My weekly Saturday Movie Post has been bumped to Monday this week. The youth groups at our church joined with another church and we held a 30 hour famine to raise money for World Vision this weekend, so I was busy planning, leading and not-eating this weekend. One of the last things we did before we broke our fast was watch The Power of One, a great movie about the struggle for equality in Apartheid South Africa and one young man’s persistance to be a part of the solution even at very grave risk to himself and those he loved.

Grizzly Man
I first heard about this documentary from my friend Wil Ryland. This film uses the footage shot by Grizzly activist and filmaker Timothy Treadwell to tell the story of a very unique and bizzare man. While Treadwell was trying to make his own documentary film about his life with the bears, his footage tells a much deeper story, about his own demons and rejection of society. Treadwell lived with Grizzly bears for 13 summers before he was attacked and eaten by the creatures he came to idolize. One of the things I found so facinating about Treadwell himself was the polar and seemingly mutually exclusive understandings he had of Grizzly bears. On the one hand he was very well educated about bears, a true naturalist who had studied them and knew so much about them and their ferocity. On the other hand he approached them almost as if they were animated cartoons that would talk to him about how much they loved him. He held these two contradictory beliefs without any sense of tension at all. This is a must for any sociology student, as the real story is about Treadwell himself and not his life with the bears.

Lord of War
Filmmakers don’t make trailers for movies, they make movies. Sometimes that’s a shame, especially when a great film is misrepresented in its trailer. When I first saw the trailer for Lord of War, I thought to myself how cheesy it looked, how it painted with such a broad and watered down brush over a serious issue (the international arms trade) that it would do more bad than good. So I just ignored it and moved on to other movies instead. Then a while after it came out on DVD people started seeking me out asking what I thought of it, when I told them I thought it looked cheesy so I never saw it I was reprimanded. Well I got that response enough that I thought like Crash, perhaps I had just misjudged a great movie. Indeed I had. The film opens with what has to be one of the most memorable opening sequences I have ever seen: the life of a bullet, from being molded in the factory to entering the body of it’s victim. And so the movie goes, showing the tragedy meeted out by “small arms” like the AK-47 all over the world. We meet Yuri Orlov, played by Nicholas Cage (who finnaly found his way into a good film, even if he isn’t amazing in it) who becomes an arms dealer very young in life selling Uzis to gangsters in the Bronx. He eventually moves up to the “big leagues” and starts selling used American weaponry after the US has pulled out of a region and left all their guns behind. When Yuri breaks into the international arms trade he starts sellling and buying from some of the worst human-rights offenders on the planet, but for him it’s all about making a buck.

The film is a good look inside what is happening around our world because of the arms trade, it opens the conversation about child soldiers in Africa as well as how the support of one group of “freedom fighters” against another is often a choice between evil and evil. If you saw it in the theaters, go rent it again for the short documentary on the international arms trade that’s found in the DVD special features. The acting in Lord of War isn’t going to win anyone an oscar, but the subject matter it covers is usually only tackled by documentaries and while they are more informative and perhaps even more condemning of the international arms trade, Lord of War, brings the discussion to the masses, especially those who would never watch a documentary but would be psyched to go see a cheesy war movie…. so perhaps that misleading trailer wasn’t a bad idea after all.