This morning I preached an Advent sermon about Joy.  I focused on the text in Luke 2:1-20, especially the angel’s annoucment that the Good News of Joy was for ALL PEOPLE.  I thought the story of Darth Vader was a great illsutration for this radical inclusion… to listen to the sermon click here.

February 22nd, 2009 will be the 81st Annual Acadamey Awards celebration.  So… we’re a few months out and haven’t hit the holiday movie rush but if the Oscars were held today, who would you nominate for best picture, best director, best actor in a leading role, best actress in a leading role and best original screenplay?

[disclaimer: full of spoilers]

A couple years ago I read an excellent book called How Movies Helped Save My Soul that has affected my Blockbuster Queue ever since.  One such film was High Plains Drifter.  HPD  was just the third film Clint Eastwood directed and it foreshadows a long line dark films to come.  HPD tells the story of a nameless stranger who rides across the eerily quiet and suspicious desert mining town of Lago.  Within minutes of his arrival three men pick a fight with the drifter while he’s getting a shave.  The stranger kills all three men for their trouble, all while sitting in the barber’s chair.  Immediately after the barber shop scene a young woman bumps into the drifter in the street in an effort to flirt.  Not impressed, the stranger derides her attempt to introduce herself and then drags her to a barn where he rapes her while the people of Lago turn a blind eye.  In the very next scene we find out that the leaders of the town have called a meeting to decide whether or not they should hire the stranger to protect them from some soon-to-be-released outlaws that are sure to return to Lago with revenge on their minds.

The town leaders in Lago find the stranger’s ruthless amorality to be an asset rather than an affront.  The townspeople are a cowardly bunch and cannot stomach defending themselves against the immanent threat of the outlaws and despite all appearances that the drifter is the devil himself they agree to hire him to defend their town for them.  When approached with the offer the drifter refuses, shrugging off the threat to the town as not his problem.  In an effort to sweeten the pot, the sheriff offers “anything” the stranger wants in order to defend Lago.  “Anything?” the stranger asks?  And at this point you know that the people of Lago have truly made a deal with the devil.

The stranger turns the whole town upside down, making the Barber’s diminutive servant into both the sheriff and mayor, handing out free booze to everyone in town, kicking everyone out of the town’s hotel to keep for himself.  In “preparation” for an ambush on the returning outlaws the stranger turns everyone in the town against each other and begins to dismantle their lives piece by piece.  Some turn on him and they pay with their lives.

In one of the most telling scenes of the film happens just outside of town in the cemetery next to the town sign.  The stranger is painting something on the sign when he tells the people of Lago to get to work painting all the buildings of Lago blood red.  The preacher complains, “You can’t possibly mean the church too.”  And the stranger responds, “I mean especially the church.”  With resignation the saloon owner says, “Alright, I’ll paint if you say we’ve got to, but when we get done this place is gonna look like hell.”  As the camera pans from the people returning to town to the sign we see that the drifter had painted the word HELL over the town’s name - LAGO.

HPD really blurs the lines between the western genre and the horror genre and pushing it further into horror territory is Dee Barton’s hair-raising score reminiscent of the 70’s horror classics.  The score is at it’s most terrifying during the flash-back scenes where we learn that the three outlaws who are returning had whipped Lago’s marshall to death in the street while people in the town all watched.

When the three outlaws finally come riding back into town the stranger slowly rides his white horse out of town leaving the people of Lago to deal with the prisoners themselves.  The men wreak havoc on Lago, setting man of the buildings on fire, killing man and corralling the rest of the people together in one room where they would take their revenge for serving time in jail for a murder the people of Lago had hired them to do.

Only then does the stranger return.  He drags one of the outlaws out of the saloon in the night, while the red buildings are burning in the background and kills him the same way he killed Lago’s sheriff - with a whip in the middle of the street.  The people scatter and the stranger eventually gets to each of the other two outlaws and by this time in the film there is no doubt that Lago is Hell.  The people of Lago had their own marshall killed by three men that came back to take revenge for having to serve time for their crime, and they hired a stranger to defend them who killed the three prisoners but also brought the gates of hell right to their front door.

In the last scene of the film the stranger is leaving a smouldering, ruined Lago with an expanding cemetery when he pauses by Mordecai who is finishing up the tombstone for the murdered marshall.  Mordecai looks up at the stranger and says “I never did know your name.”  To which the stranger responds, “Yes you do.”  As the stranger rides off into the distance on his white horse the camera zooms in on the tombstone which reads “Marshall Jim Duncan | Rest in Peace.”  One interpretation is that the stranger is the devil, but the more likely the stranger was the avenging ghost of the murdered marshall.  Either way the stranger represents some kind of supernatural incarnation of wrath and vengance.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Oliver Stone’s new film W. for several months now.  I must admit when I saw the first teaser trailer I thought it was going to be a roast-fest at the expense of a president I am less than fond of.  So, somewhat deviously, I was looking forward to the chance to see Bush exposed and raked over the coals.  There’s a ton of material I thought would do the job quite well - the rush to invade Iraq, the Patriot act, Guantanamo bay, presidential “signing statements,” invoking God to bless invading Iraq, pushing Powell out of the administration, faking evidence for WMDs, the Plame scandal, Katrina, etc.  And while W. at least acknowledges most of these instances of governing incompetence or arrogance the film is less about these details and more about the journey of George W. Bush.

And I found the character of Bush to be incredibly compelling.  This is a story of an underdog, a guy with a booming personality, an underachiever trying to find his place in his own family… and in the world.  Bush’s family name gets him out of the kind of trouble that would ruin many people, and the result is a man-boy who has a hard time taking responsibility for his actions and who lives in the shadow of his cold father.  There is so much that this president has done that absolutely makes my blood boil… and during the entire film I couldn’t help but root for him.  He has screwed up so many things in his life (and the film doesn’t shy away from his rocky past) that I found myself hoping that he’d pull it together, that he would find his place in the world, that he could kick his drinking habit, that he would become a successful politician… that he would become better than his father.  This is a man about which I can count areas of overlapping ideology on one hand (I think he has done a great job in funding AIDS prevention & treatment in Africa)… and yet I just wanted him to win.

With the exception of Richard Dreyfuss‘ Cheney and Jeffrey Wright’s Colin Powell the cabinet members are were a bit two-dimensional and at times bordered on SNL spoofs.  Thandie Newton was transformed into a spitting image of Condoleezza Rice but her performance seemed like it was better suited for comedy than a serious film.  But we can forgive Stone & Co. for not mining the depths of all the cabinet members characters, because after all this is a film about dubya.  The cabinet members really are orbiting the central personality and taking the time to develop them as characters would have been really tedious.  Casting Josh Brolin in the lead role of Bush was a stroke of genius.  Brolin rose above the SNL spoofishness that some of the other characters seemed stuck in.  His portrayal of Bush was brash, insecure, but above all really compelling.

Brolin’s performance helps remind us why even if the guy doesn’t make a good president, he’s still very likable.  For all the calculating, macheovelian policy of characters like Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld they lacked the “heart” and people skills of someone like Bush.  For his part, he seemed less invested in the overall big picture of the technocratic policy elements and trusted his neo-conservative cabinet members to do the thinking for him - just so long as everyone acknowledged that in the end he was the decider.  Then he would help “translate” their macheovelian politics into words that “real Americans” could grab onto.

So if you’re looking for a roast of Bush, you may leave feeling like you got to know the guy’s story and that despite his politics you can connect to his character on a human level.  It’s probably a good reminder, especially for a Christian like me, that every person is bigger than their faults and everyone’s story is more complex than what simply meets the eye.

Tonight Kara and I went out to dinner and saw M. Night Shyamalan’s new film - the Happening. I’ve been a big fan of Shyamalan’s writing from day one. But I’ve tended to be drawn towards his less “successful” films. Unbreakable? Awesome! Lady in the Water? Loved it. The Sixth Sense? Yeah, that was alright. For some reason Shyamalan’s skill at pulling off the twist ending has been like crack for audiences. They just want more. It’s unfortunate, but he has quickly become typecast as the guy who does twist endings. And then he went out and made a wildly intelligent film like Lady in the Water and people were pissed! The same can be said for The Happening, people will not like this film and not because it’s not a good film, but because it’s not a “good Shyamalan film.” Can we just judge him on the quality of his writing and not on whether or not he’s still in the tiny box we found him in… 9 years ago!?!

If you take this film for what it is - a modern day paranoia suspense film - you can begin to appreciate it. If you just want to see the Sixth Sense again, then just go watch that film again. In fact, stay home, and keep watching it over and over again and stop going to Shyamalan movies and talking during them about how different they are than the Sixth Sense! Yes, dudes one row behind me, I’m talking to you!

[spoilers ahead!!!] The Happening is a paranoia film. Suspense from something so commonplace, so ordinary that it is inescapable. Ever see a little Hitchcock gem called The Birds? Suspense films don’t have to be about insane serial killers, aliens from outer space, or ghosts… some of the most adrenaline inducing suspense films find their villans in the ordinary. And what could be more ordinary, what could be more inescapable than plants!? Or is it the plants? We don’t know. Could it be? It seems like it might be. The questions about who or what is causing “the event” are nerve wracking. And then what happens to you once you are “infected” or whatever… you loose your survival instinct. In fact it is reversed! The thought that a chemical in the air could cause you to turn on yourself and willfully find a way to end your own life… now that’s terror. And if that chemical came from some kind of a plant… well you’d have a hard time finding a safe place.

Why would plants do that? It’s not even possible is it? “Whatever it was, it was some kind of act of nature and we’ll never be able to explain it.” I love that line. There’s no need to explain what and why and how “the event” happened. First, because the characters in the film don’t really know. They make some guesses, some hypothesis, but no one really knows. So we are left to wonder ourselves. And sure, in the midst of the suspense we might just stop to think about our impact on the environment. But if I was a little kid and I saw this film… I’d have a new “boogey man” to worry about…

the tree in my back yard…

the grass on my lawn…

the hanging plant in the hallway!!!

I went and saw The Incredible Hulk tonight while Kara was at Starbucks studying. For my birthday she gave me two gift cards to my two favorite movie theaters loaded to the gills. So I’ve been able to indulge my summer movie cravings to my heart’s content.

Even though I never followed the Hulk comics, I’m usually game for a comic book film. I felt like I was one of the few people who appreciated Ang Lee’s attempt to bring the Hulkster to life on screen back in 2003. That one was so roundly disappointing to so many people I was surprised to see that they gave it another try. As it turns out, this is part of Marvel’s coming out party. They have started their own studio and aren’t relying on other producers to make their films anymore, and the first two films coming from Marvel Studios - Iron Man and Hulk. So think of this as Hulk (re)boot. Scratch Ang Lee’s film and let’s start again.

Normally this would have put me off a bit, with the whole “let’s try again” mentality. I probably would have caught Hulk on DVD if it weren’t for Ed Norton. Now, there’s a casting job to pique my interest. Then add to that the supposed feud between Norton and Marvel over how the film should be cut and I was hooked.

I’ve gotta say, I was impressed. This Hulk brought so much more of the raw power and fury to bear in its action scenes. The tender hearted moments are all done by Norton and not by the CGI Hulk (good move). It was a rip-roaring summer action flick. But it makes me wonder, what did they cut that Norton thought would have made it a better film? Will there be an Ed Norton Special Edition of the DVD?

I went out with one of the students from our church the other day to see Iron Man. I’d heard some great reviews and the buzz surrounding Iron Man was huge. Even with all the hype, Iron Man surpassed my expectations. I was pretty unfamiliar with the story line and had only recently overheard the “origin story” where Tony Stark, über-wealthy arms dealer, is captured by the enemies of America and is able to escape by building himself a robotic suit of armor. Fast-forward to 2008, update the enemies (Viet-cong to Afghani Terrorists) and we have today’s Iron Man.

[spoilers ahead] I really enjoyed Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the self-centered billionaire, Tony Stark. He brought the kind of “rough around the edges” persona needed for this character. It also makes Stark’s conversion seem believable. And speaking of conversion, I was really surprised at some of the territory this film covered. There was a healthy dose of critique for the arms industry and Iron Man wasn’t afraid to portray the United States for what we are, the largest and most indiscriminate arms dealer in the world. Stark learns this when he finds that his Afghani terrorist captors are using weapons that came from his own company. While it may be public knowledge that the United States armed both al Queda and Iraq… oh, and Iran, we don’t often see that in the plot line of a blockbuster summer action flick. So to the writers with the gravitas to pull that one off… bravo.

Stark comes back from his captivity and has an incredible change of heart. As the president of the largest Arms Manufacturer in the world (Stark Industries), he holds a press conference and announces that Stark Industries will no longer be making weapons. The stock takes a 50 point nose dive and people begin to speculate if he is insane. Could you imagine if Lockheed Martin did something similar? Wow. Tony tries to steer the company towards more humanitarian pursuits while he begins to build the REAL version of his robotic suit of armor that got him out of Afghanistan. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a preachy Amnesty International film disguised as a superhero movie. It is still an action packed two-hours of eye candy… with a heart.

I saw this over at Wil’s blog and couldn’t resist doing it myself.

My movie meme

1. One movie that made you laugh
The Big Lebowski

2. One movie that made you cry
Field of Dreams.

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
The Empire Strikes Back

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
Bad Boys 2

6. One movie you hated
Open Water

7. One movie that scared you
The Descent

8. One movie that bored you
Doomsday

9. One movie that made you happy
The Goonies

10. One movie that made you miserable
Who Killed the Electric Car?

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
Those sick torture movies that are popular now… Hostel, Saw, etc.

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Samwise Gamgee

13. The last movie you saw
Cloverfield

14. The next movie you hope to see
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

15. Your favorite movie
Donnie Darko (Directors Cut)… or Pan’s Labyrinth

I had hoped to see Cloverfield in the theater back in January when it first came out but never got around to it. So while I was in Blockbuster the other day looking for another film I was using in a message at youth group I picked it up. I can’t remember where, but I had been hearing some discouraging things about Cloverfield since it came out. Regardless of what people had been saying I was going to give it a shot, not the least bit because J.J. Abrams was involved in the project.

I loved it. And in retrospect I’m actually glad I had heard some negative reviews because I saw it without it having been over-hyped. To grossly oversimplify, Cloverfield is somewhere between Blair Witch and Godzilla. Some kind of creatures begin to attack Manhattan but we see everything from the point of view of a hand-held camcorder manned by one of the main characters. To paraphrase the filmmakers, there’s this huge disaster happening on an enormous scale but we’re looking at it through a soda straw. While the camera work made some moviegoers sick… literally, I found that it drew me right into a familiar (and by now, predictably boring) storyline - the disaster movie. The creative perspective given to this storyline in effect redefined the boundaries of a disaster movie and the result is anything but campy.

[spoilers ahead] Cloverfield just entirely abandons many of the staples of the disaster film. We don’t get to sit in on any high-level military meetings on how to kill off the monsters. We don’t get to see the the monsters arrive and brush by unsuspecting people before it all hits the fan, we don’t really even see the “end” of the whole drama. Instead we simply get the hand-held camera view of what happens to 4 friends in the midst of this whole disaster. We know as much as they know. We are as in the dark as they are. There is no third person narrative, we experience the entire film from the first person point of view. As a horror technique I found this extremely effective because the anxiety that accompanies ignorance is so much greater than the fear from a well framed close up of some really well done digital creature. For much of the film we are really very ignorant of what is really happening. There is the tidbit of info from the random solider, but for the most part we walk through the film in the dark with the main characters.

The opening credits set the premise that the film we are watching isn’t a film, it’s just a tape that was found in the wreckage. There’s no editing, there’s no commentary, we’re just going to watch what was on this tape. This would seem like it would significantly limit the ability to do any character development or deeper storytelling. However the filmmakers used the “this is just a tape” premise to their advantage in a move of brilliance. We find out pretty early on in the film that our videographer, Hud, didn’t use a new tape, but he’s taping over a pretty special video his best friend and our protagonist, Rob, had taken of a day he spent with longtime friend, Lily, who for that one day, became something more. Lily is trapped in an apartment and Rob, against all common sense is going in after her. We are able to get a little backstory and character development from some of the gaps between Hud’s filming where the original tape isn’t recorded over. Genius.

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while now, I saw There Will Be Blood back in January with Kaz and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Blood was so good, so memorable on so many different levels its hard to know where to begin talking about it. But here goes…

Protagonist (the hero)
This brutal bio-pic of fictional oilman Daniel Plainview has no classical protagonist. To be sure Plainview is the driving force of the film and thus he is the protagonist, but there are no heroes in the classical sense, no “good” characters with the exception of H.W. who is visible in much of the film but has a mostly background role. Plainview’s most notable nemesis, the pentecostal boy-preacher, Eli, is just as twisted a character as Daniel himself and Daniel’s “brother” Henry Plainview/Brands we find is just a posing conman.

Unconventional story arc
While films like Eastern Promises and No Country for Old Men have raised the bar for unconventional story arcs this year, it’s certainly true that Blood was unconventional in its own way. We begin with Plainview picking away at the earth deep in a hole in the desert and end with him as a wealthy oil tycoon. But what lies in between didn’t feel as much like character development as it did character intensification. Daniel doesn’t have any a-ha moment, any crisis that particularly changes his course. He is ambition embodied. He is drivenness in human form. Like many tracks from the score, Daniel’s is not so much a tale of “beginning, middle and end,” but rather of snowballing intensification. If there is a climax in the story it is Daniel’s “conversion” moment but this changes nothing about where Daniel was headed or where he will end up. It is an emotional climax for us the viewer, but it is simply one more step along Daniel’s ever intensifying journey of greed and conquest. The film ends, not after the story has been neatly tied up, but after one of the most shocking moments in the story.

Acting
Daniel Day-Lewis gives what has to be one of the best performances I have ever seen. His character will be burned in my memory forever. Paul Dano’s (who played the older brother in Little Miss Sunshine) portrayal of the young preacher Eli Sunday was nuanced so well that it always keeps you guessing as to how much he buys into his own message, just terriffic.

Score
Jonny Greenwood’s (from Radiohead) score provided the snowballing and ever-intensifying context that the film swam in. In scenes where visually there might not have been much to make you anxious the soundtrack kept thumping that theme home.

Poetic Justice?
During the film we come to really sit uneasy with both Daniel and Eli’s characters. Both have moments where they are taken down a notch by the other (final tally Daniel 2, Eli 1). In all three cases I found myself taking some satisfaction in their being brought low by the other while never really rooting for the one doing the humiliating. Daniel does get the last laugh in a haunting scene where Eli is coaxed into making a dramatic pronouncement of unbelief with all the pentecostal flair he could muster to match exactly in the inverse the “getting saved” scene he made Daniel put on before the church.

I feel like I just scratched the surface on what was undoubtably one of the best films of the year. Oh and… “I. DRINK. YOUR. MILKSHAKE! … I DRINK IT UP!” I couldn’t resist.