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

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

This is a total feel good movie of the year, sure to be a strong Oscar contender. The story of one of the most amazing race horses in history, whose speed in winning the triple crown has never been repeated. But really, it’s the story of Penny Chenery, the owner of Secretariat, a story of American egalitarianism triumphing over class, gender, aristocracy and hatred. Penny is portrayed as a middle class housewife who, with her brother, inherits her rich parent’s horse farm. Because of the inherent oppression of inheritance taxes, she is pushed to sell the farm to pay the taxes. She says no. Then to sell Secretariat to pay the taxes. She says No. And then to get out because she is a woman in a man’s world, to go back to her kids and raise her family instead of engaging in successful business. But she keeps pushing through for her dream, a dream to make something of her life, to find her passion by raising Secretariat to be the champion he became, from his underdog beginnings as a second choice bred horse. Her husband is shown bothered by her absence from the family as she obsessively pursues her dream miles away from home, but he gets over it and the family is never shown to be adversely affected by it all. Sure, she misses some school plays, but it’s all depicted as worth it. In a way, this woman is the ultimate feminist who has it all: a good family, a successful business and a priority of her own dreams. She fights the establishment of white male power with the egalitarian American “never give up” spirit and wins.

The movie starts with a passage from the book of Job about the power and beauty of the horse in God’s scheme of things. And the movie ends with a gospel song as Secretariat wins. These spiritual elements add a deeper sense to the theme of the movie, though wind up appearing somewhat artificial due the complete lack of spirituality in Penny and her family’s story. Is redemption really only about achieving personal dreams and bucking the establishment? Is salvation really just about triumphing over cultural prejudices or over personal character flaws? I say this because there seemed to be a lack of this personal dimension to the story that would make it rise above a shallow external victory of personal dreams into a triumph of the human spirit.

A true story of Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa and his subsequent attempt to bring the country together by focusing on the nation’s rugby team winning the World Cup. The movie begins with Mandela winning the election and being installed. The racial tensions run high as everyone, including his own entourage, expect a “regime change” mentality – fire all the previous administration and replace everyone with your own agents of power. But Mandela surprises them all, by his very first act in office. He calls the previous staff in and tells them that if they want to leave, they can, but if they want to stay and help bring change, then he will keep them. Much to the chagrin of his head of security, Mandela also brings in five big white Afrikaaners to round out his security. Mandela also stops the newly empowered rugby committee from disbanding their “all-but-one-white” team. Why? Because they see that team as a symbol of the oppression of the past. But Mandela sees it as the perfect location for embodying the very future unity the country needs.

And this is the theme of the movie: Overcoming injustice through forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than the multicultural view of overcoming injustice through the will to power and revolutionary regime change. Whereas multiculturalism would preach forced or artificial affirmative action and the vengeance of reverse discrimination against whites, Mandela says, “Forgiveness starts here. A rainbow nation starts here.” If you want to overcome past institutionalized injustice, you cannot replace it with a new injustice of institutionalized vengeance. That is only a cycle of violence. Demonizing previous administrations and punishing them is the injustice of victimology, crying victim in order to justify revenge.

Interestingly, the movie does not address in detail the fact that Mandela was also estranged from his wife because of her belief in violent resistance, but it does show his estrangement from his daughter because of his commitment to a higher cause. His daughter asserts the vengeance and regime change mentality of reparations and affirmative action. But Mandela tells her, “You seek only to assert your own personal feelings. That is selfish. That will not help build our nation.” Mandela so believes in the higher cause of forgiveness and reconciliation that he will even walk away from his family because they sought the ways of multicultural hate and violence.

The title of the movie comes from a poem by William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” that Mandela quotes a couple times in the film. The last lines are emphasized in this lyric of overcoming the “fell clutch of circumstance” that bloodies the head of the oppressed in life: “I am master of my fate and the captain of my soul.” Mandela concludes, “If I cannot change when circumstances demand it, how can I expect others to?” And so this film is a story about living out grace and forgiveness instead of getting back at your oppressors by oppressing them when you are in power. That “master of my fate” line seems to cast it in a humanistic self-derived power to forgive rather than a religious or faith oriented worldview of divine empowerment.

Highly Recommended. This is an amazingly preachy movie that I absolutely LOVED. Which in my mind only proves that being preachy in movies is not always bad if you preach a sermon well. It’s based on a true story about a black basketball coach of a high school in the inner city who seeks to discipline his players not only on but off the court. Samuel L, Jackson is superb as Carter. The theme of this movie is obviously that individualism is selfish and won’t lead to success. The key to successful living is to be a part of a team, where “if one person struggles, we all struggle. If one person triumphs, we all triumph.” It is also an excellent moral antidote to the ghetto hip hop culture that is controlling the minds of young people today with a complete disregard for authority and moral responsibility, and a worship of violence and hate. Coach Carter comes in, as a black man mind you, and teaches his mostly black players things you will NEVER hear in hip hop culture, but we all know he is right. From a BLACK MAN! This is beautiful! Like listening to Bill Cosby chastise the black liberal leadership in its failure to teach responsibility. He starts them out calling each other “sir,” for respect. He despises the use of the N-word by blacks, because “it’s derogatory. When a white man uses it, you wanna fight him, but then you use it of yourselves you disrespect yourselves and you make it easier for the white man to disrespect you.” He teaches them that basketball is good, but it is not more important than an education. It is an education that will free you from your impoverished past. Now, this is a bit too much enlightenment prejudice for me. The belief that education is salvation simply isn’t true. It is not mere “secular” education that changes a person, it is MORAL education that people need. However, everything that Carter is teaching the kids is precisely a moral worldview, so that balances the negative for me. Carter points out that the system is designed for them to fail because the expectations of the educators and parents are too low. They expect kids to fail and don’t raise the bar to challenge them to do better. Carter never believes this lie and believes the theme of the movie: “Growing up means making your own decisions and living with the consequences.” He disparages the blame shifting of most poverty oriented activism, he faces parents of the kids who are themselves undisciplined and unwilling to accept their kids’ responsibility for their actions. He asks the kids, “Look at your parents, and ask yourself, Do I want better?” Carter makes the kids sign a contract to play ball that includes wearing ties and jackets on game days, and that they will maintain a 2.3 grade average, which is higher than even the school district demands. But this is the grade average that will get them into college. When the kids start to accept responsibility and become better ball players, they get cocky and Carter commands them to stop “Trash talking,” to humiliate their opponents. This is just as disrespectful as anything else, and he won’t have it. It’s brilliant. I could not believe all this moral sense coming out of a Hollywood movie dealing with poor black kids. It was astounding. But when the kids fail to meet the grades on their contracts, Carter suspends the whole team and cancels games, even though they have become a winning team. When the parents try to fire him and complain, he tells them, “if you enforce the fact that they don’t have to keep a simple contract, you are sending them a message that they are above the law. How long then before they start breaking the law?” Again, truly unbelievable to find such truth in a Hollywood movie. One big negative for me was an anti-life message with abortion that contradicts the theme of the movie. One of the players has gotten a girl pregnant and they struggle with the reality that he can’t go to school and college trying to maintain a family. But he wants to try anyway. Okay, that’s cool. That’s reality. Let’s see how they overcome it. Unfortunately, the girl has an abortion and this is what is portrayed as solving all their problems. Now she won’t be on welfare and they won’t be saddled with a child while trying to go to college and they can still fornicate by living together on campus. Well, this is directly contradictory to the theme of the movie which says, “Growing up means making your own decisions and living with the consequences.” When those kids had sex, they were making the decision to risk a family. To kill the preborn child is an unwillingness to take the responsibility for their actions, and unwillingness to live with their consequences, but another juvenile way of selfishly thinking not of the “team” but of one’s self. And unfortunately, the movie presents this as a solution rather than the problem. It is the typical attempt to avoid the consequences for their choice of having sex. It is a selfish definition of children as unworthy burdens to be eliminated or destroyed. The devaluation of human lives is not responsibility, it is the height of irresponsibility. Not a single thought about the responsibility of adoption or even accepting the consequences and getting married or maybe refusing to fornicate anymore. This could have been a great moral lesson for the ball player to learn that he shouldn’t be having premarital sex because of all the responsibility that comes with it. But instead the filmmakers contradict their own theme because of their immoral agenda to support the killing of the unborn. But that said, it is a minor plot point, not the major one which is more important to the heart of the movie, so I am able to complain, while still appreciating the countercultural truths that the movie does promote.