The Purge: Hate the Rich Agitprop

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Great concept, but terribly morally confused and untruthful. This film is in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, where Swift suggested they sell the children of poor people as food in order ease the economic burden of poverty and the growing underclasses. In this movie, the idea is very simple and high concept: In the near future, one night a year, called The Purge, everyone is allowed to release their hatred upon one another and not be arrested for their violence. The goal is to purge the hatred through a cathartic release of “the Beast” within as people rape and kill one another. Supposedly this cleans up crime to only 1% during the rest of the year, by “sacrificing” those victims of the Purge to the “cleansing” of that Beast. This comes from a “reborn America,” that was instituted by the “New Founding Fathers,” who instituted the Purge to decrease crime and whose praise is chanted by Americans in the phrases, “Blessed be America. May God be with you all.” And of course, in good hypocritical fashion, all government officials are immune from the Purge, just as they always are unaccountable to the laws they pass to saddle everyone else.

Coulda been great.

The hero, James Sandin, is played by Ethan Hawke, as the inventor of the new security systems that most rich people have to “lock down” their homes with steel doors and such. He believes in the Purge and is also excessively prepared to survive the night, with back up firearms and plans – oh, you know, kinda like those whacky survivalist types. The problem comes with a black homeless man who is being chased by some rich kids cries out to helped. One of Sandin’s kids lets him into their home, which sets in motion a violent bloodfest as a group of killers threaten Sandin to let the black homeless man into their hands or they will kill his entire family.  And the killers want to kill him because he is a “worthless non-contributing member of society.” And he is black, so they are also racists.

Well, I have to say this was a great concept to explore some complex moral issues such as how far do we go to defend ourselves? What do we do if presented with the impossible options of protecting our family vs. endangering that entire family to save one person. One versus the many. And especially how evil people can be when they think they are not accountable for their actions or if they think they can get away with their behavior. Not that the movie is saying this, but I think this is a powerful argument for the rule of law, as well as, the belief God. If people think that they will ultimately not be punished for what they do in this life, they will do heinous things – even those who seem like nice people on the surface, because the human heart hides a dark sinfulness.

The problem with the movie lies in its confused political morality.

It is an obvious parable about how the rich shelter themselves in their safety and “let the rest of the poor” fend for themselves. Some good potential there too. Which kinda made me think. Well, the most relevant example of that would have been to have the hero be a Hollywood celebrity in his rich protected mansion – not caring about the world they feed off of, or the poor they kick off their curbs – oh wait, those are the people making the movie. We can’t have that. Take two…

But the thing that makes this story fall flat with a lack of authenticity and true original thinking is the Hollywood Political B.S. of trying to tie this Purge concept and all the evil rich people to the Tea Party. Yes, that’s right. The obvious religious language and references to the Founding Fathers, just like the Tea Party always talks about returning to the vision of the Founding Fathers, and God and all that. But the problem is that the immorality of anarchic destruction and lawlessness is the antithesis of Tea Partiers who promote the rule of law peacefully. But lawlessness is more like that of the Occupy Movement with its laundry list of violent crimes like rape, theft, vandalism, and murder that plagues its hateful protests. This rhetorical connection is so opposite of reality that it makes the movie laughable propaganda instead of thoughtful moral exploration. The kind of thinking that results in such violent notions of catharsis and anarchic crime do not come from the Christian religious folk, but from the antichristian Leftist universities and Media machine that dominates this country. One of the few things this movie gets right is having the lead sociopath wearing some kind of prep school jacket or such, to try to show that the evil is just as much from the educated upperclass. Well, actually, it is precisely from that Marxist Leftist hatred of the rich and victimization philosophy that comes from the Universities that would breed this (atheist) French Revolution notion of The Purge. “The rich” are mostly not religious, but secular, so that whole “God bless America” rhetoric just doesn’t ring true. Too bad. It coulda been a thoughtful story.

And I just don’t see this desperate and consistent obsession to connect the “rich” with the Tea Party conservatives or the Republican party. It’s completely counterfactual. The top richest people in congress are almost all Democrats. Wall Street and Big Business give far more money to the Democratic party than the Republican party. The richest people in America tend to be liberals and leftists. All the above the line people of that very movie are statistically all liberal or leftists and they make profits far beyond “fair” compared to the little guys who work below the line. A story has to ring true to be good. This story doesn’t ring true.

SPOILER: At the end when the worst villains turn out to be Sandin’s rich neighbors who kill all the killers because they want the Sandin’s for themselves. And why? Because he got rich off of all of them of course! Really?! I think they are trying to say that the rich like to exploit but they don’t like being exploited. Okay, fair enough. But again, I think that the storytellers may not realize that they are inadvertently proving the point that the real evil that results in all this violence of our society is the victimization that results from the Politics of Envy. The fact is that it was not wrong for Sandin to become rich off an invention of protection that he provided the world. The profit motive is not what is evil, envy and theft is. The belief that getting rich is inherently evil is becoming so woven into our social fabric through government propaganda, media, and entertainment, that people are actually starting to believe the Lie. And that is the lie that justifies in their minds the evil they engage in to “purge” their own hatred with violent desires. The irony of it all is that it is the policies of the secular Left that lead directly to the oppression and exploitation of the poor and minorities, not the religious Tea Party. In order to have been a good movie that dealt with a moral issue fairly, they should have avoided all the politicizing. But if they were going to be truthful or consistent, the phrases that should have been spouted as the slogans of America should have been more like “pay your fair share” “spread the wealth around” and other Socialist or Marxist phrases.

And then the ultimate moral confusion comes when, after the bloodbath, and the wife of Sandin and her kids have the upper hand over their rich neighbors who are trying to kill them, she refuses to kill their attackers because “there’s been enough bloodshed” tonight. She wants to hold them until morning. Obviously they are trying to say that you must stop the cycle of violence by not returning violence with violence. Fair enough. But the problem is that this denies the morality of self-defense. If you do not kill those who are trying to kill you as they are trying to kill you, they will not stop trying to kill you. It’s human nature. Self defense is morally justifiable homicide. Now, if this was a normal legal situation, where they could be brought in to pay for their crimes, then it would be entirely acceptable to “capture” them and bring them to the Law because justice would be done. But that is not the situation. These murderers would go home without justice served, so the wife is simply allowing them to live to kill them the next time, which is not protecting her family. Now, one of the killers tries to get the wife’s gun and she gives the killer a broken bloody nose, so she’s not above using violence to get some “justice.” Wanna stop the killing. But the filmmakers recognize our need to see some comeuppance to the killers, so that’s why they threw that in there. But it ain’t enough. Because we know they will come back to kill again. So there is some worthy stuff in that ending worth debating, but it’s not worth the rest of the untruthful story to get to it.

In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not rich or a member of the Tea Party.

Now You See Me: Don’t See It

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So, here is another one of those movies with terrible morals that Hollywood filmmakers think must be okay cause all the stars are cocky and cool. Harrelson, his lovable selfish self; Jesse Eisenberg and Morgan Freeman and Mark Ruffalo are all clearly defined characters with strong presence and clever scenes. But it’s really all about inciting hatred and violence against corporations because of so-called “grievances.” It flirts — no, makes out — with Occupy morality, that peculiar violent Marxist ethic that thinks stealing and vandalizing corporations is morally justifiable because they are “greedy.” This is the Ends Justifying the Means and it is immoral and unsatisfying in a story like this.

I would like to note that the filmmakers are themselves one-percenters, so they fancy themselves on moral high horses because they promote hatred of corporations like banks and insurance companies, while hypocritically excusing their own Hollywood corporations.

In this movie, criminals are good guys, and the good guys are the ultimate bad guys. In the end, all the people you think are good guys justify the crime and don’t care about justice. Oh wait, there is ONE partial good guy, played by Morgan Freeman, who ends up in jail for life, and apart from his own money self interest, is the only good guy who wants to expose the lies of the Occupy Magic stars.

So the morality here is all upside down, which means the storytellers are trying to misdirect us like a magic trick to accept their terrible immoral ethics inside a glitzy thriller movie package.

Don’t let them do it to you! Don’t watch this poor magic trick.

Get Chronicles of the Nephilim on Audiobook!

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As many of you know, I am not only a filmmaker, but an author of novels.
My current Biblical Fantasy saga, Chronicles of the Nephilim is being received with much love and fandom.

Chronicles of the Nephilim is a saga that charts the rise and fall of the Nephilim and just what their place is in the evil plans of the fallen Sons of God called, “The Watchers.” These rogue members of God’s divine council will stop at nothing to win their war as the Seed of the Serpent against the Seed of Eve. But God has other plans!

But I need your help.

I want to put the whole series on audiobook so more people can get the series.

So please check out my Kickstarter Campaign and consider pledging to the cause!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE COOL VIDEO EXPLAINING EVERYTHING ON KICKSTARTER

You’ll get rewards that are better than if you bought the items from Amazon or Audible.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

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Ordinary man changes the world. DO NOT see this in 48 fps, and DO NOT see it in 3D. The first made it look like a bad British Television Soap Opera and the 3d was completely ad hoc worthless. But other than that, it was a great movie! It took half the movie for me to stop noticing how bad the image looked with it’s video like edges. It was so interruptive in a bad sense that it spoiled that first half for me. I was thinking about how “realism” as a dominating genre or worldview can have some deleterious effects, especially when applied to fantasy.

Now, the goal of storytelling is verisimilitude. That is, the author wants the audience to feel that regardless of the fact that the story may be fictional, or fantastic, or poetic, or their opposites, it still “rings true” with human nature or the way things really are or should be. It “seems real.” Now, this not only goes for the human drama or characterization or emotions, but for the look and feel of the movie. We all know how bad makeup or monster suits can “take us out of” our suspension of disbelief and we then feel cheated. Good 3D (Like in Avatar) will make us feel like “we are really there.” HD or 4K can bring a sharpness of image that give us “more to see” and therefore more to ingest of the imaginary world. I would not deny that 24 frames per second (fps) creates an initial distortion of the looking glass to which we have become accustomed, and that all such customs are often challenged and often overturned as cultural bias. Look at the film versus digital debate. I too prefer grain, and have embraced digital only insofar as it can replicate the moods and images of film, which is often achieved through lighting and cinematography. I even prefer the video look for certain genres that require it to give the feel of “reality” such as found footage horror films. So there is a time and place for all kinds of techniques to produce effects in the audience.

But this 48 fps thing stinks.

It creates a “staged look” of a television play that intends to be more “realistic” but in fact is less so. What I mean is that when we speak of “realistic” let’s not fool ourselves into thinking “realism” is a superior genre or any less of a biased genre or prejudicial worldview than any other. The very notion of “reality” begs the question, “whose version of reality?” What often masquerades as realism is in fact a nihilistic worldview or at least a blind humanistic elevation of empirical observation. Who says that being able to see the pores in an actor’s skin is more “realistic”? Only the person who believes that scientifically observed details are more important than the spiritual journey of the character, or that ignores the fact that our eyes actually operate to obscure some details in order to see the bigger patterns of “reality.” Or consider the more “realistic” movies that don’t portray angels or demons. Why is this more realistic? Because “we all know that such things don’t exist” says the ignorant humanistic physicalist. Do you see how “realism” is just a bucket to pour one’s own prejudices into about his version of reality? I think Orcs and wizards are more “real” than most news reporting from the mainstream media since they are so manipulative and selective of facts, they almost never tell the truth. If you doubt me, just be the subject of any news report and you’ll see what I mean. I’ve had people “report” on my blog about the Noah movie as being that I “don’t like the fantasy” of it or that I had no problem with the environmentalism of it. Both of which are completely the OPPOSITE of what I wrote. But the depiction of the Trolls in the Hobbit are definitely like people I’ve known.

So don’t try to tell me that 48 fps is more “realistic” cause it’s not. It’s more Soap Operaish and ugly and that is not a good thing for a fantasy epic. Rather than watching a fantasy story, you feel like you are on the set watching the actors act.

Back to the story…

One big thematic thing stuck out to me, and that was the line that Gandalf said that embodied the entire epic, about how it’s not really extraordinary people who change the world, but the ordinary who do normal acts of goodness. That really hit home with hope because it seems that in today’s world of increasing government and societal oppression over all areas of life, us normal people, us little guys, can feel an awful lot ineffective. We’re just a bunch of hobbits who want to be left alone to enjoy our lives in our own communities. Like Bilbo, we’re not heros. We want to leave others alone to live their lives. But evil does not sleep, and evil will not stop trying to control until it rules over everyone. So by trying to “live and let live” we are actually empowering evil and its net of fear to destroy innocence and spread. We must stand up and do something to help others. This is what Bilbo learns in his relationship with Thorin Oakenshield. If he does nothing and hides his head in the ground, Great men of goodness like Thorin will die. So when Bilbo finally becomes the rallying man to save Thorin from the Wargs and the Pale Orc, we see a man who has grabbed a hold of his responsibility to fight evil in this world, even if he is small and ordinary and has no chance. And it is of particular importance that he does not use the Ring when he does try to save Thorin. If he used the Ring, it would have protected him in such a way as to preclude sacrifice. It would have been easy. But instead, he fights the enemy with full danger of losing his life in order to save the fallen Dwarf king. That single act of courage is the high point of the entire story and pinpoints Bilbo’s transformation into a hobbit of honor and courage.

When Thorin repents for considering Bilbo a worthless chap that they should have left in Hobbiton, they cement a connection that shows everyone has something to give to help in the fight against evil. It is the small things, the little things, the ordinary things of life that can change the world. When the fellowship of dwarves is caught by the Goblins, Bilbo is completely overlooked because he is so small and unassuming. The tiny Ring of course carries the destiny of Middle Earth and its held by the sniveling Gollum and then the small humble hobbit Bilbo.

Being small and ordinary is not so bad or meaningless a life. And that’s why this story is so grand and universal, because it shows that in a world of fighting titans, both good and evil, it’s the little guys doing the right things that add up to changing the world as much as any king or wizard.

It’s kind of a pity that by adding in all the back story battles, Jackson has turned The Hobbit from a lighter fairy tale type story into a darker story more like Lord of the Rings. But I reckon those who worship the mythology of Middle Earth may be pleased to have the extra material in there.

Best Scene: When Bilbo meets Gollum and they have the riddle game sequence. Gollum’s penchant for melodrama and juvenile narcissism makes him the single most endearing nemesis in all of movie storydom for me because we both hate him and have pity for him – because he is US.

Silver Linings Playbook

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Everybody’s mentally ill! A dysfunctional romantic comedy about Pat (Bradley Cooper in his usual flexible acting excellence) is home from the mental hospital after 8 months. He was sent there because he had a hostile outburst beating up his wife’s adulterous partner after catching them at home. Pat is delusional in that he thinks he can fix his marriage and his wife will return to him. But when he meets brutally honest Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence is phenomenal), who goes sexually promiscuous crazy after her beloved husband died, he gets sidetracked into discovering what is reality, and it ain’t what he thought.

This is all about how funny mental illness can be. Of course, I’m being facetious, because the mental illness becomes a hook for the storytellers to have fun with the ironic contrast of honest crazy people versus the delusionary dishonesty of normal people. In the real world, this stuff is not funny, but movies are not the real world, they are parables using a fictional world to make us see ourselves through different eyes and therefore learn something about ourselves.

There’s certainly room for some to see this as the dysfunctional Hollywood worldview of reality that is so jaded and cynical that it must have antiheroes and dysfunction to be entertained because the storytellers are themselves nihilists who are numb to hope and goodness. You know, the juvenile pseudo-philosophizing of “how do we know WE are not the insane and the insane are the normal?”

But I think that is too simplistic. Because this is in the end a very traditional love story in terms of discovering one’s selfishness and learning to love the person who cares for you, not the fantasy you’ve created of someone else. It is about facing reality and giving up false pictures of the world in our minds. It does have that element of showing how some of the people in the “normal world,” like Pat’s OCD gambling father, and his doting mother, and best friend and wife are as mentally screwed up or unhappy as any inmate. It also shows a certain insanity that is a part of sports fans (“Fan-atics”). The family’s father is an Eagles fan who has superstitious religious like behavior he lives out in his devotion. But that craziness is also on display in many fans who paint themselves up and get in fights at the sports arena without reason – just like the neurosis and explosions in the asylum. Let’s be honest, there really are things in “normal life” that are acceptable, but are in fact crazy.

And here is what I like about that. There is an element of honesty in Pat and his love interest, Tiffany, that is not in the “normal” people around them. Their frankness, their lack of social filters in saying inappropriate, but truthful statements in public, their open misery and inability to play the game of being happy or normal when they are not, are all reflections of an honesty of facing their flaws that is the beginning of a fully human life.

I could not help but see this movie as a metaphor for Christian faith – not the movie’s intent, but in my own triggered thoughts. I believe that the more one gets closer to God, the more one sees how bad in our soul we really are. How inherently selfish, but in clever secret ways that make us look “normal.” It’s like the closer you get to God, the more screwed up you see that you are, and the less willing you are to try to deny it, so the more honest you become in confessing it. But also, the more vulnerable and trusting in God that you are because you consider yourself more and more helpless and unable to be that “good person” that everyone aspires to be, but no one truly is. This does lead to some changed behavior of course, but it does not get rid of the “diagnosis.”

And that looks crazy to the world. To the world, that’s low self-esteem, that’s neurotic negativity or “fear religion” or “worm theology.” They think that it hampers our human potential. I mean, after all, if a religion is healthy, it should result in us seeing ourselves as basically good, which would make us become better people with positive thoughts, right?

Wrong. The belief in humanity’s inherent goodness is the delusion of the “normal world” with all its facades and games of cover up. This unwillingness to face the truth is the worst sort of dishonesty, it’s lying to ourselves and it is the true insanity. It creates the very self-righteousness that such people accuse Christians of being. It is not the Christian who sees himself as increasingly sinful before a holy God that is crazy and self-righteous, it is the fool who nestles in his normality of innate human goodness.

Before you can live fully human you must face the tragic honest reality that everybody’s “mentally ill.”

The Life of Pi

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Visually stunning, spiritually confusing. The Life of Pi is the story of Pi, a young Indian boy whose family owns a zoo in India. Because of political troubles in the country, the father puts his family and animals on a ship to Canada with the hopes to sell the animals to America and start their life over. Unfortunately, the ship sinks in a perfect storm and only Pi survives in a life boat – with a Bengal tiger.

Well, the movie is really so much more than that. Because you see, it begins with Pi as an older thirtysomething telling his story to a writer. And he explains in the very beginning that this is a story that will help him to find God. So that is the stated purpose of the story right from the start. We see Pi as a young boy who is curiously spiritual. His father is a secular humanist who lost any faith when western medicine cured his polio instead of his gods doing so. Pi’s mother remains a Hindu who believes in millions of gods. So there is that unity of opposites set up to contrast the extremes fighting for the soul of the boy. Atheism versus religion. Reason versus Revelation. We see Pi as a young boy explaining how he was raised as a Hindu but then found Jesus Christ. Yes, he explains how a Catholic priest led him to realize that Jesus Christ died for his sins and faith in Jesus atoned for his sins (In a church as full of icons and statues of deity as any Hindu temple). Pretty plain and clear.

Only there’s just one more thing. Pi THEN discovers Islam and becomes a Muslim, citing “Allahu Akbar” (a phrase that if one hears today, one should dive for cover). It’s as if he is “trying out” every religion in his spiritual quest. He is teased for being a Hindu Christian Muslim and eventually a Jew too as he teaches Kabbala at the university. From then on, it’s always a generic reference to “god,” Except once when we see Pi pray to the Hindu deity Vishnu for providing himself as a life giving fish on the stranded lifeboat. So he remains a polytheist. In essence this is a story of multiculturalism, or the attempt to show the legitimacy of all religious narratives as a part of the truth, much like the story of the blind men and the elephant.

The theological underpinnings of multiculturalism is polytheism. That is, all roads to lead to god or the gods or the goddesses, or whatever “non-offensive” term you use of your deity or your ultimate or your whatever. One cannot propose that one’s own religion is superior to others because they are all “masks of god,” and to suggest one religion is true and the others are false is religious imperialism. This is why relativism is the epistemology, and often ontology, of multiculturalism. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. It is not hard to see the self-refuting nature of such ludicrous ideas but many still hold to the fairy tale of relativism in today’s pomo culture that seeks to intolerantly oppress all absolute worldviews in the name of tolerance. Well, really mostly only the oppression of the Judeo-Christian worldview because for some reason multiculturalists seem to be often anti-Semitic and anti-Christian and to protect Muslim absolutism because it is an arch-enemy of Judeo-Christianity (the enemy of my enemy and all that). Which is ironic, since Multiculturalists are among the first to be eliminated under Sharia law, along with their compatriots: Feminists, homosexuals, atheists, and intellectuals. But that is another story.

So the entire story is like Castaway on the ocean, but with a young kid, a tiger, and as it turns out, a wounded zebra, a hyena and an orangutan. One by one, they die and the kid is left alone with this tiger, who rules the boat and forces the kid to live on a little raft he put together tied to the boat a safe distance away. This is kind of a parable about man and nature as the boy learns to live and let live with the tiger, helping each other to survive. It’s all part of the current “spirit of the age” or zeitgeist of environmentalism and animal rights. It’s a dominant theme in Hollywood from Avatar to the Lorax to the upcoming Noah and a multitude of corporate conspiracies: Man must learn to coexist with nature in a symbiotic relationship. Okay, I’m all for animal movies, and I love “dogs are people too” stories just as much as the next guy. Anthropomorphising animals is in our souls (more on that in a second). But let’s not be stupid. The Romantic notion that harmony can be found by man submitting to the chaos of nature is pure foolishness. The best movie that operates as a parable that depicts this foolishness and its consequences in reality is Grizzly Man which is a true story about the fool who thought he was the protector of the Grizzlies in Alaska, only to be eaten by one. Nature is to be tamed by man through technology and conservation and planned administration. That was the point of Genesis in tending the garden, and of being given “dominion over nature” and the command by God to “subdue it.” Because nature is unruly and man is the one who can harness it for good through application of his control over it. This does not justify pollution or criminal negligence of the environment (It never did), but neither does it justify the pagan idolatry of the earth that seeks to place man as a servant of the earth rather than the earth as a servant of man.

But maybe the movie is hinting at this same point.

At the very end of the story, we discover that Pi’s story was not believed by the insurance adjusters who sought the reason for the ship sinking. They could never find out why it did sink, but they pushed Pi into telling them a story that was not so unbelievable that they could use for their insurance claims. Finally, Pi then tells the story of himself and several other human survivors on his boat, his wounded mother, a couple others and a mean ship’s cook who ended up killing the other dying survivors. And then we learn that maybe, just maybe, the animal story was an allegory of what really happened and that Pi told the story with animals because the reality was too painful to face. Each of the animals represented different people who survived on the lifeboat. We never really know for sure if that is the case, but Pi concludes by asking the writer, and us, “Which story is the better story?” The animals of course. And then he says, “Now you understand God” or something to that effect. So, I see this movie saying that stories about God are the way that we “cover” the harshness of reality for us to be able to survive with hope in a brutal world.

But I think the claim is equally applicable toward the secularist or materialist. I think that the materialist paradigm is used to construct naturalist narratives of explaining away spiritual reality in order to salve the guilty consciences of people into thinking that they are not ultimately responsible before their Creator for their actions. The depravity of mankind is so thoroughly a part of who we are that we deceive ourselves to avoid accepting moral responsibility. The guilty are always looking for loopholes and telling stories that justify themselves. But I would certainly agree that the harsh reality of life dominated by suffering is hard to understand in a universe created by God. It’s one of the dominant themes of all my storytelling as well (It’s the meta-theme of my Chronicles of the Nephilim saga). Jesus used parables (and so did the Prophets) to conceal from the hard-hearted, but to reveal to the open-hearted, because God’s Kingdom could best be understood by finite fallen humanity by way of imaginative analogy. It’s not that we “mythologize” this life to avoid harsh reality, but rather that we need imagination to understand ultimate reality that is beyond this suffering life and our comprehension of it. I write about this in my new book, Myth Became Fact: Storytelling, Imagination and Apologetics in the Bible.

But there is another side to this story. Remember the kid’s father? The secular humanist? Well, he taught Pi a lesson one day to show him that nature is not man’s friend. Pi thought to give a chunk of meat to befriend the Bengal tiger in the zoo. The tiger appeared to be cautiously ready to receive the meat from the boy’s hands through the cage bars. But his father pulled him away before anything could happen. Then he showed the boy a live goat at the cage entrance and how the tiger grabbed the goat and killed it and ate it. So his point was that we are deluded to see ourselves in the reflections of the eyes of the animals. Anthropomorphism is a self-delusion. Nature is red in tooth and claw. So the anti-anthropomorphism of the father was internalized in the boy when he recast the lifeboat human scenario as animals. In other words, maybe the delusion lies in thinking man is superior to the animals. Pi does reverse anthropomorphism because the humans had acted more like animals than the other way around.

So this is a complex narrative about how we tell our stories to understand what is incomprehensible to us. On the one hand, I detest the modern/postmodern rejection of reality as a mere construct of fiction storytelling, yet, I certainly agree that reality cannot be fully accessed through empirical senses and “brute” experience or “raw facts.” Ain’t no such things. And “meaning” transcends observation. God transcends observation and is understood through story (after all, the Bible is a metanarrative embodied in a collection of narratives about God at work in his people). But The Life of Pi seemed to say that the story is more important than “what really happened,” which has a ring of manipulation to it. After all, all manner of evil has been perpetrated by false narratives (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Das Capital, etc.). For Christians, the claim of atonement for sins is based on a historically factual resurrection from the dead by Jesus Christ. If his resurrection was “just a story” and did not really happen, then we are still dead in our sins. However, a bodily resurrection without the narrative of Israel’s Messiah behind it means nothing. It is a mere scientific oddity.

So I certainly agree that we access meaning through the story, not through mere empirical or rational accuracy. And therein lies the movie’s thoughtful challenge. It is not so much the nature of fiction in our storytelling that would concern me about The Life of Pi as it is its polytheism and relativism related to God. It’s the god talk that has problems, not the story talk. After all, most storytellers tell stories about reality that are clothed in fictional terms because to express them outright would cause hostility from the blind prejudices of the audience. Explaining hard reality in other terms that an audience can relate to is a universal storytelling axiom. In the end, affirming a contradictory polytheism is a spiritually detrimental worldview to be communicating through that fiction.

But boy, does The Life of Pi make you think. And I like that.

Hatfields & McCoys (2012)

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Boy, was I angry that I was skipped over for the new release of this dvd at Netflix, and then it took THREE MONTHS waiting at the top of my queue to get the dang thing. Sometimes I love Netflix and sometimes I hate it.

Well, this is an engrossing and fascinating exploration of the self-destruction of revenge much in the way that Othello is of jealousy or Macbeth is of pride. It is Shakespearean, and rich with human understanding. Kevin Costner is at his best as a broody quiet patriarch of the Hatfields, Devil Anse Hatfield (of all the names he could have had, how perfect is that?), and Bill Paxton as the emotionally explosive patriarch Randall McCoy. This is a classic unity of opposites that seeks to capture the tenor of our very modern day “uncivil” discourse. Hatfield is an atheist who has a strong moral sense, but also rejects higher causes such as the Civil War that he deserted. McCoy is a classic Southern Christian man, who also has a strong moral sense mixed in with an addition of bigotry against unbelievers such as, you guessed it, Hatfield. So both sides are strong in their moral convictions from different viewpoints, even unyielding at times, and thus the conflict brews.

As I watched the miniseries, I must say that I began to see the obvious moral message being incarnated in the story: Extremes of both sides are the same self-destructive spirit. Okay, not too bad. So, a religious McCoy praying for the soul of a man he is about to murder is shown to be no different from the godless who kill as well. But the context was that Hatfield started out as the more moral man because he was the one who held back from revenge and experienced the injustice of false accusations from the McCoys. So the atheist was the more moral man than the hypocrite Christian. Okay, typical stereotype bigotry against Christians in the movies. And Hatfield only jumped in after his brother was killed in cold blood in front of a crowd by three McCoys without provocation. Since the law would not bring justice, he started retaliating and thus the rest of the movie. And he always sought to try to bring resolution. He was depicted as without any other option than “cutting off the head of the snake” that would not stop striking. SO Hatfield is the obvious favored protagonist.

But McCoy is shown to be a religious man who descends into madness and atheism when he concludes that no God would let his children be slaughtered. His is a story of how one loses his faith. He starts rejecting God as being a meaningless concept in a cruel world.

So, I started to get annoyed that even though it was making a point that ALL extremes are bad, the faith of Christianity appeared to me to be without any power in bringing reconciliation. And this is the biggest lie of all. Yes, FALSE religion leads to self destruction, but true Christianity does not.

So I was blown away when the ending of the story has the little “innocent lamb” Hatfield, a mentally handicapped kid get hanged, which stops the feud because the insanity of it all is finally exposed in this blood sacrifice of innocence. Yes, you got it. The innocent Son sacrificed that stopped the war. Hatfield gives a speech to his family of repentance from the hate. Quite soul stirring.

Then the last shot of the movie was Anse Hatfield GETTING BAPTIZED! After all the bloodshed, it was HE who becomes a Christian and embraces the Faith because he understood it through his own journey of justice and peace and repentance. WHOAH. Now THIS was superb storytelling. One man’s loss of faith countered by another man’s discovery of faith. I have no problem showing religious hypocrisy and religion that is evil, AS LONG AS you contrast it with TRUE faith and religion. Otherwise, you are just saying ALL religion is false, which is itself, bad faith. Hatfields and McCoys is a story that captured powerfully the essence of true reconciliation through the cross that and I was moved to my soul with repentance.

Lincoln

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Oscar winning performance in a dreadfully B-O-R-I-N-G Movie. Daniel-Day is superb. Warm, human, weak, but a great and noble “man of the ages”. He brings Lincoln to life. The writing for his character and Tommy Lee Jones’s Stevens was brilliant. The rest of it was BORING political procedural. Did I say Boring already?

OMG, I wanted to leave after the first 15 minutes. But I stayed, so you don’t have to. Don’t worry, you’re not a racist if you don’t see this movie. You’re just a moviegoer that wants a good story.

The entire dramatic question of the story is “Will Lincoln get the votes he needs to secure the 13th Amendment?” The moral dilemma was that Lincoln was told he could have peace or the Amendment, but he could not have both. But he sought for both on moral conviction. And the movie is taken up with the completely uninteresting storyline — attempting to be interesting by adding the brilliant cynicism of James Spader and cohorts as the first lobbyists — of trying to convince each and every man to vote for the Amendment.

Look, of course, this is a truly important and truly noble part of history that we all need to know about. And I’m sure it works well in the original historical political book. BUT A MOVIE IS NOT THE PLACE TO TRY TO EDUCATE US LIKE THIS. We want humanity, emotion, human drama, and this movie only delivers snatches of that humanity buried under boring political procedures. Let me say, that I actually LOVE political intrigue in movies. Braveheart, Gladiator, Rob Roy, and others only work as epics because of the court intrique and machinations. Game of Thrones and The Borgias are entirely about such things, and they all work just fine. But only because they are engorged with the human drama of the main players. The political intrigue embodies the personal conflicts AND is NOT focused on the details of the political procedures. In contrast, this movie is an endless litany of unknown men and their unknown faces being “persuaded” to vote, interspersed with Lincoln and his men talking about those unknown men and all their unknown details, interspersed with some very cool movie moments of Lincoln telling stories, ending with a complete roll call of E-V-E-R-Y S-I-N-G-L-E V-O-T-E in the House. Look, I know Spielberg thinks it is historically important to “call out” those who voted for and against, but that means he has capitulated to using movies as a political tool for indoctrination (regardless of how worthy the cause is). It’s a movie, for goodness’ sake, not an original forensic document. We don’t want to hear and see each and every vote, we want to know “what happens next.” Oh, look at me, trying to lecture the great Steven Spielberg. I’ll stop now.

But my point is that Spielberg tried to make this very much like an updated Frank Capra movie. Of course, he’s done so in its beautiful look and feel, but not in soul. It is not enough to have a couple brilliant characters, you must have a brilliant storyline, and sadly, Lincoln does not. He should learn how to do it right from his own Amistad. That movie brought it. This movies blows it.

To be fair there were several VERY human and powerful moments that moved me to a tear, and that much I’ll gladly admit. A very unique scene where Lincoln’s son forgoes the cliché scene of visiting the war wounded to see their hacked up bodies, but instead follows a cart to find the pile of severed limbs being buried. Whoah. Lincoln taking time to talk to black soldiers and to common men to get their advice. Awesome. One scene of Lincoln struggling with his wife Mary over her manic troubles was truly sympathetic yet honest, and captured that suffering in both their lives. And an amazing last scene of the movie when Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens brings home the actual bill passed by the House. It was a beautiful surprise revelation that made the movie. But of course, Jones owned the movie, even more than Lewis, but that is because he had the strongest character arc that embodied the theme and meaning of the movie: You must subjugate your personal convictions to negotiation if you are to achieve the public good in a democracy. And this is NOT moral compromise or lack of character, but rather our responsibility as humans in a divided world of imperfection. Lincoln had already accepted this before the movie began (which is why he is not as interesting a protagonist), but Tommy Lee, as the chief “extremist Pro-Lifer” – whoops, I mean Abolitionist, — was the one whose journey to finally give up his “radical” absolutist stance in order to actually bring about good in the world of the abolition of slavery. The “all or nothing” mentality is actually irresponsible and of low moral character in a democracy.

This is why the movie really should have been titled, “The 13th Amendment” and a story about the journey of Jones’s Thaddeus Stevens’ goal to abolish slavery, only to realize his own human weaknesses and his need to bend to his fellow humans in order to bring change and peace.

I have to say I was impressed by the fact that Spielberg, a well-known leftist in Hollywood, actually told a story where he openly revealed the Democrats as the bad guys. And he didn’t do the usual of turning it around and making the Republicans the bad guys. He showed that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery and racism, and the Republican Party was the party created to stop slavery. Of course, there were nuances that he dealt with as well which also made it more even handed (Not all Republicans were radical abolitionists, and some Democrats did vote for the Amendment, they were needed to win after all).

But regardless, I think this movie has enough in it for both sides to see their own biases affirmed, which actually makes it pretty fairly done. No doubt, the Republicans will see in it the affirmation of their pro-life struggle, and the Democrats as the party of slavery and racism. They will point to this dark underbelly as reflective of what has been ignored in education and the media, along with the Democratic Party’s history as the origin and membership of the KKK, and the main force behind Jim Crow laws and against the early Civil Rights movement (See here). And also no doubt, the Democrats will see it as an affirmation of their gay marriage laws struggle as well as a justification for Obama’s Executive Decisions to avoid accountability to the legislative branch (because of perceived righteousness of cause), as well as his antipathy to State’s rights.

But I think all this simply means that the movie Lincoln pretty accurately captured the universal political struggles that never change through history and keep repeating themselves in the endless struggle of a divided population.

But did it have to be so BORING?

Twilight: Breaking Dawn (Part 2)

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As bad as Breaking Dawn Part 1, was, this one is not much melodramatically better. But you have to admit, Kristen is A-L-M-O-S-T acting in this one. I have to say, she is getting a teency bit better with each of the series. She is no longer making her trademark shirks and ticks and lookaways. Go, team Jacob.

The first two of the movies in the series were very strong powerful arguments for sexual abstinence before marriage. Yes, the entire vampire mythology became a metaphor for the Mormon author’s moral worldview in a way that I have never seen in Hollywood movies. Wait until marriage because it is a fusion of souls and bodies that is not to be taken lightly. Suck on that natural law, fornicators.

And then Breaking Dawn Part 1 was one of the most pro-life stories in movie history. Do not kill the baby, even if Bella dies. Wow, those Mormons don’t win national elections with beliefs like that, but they sure can tell stories that resonate with the souls of the audience, when that audience does NOT have their political radars on. Ha, ha, Hollywood, you’ve been punked.

Part 2 is all about protecting the new child, the fruit of Bella and Edward’s union that appears to be a unique half-breed of humanity and vampirinity. The head vampire council in Italy does not like this “unknown.” For “unknowns” are what can expose them and have them all destroyed. They prefer having control by maintaining the “known,” so they want to kill the child and come, seeking a big battle with the vampires and now werewolves who protect her, the climax of the film.

What interests me in this story is the universal quest for immortality that resides in all of us. It is essentially an historical meme that still plays today, god and human hybrids. That’s right, the child, Renessme, or Ness for short, is basically a Nephilim. That is, the story reflects the ancient worlds’ notion of the gods mating with humans and bearing them offspring that are half human half god. Most ancient religions have this meme embedded in their stories. Genesis 6:1-4 talks about it as the divine sons of God in heaven mating with women and bearing them the Nephilim. I write about this storyline in my own Biblical fantasy novel series, Chronicles of the Nephilim. It’s all the rage these days, Nephilim and the end of the world. But it’s more than a fad, it’s a universal drive in human nature. That’s why it keeps coming back in stories and it works so well.

The idea reflects the notion that man seeks to be like gods. The vampires, as immortals represent this “shining glory” as their own skin shines in the daylight, and they live forever. In this mythology, they also have individual powers like the ability to control the elements or read minds or produce shields of protection. Sounds a little like superheros? Yep. Sounds a little like the ancient pantheon of gods? You bet. We recycle these stories because WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, AND NONE OF US WANT TO. We long for immortality, the desire to be united with divinity. I think Genesis captures this inherent longing in man best as man refuses to submit to his Creator and instead violates the image of God in man. He does this through murder, as well as the violation of the heavenly earthly divide. He seeks to be like God and so falls from his exalted place over creation, only to hunger because of his fallenness that the Bible calls the sinful nature.

Now, this is where Stephanie Meyer’s Mormonism comes in. Mormonism believes that we become gods (the immortal vampires), and for women, the highest pursuit in life is to become a god through this divine marriage. They believe in eternal marriage. That is why the ending of the movie stresses the words “forever” in relation to the happiness and married love between Edward and Bella. They will live forever and be married in love forever. Now, we all use the metaphor of “forever” when we speak of love. I do with my wife. But Mormons believe this literally, in that eternal marriages are the culmination of us becoming gods and marrying and having our own planets to reside over forever. Sooooooo, it’s not quite the same thing to us “normal” people and our emotional exaggerations.

But don’t let that ruin the movie for you. The reason the story resonates with so man is not just because of the female pornography of it, but because it taps into that impulse, that desire that we all have to seek immortality in our fallenness.