Eat this nay-sayers! It’s a quiz, it must be true! As I post this, I realize that my previous post was about Chad Vader, so maybe this Nerd Quiz is broken.

I am 32% Nerdy

I’m a little nerdy, but no one would ever call me a nerd. I sometimes get into nerdy things, but only after they’ve become a part of mainstream culture.

I found this gem on YouTube a while back. Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager. Haven’t you always wondered what if Darth Vader was the shift manager at a grocery store? I know I have! And now we can all see.
For the other episodes…

If you’re like me and have a large DVD library from which friends are always borrowing movies and you use a Macintosh, then you might want to check out DVDpedia. I found this little gem a few weeks ago and I absolutely love it. The initial setup was great, it was able to use my iSight camera to scan the bar code on my movies and add them to my library. It will keep track of the movies friends have borrowed and even lets you send them an email reminder to return them. For more info check out their site http://www.bruji.com/dvdpedia or browse my own collection by clicking on the blue DVDs button in the sidebar (DVDpedia will export your library to HTML).

Eric Lee tagged me to put up my list of best books of theology published in the past 25 years.

This is the criteria:

Name three (or more) theological works from the last 25 years (1981-2006) that you consider important and worthy to be included on a list of the most important works of theology of that last 25 years (in no particular order).

1. Torture and Eucharist by William T. Cavanaugh 1998
2. Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon 1989
3. Between Cross & Resurrection by Alan E. Lewis 2001

And now I’m tagging… Wilson Ryland, Scott Savage and David Tatum

Yesterday I suffered from 6 or 7 rounds of hiccups. Each time it began anew someone would offer their advice for curing my ailment. I’m not sure if you have noticed this, but when people give advice for curing hiccups they are instantly transported back into time, roughly around the year 1249, when draining someone of their blood was a way to “cure” them from fainting.

It was fun to watch some of my fellow graduate students turn into something between a late-night infomercial guru and a medieval witch doctor. So here are some of my favorite suggestions…

Put sugar on the roof of your mouth.

Bend over and drink water upside-down.

Pick up something really heavy.

Get slapped in the face… but only if it’s a surprise. (a la Dwight Schrute from last week’s episode of the Office)

and my favorite…
Drink 8 oz of freshly squeezed baby Dragon tears and then slap an Icelandic witch (it’s very important that she be Icelandic) on her bum.

Each one of these was followed by, “I SWEAR IT WORKS!”

I recently saw the 2nd 5 hour episode of the new season of 24 which plays 9 times a day back to back to back on the new 24 network formerly known as FOX or some such thing. Part of me expected to actually like the show despite all my nay-saying over the years about how nothing in 24 would appeal to me. Part of me thought that, as it was the case with LOST, I would become an addict.

BUT NO! 24 was everything I thought it would be: a “we’re constantly being threatened by terrorists and need to be ’saved’ by people like Jack Bauer, poorly acted, cliché laden, obsessed with America, ‘we’ll get them‘ voyeurism” show. Sure its tense but that alone does not explain the amount of hysteria over this show.

Example from this past week’s episode 2 of 193 straight hours of heart-pounding 24 action…

Jack Bauer

I’m not afraid of dying.
In China I wasn’t afraid of dying, I was afraid of dying for nothing.
Now I know I’m dying for something.

That “something” was intelligence about where a terrorist was hiding out. I laughed out loud when I heard those lines.

So, my question to all of you 24 fans is this… WHY do you love this show so much? It is usually better than this? WHAT is the reason you are so in love with it?

It wasn’t until college that I met the forgotten Martin Luther King Jr. Like everyone else I had met the civil rights leader in grade school, learning about him in history texts and on MLK Jr. day. This man was so monumentally popular in US history, held up as a saint who helped make racial equality part of what it means to be an American. But I didn’t meet the other MLK until years later and I’ve come to find out that most people never meet this other MLK. It was in his last years here on earth that Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention towards the growing poverty in the United States and towards the systems that help cause and maintain such poverty. He turned his attention towards the growing militarism of the United States and towards the wars being fought. Indeed MLK had the courage to say that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” It was this MLK that our country has forgotten. This MLK was assassinated. The words of this MLK still have a prophetic word for us today.

Thanks to Mark Bilby for this article about the forgotten MLK.

Tonight was the first night of my Film Theory class and after watching some of the earliest films ever made along with 1902’s A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès we watched The Passion of Joan of Arc filmed in 1928.

Wow.

Seriously. If you agreed with me that Seven Samurari was ahead of it’s time just get your hands on a copy of The Passion of Joan of Arc! The story of how we even have the film is interesting in itself. The film was originally censored and much of it was destroyed in a fire, bits of it surviving via the scrap clips that could be found, and then in 1981 the entire film was found in a janitor’s closet in an insane asylum in Oslo! The film itself is incredibly striking, like Seven Samurai it feels right at home in 2007. Director Carl Theodor Dreyer used a TON of close ups and in so doing captures up-close and personal some great performances. The use of camera angles is dramatic and serves the story well. Joan is almost always shown from above with soft lighting. Her monastic acusers are shot from below, towering above her. Hard lighting is used on the old monks and every wrinkle, every skin pore sticks out in these extreme close ups. In the midst of the acusatory rants thrown at Joan are cut extreme close-ups on angry, shouting mouths. The cinematography in this film is nothing short of beautiful. It is art! I have so much to learn from this film, I can’t wait to watch it again.

With all the Oscar buzz this time of the year I had to get in some films that I had the audacity to miss earlier in the year, first on the list was Babel (no. 2 is The Departed). Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams) this film like Children of Men is also about children in an around about way. It’s title however seems to be an even more dominant theme, miscommunication. This movie is plagued with miscommunication starting with an American man’s attempt to get his wife to a hospital after she has been shot in Morocco, to a deaf-mute Japanese girl’s failed attempts at teenage flirtation and finally between a Mexican nanny of two American children, her unstable nephew and an American border patrol agent. Caught in between all this miscommunication are children in a broken world. Two poor Moroccan goat-herding boys, the previously mentioned deaf-mute Japanese girl who’s mother has recently died and two very young American children raised by their Nanny who have an unintended adventure in the desert of Southern California near the Mexican border. If Children of Men gave us a vision of a world without children, Babel gives us a vision what some of the world’s children are going through today.

I’ve had Seven Samurai sitting around for a few months now and I finally put it in and watched it all the way through. I had previously made the mistake of trying to put it in at 1am (twice), not knowing how long the film was (3 hours and 20 minutes) I fell asleep both times. But this weekend I sat down much earlier with the intent of watching Akira Kurosawa’s film all the way through.

Finally. An old classic which is thrown around in the whole “greatest films ever” conversations that wasn’t disapointing! Maybe it wasn’t disapointing because so much of modern cinema draws on this film. Other than the obvious western adaptation/translation The Magnificent Seven we see Kurosawa’s plot of gathering a rag-tag group of heroes to acomplish something or defeat an enemy everywhere today. Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan, Ocean’s Eleven, Star Wars, The Matrix, Independance Day even Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring of the same year (1954) follows a similar storyline of gathering heroes for a task. Kurosawa also pioneered the use of slow motion in action sequences.

This film was done so well I kept thinking to myself he did that in 1954!? The Samurai have to defend a small village against a large group of bandits and during a long sequence in the film we get the foundation for every “defend the fort” movie I’ve ever seen (13th Warrior, Kingdom of Heaven, The Alamo, Last of the Mohicans, etc.). At times I felt like you do when you hear the original song after having only heard the Weird Al version, thinking to yourself “that’s where that comes from.”

Altogether a great movie, with an excellent and foundational story we use often today and wonderful cinematography. I can’t wait to see Kurosawa’s 1950’s classic Rashomon next.