Movies

The Finest Hours: A Movie of Hope, Courage and Self-Sacrifice That Carries You Away

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OPENS THIS FRIDAY, JAN. 29

The 1952 true story of the most amazing small boat rescue in history. Two separate oil tankers break in half in the midst of a raging winter storm off the coast of Massachusetts. This is the story of the amazing captain and his crew who brave the crushing elements and impossible odds to save 32 crew members of one of those tankers. And on a boat that could only carry 20.

When I saw The Perfect Storm, I thought I had seen the true power of the sea and man against the elements.

Uh uh.

The Finest Hours blows that out of the water. It was a riveting adrenaline fest of the limits of courage and self-sacrifice that humanity can attain.

It’s a simple search and rescue story of impossible odds, but it is that simplicity that makes it so profoundly riveting. I won’t tell you what the obstacles were. That would spoil it. Suffice it to say that every obstacle that they encountered just made me open my mouth in wonder and say, “No way. There’s no way they’ll get through it.” Which is pretty dang good, considering you know the basic outcome going into the movie. That’s good storytelling.

And most of it really happened. Which makes it all the more amazing. But listen to this about the faith of the lead character… Continue reading →

OSCAR WATCH • Mad Max: Fury Road – Feminist Heroine and Her Dog Max Fight the Evil Patriarchy

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Post-apocalyptic action. Mad Max, a loner in a desert world of male gangs, cars, and water shortage is held captive by an evil dictator. When one of the dictator’s chief drivers, Imperator Furiosa, turns against him and escapes with female sex slaves, Max is pulled into the ride of his life – or death.

Mad Max Reboot with a Gender Transformation

Actually, the logline isn’t really accurate, cause it makes it seem like it’s Max’s story. But it isn’t. It’s Furiosa’s story. She is the real hero of the piece. Which is interesting, since Max, made famous by Mel Gibson (and made famous Mel Gibson), has been the star of the series of post-apocalyptic macho mayhem from the beginning. It looks like this testosterone franchise just got itself castrated with a feminist subversion, a sign of the real war — on boys.

It should have been called: Imperator Furiosa and Her Dog Max.

I gotta hand it to Miller, the filmmaker, it is a brilliant tactic of social commentary to make an action movie that subverts the genre by giving the viewer what they want, but twisting it into an indictment against them. A kinder gentler misandry.

I wrote about the feminist action silliness of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Well, that was NOTHING, compared to this. Read on… Continue reading →

OSCAR WATCH • Bridge of Spies: A Conspiracy of Boredom

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Bridge of Lies

Espionage legal yawner, I mean thriller. A common lawyer practicing insurance law is chosen by the U.S. government to defend a Communist spy during the Cold War. Then he is becomes the negotiator to trade that spy for the American pilot shot down in the U2 plane, Gary Powers.

I tried to watch this film. I really tried. I got half way through and just stopped out of sheer boredom. I think Spielberg must have been trying to make an old 1950s spy movie, complete with long boring shots of people walking to meetings and away from meetings, long drawn out scenes of talkie talking, and negotiations that are supposed to be interesting but aren’t. How they used to edit back in the 50s. It was 30 minutes too loooooong.

An Oscar nomination for best picture? What were they thinking?

And then I realized why it was. Modern Hollywood has a love affair with depicting Communist artists as victims, so they LOVE to award that sycophancy.

You can see Spielberg building a case for “due process” by trying to show that even Communist spies deserve a defense. Fair enough. But it’s always Communists. Let’s protect Communists, they’re really just a Boogeyman of the Right, anyway, right? I can’t wait to see a movie where they defend the right of Christian bakers and wedding photographers to due process. Oh, wait, that’s the real danger in America, Christian do gooders, not murderous Communists and Islamists. THEY don’t deserve due process.

I won’t be holding my breath for THAT movie.

And then he depicts all the Americans as wanting to skirt law because of their hard heartedness toward that poor little old Communist man who likes to paint pictures. He’s so sweet and gentle. Oh, he’s an artist too! The persecuted artists in the dark underbelly of 1950s America! While the heroic Everyman, named Donovan, played by heroic Everyman actor Tom Hanks (Although I can’t say I see him that way anymore) blunders his way through a world of “American Red Scare paranoia.” His neighbors become paranoid of him for defending a Commie. His son comes home paranoid, preparing for an atomic blast at home. All the terrible Paranoia! This is supposed to appear to be absurd to our modern eyes since we know it never happened. But the real truth is that it WAS a possibility and within their context, it was not outrageous or paranoid. The fact that it didn’t happen does NOT mean it could never have happened. It was a real possibility.

Communist denial in Hollywood is pandemic. I don’t think I have the stomach to watch Trumbo and the hero they will no doubt make out of that Communist traitor to America. Because after all, he was a poor little old Communist Artist.

This is just more of the moral equivalency of Spielberg that we got with Munich, where the Israelis were portrayed as morally equivalent terrorists for exacting justice on Palestinian terrorists.

But I sat back down and suffered through the rest of Bridge of Spies, because of my patriotic duty.

And though it was still boring, there were a few qualifying elements that countered the moral equivalency of the story. I must be fair, since I’m not a Hollywood Communist artist. First, there is an eerie moment near the end where Hanks is riding a train in East Berlin (The Communist side). He sees a group of people running to the Berlin Wall and trying to climb over to the West Side to freedom. He sees them all get shot by East Berlin guards. Then at the very end, when Donovan is home in America, he’s riding a train again. This time he sees a bunch of kids running to a fence and climbing it in their backyard. A brilliant counter image of freedom versus the captivity of Communism. So there IS a difference between the two worlds. They are not ultimately equivalent. I wonder if that was the Coen Brothers’ writing leaking through.

On the other hand, the U.S. government is portrayed as not caring about its own citizens. Donovan uncovers the opportunity to add another hostage to the negotiations, a stupid American student studying Marxist economics in Berlin. The US government guy handling the deal tells Donovan about 20 times that they don’t care about the student, just the pilot, forget the student, we don’t want him, leave him there, it’s his problem, we don’t care about American citizens, only our pilot, forget about him (we get the point, Steven). The irony is that the government guy was right. An American soldier POW is NOT the equivalent representative of the United States as a stupid American who deliberately hides out in enemy territory during war. Sorry, they ain’t the same.

On the other hand, the treatment of the American prisoner Gary Powers in Cuba was not portrayed as equivalent to the treatment of the Russian spy in America. Spielberg did show Powers being manhandled for information (child’s play compared to today), while the Russian was questioned humanely in America.

Okay, so I’ll grant it’s a somewhat nuanced moral equivalency.

And there is the fact that Donovan went on to negotiate the release of 9000 captives from Castro’s Cuba. So it was amazing that this average American guy got caught up in changing the world for the better.

Spielberg has made a legacy of brilliant storytelling by focusing on the ordinary common man who becomes a hero, and this is no exception. I can’t fault him for that.

But I can fault him for boredom.

If you want to see the reality of Communist spies in America during the Cold War, I highly recommend watching the Series, The Americans. It’s fantastic. it’s truthful.

And it’s not boring, I promise.

DragonKing6

OSCAR WATCH • The Big Short: A Big Racist Lie

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Big Short

The “true” story of the housing bubble financial crisis of 2008, and how some financial investors saw it coming and sought to make money on it by doing something unheard of at the time: betting on the complete failure of mortgages instead of their success. This is called short selling.

The Big Short is a star studded cast of stellar performances, led by Christian Bale as the autistic type nerd investment broker who computed the numbers and was apparently the first to figure out that the housing mortgage market was going to crash. So he did his job, he figured out a way to make money if you knew something was going to crash, is to sell short, or bet against its success. Everyone thought he was crazy and thus a fascinating dramatic story with Oscar performances.

Look, the whole shebang is one big confusing mess for us normal people to follow and understand. There are a multitude of technical details of investing and finance that make the average person’s eyes glaze over trying to understand. One would think that such a movie about the petty details of finance would make for a boring movie.

And one would be wrong.

In the hands of the storytellers, The Big Short is a fascinating multidimensional tale that does a great job of simplifying the issues and even explaining them to the audience in creative ways to follow the emotional trail of what was going on. It’s kind of like Shakespeare. You watch it and you can barely understand what is going on as they explain it, but you’re mostly picking up the emotional storyline, without knowing fully what is being said. But that’s okay, cause you follow the drama with what little you can hold onto.

The writer director, Adam McKay, paints a masterful big picture that incarnates the notion of selling short even within the editing itself, where many scenes are cut away in the middle of sentences, giving the viewer the uncomfortable feeling of being cut short from what you were watching (loved that). He breaks the fourth wall every once in a while to explain the complex financial issues, with celebrities talking to the camera using metaphors. Like Anthony Bourdain in a kitchen describing the financial mess like hiding bad fish in a stew. It’s all quite brilliant and entertaining. Sometimes, we see what is happening on the screen and a character breaks aside to explain to us what is really happening that we don’t see, or how the real events were somewhat different from what we are seeing because they had to make it more entertaining for the movie. The conceit is brilliant and it works.

McKay made an otherwise complex tedious boring financial situation a fascinating clever simplified explanation for just long enough to follow the money.

The heart of the story is to show how banks and Wall Street are greedy and corrupt and how they exploited the regulatory system and the disadvantages of others in such a way that it crashed the system and brought on the massive financial crisis of 2008, ruining many Americans’ lives.

And it’s a big fat lie.

Oh, I don’t mean a factual Clinton type lie, as in “I did not violate the Espionage Act by sending classified emails through my private server.” But a contextual lie, a tricky half-truth lie. You know, the kind where everything you say is technically true, but ultimately a lie, because by leaving out the most important other half of the truth, you end up creating a false impression of what really happened. It’s manipulating true facts to create a falsehood.

Yes, Big Banks, and Big Business, and Wall Street were greedy and exploited the system, but the fact that was left out that changes everything was where it all originated. And that was in the Big Government regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led by Democrat Barney Frank, that forced those banks to give mortgage loans to poor minorities they knew could not pay them back. That’s where it all started, and that was completely left out of the movie. The banks were forced by the government to create the bubble that would ultimately burst. And all of it was done in the name of left wing so-called racial equality. It was supported by Clinton, Bush and Barak Obama.  (UPDATED. It was not Dodd-Frank, but Barney Frank led legislation before 2007.)

Here is the part they left out: Government hacks look at the fact that some minorities are not able to pay for homes with the same representation as others. Rather than looking at the moral value system that created and reinforces that poverty within those communities, they immediately blame the poverty on racism. They then marshal laws to force those banks to give more loans to unqualified poor and minorities in the name of “social justice” (a code word for fascism). But since they don’t address the moral values, the unqualified, mostly minority, debtors fail in their responsibility and are hurt or ruined by the policy. It’s racism, plain and simple. Racism is favorable or unfavorable prejudice based on race. It is perpetuating the problem instead of fixing it.

Ironically, one of the characters says in the film, “They will blame the crisis on immigrants and poor people, like they always do.” WTF?

Yet in the film, when it is describing the discovery of the problems, there is no reference to the fact that it was government enforcing racist policy that created the bubble to begin with. The Barney Frank led regulations are never mentioned in this film. They may have been alluded to, but I didn’t catch it, and I didn’t hear any explicit mention. It’s like the government only appeared at the end of the movie instead of the beginning.

One character speaks of the irresponsible tell tale signs of the crash, as if they are arbitrary occurrences without reference to why: Rock bottom FICO scores, no income verification, adjustable rates and collateralized debt obligation. But those were all allowed because the government forced the banks to ignore those very qualifiers in order to get more unqualified poor minorities to get loans they knew they could not pay back.

That wasn’t private greed that started that, it was big government left wing racist policy. The government sold poor minorities short and sent them to their financial doom in the name of helping them.

In the beginning of the film, there is a scene that paints the picture as if this whole bundling of bad mortgages with good mortgages was created out of thin air as a scheme to make money by banks or lenders. Yet, it completely ignores the fact that the banks and lenders were all forced by government regulation to take on those bad mortgages. I am certainly not excusing the greed of those who did so, but the other side of the coin is that unjust government regulation forced them to come up with ways to make money within the parameters of unjust law that created the bubble.

Here is a short article by smart financial dude, Michael Barone, that explains some of this left out truth, and the tragic reality that they are doing it all over again: Government Created the Housing Bubble Financial Crisis and Could Be Doing So Again.

Here is another great short article close to the actual crisis by Walter Williams reviewing Thomas Sowell’s book on the Housing Boom and Bust. If you don’t like reading and want to see a video watch Sowell explain it here. Now, I want you to be aware that both Williams and Sowell are black economists. And since public debate is now dominated by the Obama rules of political discourse, if you disagree with Williams and Sowell, you are a racist. 🙂

Just kidding. But the point is made that the real origin of the financial crisis was the racists who used the race card to short truth and justice, then shifted the blame to the greedy Big Business monsters who exploited that original crime. Affirmative action is racist and hurts minorities and the poor.

And that’s the Big Truth about Big Government left out of The Big Short.

DragonKing7

13 Hours: THIS is What Difference it Makes.

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13-hours-movie-posterCombat Action. The true story from the perspective of the military contractors who rescued Americans in the terrorist attacks on the American embassy and CIA facility in Benghazi on 9/11 2012.

Woah. Michael Bay, you are forgiven of Transformers. In fact, all Michael Bay haters will have to stand down and admit that this phenomenal action movie is a well-told and entertaining story of American valor. No vain empty action, this is rich and full heroism. I think Bay is probably the only one who could get this movie made because no one can accuse him of political agenda in his filmmaking. He makes big action, and this is big action with a deep and human twist.

I guess other Hollywood directors couldn’t find a way to spin the story to make it George Bush’s fault.

13 Hours captures not only the fighting spirit of the warriors who stand for American values in a world of external totalitarianism and internal political corruption, but the human heart of those men, not perfect, but human, whose families and children also sacrifice for our safety. The moments we see of these hardened soldiers talking to their families over Skype are both enlightening and heartwarming. We see the goodness behind these bad asses. The entire story, they seek to do what is right even though they had an impossible task of discerning friend from foe, because of the chaos around them (a metaphor for the politics of the region). They are not heartless inhuman fighting machines, they are men with families who try their best to do what is right and suffer for their sacrifice. Yeah, sure they chose to do it. But they chose to do it, as one of the characters says, “To give myself something bigger to believe in.” Then he sadly admits the revelation of this decade, “That something bigger is gone now.” That is understated poetic indictment. Great writing.

The filmmakers, along with the original authors of the book, have said that they wanted to make an apolitical movie about what happened on the ground. A story of the heroism and courage of those 5 men and assorted others who helped them. It is true. This is as apolitical as you can get. And considering that most of Hollywood is rooting for Hillary Clinton, I can’t imagine a major studio willing to make a movie that revealed her political crimes that would deep six her. We’ll have to wait for a Republican administration for them to do that.

I admit, sometimes the truth gets through, and I want to be the first to trumpet that when it happens. Thank you, Paramount. You told some truth with 13 Hours. (for all those cynics who didn’t like me pointing out that they F’ed up with Noah, see? I don’t hold grudges. I’ll support you if you tell the truth.)

So the storytellers kept out any references to what was going on in the Obama administration and State Department in order to be apolitical. Ah, but herein lies the most subtle and brilliant subversion of all. By not showing what was going on in the administration, it reinforced the image of complete and utter silence and lack of response. They were nowhere to be found. They left these people to die. The fact that the movie shows complete silence on the part of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, and any of their inferiors when it came to the cries for help is of course the most morally damning of all. That ain’t political, folks, that’s moral.

We see that Chris Stevens and the CIA chief kept calling for help, any kind of help. F-16s 45 minutes away, rescue 20 minutes away, A Blackhawk helicopter, even a lousy flyover, dammit. But all we see in response from Obama and Clinton is silence. We don’t even hear their names. Apolitical in a way because no one is referenced. But in a way, a moral indictment of the worst kind. Even to the very end of the story, where those remaining three heroes were the last to be flown out of the country, even THEN, it was a Libyan transport plane. “Still no Americans” to help them. And which Secretary of State is responsible for that heartless cruelty?

One brief statement in the film tells us that POTUS was briefed, and then we hear that State thinks it was Al-Sharia. We see that it is an orchestrated terrorist strike on the ground, yet we see the soldiers hear that the State Department told the public it was “protests about an anti-Islamic film.” Now, with Clinton’s criminal felonious emails uncovered, we know that she knew it was terror, and she deliberately denied it as terror in order to secure the second election of Obama.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton let those people alone to die.

Madamn Secretary, THAT is what the hell difference it makes.

Godawa’s Quibble Corner

There was one small element that I thought had big implications and worked against the theme of transcendence in the film, that belief in something bigger than ourselves. One of the soldiers reads a book by mythologist Joseph Campbell and quotes the phrase which becomes a tagline repeated in the story with thematic intent. “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.” Though this may seem to the storytellers to be profound wisdom that illustrates the grandeur of the human spirit, it actually undercuts any transcendence that this great story could have had. That statement illustrated Campbell’s relativistic worldview of immanence that actually denies transcendent purpose, destroys the human spirit while promising greatness within. Because you see, it rejects all transcendence of deity, all “higher purpose” or “something bigger than ourselves,” and replaces it with ourselves as our own gods, our own source of good and evil (“heaven and hell”). Hey, kinda sounds like the Serpent in the Garden, don’t ya think? (“You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”). This is the problem with Hollywood storytellers who seek transcendence for their stories, because they know in their souls there must be, but because they don’t believe in God, they create a substitute in humanity itself. Famous mythologists like Campbell aid the deception with their influence on the storytelling community, and you get that hunger for transcendence with an unsatisfactory tripe to fill that hunger.

But don’t let that ruin the movie for you. If you want to see the truth that the news media is hiding in order to help elect Hillary Clinton, then you must go see this movie. And even if you don’t like the truth, then see it cause it’s a kick ass action flick with real heart and soul. The best of all worlds.

Oscar Watch • The Hateful Eight: A Love Affair with Hate, Racism and Misogyny?

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Western Mystery Thriller. In the post Civil War period, an infamous bounty hunter, bringing a female criminal to a town for hanging, stays at an outpost during a storm. While there, he encounters a group of dubious characters who will complicate his quest.

Watching a Tarantino movie is watching a 90 minute film stretched out to almost 3 insufferable hours of long rambling scenes with trivial dialogue that should have been cut in half. It was a clever trick in the long table scene of Reservoir Dogs, but now it seems like its every scene in every movie of his.

Along with gratuitous racism, excessive and irrelevant profanity (His romance with the N-word continues with this film), and an erotic fetish for violence.

I watch this crap, so you don’t have to.

Now, keep in mind, I am not against the accurate depiction of evil in a story. I do it myself, and some of my favorite movies do as well. It’s all in the context. And one gets the impression watching this guy’s movies that his “signature” or voice is that of a video store clerk’s obsession with shock because it’s the only thing that interests his numbed conscience from watching too many movies.

Tarantino tries to mimic the spaghetti westerns of the 60s and early 70s, complete with Cinerama widescreen and 1960s western titles and music. The movie starts with an excruciatingly indulgent “Overture” of music over a flat graphic — like they had for epics in the olden days. The movie is an homage that illustrates his own nostalgia for old movies more than an actual creative take on the subject. The whole nostalgia thing worked once in Pulp Fiction. The metaphor that I think best describes this director is that of a young dinosaur that is unaware of the concept of extinction.

The first shot is a long, meandering dolly out of a stone crucifix of a suffering Christ, apparently a gravestone, covered in the blistery snow of dead winter. Yes, foreshadowing the violence to come (as all Tarantino movies end in an orgy of violence), but could it also be a visual cue of the “death of God” in the story he is about to tell, or rather in his own worldview?

The rest of the movie watches like a play that has been adapted to the screen. The bounty hunter, (Kurt Russell) brings along a captured female outlaw (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who the director enjoys getting laughs out of beating up and calling “bitch.” It seems the only word Tarantino loves as much as the N-word is the B-word. Back to the story. So these two end up at the outpost lodge with another bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and the new sheriff of the destination town. There are several other dubious lodgers already there. As they wait for the snow storm to subside, some subterfuge occurs and the whole thing is a mystery to figure out if any of the other lodgers are hostile and waiting for their moment to free the female prisoner.

There is really nothing special here. Just a murder mystery play, with a few good twists, good performances by the actors (I will always watch any movie with Kurt Russell in it). But certainly nothing worthy of Oscar nominations.

Before the inevitable Tarantino bloodbath ending, there is one good moment of insight. Tim Roth plays the hangman of the town who is also on his way to the same destination. He has a discussion with one of the other characters about justice. He explains that the rule of law is what civilized society calls justice. While lynching or vigilanteism is frontier justice, which is just as apt to be wrong as right. He then says that the only real difference between the two is the hangman, because dispassion is the essence of justice. Justice delivered with passion is always in danger of not being justice. So for a moment, it appears that Tarantino may actually be supporting the rule of law as the means of civilized justice.

Which is really an odd thing, considering his own recent real life involvement with racist anti-cop protestors in New York. A few days after a NY cop is murdered, he pronounced cops as murderers who engage in alleged institutional “police terror.” Of course, he would argue that he is standing against corrupt authority, not good cops, but the problem is that the whole racist police narrative is itself a corrupt racist conspiracy theory, whose purpose is to incite racial hatred and uncivilized rage that results in lawlessness, mob violence and inspires more cop killers. Hey, what happened to that rule of law?

But when you consider the character who says those lines about dispassionate justice in the movie, along with Tarantino’s own passionate hate speech, maybe he’s really spitting on the whole concept of dispassionate rule of law in favor of his passionate hate. Maybe he really believes in the frontier lawlessness he so often celebrates in his movies like a religion of violence.

Oscar Watch • The Revenant: Vengeance is God’s, and God Ain’t No Pacifist

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Though we don’t have the Oscar nominations yet, I labeled this as one of my 2015 Oscar Watch commentaries because after seeing it, I am confident of two things: 1. The Revenant will receive an Oscar nomination for best picture and best director, and 2. Leonardo DiCaprio will win best actor for his gut wrenching performance as the frontiersman Hugh Glass.

Alejandro Inarritu directed this vast, weighty, sprawling epic that tells the story as much through visual and visceral filmmaking as through its dramatic exploration of the primal urge for revenge. Yes, it is brutal, but it is also beautiful. And I don’t mean “beautiful brutality” as in a Tarantino film. I mean the fearful symmetry of life that is the fallen splendor of creation.

Inarritu interweaves words, visual, audio and emotional drama into a masterpiece of storytelling tapestry. This is the kind of movie that shows you the real fullness of what film can do that other media cannot. Something I have not seen in a while. As you watch the brutality of winter trappers fighting with local American native tribes over pelts, you sense, you feel the power of man against the elements and man against man, that these early Americans had to overcome. The bear attack is at once truly terrifying and yet profound in its incarnation of man vs. nature.

In the world of filmmaking, you have the “arthouse” movies that are so obsessed with being “creative,” that they result in boring pretentiousness. And you have the “Hollywood machine” movies that seek to be a drug fix of action adrenaline that can be empty and shallow. Inarritu manages to transcend both and bring it all. Action, beauty, art, human depth and story. He did it with the Oscar winner Birdman last year, an existentialist exploration of our search for significance, and this year, he just might do it again with The Revenant.

The reason I am so impressed with Inarritu is because he is like Terrence Malick with a good story. Although I don’t often agree with his worldview, I do appreciate his filmmaking as a unique and creative voice in cinema (See my commentaries on his thoughtful films 21 Grams, and Birdman).

In The Revenant, he wrestles with the universal moral dilemma of revenge vs. justice. Bad revenge movies celebrate vigilanteism – or retribution outside the law (see my reviews of on The Punisher, Walking Tall, Sin City, A Time To Kill) Good revenge movies sympathize with the universal human desire for justice against criminals, especially murderers, but also deal honestly with the spiritual reality that revenge destroys the soul of the vigilante. (see my commentaries for Man on Fire, The Equalizer).

The Christian worldview proposes that God achieves justice, or in other words, his vengeance against criminals, legally through the state, not through personal vengeance outside of the law (Romans 12:19-13:5). Capital criminals deserve to die, but by the hand of the state and within the law. Of course, self defense is also a legitimate means for righteous violence (Exodus 22:2-3). But the main point is that certain evil men deserve to die, but if you do not achieve that justice through legal moral means, it will destroy you, and turn you into the very monster you seek to punish.

The Revenant brings in this spiritual dimension into the discussion in a way that other revenge movies sometimes miss. Hugh Glass is a man between worlds, a white man with a child from his marriage to a Pawnee woman, now dead. Don’t worry, no spoiling yet. This cinematic world has a fairly good balance of viewpoints within it. Yes, the Indians think the white man stole their land and their animals, but they also steal land and animals from each other, as well as from the white man, and the Indians kill each other as well. So there is no pristine “noble savage” nor thoroughly evil European here. All flawed, all human, too human.

At one point in the film, Hugh meets a Pawnee Indian whose family was wiped out by the Sioux. Hugh cannot understand why he is seeking to find more of his people to settle with rather than seeking revenge on the offending warriors. The Pawnee tells him, “Revenge is in the Creator’s hands.” This becomes a thematic challenge to Hugh’s own personal journey of revenge. And the moral issue that is addressed with thoughtful poignancy through the movie.

The villain, John Fitzgerald, played masterfully simple and real by Tom Hardy is an atheist, and fellow trapper who is guilty of atrocities. At one point, he tells a story about a fellow who found God. That fellow looked up in the air, and then climbed a tree, and found God. And God was a squirrel. So he “shot and ate the son of a bitch.” This is a brilliant encapsulation of the mockery of the atheist worldview and it is villainous pretentions.

Keep reading to find out how the ending embodies the moral theme of the movie… Continue reading →

Star Wars VII: Star Wars IV Redo with Female Feminist Luke

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The Empire of the galaxy is trying to crush the rebellion and destroy the Republic, unless a droid can get a message to the only one who can help them.

Wait, isn’t that the original Star Wars? (episode IV for you fanatics)

Yep.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is like one big homage to the original Star Wars. Or is it a remake?

Uninspiring.

And that’s coming from a fan of the original and Empire Strikes Back (except for the godless worldview :-).

All the other four movies were horrible boring pedantic wastes of precious time.

Oh, yeah, I know, I’m “an idiot” because this one will be the biggest box office phenomenon in movie history, so what do I know?  But I think there are two main reasons why it is a hit:

#1. And pretty much the biggest reason. All of us want to see Han, Chewy, Luke and Leia again. Period. That alone will draw gazillions. But that doesn’t make it a great story.

#2. The original story was successful, so Abrams ditched the dead end self-indulgent narcissism of Lucas’ prequels and remade the original. Cleverly and ruthlessly calculated for marketing formulas.

The sad and ironic truth is that much of Hollywood’s success in sequels is simply retelling the same exact original story in a new context. People want more of the same, over and over again. And that is why many tentpole movies and other mainstream movies recycle the same stuff over and over again.

It’s not always bad. I mean that’s why genre movies work: formulas. Formula isn’t always bad. And I could give a million examples of great stories in history that are refurbished or rewritten versions of previous stories (Empire is arguably better than IV). So, I’m not saying it doesn’t work or that it’s all wrong. The goal is to reinterpret and add unique twists that clothe that success with a fresh take. Disguise the homage, don’t trumpet it.

In this case, I thought the redux was uninspiring and forgettable. Okay, I loved to see Han and Chewy again. Even though poor Han at his age can barely fight anymore. And a few lines were kinda funny. And I do love a story pitting a Republic against an Empire.

So, this movie replays so many things that were reminiscent of the original. And I’m sure Star Wars religious fanatics could list off more than these:

Spoiler Alert (But not really, because I already revealed everything in the headline)
Enjoy… Continue reading →

In the Heart of the Sea: Greenpeace Whale Rights Blubbering

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In-the-heart-of-the-sea-Banner

The so-called “true story” behind the fictional tale of Melville’s classic Moby Dick. White whale crashes evil human fishing party and hunts them down to teach them animal rights and earth worship.

Well, he’s at it again. Christophobe Ron Howard, the guy who made the hate hit piece on Jesus (and the Roman Catholics), The DaVinci Code, has just offered up a new sacrifice to the earth goddess, Gaia.

Howard and his writers bookends his tale with young Herman Melville tracking down a survivor of the whaleship Essex that was destroyed by a huge white whale, for the sake of research for his new novel. The monster whale is full of crusty sea barnacles and whaling wounds and has a preternatural ability to attack whaling ships out in the deep sea, thousands of miles from land.

The survivor being interviewed is a drunk who can’t live with himself because of the “abominations” the survivors had done. He tells his scary story and we see it all in flashback.

So, obviously, the whalers go awhaling, the white whale shows up and destroys their ship, casting them adrift, which forces them to become cannibals and thus shows them how evil it is to eat meat. But the privileged white “big Nemo” also shadows their lifeboats like an angry deity waiting to teach them a lesson.

And that is what the metaphor is all about. The white whale in this story represents the revenge of the animal world upon evil mankind that is slaughtering them for their oil. For whale oil fuels the lamps of the evil white Europeans.

This is earth worship versus the Judeo-Christian worldview, quite literally with a vengeance.

Before they launch off to their whaling expedition, we hear Christians praying that God will provide his blessings upon their industrial revolution (Of course, a demonized villain in Hollywood). So Christianity is One with the exploitation of energy resources to the storytellers.

At one point in the story, the captain, a young inexperienced blueblood jerk, tells the hero of the story that man is created as the pinnacle of creation and it is our calling by God to take dominion of the earth and bend nature to our wills. So, much like the idolatrous Noah movie, the two worldviews in conflict here are the Judeo-Christian ethic of dominion and the environmentalist/animal rights/earth worshipping ethic of pristine nature, unsullied by human interference. Or more accurately, human exceptionalism versus anti-humanism.

Can you guess which one wins?

Of course, in the end, the hero of the story, who became obsessed with killing the white whale, finally has his “come to Gaia” moment and refrains from his last chance to harpoon the leviathan. And of course, the ever-loving monster, who is apparently a fair and square kind of mammal, stops attacking them. You see? The poor whales just want to be left alone. They are more moral than us, and can teach us a lesson.

I am amused by how earth worshippers like to humanize animals (and nature) as if they are equally moral sentient creatures. That is because they really do believe that humans are NOT created in God’s image as the pinnacle of creation. But notice, they have to HUMANIZE the animals, because the reality is more like the documentary Grizzly Man, where the naïve animal rights activist gets eaten by the very bears he is deluded into thinking that he is the guardian of. Watch Grizzly Man. THAT is the ironic truth, folks.

At one point, the storyteller is talking of whale oil and he simply calls it, “oil,” an obvious connection with the so-called “evil” of fossil fuels. In fact, at the end, he says something like, “I hear they have found oil in the ground in the United States. Imagine that.” So the evils of the industrial revolution will move on from whale oil to crude oil.

Oh, Lordy, will man ever stop utilizing the earth for his own greedy survival? Why don’t we just lay down our energy needs and die? Let that pristine nature take over and eat us all in the wonderful circle of life that is survival of the fittest? It’s okay for sharks to eat whales, but we humans aren’t allowed to? After all, bending nature to benefit mankind is speciest, right?

Whale sh*t.

Earth worship has been eeking into Hollywood movies for some time now and it is going to be more ubiquitious as a theme. The rising god of Hollywood is the earth, and if the ancient history of earth worship is anything to go by, these idolaters are violent and will not stop until they have enslaved or destroyed everybody. (This same antihuman theme of the earth as a divine being “getting revenge” on humans is in The Happening. But in other movies, it’s localized in a substitute deity, like aliens in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or in a subverted Biblical Creator in Noah, Evan Almighty, and others)

Hollywood social justice warriors rant about how evil oil is, while burning a thousand times what normal people use, and spewing out more carbon emissions than anyone else with their huge mansions and private jets. It’s more than hypocritical. It’s despicable. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with riches. And I don’t believe carbon is pollution (if you do, you are a science denier). But these mostly white, all privileged, aristocratic fascists love to force others to suffer while they live “above the morality” of the plebeian class. Where is Bernie Sanders when you need him?

Environmentalist policies are already murdering poor black people by the MILLIONS in third world countries, precisely by keeping oil from them (as well as other policies). Earth worshippers believe in saving the whales, but let those poor people of color die to maintain their crusading fanaticism. Paul Driessen is blowing the whistle on this genocidal environmentalism. By liberal standards of outcome distribution, environmentalism is racist to the core.

It is the Judeo-Christian ethic of dominion that desacralized nature and allowed man to rise up out of the depraved self-destructive barbarism of earth worship and other idolatries. It allowed us to harness nature for the good of mankind, which resulted in science and technology that advanced civilization and brought about everything that the earth worshippers rely upon, from medicine to travel to safe living to their smart phones. Check out the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and get educated. The computer screen you are reading this on is because of fossil fuels.

And no, I am not now, nor have I ever been a card carrying member of the oil cartel, nor have I ever been knowingly paid by oil interests (but if they want to pay me for telling the truth, I’ll gladly take it).

But, boy, there sure are billions and billions of dollars in the pockets of those paid by Big Green and Big Government to deny science and suppress the facts (There are many reputable scientists and researchers who are exposing this Big Green corruption: Climate Change Dispatch, Climate Audit, Dr. Roy Spencer, Science and Public Policy Institute, Climate Depot, Climate Etc, Watts Up With That? And others.

Cornwall Alliance is the best in providing a Judeo-Christian approach to a balanced proper conservation of the environment with human interests.

Yes, we must be careful to regulate our energy usage and waste. But don’t be a fool. Energy consumption is not inherently evil, it is scientifically axiomatic to existence. All living systems create waste as a by-product of the conversion of energy into life. So the only way for us to achieve the ultimate end of a pristine nature untouched by human waste is of course to extinguish all of humanity.