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Season of the Witch

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Supernatural period horror. Behman and Felson start as Crusading knights fighting wars with Muslims (not mentioned as such in the movie) who appear to be more mercenaries than holy warriors. But when leaders start making them kill innocent women and children of conquered cities, they excommunicate themselves from the Crusades to result in being outlaws on the run. So when they come upon a town afflicted by the plague, they are commissioned to transport an accused witch to another city that hosts a holy monastery of priests with the ability to legally try the women to discover her innocence or guilt.

Because of their bad experience with the Crusades, Behman  and Felson are highly dubious of the woman’s guilt, but still maintain the hope of a fair trial by the church so they take on the task with hopes of being pardoned of their desertion.

The movie plays with the possibility of the woman’s innocence, but eventually we see that in fact, she is not a witch, but is possessed by a demon whose goal is to draw the men to the monastery, now destroyed, in order to capture the last book of exorcism ritual that they carry with them. If they can destroy that book, they can run amok in the world.

This movie is an interesting mixture of anti-institutional Christianity with a positive support for individual spirituality and the reality of the Christian vision of the supernatural. Okay, the “magic” book of exorcism is a fiction, but the movie uses the audience’s anti-Christian prejudice based on the Crusades to subvert that prejudice by depicting a world very supernatural where Christianity wins out. The monk who travels with the heroes is hinted at being a lecherous rapist (a common bigoted stereotype in the modern cinema) but alas turns out to be a good guy who is libeled by lies. Quite refreshing and original.

In contradiction to this subversion, there remains another modern libel against Christianity in the movie. It seems that the name of “Jesus Christ” is only mentioned in movies as a cuss word or in the mouth of an evil criminal and never as a positive expression of specific faith. So in this movie the only time “Jesus Christ” is mentioned is in the mouth of an evil Crusade Leader who yells to his soldiers to “kill all the infidels in the name of Jesus Christ!” (repeated later in the movie to make the poinkt) Interesting that they used a word that was not used by Christians, but Muslims. Christians used the word “heathen,” and the word “infidel” is commonly known to be connected to Islamic imperialism. So, maybe the filmmakers were trying to make a predictable moral equivalency of institutional Christianity and institutional Islam. In any case, Season of the Witch portrays a balanced world of false and true Christianity within a paradigm that affirms supernatural evil and supernatural good.

 

The Adjustment Bureau

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Humanism and Open Theism. I got a chance to see an advance screening of this theologically and philosophically rich film, so you’ll want to come back later after you’ve seen it. It does prove once again, along with the blockbusters The Matrix all the way to Inception, that you can tell a good story and make a good movie AND have a rich philosophical discussion as the essence of it all.

David Norris is an aspiring Senator in New York who loses his latest bid and in a fit of authentic honesty, admits that so much of politics is poll driven (by controlled research) and not from the heart. But then one day, we see strange men with hats who are following him and we learn they are from “the adjustment bureau” following the orders of the “Chairman” and are controlling David’s life, along with many others’ lives, or at least intervening at key moments to keep him on track with the Chairman’s plan for his life. They carry little books that show blueprint like pages with moving lines to show them directions of people’s lives as they are making choices.

One day, David is supposed to spill his coffee, but the agent who is supposed to cover him falls asleep and David does not spill his coffee, thus making it in time to a bus he was not supposed to be on, and thus having a second encounter with a woman he had fallen for in a chance encounter during his campaign. The thing is, according to the Chairman’s plan, they are no supposed to be together, so the rest of the movie is David pursuing this woman and the bureau agents trying to stop that from taking hold.

But when David spills his coffee he sets in motion a series of events that allow him to get out of the sight of the bureau agents, and he stumbles upon something he is not supposed to see: The agents are engaged in a “readjustment” by freezing everyone at David’s work and scanning their brains to make them change their minds and get back on course with the Chairman’s plan for them. When David sees them, lead Agent Richardson is in a predicament of having to explain to David the behind the scenes scenario. He then tells David that he must not get together with the woman, Elise, because it will ruin the Chairman’s plan for both of their lives. As it turns out, David eventually learns that the plans are for her to become a world class Ballet dancer and for David to eventually become president of the US, and both would do great good for people. But David does not understand why he can’t have both, and like Jacob fighting with the angel, he determines to make his own way in life with his free will and fight for Elise.

Though the movie judiciously avoids saying it explicitly, the metaphors are obvious, the agents are angels, and the Chairman is God. The entire struggle of this film is between free will and determinism, or predestination. Are we absolutely free to make our own way in this life or does God control everything? The view of the storytellers is Arminianism, and more particularly Open Theism. The Chairman has a plan for most everyone, but mostly very important people who will do great things. The rest of us are mostly on our own. So people have free will AND there are chance events that keep mucking up the Chairman’s (God’s) plan so God has to send angels to try to fix things to some degree to keep things on track. But there are not enough angels to do so, so there are quite a lot of things that get out of God’s control. One higher up explains to David that throughout history, God has tried to give man free will and he messes it all up so God takes control again to fix things. So, in this movie, God gave men over to free will and we had the Dark Ages, and then God took back control and we had the blessings of reason and the Enlightenment and Renaissance (The Reformation is studiously avoided), and then God gave free will back to us in 1910 and we had the World Wars, so now God is trying to fix it all again. This is exactly the viewpoint prejudice of the Enlightenment that created the derogatory term “Dark Ages” out of its antisupernatural bigotry.

This points to another theme of the movie, that ultimately the reasoning intellect of man is safe and in control (which is a parallel to the Chairman’s control), but the emotions of man are unpredictable and messy. So the battle between free will and determinism is also a battle between control and chance as well as a battle between the heart and the mind, or emotions and reason. They’re all linked. Thus, our hero is an impulsive man whose impulses get him in trouble in the story. But the real trouble happens when he learns that if he stays with this woman with whom he has fallen in love, they will both not meet their dreams, she will not become a famous dancer, but will end up a simple teacher, and he will not be president and help the nation. So his choice is: should he “follow the plan” and give up his dreams of love or should he pursue his dream and ruin both their potentialities for goodness in society? So for the sake of his love for her, he gives up their love and let’s her go, only to be haunted by that decision for years.

By chance, he stumbles onto her again much later, but by now, he has decided that he wants both. Why can’t they have both love and greatness? David’s original design to be a politician is revealed to come from his inner emptiness for meaning. He seeks the “love” of the masses to fill a hole that only true love can fill: Another humanistic theme – human love is the ultimate meaning in life. So David fights to stop Elise from marrying another man and to show her why he had avoided her all those years: Because of the angelic plan. But revealing the behind the scenes is a dangerous no-no, and David will have to have his brain erased, because they can’t have the secret get out.

With the help of a rebellious angel, David decides to grab Elise and make a run for it to the Chairman to plead his case. He never makes it, but his sheer “free will” for love has so impressed the God Chairman, that God changes his plans, and allows the two to be together. The last shot, we see the plan book, with the two moving lines of David and Elise moving out of the planned zone and into a white area of undetermined uncertain future, but we all know it is hopeful and free will gives us the hope of uncertain but unlimited possibilities

The problem with the scenario is that it is ultimately unsatisfying. The God of this film is unwittingly the best argument against the Arminian notion of absolute free will, by depicting a God whose will is so often thwarted by humans that he is virtually impotent, running around fretting over the mess that he cannot seem to keep up with. God here is the antagonist, the enemy that man must free himself from, much like The Truman Show. This God is not very all-knowing either, as he is the one who realizes his plan was wrong for David and Elise. Rather than David struggling with God and learning a lesson about meaning and purpose beyond himself, God is the one who learns a lesson from David that true human love is better than a deity’s plan, that people should make their own meaning instead of accept God’s meaningful intent for them. Also, it is the God of Open Theism that only knows the future in the way that a very intelligent being can know where someone is headed based on intimate knowledge of the way a person thinks and acts – but this foreknowledge is really an educated guess not actual foreknowledge.

This is Open Theism. This is not a satisfying deity that is worth worshipping. In fact, watching it makes one repulsed at the pathetic excuse for such a meddling, inferior, half-assed puppet master getting his strings tangled on the few puppets he is trying to manipulate. One can only think, “For God’s sake, if it’s all too much for you to maintain control, then get out of the way and let us try to make our own way in life.” And that is in fact what happens in the movie. God gets out of the hero’s way and lets him have his “freedom” to chart his course in an unknown uncertain future determined only by human “love,” NOT God’s purposes. This is the humanistic existential man telling God to let him alone to create his own meaning and purpose in life out of his own emotional desires. In this story, politics may appear to help people, but it is ultimately a form of control that is determined by polls and manipulation. So David’s redemption lies in giving up his dreams of politics for the sake of individual love, in the same way that God must do so.

The Sovereign God of the Bible may be in control of every sparrow that falls from the sky, but at least such omnipotent power also comes with a Shepherd’s loving promise that is worth trusting. At least this God can actually accomplish his promises to work all things out for the best, and maybe he knows a little more than me, and maybe the world does not revolve around me and my passionate desires. Maybe it’s not all about me, me, me

To be fair, there are resonances with many Biblical characters in this story. One is reminded of Job who complains to God for his misfortune; or Jacob who wrestles with God and won’t let go until he is blessed by God: or Moses who persuades God to change his mind about destroying the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness.

And yet, one cannot help but see the differences that make this deity a false idol of the one in the Bible. For we do not see a God who rebukes and humbles Job into submission, or the God who won’t let go of His purposes for Jacob. Nor do we see the God of Moses who changes his mind on the basis on his own glory, and who separated and destroyed the rebellious Israelites for the sake of a remnant.

The Rite

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A story of faith’s victory over skepticism through the supernatural. Michael Kovak is the son of a mortician whose only family directed choice is to be a mortician or become a priest. So he chooses to become a priest to get away from his pain. The only problem is, he doesn’t believe in God. So at the end of seminary when he is about to tender his resignation from his priesthood process, he discovers that if he does, his $100k scholarship will be converted into a loan. His mentor priest offers him the opportunity to get Exorcism training from the Vatican before he decides. The obvious goal is that maybe a face to face encounter with supernatural evil will persuade him of supernatural good.

It’s part of the formula in these supernatural stories for the hero to be a skeptic who can explain away demonic phenomena as psychological manifestations. The battle of worldviews, naturalism and supernaturalism. Well, Michael does explain them away in the presence of unorthodox yet experienced exorcist, Father Lucas, an old man who overcame his own youthful skepticism the same way. But when the possessed victims start telling him secrets and knowledge that only spirits could know of his past, of things said in secret, and of his own dreams, Michael becomes conflicted.

The spiritual manifestations in this movie are more realistic than a standard horror movie about demons. These are not so much special effects, but more about oddities like frogs showing up, or speaking in strange voices and other languages. Some body contortions and such, but not of the Exorcist variety. In fact, there’s even a line in the movie that Lucas gives Michael when confronted with the relatively unimpressive display of possession, “what did you expect, spinning heads and pea soup?” But there is one terror that is deeper than any shock scare: The demons do know your sins, your dark secrets that haunt you with pain. Thus, the perfect metaphor of fighting one’s inner demons is captured by the external fight with real demons.

There is another line that Lucas says to Michael that captures the theme about spiritual reality versus secular skepticism: “Choosing not to believe in the devil won’t protect you from him.” Other lines that carry a surprising strong Christian understanding to the worldview of this movie: “The terror is real. You won’t defeat it unless you believe.” And this bears out when Michael is faced with his ultimate challenge: Father Lucas is possessed by a demon named Baal (like the Canaanite deity in the Old Testament) and Michael must now cast him out. But how can a man so weak in faith, fight an entity so strong? A note written to Michael when he was young echoes in his mind, “You are not alone. He is always with you.” Michael then names the demon, adjures him in the name of the Father, the creator and casts him out in the name of Jesus. I have not heard the name of Jesus uttered in such a positive way in a movie in a looooooong time. So the storytellers don’t hide the connection of the power of the cross of Jesus Christ over these demons. Impressive and faith affirming.

So Michael discovers faith in the face of true spiritual evil and becomes a priest, affirming the thing he once rejected.

The Way Back

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An epic road movie. Based on a true story that was probably plagiarized by author Slavomir Rawicz as his own experience. A handful of Polish prisoners in the Russian Gulag in Siberia during WWII, escape their prison in the freezing tundra and travel 4000 miles to freedom in India, going through the Gobi Desert AND over the freezing Himilayas.

This survival story was most amazing to me in that it is probably the first Hollywood movie about the Russian Gulags. There are dozens and dozens of movies and television stories about the German concentration camps in WWII, but what most of the public does not know is that the Soviet Communist Gulag system makes the Nazi camps look like children’s play pens. Problem is, they didn’t get the exposure they should have. It reveals how uneducated many people are about the truly evil empire of Soviet Russia and the atrocities that dwarfed the Nazi machine by 3x. Stalin starved over 20 million of his own people. 20 million of his own people. And that is not counting the other 30 million killed in the entire Stalin era for a grand total near 50 MILLION PEOPLE – savagely and brutally killed, many of them tortured as “political dissidents” because they were not Communist party members. Yet, this is the FIRST movie about the Soviet Gulags? All I can say is Peter Weir is a heroic filmmaker to bring out this essence of Communism in an era that seems to deny it was even a threat.

The King’s Speech

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A British period drama about a commoner speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome a stuttering problem right around the start of WWII. In this sure Oscar movie, Lionel Logue is the commoner who is enlisted by George’s tireless wife, Queen Elizabeth after an endless list of other doctors who have failed to help the weary Duke of York with his persistent childhood curse. What starts as a simple story of royalty and plebian culture clash quickly becomes a transcendent tale of the equality of man and the victory of strength in defeating evil.

Logue’s eccentric techniques of physical exercise and psychotherapeutic exploration of the stuttering origins provide the dramatic scenario for these two men to break through their cultural barriers and make a human connection. For Logue’s approach to work, he must have complete control and authority over the patient within his domain, which violates the exclusionary protocol of aristocracy that has been the only experience of George VI. Ironically, Logue’s exclusive access to this personal world of “Bertie” as he was called by only family results in a friendship that would last the rest of his life. In a world of isolated royal loneliness, Bertie finds human connection with a person of social status that was excluded within his cultural prejudice.

When he discovers that Logue is not only a commoner, he is NOT the doctor that Bertie had assumed (sin of sins!), their relationship is almost destroyed, until a rousing speech by Logue proves the very American egalitarian notion of pragmatic results over titles and social status. All the doctors in England could not help Bertie, but Logue’s practical experience as a WWI soldier helping his fellow soldiers overcome shell shock gives this self-made man true equality with any establishment academic or privileged aristocrat. The American Revolution won all over again. Bertie’s compassion for the common man becomes real when he finds his own privilege masks a prejudice.

Of course, Logue himself learns that such equality cannot be abused to violate authority. In one particularly beautiful line of the movie, at the end, both men gain a renewed appreciation for each other when the King calls Bertie “my friend” outside the therapy room, but Logue responds with “your majesty.”

But the King’s Speech is also a bigger picture story about the need for leadership to guide a nation to rise up in strength against evil. A nation gains its fortitude and it’s inspiration from its leaders. The climax of the movie is the King’s need to give his declaration of war against Germany, the greatest of sacrifices. Yet, until then, he had not been able to get through a public speech if his life depended upon it. Walking into the recording booth, he knew that Hitler would exploit his display of weakness (much as Islamists exploit western duplicity in avoiding swift justice against terrorism). If the King of England could not speak to his own nation about sacrifice and warfare because of a stuttering weakness in the face of the Nazi evil, where would the people draw their strength from to join him in the highest of sacrifices? Completing that speech without barely a stutter marked the entry of the English into the War with a fearless strength that would make Germany shudder. Yes, Churchill was the real hero who came from behind the scenes to the limelight, but it all started with the figurehead of their culture standing strong and unwavering, or in this metaphor, unstuttering. A powerful tale of victory and the triumph of the human spirit that means more than personal victory over individual problems.

127 Hours

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Survival tale based on a true story of Aaron Ralston, a mountaineer whose arm was caught in a fallen boulder while rock climbing in a remote crevice in the desert. When he realizes that no one knows where he is, and no one will find him, he will die unless he can cut off his arm to escape. It is a riveting story that takes place virtually entirely in one simple location where Aaron deals with his dilemma. Aided by a few flashbacks and video recordings, Aaron faces the consequences of his own solitary existence. He was such a loner that he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He didn’t answer his mother’s phone call because he was too focused on leaving to bother. So his personal journey of examining his life leads him to realize how he needs people more than he realized and this dilemma is a direct result of his own selfish solitariness. We need others.

One dishonesty of the story is that in this entire journey of facing death, Aaron is never depicted as thinking about God and his ultimate destiny. I understand that Aaron in real life is a Christian, so this is particularly manipulative of not being true to his spiritual journey. But even if he was not a Christian, it just doesn’t ring true that someone with that time on their hands, facing death, would not even spend a moment considering God and his spiritual destiny. It leaves one empty in an otherwise riveting account.

The Company Men

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Drama about three executives at different levels and ages who lose their jobs in the ship building industry in Boston through downsizing. Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones are the three guys who successively are downsized and they each react in different ways. Affleck is the lead, who has a typical upper middle class huge home, and sports car with a wife and kid he hardly knows because his job has been his life. As he loses all his material possessions and winds up in a job search community he is humbled and finds worth in people and work that he used to have contempt for. The ultimate humiliation of having to move in with his parents is the bottom of the bucket. Whereas, Cooper cannot face the reality and kills himself and Jones leaves his wife for his adulteress, Affleck chooses to rediscover the value of those around him. He begins to work in construction with his detested brother in law, whom he used to look down on. But when he discovers the brother in law is taking losses and working weekends just to keep Affleck employed, he realizes his view of class structure is all wrong, and the best people are those he would not take two minutes to respect. Tommy Lee has to leave his adulteress and strike out on his own to discover the same thing and they eventually get together with all those in the job seeking pool to start a new company with a dream of treating workers with more value and respect.

Shrek Forever After

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If you remember, the original was an apparently traditional fairy tale that made fun of traditional fairy tales but ended up being a traditional fairy tale. A hero rescuing a maiden from a tower protected by a dragon, true love’s kiss redeeming the maiden. And the twist was that the maiden who was an ogre by night and a blonde human by day, was actually an ogre as her true self. Some Jungian analysis about the self etc.

But in this fourth installment it seems the storytellers went back to the original spirit. In this tale, Shrek has now been married with Fiona and has cute little triplet ogres and they are living happily in their village. But Shrek has a mid-life crisis and pines over the loss of his youthful free spirited ogre life of scaring people and being a basically selfish rogue. All the responsibility has taken the fun out of his life and he makes a deal with an evil Rumplestiltskin to have one day as his old single self in exchange for one day that Rumple picks out of Shrek’s life. Well, after Shrek has his fun, he discovers that Rumple has picked Shrek’s birth date as the one day he gets. So Shrek is never born and Shrek is now trapped in a world where he didn’t exist to free Fiona from her tower and the evil Rumple has taken over building his exploitative kingdom in place of the good king and queen. Shrek now realizes what a mistake he has made and tries to find Fiona, only to discover that, because Shrek never rescued her, she had to rescue herself and has now become a hardened warrior leader of the ogres who are oppressed by the kingdom. So now Shrek has to win Fiona’s true love kiss again in order to change the world. Only this time, she doesn’t need him. She’s been liberated and doesn’t need a man to rescue her.

This is a tale of traditional values that seems to reinforce the need for strong male leadership in a love relationship. Yes, Shrek and Fiona go on a journey together, so it’s not patriarchal abuse, but rather a need for Shrek to take the lead and even responsibility in his life and love. And Fiona is not fulfilled as a lone warrior leader until she discovers love with Shrek. When Shrek gets back to his real world, he has a renewed appreciation and treasure of his family that rejects the juvenile freedom of his single past. It’s a classic tale of It’s a Wonderful Life, in embracing maturity and responsibility over the carefree selfishness of youth, as well as traditional role models for male and female relationships in love and marriage. In Shrek Forever After, A man needs to lead with a woman who admires him, and a woman needs a man to admire.

Faster

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A revenge story with redemption. A newly released ex-con, played by Dwayne Johnson, seeks to kill the men who killed his brother, while being tracked by a young assassin and a corrupt cop. It’s a kill by numbers formula that has a unique spiritual twist about forgiveness and redemption.

When the ex-con, Driver, gets to his last guy to kill, he turns out to be someone who became a Christian preacher and is now preaching in a revival tent like environment. When Driver gets him in his sights, the preacher talks about repentance and how he’s atoning for what he’s done with a changed life. But when the preacher is about to be shot dead, he looks the killer in the eye and asks for forgiveness for what he did. He all but accepts his fate as punishment for his actions (this could have been more clear). Driver is confronted for the first time with grace and real redemption that revenge cannot satisfy. Driver decides not to kill the preacher and ends up in the tent before God wondering what repentance means for him.

This movie has all the hallmarks of a “Christian movie” in terms of genre: A preacher telling a sinner to forgive, redemption in a sanctuary while looking up at a cross, hearing a gospel sermon on the radio. The difference is of course that this movie showed the gritty violent reality of revenge, so that when the church redemption occurs, it is not cliché, simply because the one extreme of blood revenge and violent death is countered by the equal extreme of blood atonement and salvation. The redemption is powerful and rings true because the evil is portrayed with clarity. Because Christian movies are too afraid to show sin as it really is, they become cliché ridden formulas of “preaching” that does not ring true like this movie does.

Unfortunately, the movie becomes morally incoherent in the end because, after Driver spares the preacher and survives being killed by the corrupt cop who started it all, Driver still ends up shooting that corrupt cop with revenge rather than pure self-defense. So a contradictory portrait is displayed in perpetuating the very revenge Driver was supposed to be redeemed from. A bit unsatisfying ending.

Skyline

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Low budget Sci-fi action rip off of Independence Day meets Cloverfield. A group of friends and acquaintances seek to stay alive when Los Angeles is invaded by alien space ships who seek out all humans to suck their brains out for energy. This movie seems to illustrate the emptiness and lack of meaning that many young filmmakers have. They come up with a “cool” idea about aliens invading and a “cool” visual chase film about survival, only to fall apart narratively at the end, which seems to reflect their own lack of depth or meaning to draw from in their own worldview. If they are taught there is no real transcendent meaning, then they have nothing to really say in their stories.

In this case, the hero and heroine, after spending an hour and a half trying with futility to stay free from the invaders, are finally sucked up into a big space ship, only to discover that the aliens are using human brains to feed on and in some cases inhabit their dying bodies. So, the hero’s brain becomes a part of some alien who then recognizes the heroine about to be eaten alive, and he then saves her from being chomped — for the moment. And that’s how it ends. What the…? In the trailers to the movie, they showed TV news clips (not in the movie that I remember) that editorialized that this invasion must be how the Indians felt when the bad evil Europeans invaded their land and took it over. A movie that starts out with a politically correct theme of anti-colonialism, ends up fizzling like a kid who started out real excited making up a story and then ran out of steam near the end when he realized he hadn’t thought it through to the end.