Anakin Skywalker.
+ + + + +
To the rest of us, the political uprisings in the Middle East seem sudden and mysterious. But Thomas Friedman had some interesting observations on what lay behind these uprisings, other than the contribution of the 83 year old former Harvard professor whose booklet on toppling dictators seems to have been influential.
Among his suggestions are geeky things like Google Earth:
On Nov. 27, 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas. ‘We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’
Read the whole. Like I said, interesting.
For those of us who need a break and don’t have a kid readily available, the following counsel is in order:
1. Block out two hours time.
2. Pop some popcorn.
3. Pull the shades, lock the door, turn off the cell phone.
4. Watch either Nanny McPhee or Nanny McPhee Returns.
The precautions in point three may seem extreme, but they are necessary. As a responsible and intellectually serious adult, you would not want anyone to catch you watching, much less enjoying, a kids’ movie without a kid present.
Fortunately, for me, I have a kid so I could dispense with step three and simply enjoy what I have found to be a couple of the most delightful and pleasing “family” movies ever.
Emma Thompson has taken stories from her childhood about a character named Nurse Matilda and crafted movies which are fantastical and magical, fun and entertaining. She has coaxed into participation top tier stars like Colin Firth and Maggie Gyllenhaal to play along with her.
The movies are not out to make a point or drive home some lesson of ‘believe in yourself’ which is the stock theme of movies made for families, making most of them nearly indigestible. Rather, Thompson captures that element that makes the best stories: playful fun.
If you are not an absolutely incorrigible curmudgeon, the movies will make you smile. And isn’t that a good thing, after all?
Oh, and if you don’t want to invoke step three, borrow a kid. He, or she, will love the movie as well.
1. Cajole 26 year-old son into giving you an unused powered sub-woofer.
2. Set sub-woofer next to audio system for seven months.
3. Move to different city.
4. NOT connecting sub-woofer to receiver saved having to disconnect for move. Make note of brilliant foresight.
5. Set sub-woofer next to audio system for another seven months.
6. NOT connecting sub-woofer to receiver sets baseline audio quality so that women-folk are prepared to be impressed upon connection. Make note of brilliant strategy.
7. Plug sub-woofer in to power source.
8. Connect sub-woofer to receiver using suitable RCA cable.
9. Crank up Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in DVD player.
10. Eat some potato chips while pondering still silent sub-woofer.
11. Move cables around on back of receiver. Push random buttons on front of receiver.
12. Eat more chips. Pound top of sub-woofer.
13. Ask wife where receiver manual might be found. She knows, of course. Add crow to chips. Get manual. Womenfolk have yet to be impressed.
14. Follow instructions to screen that says: “Sub-woofer: Off”
15. Change to “Sub-woofer: On”. Feel pulse rising.
16. Discover “Double-bass” setting. Turn it to “ON” of course.
17. Excitedly resume movie. Sadly note silent sub-woofer. Note cable plugged into wrong spot. Move cable.
18. Hear sub-woofer rumble. Look at ten year-old son with that “isn’t that cool” look.
19. Watch “I-Am-No-Man” Eowyn slay the Nazgul at top volume, no longer caring if womenfolk are impressed.
20. Cheer wildly. For multiple reasons.
The new release of True Grit is a movie I will see. The Coen brothers have redefined Homer for me as well as wood chippers and now they will redefine John Wayne. Though I sometimes don’t understand them, I still have to watch.
I expect, though, to learn something fresh from their new work. In this interview, they talk about the 14 year old girl who plays such a pivotal role in this story. Pay special attention to the last sentence:
They made “True Grit” not as corrective to the movie featuring an eye-patched Duke wheeling around as Rooster Cogburn but because both brothers loved the book by Charles Portis that it was based on. The novel is narrated by Mattie Ross, a spinster who tells the story of her quest many years earlier to avenge her father’s murder by a no-account by the name of Tom Chaney. Her younger self stomps into the frame of the Coens’ film with a gift for language and figures, a vision of pigtailed precocity.
“She is a pill,” Ethan said, “but there is something deeply admirable about her in the book that we were drawn to.” Joel continued the thought: “We didn’t think we should mess around with what we thought was a very compelling story and character.” Ethan stepped in: “The whole Presbyterian-Protestant ethic in a 14-year-old girl was interesting to us and sounded fun.”
The whole what?
There are few occasions where I can say that Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and I share something in common. In this, we do: each of us needs story to address a sense of our guilt.
Nothing demonstrates this more powerfully than two recent movies: Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Nolan’s Inception. Both movies star DiCaprio as a man wrestling with a deep sense of his guilt. (Is it coincidence that in both, that guilt has some relationship to the death of his wife? I’d like readers to weigh in on that.)
In wildly different ways, DiCaprio in each movie retreats inwardly and
spins an elaborate fictional reality which enables him somehow to deal with the guilt of his actions. Both movies show guilt as an actual reality with powerful motivating force in the human psyche. It is something that must be dealt with, and it is dealt with, it seems, by story, by creating a reality in which the guilt is atoned for or passed off upon another. Guilt cannot reside within us without being addressed.
Remarkable to me is that these master story tellers – and these films are technically masterful – both intuitively see and accept what every preacher of the Gospel preaches each Sunday: that guilt is real and must be assuaged. It will have an effect on us. We will face it one way or another.
And, like Scorsese and Nolan, the Christian preacher tells a story by which the guilt of his listeners can be addressed. His story points to a Man come from God who took guilt upon Himself. It is a story the preacher calls upon his listeners to embrace.
The movies should challenge us to face the importance of dealing with the guilt but should also cause us to ask this question: Does the Christian story have any greater validity than the fictions created by Mr. Scorsese or Mr. Nolan, or by any number of others? Is the Christian story simply another elaborate fiction generated deep within the human mind by which sin is addressed? Is that all it is?
This, I think, is the question forced on us and left unanswered by these intriguing movies.
I have come to my own answer on that question. What is yours?
Sitting in a stack next to our TV are three movies from Netflix, listed here in alphabetical order.
The Last Station
The Road
Solitary Man
Please, would you, order these for us in the order that we should watch them.
What do you all recommend we watch first?
My son and I have been watching when we can the Discovery Life series. It is beautifully photographed, so beautiful that I wonder if James Cameron has gotten involved. Somehow, though, this series is not as captivating as the previous Planet Earth series.
Perhaps others have formed a different opinion, but the series seems to predominantly explore who eats whom (which we watch in graphic detail) and how various creatures copulate. I guess there’s not much else going on out there in nature.
Admittedly, I’ve seen but two of the ten. To early to form a solid opinion.
Last weekend we watched Cold Souls with Paul Giamatti and Post Grad with Alexis Bledel.
The first had great potential as an idea. An accomplished actor is having trouble getting into a role because the troubles of his soul are so great. To lighten his load, he has his soul extracted (it is a chickpea) and put in storage for a couple weeks.
A soulless actor is not much better than one with a troubled soul, and so he looks through a catalog of smuggled souls and has implanted in him the soul of a Russian poet. Now he can really act. In the meantime, his own soul goes missing, and so the search begins.
The idea is clever, and has potential for examining all kinds of, uh, soulful themes. But it doesn’t. It is occasionally funny, but generally weak.
The second was actually one of the worst movies I’ve seen in quite a while. Bledel plays a recently graduated over-achiever who can’t get a job. Her best friend is a high school buddy who has had a crush on her since grade school, but she refuses to see it. You already know how this ends.
We are willing to accept knowing how a movie will end if the path there is fun. Romantic comedies are formulaic to begin with. But this one pushed the conventions to their most trite extremes. Every stock idiocy of the genre is brought to play. Honestly, it comes across as a first attempt in a beginning screenwriting class.
Which tells me that there is hope for aspiring screenwriters. If you have a good idea that you can’t fully mine, no problem. And if you want to play the RC game, you don’t need to have a knack for dialog or characterization or anything of the sort.
If these movies can get made, so can yours.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén