Movies

The Devil Wears Prada

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Comedy. An unfashionable girl gets a job with the Queen of the fashion industry and is educated in the ways of outer beauty. A thoroughly enjoyable moral tale about fashion as a metaphor for life. Anne Hathaway is brilliant as the neophyte thrust in over her head and Meryl Streep is even more brilliant as the Devil herself. What I liked about this story is that it was pretty fair to the fashion industry, even while critiquing it. That is, the moral was of course that you should be yourself and not some fake façade of nouveau, but it gave the devil her due as well. That is, one scene was the most brilliant in the film is where Ann chuckles at the pettiness and apparent irrelvence of the designer’s design choices. Meryl stops and turns it back on her by describing to Anne, the origins and development of the poor taste turquoise blue in the sweater Anne is wearing, all the way up to the point where Anne buys it in a half price bin, thinking she is making her own choice, without being aware that the entire fashion industry dictated her options to her right down to what she is wearing. It was one of those moments where you say the villain is not all that wrong, though she may be an extreme. Favorite line in the movie, Anne questions Meryl about the legitimacy of the fashion world, and Meryl says to her, “Don’t be ridiculous, everyone wants to be us.” There is a particularly poignant punch to that line that hit me about our culture. That is the entire world of advertising/marketing/fashion simply works because everyone DOES want to be the impossible unattainable icon. Fashion is the deity of perfection which we all desire or are drawn to, whether we know it or not.

What I did not like about the movie is that a triangle is set up between Anne and her current boyfriend, a nobody nothing student of some kind, and a writer of the fashion world that is hitting on Anne. Well, the boyfriend is set up as the guy who represents conviction and the world she left but should have stayed with and the fashion writer represents the false world of temptation into emptiness. And yet, I thought the boyfriend as a loser and undesirable non-convictional man. So, I think their moral was not quite incarnate in that character as depicted. Another failing I think is that Anne sleeps with the fashion guy and then leaves him for the boyfriend, as if that liason did not affect her spirit at all. This was dishonest. Something that The Breakup storytellers were more observant about. In the Breakup, they break up but never sleep with anyone else because the storytellers realize that that changes you in a permanent way and alters the hope for true reconciliation. Not that reconciliation is impossible, but surely that the relationship loses the true unity that it had. Sex is sacramental. It changes you and your relationships forever. It takes a piece of you and loses it to another person. To deny that is dishonest.

Little Miss Sunshine

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Quirky Comedy. A family of dysfunctional misfits takes a road trip to bring their little daughter to a beauty pageant for children. This was a fascinating story to me with fascinating characters, and a touching theme about the value of family love and acceptance in the midst of imperfection. Alan Arkin as the 60s hippie grandfather who cusses too much, Greg Kinnear as the Success motivational teacher who is a loser, the brother who reads Nietzsche and hates everyone and takes a vow of silence. Steve Carrell as the gay professor of Proust who tried to commit suicide because of unrequited lust. Toni Collette as the mother and a newcomer as Olive, the little girl who appears to be the only sane one in the family.

What I liked about this film was it’s sense of reality, that none of us are perfect and that love and human connection can occur even within messed up families. More importantly, that perhaps the “functionality” of the “normal world” is maybe not so right or even desirable after all. When they all get to the pageant, it’s a circus of Jon Bene Ramses, strutting their little 6-9 year olds around like Miss America, looking way too adult for their age, and being coaxed to be a commodity of commercial success rather than just being little girls and enjoying life and family. If this is normal life, you can keep it. One of the themes is about how each of us is special and important, even with our quirky dysfunction or problems. At the pageant, Olive is about to be totally humiliated when she does her little dance because the family realizes that all the other girls have professional routines and they know Olive just doesn’t match up to them. So, when Olive starts to be rejected at her dance, the whole family joins her on stage dancing like fools to diffuse and even absorb her rejection. It’s really quite a moving moment of unity within this motley crew called family, and shows their concern for her more than the other parents who have culled their little girls to be things of entertainment.

What I did not like about it is that the dance that Olive had learned was from her grandfather, who was a dirty old man. So Olive does a strip dance. Okay, she has a sequined little outfit underneath, so it is not a pedophile thing, but the point is that it is a truly immoral thing and NOT a worthy thing to support in the little girl. This element sullied the moral of family support. We simply should not support such impropriety in little girls, it will destroy them if we do. Also, another scene tries to create a moment of family unity, when the father, who is obsessed with being a winner and not a loser, challenges Olive not to eat her ice cream because it makes people fat and fat people are losers, or more precisely, the Miss Americas that she idolizes do not eat ice cream, so if she wants to become a winner like them, then she shouldn’t. The other family members mock and deride the dad as insensitive and they all take a spoonful of ice cream to get her to take some as well. Later, the little girl asks a Miss America if she likes ice cream and she says, yes! The point here is that I think the filmmakers intended this to be a moral statement about the obsessive preoccupation with health as destructive on children’s psyches. But I have a completely different moral compass that says that the epidemic of obesity in children today – and it is an epidemic – is caused precisely by this politically correct rejection of guilt and elevation of the impulses. After all, it’s what all addicts do to each other, comfort each other in their problem. The father was actually right and was in the better interest of the child. She was already chubby, which indicated that she was already eating TOO MUCH CRAP (read: SUGAR). So, yes, commodification of women is wrong, but so is psychobabble about making children feel good and giving them whatever they want instead of teaching them discipline and giving them what they need.

Click

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Romantic Comedy. A family man discovers a magical “universal remote” that allows him to fast forward through undesirable parts of his life. But tragedy strikes when the remote gets stuck and he can’t stop it from fast forwarding all the way to his old age. This is a brilliant touching story that made me deeply consider my own life and the things that I neglect now that I will regret at the end of life. I absolutely love these movies that do this to me. They take you to face death so you reevaluate what you are doing with your life. Too crude for kids, but some very poignant truths about the simply profundity of smelling the roses of life and making family important in your life choices.

Superman Returns

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Comic Book Action. Superman returns to earth after a five year absence of soul searching and psychoanalysis. “I have sent you, my only son,” “The son becomes the father and the father, the son.” With these words, Jor-El, an obvious derivative of a name for God in Hebrew (“El”), casts this new installment of the Superman franchise into its original religious mythical status. Singer, in an attempt to bring another unique twist to the comic book saga, does what is original in our secularized society, but is actually old hat to us religious people. He emphasizes the deity aspect of the caped crusader (and for that matter, all superheroes). One character likens the Superman situation to Prometheus and the gods. To which, Lex Luthor, the villain responds, “The gods are selfish beings, who don’t share their powers with mankind.” Thus expressing the hubris of all humanity alienated in sin from their Creator.

Lois Lane gets a Nobel Peace Prize for her article “Why the world doesn’t need Superman,” thus illuminating the real life tragedy that Nobel Peace Prizes are more about reflecting the hegemony of political power than promoting actual Peace. Oh, kinda like Yassir Arrafat getting a Peace Prize, maybe. In one particularly powerful moment of the film, Superman flies up into the stratosphere and he hears the cacophony of billions of people in need of his saving powers. He then brings Lois Lane up there (How she is able to breathe at this altitude, Superman only knows) to show her his response to her claim that “the world doesn’t need a savior and neither do I.” He tells her, “Everyday, I hear people crying for one.” This was particularly moving to me because I have thought of this “God’s-eye view of the world of pain and evil many times, and this scene captured it so beautifully.

There is also a resurrection scene where Superman is dying in the hospital bed after being infected with Kryptonite. But then, they go to the room to see how he is doing, and alas! The stone is rolled away and the body is gone! Or rather, the window is open and Superman has flown away.

Unfortunately, regardless of some of this beautiful religious correlation, I think that the Savior mythology is more akin to The Da Vinci Code than the New Testament. This is more a Gnostic Jesus of Joseph Campbell than a Hebrew one of the Four Gospels. Because, here, Superman fathers a child with his “Mary Magdalene,” Lois, just as he was fathered (the son becomes the father), who of course, has superpowers, thus affirming a mythology of Christ as an office that is appropriated by a succession of avatars (Much like the Mask of Zoro handed on to the next generation), than an individual who is the culmination of all history and hope.
But I still think it’s better than a secularized Superman.

The Break Up

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Romantic Comedy. A live-in couple learn how hard it is to break up when they refuse to leave the condo they both share. This is a very insightful comedy that captures the differences between men and women with a spot on brilliance. The moral of the story is the growth of Vince Vaughn’s character into a responsible male who turns from a selfish orientation into a selfless person who is as concerned about other’s good as his own. His best friend tells Vince at the self revelation that everyone knows that Vince controls everything and only does what he wants to do and doesn’t care what others want. Vince’s moral transformation is highlighted when he goes into the office all night to do the paperwork he was responsible for but never did for his co-owner of his company. I particularly found the ending of this movie to be very impacting in that when Vince does the right thing and changes, he DOES NOT get the girl back, because she has already changed and it is too late. People do change in these things and you can do damage to them that is real. But a last little denouement shows them meeting a year later and Vince is a different man, and maybe, just maybe they might see each other again. So, it shows the hope without the neat and clean resolution. I liked that. It showed that maturity doesn’t always result in getting what you want, but it is worth it anyway.

The major gripe I have with the movie is the complete assumed casualness of living in sin that it takes in its story. Sadly, this is a reality in today’s world, and I will be considered an archaic Neanderthal for even considering that sex before marriage is morally unacceptable and detrimental to relationships. So sue me, I’m not a modernist and you are. But the true tragedy is the attempt of people to live out of wedlock and try to attain all the blessings of marriage without the responsibility and commitment. Now that would be a worthy story indeed.

The Omen

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Horror. An American Ambassador in Europe discovers that he is raising the Antichrist as his son. Okay, first off, the only thing I really liked about this was Liev Schreiber, but he’s no Gregory Peck. And Julia Stiles is certainly no Lee Remick, in fact Julia was terrible in this movie. This movie was a scene for scene remake of the 30 year old original. I will rent the 30 year version again and again. I will never see this remake again. The old one is scarier, the death scenes are better, the kid is scarier. In this one, he is just cute. A cute Antichrist. I guess one might argue that is the most devilish to appear to be an angel of light, but it don’t work for me. Every thing about the original is better so why bother seeing this one. My first response was that this is the Christian answer to the Da Vinci Code. It’s a studio movie conspiracy theory that elevates the Bible as true, even though I don’t believe in the eschatology of it. But after thinking about it more, I really think that the eschatology, the Dispensationalism whose entire end times scenario is now enshrined in that glorious piece of art and theological acumen, Left Behind, is possibly more destructive than the Da Vinci Code. Why? Because it has created a claim that the Bible is true because all this stuff is supposed to happen, especially within our generation, but it is not happening, and it will never happen because the book of Revelation was a cryptic prophecy that was fulfilled already in the first century. Anyway, so now Christians are awaiting the great rapture to take them all away to avoid pain and suffering, and it simply isn’t going to happen. And the longer it continues to not happen, the more unreliable the Bible will appear to unbelievers, not because the Bible is actually unreliable, but because certain silly escapist Christian interpretations set themselves up as the only true interpretations and continue to make predictions, claim that their homespun predictions correspond to the Bible, as they have for over 30 years, and those predictions continue to fail to happen. Give it up, people. Read Last Days Madness by Gary DeMar, I’m tellin’ ya. You won’t regret it. It will set your eschatology straight.

The DaVinci Code

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Thriller. A cryptologist and a symbologist stumble upon a conspiracy by nefarious Catholics to cover up an alleged secret that God is a woman and Christians are cold blooded murderers who want to keep people from having fun, especially women.

All right, here’s the scoop. I did some research and found out that the director of the movie, Ron Howard, the writer, Akiva Goldsman, and the producer, Brian Grazer are all part of a vast conspiracy called “I IN GAME,” which just happens to be an anagram of “Imagine” Entertainment. Check it out for yourself. Really. Religious scholars say that this secret order is an atheist bloodline of soldiers who have a long line of connections and aberrations through history going back to the Ku Klux Klan, White Supremacists, the Nazis, slave holders in the antebellum South, Hezbollah and Al Queda, as well as all the way back to the Baal worshippers of ancient Canaan, who sacrificed their children in the fire. And it’s all right there in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels. Somewhere in the Tripartate Tractate or the Trimorphic Protenoia, and other serious sounding scroll titles.

There are some who believe that at the same time as he was playing 6 year old Opie Taylor on TV, Ron Howard may have had a part in the assassination of JFK—most likely as a messenger boy for the mafia, CIA and Cubans Against Castro, though some believe he may have actually been the unseen trigger man in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There is a “Hanks” family tree that goes back to some slaveholders before the Civil War who beat their slaves and raped them.

“I In Game” is a phrase that means, “I am in the game of world conquest.” It seeks to achieve this by spreading hatred for Christians so that people will rise up and imprison them and create a new Colloseum to throw religious believers to the lions, jut like Nero did in the First Century. Which is not the least bit ironic since Goldman’s Jewish ancestors did that very thing to Christians, by betraying them to the Romans. It’s all true and I found it out from scholarly respected books like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Some documents recently discovered show that Howard, Goldsman, and Grazer, and even Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen have been members of this organization for many years, and the fact that there is no documentation to prove it only shows how secret they are. Even though both Howard and Hanks appear to have good marriages, it is entirely possible that they actually beat their wives regularly and their entire family covers it up. If you doubt this, just ask them, “have you stopped beating your wife?” and see what answer they give. Besides, he has worked very closely with Russell Crowe on A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, who has been arrested for his violent behavior.

But the oldest secret Academy that may be connected to Dan Brown himself (the original author of The Da Vinci Code) is one uncovered by journalist Bill Federer (He writes about it on WorldNetDaily.com under the article “Dan Brown and the “Voltaire Code.”). He reveals that the famous God-hater Voltaire started this secret academy around 1728. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795-1817 gave an address in New Haven on July 4, 1798 wherein he uncovered this conspiracy of “Voltaire’s Code.” His address is available in Encyclopedia Britannica’s Annals of American, Vol. 4. In it he exposes Voltaire’s plans to “fabricate books of all kinds against Christianity, especially such as excite doubt and generate contempt and derision.” Dwight reveals the astonishing fact that these false books that Voltaire proposed “were formed, altered, forged, imputed as posthumous to deceased writers of reputation and sent abroad with the weight of their names.” The Gospel of Mary Magdalene? The Gospel of Judas? Obviously counterfeits imputed with false authority in order to attack Christianity. Now, The Da Vinci Code, another in a long line of such conspiracy propaganda.

Ron Howard, as most Enquiring minds already know (reported trustworthily on the internet, Dec. 6, 2001) left his kid behind at a donut shop. What they didn’t tell you was the rumors that he may have been wanting to get rid of this child so he can divorce his wife and marry a mistress. This may be just legend, but it fits the picture perfectly, doesn’t it? Grazer of course, most likely has a string of venereal diseased “girlfriends,” but some reporters disagree. According to some sources who remain unnamed and therefore unverifiable, Ian McKellen once met a guy at a Hollywood event that was an alleged member of a militant gay group that has burned down churches and may have been the financing source of the Roman Catholic circle of predatory homosexual priests. The goal: to topple the Roman Catholic Church by infiltrating it with its secret members.

Now wait, you tell me. This is hate-filled racist propaganda, lies, legends and rumors. Oh, you mean like saying that the essence of Christianity is oppression, misogyny, lies, murder, rape and power? You mean like saying as Langdon does that wherever the “one true God” has been preached, “There has been killing in his name,” as if the heart of monotheism is murder? So, all of a sudden now, history needs to be verified beyond conspiracy theorizing and bigotry? What’s sauce for the goose of Da Vinci Code is sauce for the gander of I IN GAME. I’ll just say what Dan Brown says—my story here is only fiction. But every detail is based on facts. Try to nail me down on that one. But isn’t it slander to attack someone’s character like that when it is not true? Answer: Slander is only acceptable when it is against Christianity. Hate is only allowed against Catholics, Evangelicals and Republicans. Intolerance is only acceptable against the politically incorrect. I’ll just answer with the wise words of Hanks’ character, Langdon, “The only thing that matters is what you believe.” So if I believe it, who cares if it isn’t true. It’s true for me.
So, now you know how it feels.

G.K. Chesterton once allegedly said, “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything.”
And those same conspiracy theorists gripe that Christians believe in fairy tales? Sheesh.
p.s. the best line in the film, uttered by Teabing: “You can’t trust the French.”

Mission Impossible 3

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Action Adventure. Tom Cruise must rescue his new wife from the clutches of an evil criminal who wants some secret weapon that Cruise has. Well, in terms of action, it delivers, but so what. Most of these James Bond movies have a cliché criminal who wants to take over the world with some elaborate plot. This one, you don’t even know what it is about. The McGuffin that Cruise is trying to retrieve has some biohazard markings on it, but we never know what it is. All we find out is the conspiracy theorizing that an Executive branch representative is trying to sell the biohazard thing, which is basically a WMD to some country that will then allow the US to invade it in the name of WMDs and establish democracy, because “that’s what we do best,” the Judas betrayer says. So this is a not-so-subtle political agenda by the storytellers that the US is empire building in the name of democracy. Anyway, it had some good stuff about courage and loyalty and trust under high pressure. But ultimately forgettable to me because it lacked the real humanity that can make an action movie so much more.

The Lost City

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Period Romantic Epic. A wealthy family in the midst of the Castro Communist revolution of 1958 Cuba. And Andy Garcia, the filmmaker, shows the truth of Communism. Different sons of the family go different ways when Revolution foments in the Batista regime. Andy and his father and uncle believe in democracy, peaceful justice. Another brother joins the revolution and we see the cruelty and evil of it as the “government” takes over private property in the name of “the people” and shuts down Andy’s night club and free expression. It’s a powerful juxtaposition of two worldviews one free and the other cruelty in the name of the people. Che Guevera is portrayed accurately as a murderous slimeball henchman of Castro, spouting the true Communist ideal, “the ends justifies the means.”

Anyway, a wonderfully tragic and heart ripping love story occurs between Andy and his brother’s widow, who fall in love with each other. But unfortunately, the widow falls for the revolution and chooses it over fleeing to America with Andy because it makes her feel good to be a part of something bigger than herself, a cause. But there is nothing bigger than us and our love, Andy tells her. Well, this was not quite accurate because Andy does in fact believe in freedom more than love because he moves to America without her, even though they both love each other deeply. This was a very powerful powerful truth that there is something higher than human love, but it ain’t the collective alone, it’s FREEDOM. I would have liked to hear more of this, but Andy’s actions show it clear enough. Freedom is more valuable than even love. In fact, without freedom you cannot have true love. To see this was very unusual because most movies place the love of two people to be the highest value that trivializes beliefs and worldviews. But the fact is that freedom and control, democracy and communism, democracy and revolution cannot coexist. One must die for the other to live. And that is expressed brilliantly in the story. Thank you Mr. Garcia for a story of truth, beauty, freedom, love and higher causes that rings deeply true to the core.

Last Holiday

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Romantic Comedy. Queen Latifah, a retail clerk, discovers she has 3 weeks to live, so she quits her job, gets all her money and blows it on a rich experience in a beautiful hotel across the world. But while doing that, she affects the lives of the rich around her because a person who is acutely aware of their mortality tends to care more about the things that are worth caring about: life, people, little pleasures, and the beauty all around us. Her new appreciation of life draws others around her like lost disciples who want to know her secret. This was a very wonderful story that really made me think about my own life and about appreciating life more and stopping to smell the roses before it’s too late. And it even had a positive Christian spiritual side to it, as Latifah prays to God, or really, more like Job, complains to God throughout the film. Her honest struggle with God made it that much more rich in spiritual appreciation.