Movies

Cloud Atlas: Freedom, Dystopias, and Sex Change Operations

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On DVD. As a movie fan, I have a love/detest relationship with the Wachowskis. Sometimes, they poop out very terrible pieces of excrement with bad philosophy, like V For Vendetta, and sometimes they make visually stunning, thought-provoking films — with bad philosophy, like The Matrix (I give them a break. No one is a 100% hitter). Cloud Atlas is one of the latter. One thing is for sure, they always deliver consistently bad philosophy. However, like Nietzsche, their hero (they are Nietzschean after all), they are great with words. And they are excellent at embodying their bad philosophy into story. They are great storytellers, these two.

Cloud Atlas is an adaptation of the novel by David Mitchell. The film is a quite fascinating intercutting of six stories that all take place in different time periods and sometimes different planets, yet are all interconnected in their theme because as one of their dialogue memes goes, “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present.” The brilliant hook they provide is that in each story, the same handful of actors play the lead characters in different roles. This is a very creative tactic to embody one of their themes that I will address in a moment.

1) One story takes place in the 1800s about an Englishman’s awakening to the horrors of slavery.

2) Another story takes place in the 1970s about a black American reporter uncovering a scandal by “Big Oil” to ruin the advent of nuclear power.

3) Another story takes place in the Victorian period, I think, about a homosexual music student that transcribes for an old famous composer, who uses the kid’s genius for his own benefit.

4) Another story takes place in the present, where an old geezer is forced into an old folks home by his brother and plans to escape with a motely band of other marginalized oldsters.

5) Another story takes place in the future, where a “fabricant” created for the pleasure of humans becomes self aware and turns into a sort of female messiah of revolution (One of the Wachowskis’ favorite themes)

6) Yet another story takes place in the distant future, after the apocalypse caused by that big oil scam, where a primitive man interacts with an alien humanoid and turns from a coward into a hero.

Whew! That might look like too much to follow, but it really isn’t. They do quite an excellent job of intercutting between cliff hangers of each story and bouncing around between the stories in such a way as to tie them all together in a thematic montage about freedom, oppression, dystopia, and identity politics. “We are bound to others, past and present.”

All the stories are about individuals who discover or live under some kind of oppression, whether its slavery, big corporations, old people in an old folks home, or the government in the future. They each have a unique individuality that causes them to feel constrained by their world and want to break out. Though my personal favorite was the post-apocalyptic story of a man who turns from coward to hero, the most philosophically blatant story is the futuristic dystopia.  There, the society is called “Unanimity,” which obviously represents homogeneity where everyone is the same in one big “unanimous” entity. Wachowskis are GREAT with working quotes elegantly into their storylines, and Cloud Atlas is full of them. Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian intellect who wrote of Soviet Communist oppression of their own people in the post WWII era is quoted, “You can maintain power over people as along as you give them something. Rob a man of everything and you no longer have any power over him.” Beautiful truth that punches through.

Another beautiful phrase is spoken by the old man in the old folks home: “Freedom is the fatuous jingle of our civilization. Only those deprived of it have the barest inkling what it really is.” Yet another line that echoes through the stories in different character’s mouths as the revolutionary inspiration is the line of a movie, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse.”

Like good Nietzscheans, they struggle against the very nihilism of a naturalistic world without God as several villains repeat, “Only one principle on earth. The weak are meat and the strong do eat.” The characters in this world are shaped by forces that “began long before we are born and go on long after we die.” In the future, fabricants are “expired” by being told they are going to “exaltation” (read: “heaven”), but they are only being processed into food to be given to other fabricants. In other words, transcendent beliefs are delusion. All there is is here and now and the naturalistic processes of life.

Now comes their magic trick. They attach that naturalism, a philosophy that believes in the existence of only natural causation, and therefore no supernatural, and they attach it to the villains in the stories who reiterate the philosophy that “There is a natural order to this world, and it must be protected.” They ask the question that if God created the world, then what changes and what is sacred and inviolable, and they conclude that our identities are socially, or more importantly, individually constructed.

This is identity politics, and I think is the main thematic thrust of the movie. As one character says, “All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended,” and “My life extends far beyond the limitations of me.” And lastly, as another says, “I can feel your heart beating as my own, and I know separation is an illusion.”

I think the import here is definitely the notion that our identities as humans is plastic. It is shaped by our own self-definition, not by God through his natural created order, because they believe there is no natural order of things. To them, the natural order is an oppression. And those who believe in natural law are the villains. So therefore to be a man or woman, gay or straight is oppression and we should be able to craft ourselves as anything we want, an obvious dominant theme in the Wachowski brother’s bad philosophy, and the obvious justification for Lana’s own real world body mutilation to change his gender. I suspect it will be a theme of just about every movie they make since it is at least Lana’s religion.

The way they embody this belief of theirs in the story is quite ingenious though. The same lead characters play the different leads of each story. But more importantly, just about every character plays both a male and female character (with make up of course), and a different race as well in the different stories. So Blacks and Asians play whites and visa versa. They incarnate the plasticity of human identity into their very filming, in order to show that there is no difference between men and women, different races, or even good guy and bad guy, as characters are good guys in one story and bad guys in another. While this certainly holds true for race because race is itself an artificial human construct that is of no significance, it is also applied to things that truly are significantly different, such as gender. So we create ourselves according to this postmodern nonsense.

Now, of course, this is a mixed bag, because the question of freedom and the individual is clearly a powerful and beautiful theme to reveal oppression and totalitarian control of the collective. There is much truth to this story and much beauty in its revelation of the abuse of power and order and the collective. Unfortunately, the filmmakers provide an answer of equal monstrosity, namely the absoluteness of the individual without accountability. They don’t realize that their statement about all of us being connected from womb to tomb by forces beyond us is in fact a statement about the very natural order, boundaries, and collective reality they condemn. Either we are connected to a transcendant order or we are not. Make up your minds, Wachowskis.

It represents the perpetual quest of man to reject God’s order and God’s Law as boundary conditions for our betterment. It is the Edenic rebellion of personal autonomy from our Creator.

Man of Steel: Jesus Was an Ancient Alien?

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The previous Superman movie, what was it called? What was it about again? Eh, forgettable. Except that Bryan Singer clearly played up the religious connections of Superman with Jesus. He did miracles, resurrected from the dead, heard prayers, yada yada. In this one, Superman is age 33 at the time of the current story, and the director places him in front of a stain glass image of Christ in a scene in a church where he struggles with his identity and purpose. We all now know that Superman is a metaphor for Christ, and Man of Steel has a couple of religious elements in it, but with a twist. And that twist is the ancient aliens myth.

Thanks to Christopher Nolan, no doubt, this Superman finally has a richer character development and deeper moral struggle at the heart of his story. Superman is taught by his father to suppress his instinct to retaliate in order to mature in his character so he is capable of handling such great power (Shades of Spiderman! That’s okay. It’s an appropriate theme). Superman’s father doesn’t believe the world was ready for a man of such greatness who would change the world. But young Clark just wants to do good and protect people. He must hide himself in his secret identity because such great power out in the open will only be exploited by others for selfish ends.

The General Zod character is also much richer and a more genuine character in this film than the one we know of from years ago. He is not a mere “villain” who wants to pillage and destroy, he actually wants to save his people of Krypton, which makes him much more real of a character. The only problem is, he wants to do it by displacing us in-the-way earthlings through genocide. The moral dilemma of do you kill others to save your own? Great moral dilemma, which Nolan is always good at.

And a particular moment in the film was quite satisfying. As Superman is fighting with a female bad guy – I mean bad girl – from Krypton, she basically says that his weakness is that he has morality, which they do not have, and that is why he will lose, because evolution always wins. I believe that this is probably the single most widespread idea in the hearts and minds of criminal behavior in our era. Namely, that they justify their immorality by an appeal to what they were taught in their public schools and colleges: We are mere animals and evolution means there is no moral truth that transcends power and survival of the fittest. So if that is true, then there is no justification for moral restraint. Superman is the pinnacle argument against this evolutionary religious philosophy. Nice.

At one moment in Clark’s moral struggle, he has to decide if he should come out of hiding, and give himself over to Zod, or Zod will destroy the world. Then Clark says he doesn’t trust Zod, or for that matter, humans on earth. Clark confesses who he is to a priest who then tells him he has to take a leap of faith before he can find the trust. Didn’t make much sense to me. Too weak of a spiritual understanding to have much meaning. But Superman’s overwhelming motive comes from a love for people to protect them. And the moral of the film is spoken by Jor-el that he believes everyone has the potential to do good with their choices. Pretty bland generic theme without much grist. And if you ask me, it really doesn’t address the fallenness of mankind.

However, this film hosts THE BEST mano a mano superhero fights YET. It makes The Avengers look like, well, a mere comic book. The power and destruction of their battling carries a formidable and fascinating weight to them. One cannot help but draw a connection between Superman’s fighting and the need to fight terrorism in our era, Islamists who would overthrow everyone and kill them indiscriminately for the advancement of their own religious Sharia culture.

Another element that is appropriated in Man of Steel is Transhumanism. On the planet of Krypton, they have overcome natural birth and now create babies in artificial wombs to be genetically programmed to be workers or leaders or what have you (Shades of Brave New World!). The cool thing is that Jor-el, Superman’s father, has Kal-el (Superman’s name on Krypton) born naturally because he values freedom of the human will to decide for itself rather than being engineered by those in power. Quite the indictment of our Socialist mindset of social engineering and egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is the belief that every person should have equal outcomes, not merely freedom to pursue whatever one is best at, but the redistribution of power and wealth and ultimately personal identity through things like multiculturalism, feminism, victimization and other “ism” atrocities taught in modern universities. But egalitarianism is an immoral fraud perpetuated by the hegemony because those in power are the ones who are “more equal than others.” (Another Orwellian reference, Animal Farm). Excellence is dragged down to mediocrity, the health and wealth of ALL is ruined in the name of helping the poor, male and female differences are denied and males denigrated, and the only thing that grows is Big Government, NOT freedom, and all in the name of equality.

Jor-el uploads his consciousness into a computer, which creates another cool way to keep Russell Crowe in the story and communicating with Superman, which I’m all for keeping Russell Crowe in as long as possible. Unfortunately, this transhumanist notion of the reduction of human consciousness to physical digital properties of ‘I’s and ‘O’s is ultimately a materialist belief that humanity does not have a transcendant or spiritual component to us. Oh well, you can’t have it all.

Now for my complaint.

My number one mantra: Movies are not made in a cultural vacuum. And in particular, franchise movies that keep getting remade, often reflect the zeitgeist of the time in their fresh approach to the retold story. And one of the dominant memes of this era is the ancient alien mythology. I’m not talking about alien movies in general, we’ve always had those. I am talking about the belief that was first made popular by Von Daniken in the 1970s with Chariots of Gods, which then became more popular lately with Zechariah Sitchin, and the Ancient Aliens TV series on The Fairy Tale Channel – I mean the History Channel.

Ancient Alien mythology is the belief that religions originated because ancient man was visited by aliens from another planet, and because he was too ignorant and unscientific, he interpreted aliens as gods, and that’s where we got our notions of deity!  These “gods” exploited us to mine our planet for energy, and may come back. Lots of movies are built on this mythos, from Stargate, to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull to Cowboys and Aliens. It’s all quite – a religious belief – these days – even by an increasing number of scientists. And they say Christians believe in made up stories! Sometimes I really think our “educated” sophisticated “scientific” culture is the most religiously superstitious ever.

I’m not gonna say that this movie is a propaganda piece for ancient alien mythology but merely that it reflects that zeitgeist in it’s new depiction. The entire atmosphere of the movie was that of Close Encounters with ships that looked like they were taken out of Prometheus (another ancient aliens story that literally claimed Jesus was an extraterrestrial alien!). So it’s feel is more about aliens and the destruction of natural resources (another zeitgeist theme of our era) than it is a traditional superhero story. But of course superhero stories are reflections of our cultural mythos. Jor-El, Superman’s Krypton father says that when his son gets to earth and experiences his extraordinary powers, the people will “think him a god.” But of course, we know better. He’s just an alien.

When Zod first makes contact with earth to try to get Superman, we see UFO shots and then Zod broadcasts onto all electronic media: “YOU ARE NOT ALONE.” This of course is the meme made famous by Carl Sagan in Contact, which caught on with alien mythology. This meme represents the attempt of secular materialists to replace spiritual hunger with an alien mythology in order to satisfy the inner longing in man to be more than mere particles in the universe. If only we knew that there are aliens, then we would know we are not alone, and somehow feel better. Of course, any honest person would admit that this does not solve our loneliness one bit, because our longing is a spiritual longing. Two lonely beings does not solve loneliness, it merely doubles it. We know that if we are mere animals without moral transcendence in an evolving universe, then our entire existence has no meaning and is empty. THAT is the loneliness we feel. And finding other lonely aliens in need of redemption would never satisfy that inner emptiness. And that is why the Ancient Alien mythology is ultimately a dishonest “god” replacement that does not satisfy the inner need for spiritual redemption.

While it wouldn’t surprise me to see Christopher Nolan, the producer and story originator, to be challenging such secular notions, it would surprise me to see Zach Snyder doing so, since he completely derided religious belief in 300. So maybe this partnership reflects that tension in Man of Steel as well.

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.