Since it opened on May 8th I’ve been to see Star Trek twice.  Given the opportunity, I would go again at the drop of a hat.  It’s just that good.  It’s been a while since I was a self-avowed Trekkie, but trust me, there was such a time.  From 6th to 8th grade I was a die-hard fan.  The Trekkie chapter in my life contributed to my remarkable awkwardness during adolescence, but it was a chapter that made me a better person nonetheless.  Napoleon Dynamite will one day be a man of great character thanks to his awkward years of living on the margin.  And I was almost that nerdy.  I would sit and draw the Starship Enterprise NCC-1701-D over and over again at lunch.  I think it’s stored in my muscle memory now.  I could probably bust out a decent sketch of it to this day.  (As a side-note from a youth ministry perspective, a childhood without these kind of social struggles generally makes for miserable people.  It is a blessing to be a nerd.  A little dose of struggle, awkwardness or suffering makes us all better.  We all know people who have gone through all of their life as the “popular” kids… it is not pretty.)

All that is to say that there was a time when I wouldn’t have missed a Star Trek film, and would have been mostly excited about the spaceships and all that other über nerdy Trek stuff.  The story and the drama was secondary to me.  Well that was in middle school.  My Trek fandom has wained so much that I haven’t bothered to watch the last few films (and from what I’ve heard I didn’t miss much).  But then J.J. Abrams was brought on board to “reboot” the Trek franchise with a prequel.  As I’ve said before, there are some artists that get a free pass from me, Abrams being one of them.  Not that it took much arm twisting to go see this film, I mean, did you see the trailer??? It was obvious that this Star Trek was going to kick butt on so many levels.  And it did not dissapoint.  Like George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise, this Star Trek just jumps right into the action, putting credits off until after the ride is over.  And the film hits the ground running.  After the first 5 minutes or so your heart is pumping because of the intensity of the action and your eyes are tearing up because of the depth of the drama.  Then *BAM* pause just long enough for the “Star Trek” title to scrawl across the screen and we’re thrown right back into the action.  I can’t say enough about this movie.  The actors were great – doing an excellent job of playing their characters and not playing the actors who played their characters before them.  Chris Pine for instance, plays Kirk, not Shatner playing Kirk.  And it worked.  They did throw a few bones to the die-hard Trekkies out there, but this film was accessible and FUN, no matter what level dungeon master you happen to be.

I forgot to mention how great Michael Giacchino’s score was.  It reminded me so much of the Ennio Morricone’s score for Eastwood’s speghetti westerns.  Lots of trumpets and kettle drums.  Soooo epic.

A few weeks ago I went and saw The Soloist, a film I had been eagerly waiting to see since this fall when I saw the trailer for it in theaters.  I cried watching the trailer.  So I was really looking forward to this film.  The day before I went to see it I happened to catch Terri Gross’ interview with Steve Lopez, the LA Times journalist played by Robert Downey Jr.  Her interview added another layer of depth to the story for me, and helped fill out some of the story that gets lost in this two hour film.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, The Soloist is based on the true story of a friendship between Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man with amazing musical ability and Steve Lopez, a journalist for the LA Times.  Originally from Cleveland, Mr. Ayers learned the cello as a young boy and was later accepted into Juilliard.  By the time columnist Steve Lopez meets Nathaniel his life is on a very different path.  Homeless and suffering from schizophrenia, Nathaniel was living on the streets of Skid Row in the heart of LA.  Mr. Lopez came across Nathaniel playing the violin in the street and was taken with his skill.  Over the course of the next several years Lopez would write about Nathaniel for the LA Times, telling his compelling story and bringing awareness to the reality of life on Skid Row in a city that likes to ignore such things.

There are a few departures from the truth in the film version of the story.  This is always the case with true stories.  The medium of film often demands tweaking some story elements for the sake of the medium, but Mike King makes a good case for why these particular points of departure were unnecessary over at his blog.  One element of the story that they got spot-on was the portrayal of Skid Row.  Back in college a group of guys from our dorm spent a few weekends working at Central City Community Church in the heart of Skid Row and the poverty we encountered there was just as stark and shocking as it is portrayed in The Soloist.  The later it is in the month the more people line the streets until it becomes a tent city of homeless refugees in the heart of LA.  The actors portraying the homeless in The Soloist are playing themselves and I really appreciated that the filmmakers included the homeless in telling this story.

This film is powerful.  It’s moving.  And yet it left me with one really huge lingering question… is it a beautiful story because Nathaniel Ayers is such an amazing musician or is it beautiful because Nathaniel Ayers is a child of God?  Can we come to embrace the homeless in the way that Steve Lopez embraced Nathaniel, even if there is nothing extraordinary about them?

My prayer is that we will.

If you’d like to see the real Mr. Lopez and Mr. Ayers check out the following videos.

In my last post I said that Slumdog Millionaire was the best film I saw before the Oscars.  That’s true, BUT, Gran Torino was easily my favorite film from last year.  If you saw the trailer and thought that this looked like a geriatric version of the old-school Clint Eastwood butt kicking movies you’d be well within reason to do so.  But that’s the tricky thing about trailers, a great one piques your interest without giving away the story and terrible ones mine the best stuff from the movie leaving you dissapointed at the theatre.  The trailer for Gran Torino tells you part of a much larger much more impressive story.  And if the grumpy old racist who’s quick to pull a rifle out to defend his front lawn didn’t get you into the theatres the rest of the story should have, so take it from me – go to the theatre this week to catch it while it’s still out.

[spoilers ahead]

Is Clint Eastwood a grumpy old racist quick to draw his rifle in Gran Torino?  Yes.  But there is oh so much more.  Eastwood is one of those people that gets an automatic pass from me.  I’ll go see any project he’s involved with, I’ll give any Eastwood film a chance.  I mean he has been on a ROLL since 2003’s Mystic River and he’s just been in so many good films he’s always worth the benefit of the doubt.

So one cold January night I drug my wife to the theater and sat there with a few hundred retirees (seriously we were the youngest people in the theater by about 30 years!) to see what story Clint Eastwood would have for us.  Gran Torino turned out to be an incredibly powerful story of Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet who has watched the world litterally change around him.  Walt never left the home he and his wife had in suburban Michigan like the rest of the whites had and after she dies he finds himself the lone white man in a Hmong neighborhood, emphasis on the hood.  When Walt breaks up a fight between some gangsters and his neighbor’s son, Thao, by showing up with his war rifle, the Hmong neighbors exalt him as a community hero.  Walt says he simply didn’t want anyone on his lawn and gruffly reject the gifts and praise, but his neighbors persist.  One in particular, Thao’s older sister Sue, shows up on Walt’s porch and makes it a point to educate him on Hmong culture.  Sue is persistent and draws Walt out of his grumpy isolation and into an unlikely friendship with his neighbors, especially with Thao.  Thao is a prime recruit for the local gang and Walt rescues him from being initated and takes the young boy under his wing.  And this is what makes Gran Torino my favorite film from last year.  Walt Kowalski is not a nice guy.  Walt is not sensitive, he drinks too much, he swears all the time, he is pretty darned racist and yet… his relationship with Thao is so beautiful it brought me to tears.

I know, I know, I am SOOOOOO late to the game in posting about Slumdog Millionaire.  But I swear that I saw this movie back on January 19th and have just now sat down to blog about it.  Had I blogged back then about Slumdog I could have reccommended the film to you and told you how amazing it was.  Today, a couple of solid weeks post-Oscars that kind of seems like saying that the internet is great and you should really check it out.  But if you haven’t seen Slumdog yet, chances are that your local movie theatre just picked it up in the last few weeks to capitalize on the Oscar buzz and you should run straight to said movie theatre and reward them for doing so.  Slumdog Millionaire treads the same road as other “poverty films” like City of God or Tsotsi without getting lost in it’s own seriousness.  Instead Slumdog dares to tell a story from within the slums that is hopeful and triumphant.  I am drawn to films that make poverty their subject matter, but like most people leave the theatre feeling pretty beat-up and outraged.  Slumdog takes us into the darkness of the slums of Mumbai and shows us the light.  Kara said that it has become her favoirte movie and I would easily say that Slumdog Millionaire was the best film I saw in 2009.

I wanted to catch Charlie Wilson’s War when it came out in the theater but never got around to it.  Well that’s the beauty of Netflix.  Eventually these movies find you.  So I popped CWW in the DVD player the other day to see what all the fuss was about.  What unfolded was an interesting story of how a morally questionable Senator teamed up with CIA hothead to divert millions of dollars into arming Afganistani fighters with anti-tank and anti-helicopter weapons.  Afghanistan was getting crushed by the Russians and Charlie Wilson set out to fight the Russians the only “safe” way to do so… by pretending that you’re not.

It was a decent enough movie, very well acted by Tom Hanks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman but would have been forgettable were it not for the very next film I watched.  One that Charlie Wilson’s War oddly and unexpectedly enough was a perfect setup for.  That movie was…

One of the last scenes of Charlie Wilson’s War has Charlie at a table with some other senators trying to get one million dollars to help build schools in Afghanistan.  This is after he has funneled millions and millions more to giving Afghanistan fighters weapons.  No one will budge.  The one million dollars seems excessive to the others and is shot down.  Wilson warns that pouring money into Afghanistan for war but not so much as lifting a finger to help rebuild what was left over from that war will create a country worse off than before.  But it’s obvious that Afghanistan was just a pawn, and that these congressmen never cared about the freedom of the Afghan people – they just wanted to beat the Russians.

The Kite Runner is set in Afghanistan, both before and after the time covered in the film Charlie Wilson’s War.  This story of friendship between two boys in Kabul is tragic but very moving.  Amir and Hassan grow up together because Hassan’s father works as a servant for Amir’s father.  They run the streets of 1970’s Kabul (before the Russian invasion) working together Kiting.  By the way, did I just miss out on this whole underworld of kite fighting or what?  I thought you just flew kites, I did not know that you fought with them!  The Kite fighting scenes were mesmerizing.  It’s hard to get into too much more without giving away too much, so suffice it to say that The Kite Runner was a great drama set in a very tragic Afghanistan amid the height of the Taliban’s power.

And take a pass on Charlie Wilson’s War… unless you plan to watch it right before The Kite Runner.

I’m way behind on blogging of late, so I’ll be trying to rectify that in the run-up to the Oscars.  Several weeks ago I met up with a friend from out of town and we caught Tom Cruise’s new film, Valkyrie.  I had caught Scott Simon’s interview with Cruise and director Brian Singer a few days earlier and it had caught my interest.  I wasn’t particularly jazzed to see Valkyrie until Simon’s interview caught me up on some of the background of the film.

Valkyrie is the story of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (played by Cruise) and a band of other Nazi insiders who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.  One of my favorite films, Amen, tells the true story of SS officer and scientist Kurt Gerstein and his struggle to cripple the concentration camps from within while risking everything to reach the Pope with the truth of what was happening in Hitler’s Germany in order to alert Christians all over the world.  Valkyrie is also the story of a solider whose conscience leads him to commit treason – another theme I’m quite taken with and which reminds me of yet another of my favorite films, The Four Feathers.

I admire filmmakers who tackle historical narratives where the “end of the story” is already obvious.  Think, Titanic, for example, there is no suspense about whether or not the boat would sink.  Similarly with Valkyrie, all the trailers have made it obvious that the film is about an assassination attempt on Hitler… and we all know that Hitler wasn’t assassinated.  But Valkyrie doesn’t suffer as a film from the known outcome of the operation.  Instead what Valkyrie thrives on is suspense and tension.  We know that Stauffenberg & Co. will fail, but we don’t know when, or how, or if they’ll be caught.  What unfolds is one of the most stressful films I’ve seen.  Think of the kind of tension you felt the first time you saw Jaws.  It’s that intense.

Beyond all the tension and suspense, Valkyrie gave me pause to think about the courage it took men to put country and patriotism aside to do what they thought was right.  As a Christian pacifist I still prefer the methods of men like Kurt Gerstein to those of Stauffenberg, but I am still sympathetic with the position they found themselves in.

Another moment that gave me pause was Hitler’s response to the failed assassination attempt.  In a radio address to Germany shortly afterwards he spoke of the event as a sign that God’s providence had saved him and his survival was a sign from God that he was on the right path.  I always grimace a bit when people say that “everything happens for a reason,” and this is exactly why.  That kind of theology is just what Hitler drew on to justify his own genocidal designs.

Over Christmas vacation I was able to get down to the Sierra Theatre in Ruidoso, NM with Kara and my cousin and her husband Dan.  We caught the late showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Dan and I had been talking beforehand about what we were expecting – mostly a Forrest Gump type narrative of one man’s life over the decades, a story as much about the changing times and history that he lives through as it is a story about the man himself.  Oh, and we thought it wouldn’t be quite as funny as Forrest Gump.  Wrong on both fronts.  Benjamin Button really is much more about Benjamin than it is the eras he lived through, and in my opinion much funnier thatn Gump.  Lightning is funny.

[spoiler alert... pretty much from here on out]

You likely know already that Benjamin Button is the fanciful love story of a man named Benjamin who is born with the body of an old man but the mind of an infant and over the course of his life his mind progresses as ours do – chronilogically speaking – forward.  Benjamin’s body however is headed in the opposite direction and with each passing year of maturity and wisdom Benjamin appears a year younger physically.

At first this seems miraculous.  As an infant no one expects Benjamin to live through the week in his frail and macbre state.  But he survives.  As a young (old) man he is as curious and rambunctious as you would expect a 12 year old to be… but with the body of a crippled old man in a wheel chair.

Somewhere in his teens Benjamin realizes what this all really means – all his closest friends, who are the elderly people he lives with will soon die, while he only gets younger.  Benjamin meets a young girl named Daisy about his same age and they hit it off as peers… of course the girl’s mother doesn’t see it this way and Benjamin learns that the world will not understand him as he is.

The story that unfolds is filled with both adventure and sadness.  Benjamin works aboard a tug-boat for a good part of his 20’s (when he appears to be in his 60’s or 70’s), he sees a great deal of the world, gets caught up in the War and comes home a much wiser (but younger?) man and finds that Daisy has grown up considerably.  He and Daisy are moving towards each other, at least moving towards the place where the world (and Daisy) can come to terms with their love.

But there are many more years of sadness and heartbreak before that time will come.

When it does, it’s everything Benjamin had hoped it would be.  They fall totally in love with each other (or so they would think), living a care-free, spontaneous life together.

But it is only when this phase of their life begins to fade away and they find themselves headed again in opposite directions that they really come to love each other.  A favorite theologian of mine, Stanley Hauerwas, is famous for saying something along the lines of this – when two people get married they do it in front of a congregation who will hold them to the promises they are making, because at the time they have no idea what those promises mean.  Indeed this is the case with Daisy and Benjamin, their love for each other comes into full bloom far after the care-free days of spontaneity.  We first see it with Benjamin, he is haunted by the countdown of his own mortality, every year he grows closer to becoming a teenager, then a child and finally a baby.  Benjamin knows that he cannot raise his daughter when he himself is a baby.  Benjamin sacrifices his own happiness with Daisy for the future of both her and his daughter.

The night Benjamin leaves is one of the saddest moments I’ve seen on film and I hated him for it at the time.  How could he just walk away?  But we meet Benjamin years later, as a pimple faced teenager when Daisy is well into her 50’s and his daughter is dealing with acne herself… and it starts to make some kind of sense.  It hurts, but it starts to make some kind of sense.

But most profound is Daisy’s love for Benjamin in the years when he is physically a young boy, but is dealing with dementia and alzheimer’s.  At this point in her life she is an old woman and Benjamin is ending life as a young boy and finally as an infant.  The way she cares for him in his final years is the full blossoming of her love for Benjamin.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an incredible film that will stay with me for years to come.

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.