Recommended. Great popcorn adventure movie. Actually, a survival adventure movie about a group of people trying to get out of the Gobi desert by rebuilding a small plane out of the parts of the plane they crashed in. I really enjoy Dennis Quaid. He is an underestimated actor. And the story really kept me interested. The writers, Scott Frank and Edward Burns, even put a heart and worldview into it. Unfortunately, the worldview is rather humanistic and empty. Once again, a story about life and death where God is virtually ignored, except to criticize him. A guy sees another guy praying over his ration of peaches and says, “I’m amazed that during these dire times, you thank God for anything.” He then tells a little joke about a boxer crossing himself before fighting and someone asks what it means, and another says, “Not a damn thing if the man can’t fight.” Well, yes, this is another humanistic interpretation that tries to reinforce the fact that if we survive it is because of our own ingenuity because God is irrelevant. Man will fly himself out of his problem. Then later, that joke teller answers someone regarding his “belief” in getting out of the desert. He says he believes in spirituality not religion. “Religion divides people. Belief in something unites.” Well, duh. What do you think religion is? IT’S A UNITY BASED ON BELIEF. The storytellers here clearly show their philosophical ignorance and religious bigotry. It is not religion that is the problem it is man’s inherently selfish nature that turns all beliefs into division rather than uniting. Of course, it’s TRUTH that ultimately divides anyway. Those who do not have the truth or want it accuse those who do of division, when in fact, it is the rejecter of truth who is the divider. But that aside, you know this is the writer’s own viewpoint because he provides no retort in the mouth of the believer. Believe me, I can think of a hundred great responses. So, that means the writer wants that view to prevail or have the upper hand cause it has the “last word.” Unless of course, the director changed the original script by cutting out a good response in the editing. That is entirely possible. There is another “thematic” moment where a character spells out the theme: “Man only needs one thing in life: Someone to love. And if you can’t give him that, give him something to hope for. And if you can’t give him that, just give him something to do.” In this sense, hope or meaning is constructed by the individual in a meaningless universe where our value comes from choice. A touch of Existentialism. As Sartre would say, “to do is to be.” Also a typical Romantic idea that in the absence of God, “love” between two humans is all there is. Well, Ironically, later on, when the hero tries to validate his reason to go on when there is no hope because “We’re not garbage. We’re people. We’ve got families, lives to live.” But of course, if there is no God, then all that meaning is self-delusion. There simply is no difference between garbage and people. We’re all made from the same molecules. There was a great opportunity in the Giovani Ribisi character, who was a great character as the annoying know-it-all, whose knowledge saves them all because he builds planes. There is a time when his arrogance reaches a truly repulsive level when he says that everyone else but him is dispensable. In other words, the typical humanist notion that knowledge is salvation. I think that this was a wasted set up because they never conclude with this character fault. They never really shame this part of him. They could have shown how knowledge alone does not save, but so does character and sacrifice. Like maybe a character could have saved Ribisi by sacrificing himself and that would be a point in the story that, No, the only reason Ribisi is alive is because of the goodness of another or something like that. My point is not to rewrite the story but simply show that a better worldview could have made this story more satisfying for me. But it’s still a good adventure movie anyway. There is some humbling and self sacrifice, it’s just never tied in with the theme like it should have been. Alas, you can’t expect much character or value from humanists with no understanding of transcendence.
True Stories
Beyond the Sea
Not Recommended. Boring biography about Bobby Darin. This guy’s life and character and music was so uninteresting, that I kept falling asleep. So, to be technical, I didn’t see a lot of the movie. One thing I did catch was a theme that expressed, “Memories are like moonbeams. We do with them what we will.” And it seems to justify the fanciful construction of the movie into a fantasy of memories itself. Loose history is all right cause, hey, what are memories, anyway, but arbitrary constructions? Its one thing to say we do this, but another to affirm it.
The Aviator
Not Recommended. All right. I have decided to announce the Triumvirate of Mediocrity: Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. These three guys are somehow worshipped as “auteurs” of artistic films. But what they really are is masters of mediocrity; overlong boring mediocrity, I might add. All of them think their movies are worth two and a half or three hours of our lives, and thus become thieves for stealing this precious time from us. While this movie has an interesting depiction of Hughs’ descent into his madness, it is all rather unfocused and boring drama. Scorsese thinks that “mental illness” Hollywood glamour and movie stars makes for interesting movies, but he is wrong. It’s what these external things reveal about our internal spirituality that is interesting. I did not care one whit for Hughs. He is no hero. And is therefore unworthy of such status in a film. He is an unsympathetic selfish self-obessessed idiot. And he was interested in sexy movie stars like Hepburn and Gardner, who were also unsympathetic selfish self-obessessed idiots. And the whole thing about how he sought to make fast planes and fought to share the airs in competition with Pan Am – who cares? I did not care one moment for this story because it was not made interesting. The Right Stuff made manned flight to the moon and the history of flight with Jaeger and everything very interesting. This made the history of flight boring. Well, it wasn’t horrendously boring like Alexander , made by Oliver the Mediocre, it was only mildly boring. But that’s enough to just say No. And you know, it shows Hughs’ descent into neurosis, but it makes no sense of it. It is just arbitrary. Where did it come from? Why did it happen? Maybe in real life it was a mystery. But this is the movies, not real life. Since they show nothing of his inner character, or his true quest for meaning, it reduces to a shallow examination of the external degeneracy of neurosis. Yeah, but how is this a reflection of his INNER SELF? Everything is external in this movie, and thus boooooring because it seeks the external sufferings of life without the true INNER HUMAN DRAMA. Pretty movie stars with pathetic juvenile temperaments are not interesting if we learn nothing about where this lack of character comes from. Hughs’ external malady should have been a metaphor for the internal flaw of everyone in this film but nothing like this is ever attempted. Thus it fails even as a tragedy because this Hero is a victim, not of his own flaws, but of some external arbitrary malady. I guess this is the essence of humanist tragedy. Life is arbitrary suffering in a chance universe. And that is why true humanist epics are unsatisfying and lack the transcendence that makes for a great movie.
Kinsey
Not Recommended. This movie is terribly dishonest and morally criminal. It is the cliché accusation that Christian morality suppresses natural desires which cause dysfunction in society (embodied in Kinsey’s cliché “sexually repressed” religious father, who is himself an obsessed masturbator). First of all, the fact that Kinsey is a hero is itself a sign of moral bankruptcy. If it was a tragedy, like Amadeus, I could buy it, but alas, it is not. This is supposedly the story of Alfred Kinsey, who wrote the infamous pseudo-scientific studies on male and female sexuality beginning in the 1930s. The scandal of it all is that he explored and frankly communicated details of sexuality in a culture that had suppressed talking about such things. He tried to legitimize pornography and perversion by wrapping it in an academic veneer of analysis. True, 70 years ago, society had some pretty unscientific beliefs about sexuality, like masturbation causing blindness, oral sex reduces pregnancy and the like. And it can be true that “strongly prohibited desires become an obsession.” But the fundamental philosophical and moral failure of this film is its assertion of the naturalistic fallacy. This is the belief that the way nature acts is the way nature ought to be. And it is the fundamental philosophical conceit of all pseudo-scientific endeavor that reality is purely physical and we must not apply morality to scientific pursuit. This is, of course, the dominant scientific philosophy of today. As Kinsey says, “the only way to study sex is to strip away everything but physiology.” “Human beings are just larger, slightly more complicated gall wasps.” “Every living thing is different from every other living thing,” and “diversity becomes life’s one irreducible fact.” Of course, what the filmmaker does not seem to realize is that these statements are themselves as absurd as the unscientific beliefs of the 30s that he mocks. Reductionism of reality down to mere physiology has proven over and over again, to not only be self-contradictory, but a failure in yielding accurate scientific results. Interestingly, it is still growing strong in the sociobiological movement of today that says immaterial notions like spirit, mind, love, good and evil are reducible to chemical and physical laws in our bodies. Okay, so if mind and reason are not abstract external immaterial notions of reality, but merely chemistry in our brains, then the sociobiological theory is itself not “true”, but merely the result of chemicals in the brains of naturalists, who are, I might add, a statistical minority, which makes them a natural abnormality by their own theories. The universal problem of reductionism is that it reduces itself to absurdity. And you know, diversity CANNOT be the absolute diviner of reality. Diversity simply cannot explain the UNITY that is also seen in the world. One’s metaphysic MUST explain both unity and diversity, or suffer under the weight of absurdity. If diversity (particulars) is the “one irreducible fact,” then one could NOT say there are such things as men, women, children, adults, gall wasps, and any other universal category that groups common things through similarity. Even to talk about sex itself is to categorize the idea through unity, not diversity. Yes, there is a diversity of sexuality, but sex itself is the unity under which those diverse sexualities are unified. What this really is is not science, but relativism disguised as fact. (Ironic that Kinsey was the one, in the film, who accused moralists of disguising “morality as fact.”). The obvious agenda of saying that “everything is different from everything else,” and that no sexual proclivities should fall into “biological abnormality” because there is no such thing as abnormality – the real agenda is obviously the normalization of abberant sexuality. It is interesting to note that atheistic evolutionists are now starting to admit that within their evolutionary myth, rape IS normal. IDEAS DO HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Kinsey tries to justify his pornography addiction by claiming it is “Simply the depiction of man in his natural state.” Okay, in a sense, I agree. That is, man is NATURALLY EVIL, so it does not surprise me that our natural tendencies will be toward evil, which include pornography. The fact that most of us men struggle with pornography may make it normal, but it does not make it morally right. We cannot look at nature to define good and evil. In this sense, normal and abnormal simply mean statistical averages, not moral “normality” or “abnormality” as in right and wrong. So the film is also guilty of this equivocation of bouncing back and forth between defining normal as statistical average and then as morally acceptable. A common trick of moral relativism. One of the most revealing aspects of the film is its unwitting deconstruction of its own ethic. To be fair, the filmmaker does put in some counter arguments to Kinsey in the mouths of his fellow laborers, but they are not carried out to a conclusion. Kinsey encourages his “researchers” to violate their marriage covenants and have sex with each other in the name of research and make their own pornography from it. Well, obviously this starts to screw up their marriages and families and one of the kids says, “Stop using science to justify what you’ve done.” But the kid stays with him. And then he says later, “What are we, lab rats? F—ing is no more than mere friction, mere fun?” But the kid stays with him. The point is that this set up is never paid off with the tragedy that it should have. Kinsey continues on in his stoic “Scientific” pursuit like a hero who weathers minor difficulties. Condon does not seem to realize that these mere arguments at moments of frustration to the hero’s goal are actually the moral truth revealing the actual absurdity and actual evil of Kinsey’s criminal activity. Perhaps the most telling scene of the whole movie is when Kinsey and a fellow researcher meet with a man so perverse in his sexual behavior that he has had sex with thousands of people, dozens of species of animals, and molested hundreds of pre-adolescents, all the while keeping detailed journal entries on it all. The young researcher actually has his limits and leaves, but not Kinsey. No, he says the kid just gets a little judgmental sometimes. BUT the scene is never carried out to its moral conclusion. It remains in the movie as a mere extreme of the hero’s obsession, rather than the actual refutation of Kinsey’s entire ethic that it is. What the filmmaker does not go on to tell us is that the real person this character was based on actually continued in correspondence with Kinsey who used his journal entries for his research. So KINSEY WAS A CRIMINAL and the filmmaker considers him a hero for it. An accomplice to pedophilia and crime. “Everyone should do what they want” the criminal says and Kinsey replies, “I’ve never said that. Nobody should hurt anyone.” But he did say it – when he said in the film that if everyone is having all this socially unacceptable sex, then “everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin. Everybody’s crime is nobody’s crime.” HE DID IN FACT SAY IT. The problem is that people do not want to face the logical conclusion of their own moral premises that all sexuality is acceptable. Even they believe that some sexual behavior is not acceptable. But who says so? By whose moral standard? If you deny the external objective moral absolutes of God’s Law, then you are left with nothing but the will to power, my friend. You have no moral authority to condemn ANY sexual behavior, including incest, polygamy and pedophilia. The logical conclusion of the “Kinsey ethic” of sexual relativism is precisely the moral acceptance of pedophilia. This is exactly the ultimate goal. When Kinsey says to the pedophile he shouldn’t hurt anyone, he is denying all he has ever said about making judgments and imposing morality and he DARES to be judgmental and impose HIS morality on others? You cannot strip away morality from sexual behavior without facing the logical conclusion of your belief. IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. If you say there is no morally unacceptable sexual behavior, then you must accept the pedophile because that is simply their “natural state.” And you are trying to suppress their desires just like the religious moralists try to suppress the desires of those they disagree with. The second a person places a limit on certain kinds of sexuality (pedophilia) as morally unacceptable, he is doing the very thing he accuses Christians of doing: imposing his morality on others. This, dear friends, is hypocrisy at its worst. If we are supposed to “strip away everything from sex but physiology,” then who is anyone to condemn the physiology of a pedophile or polygamist or any sexual predator? And who says we can’t hurt anyone? That is a moral judgment that Kinsey and other moral relativists say we are not allowed to make. It is arbitrary to claim you cannot hurt anyone if you have no absolute standard in your sexual ethic. After all, there are many people (as Kinsey no doubt observed) who actually like being hurt. So who are you to define “hurt” and impose it on everyone else? Condon ends with showing shots of all those “big bad laws against sexual perversion” being overthrown. But who says those laws were bad? What right does Condon and other moral relativists have in saying any law is “bad” or “wrong?” What right do they have to impose their morality on anyone through law, since all morality is relative and there is no abnormality? To strike down those sexual perversion laws is to tell moralists what they cannot do sexually, namely, maintain their own sexual views. More hypocrisy. We see in the end that this moral relativism is really just a cover for a fascistic oppression of the majority by the minority. Moral tyranny of the minority. Condon tries to justify Kinsey’s research with a tear-jerker scene of a lesbian thanking him for his books because they helped her come out of the closet and find a lesbian partner. “You saved my life, sir,” she says. And this is the obvious agenda. Kinsey’s work helped gays to be less ashamed and more acceptable in society, so what he did was good. In other words, the ends justify the means. Since Kinsey reinforced MY beliefs, the filmmaker says, it’s okay that he lied in his research, its okay that he lied about using an excessive amount of prison inmates to create the now-discredited statistic of 10% homosexuality in the population. It’s okay that he was a criminal in aiding and abetting a pedophile and using his journal as “research.” It’s okay that in the name of “science” he engaged in crime, adultery, orgies, pornography and pedophilia. THIS IS SCIENCE to these people? Of course, none of these facts are in the movie because then that would make it the moral tragedy that it should have been. Judith Reisman put it best, this movie is criminal because it lionizes Kinsey, “Leader of the most barbarous international pedophile sex ring of the twentieth century.” For the true story of Kinsey go here: < http://www.drjudithreisman.org/articles.htm>
Finding Neverland
Hard to Recommend. This is a complex one. This film is really quite brilliant, and Oscar-worthy on all accounts of the craft. It even has some very beautiful truths in it. The problem I have with it is that it is pure Romanticism, humanistic religion. Let me explain. It’s the story of the man who created Peter Pan, Sir James Matthew Barrie. He meets a widow with three boys and befriends them all in his visits to the park. One of the boys, Peter, has lost his innocence to cyncism because of his father’s death. He doesn’t see the fun in life. He cannot play imaginatively with his brothers because it’s all just foolishness. He has a keen awareness of death. Barrie is more the child and tries to get little Peter to explore his imagination and write, because he is a good little writer. So we have a man-child teaching a child-man how to rediscover imagination, to regain his innocence lost too soon. The boy can’t have fun imagining his dog is a dancing bear because “he’s just a dog.” But Barrie explains to him that a diamond is “just a rock” without a bit of imagination. Barrie bases his character’s name, Peter Pan, on this little boy. But by the end of the story, we see little Peter explain to the stunned, Barrie and audience, “I’m not Peter Pan, HE’S Peter Pan.” So the whole theme of this story is the redemption of imagination. How realism can kill our spirits if we do not believe in the transcendence of reality. The “realists” are those whose skepticism is self destructive. Or, as Barrie puts it, “just when I find a glimmer of happiness in this world, there’s always someone who wants to destroy it.” There is a moment when Barrie’s patron laments about the theater’s loss of innocence, “They changed it. The critics. They made it important.” Some great writing throughout this work of art. Another beautiful coming of age moment occurs when the eldest brother tells Barrie not to visit his mother because even though he likes Barrie, he just doesn’t want his mother to be hurt again. Barrie responds, “Ah, there it is. In thirty seconds, you just became a man. The boy has left.” Very profound understanding of what becoming an adult is, a recognition of mortality and the concern for others. It’s a great coming of age story. It’s a wonderful romp into the world of beauty and creativity, the necessity of imagination in our lives as human beings. My problem is that the Romanticism of the worldview is a God substitute. Barrie is the artist as prophet. Imagination is salvation, a faith substitute. Art as religion, literally. And in true Romantic passion, Barrie misplaces his love onto the fun-loving widow (played by Kate Winslet) who becomes his muse, rather than on his own wife. While they do not commit physical adultery, the story is essentially emotional adultery. Another Bridges of Madison County. Argh! The Romantic, rather than fix his marriage and face his own immature selfishness, seeks elsewhere for passion. The only sin to the Romantic is to restrain the heart. “Follow your heart” is his mantra. Doing the right thing becomes oppressive to these selfish infantile narcisists. Neverland becomes the symbol for imagination, indeed salvation, and Barrie’s wife wants him to take her there (in his heart), but instead he takes the widow. In fact, his devotion to the widow and his art drives his wife to adultery and divorce, but quite frankly, he is the one to blame, making him rather unsympathetic, a jerk of a protagonist if you ask me. Anyway, this idea of art as religion is climaxed when the widow dies and we see a imaginative representation of her entering Neverland (read: heaven substitute). Barrie tells her mourning sons, “Mom is still here on every page of your imagination. She’ll be with you always.” Well, Romanticism wants to ignore God but maintain the transcendence that only God can provide. A transcendence that gives meaning to this life because this is not all there is. There is an afterlife, there is eternal life. Romanticism negates God and hijacks the language and concepts of religious faith and substitutes creativity and imagination for the deity. It worships creation in place of the Creator. This is all very unsatisfying and dishonest for a worldview that conceives of this world as all there is to create a false hope in the living by appealing to imagination. Imagination, when properly rooted in the ultimate Creator has true value and meaning in reflecting God’s image. Without this transcendence, imagination becomes self deception and creativity, mere diversion. Imagination as imago populi is idolatry and spiritual death. Imagination as imago dei is truth and redemption.
Alexander
Not Recommended at all. BORING. A movie about Alexander the Great done by Oliver the Amateur. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how studio execs just keep giving away tons of money to this guy who makes terrible movies that don’t make money. I am personally offended by Stone’s arrogant selfishness that actually thinks he deserves three hours for all his movies when they barely deserve one hour fifty minutes. He reminds me of Scorsese. These guys are the kings of terrible epics and colossal wastes of money. Everything is too long from the very start of the boringly drawn out title sequence in the beginning, followed by a long boring droning and redundant monologue by Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy, Then followed by long boring battle sequences that are attempted to be salvaged by giving it a Lord of the Rings rip off soundtrack. We see a long boring inspirational speech by Alexander to his troops when facing King Darius. This is so boring, even to Stone himself, that he fades out of it and onto a flying eagle, and then fades back into the boring speech being boringly concluded. Well, I’ve got to say, Stone didn’t have a conspiracy here, so that’s new, I guess. Not only is it way too long and boring, but you just don’t care for any of the characters, including Alexander himself. Look, let’s face it, all these lines about undying eternal love and devotion just don’t ring with truth at all in the mouths of Mr. multisexual Alex and his sex buddy. Try as hard as he may, it’s inherently fallacious. Most people just won’t buy it. (There is a reference to Achilles and Patroclus 6 times). And besides, what’s so heroic about this genocidal murdering bloody warrior, who invaded other countries, not even for gold or wealth, (which is supposed to be some kind of virtue to the Stone) but simply to conquer and be king of all. Yeah, that’s a real hero. What a great guy for trying to unify the whole world — UNDER HIS THUMB. So Communist Stone complains and criticizes George Bush, but then makes a movie glorifying the very kind of conquering and subduing that he claims Bush is engaged in. Go figure. Of course, Stone tries to smooth it over by making Alexander a P.C. modernist. He’s for the gay marriage laws, (“there are other ways of loving”), and he is Mr. Multiculturalist. In a world of racist nationalists, he believes in interracial dating and even interracial marriage. Okay, his multiculturalism lies in believing all the peoples and nations HE IS CONQUERING are equal in worth and value. “None of these poor suckers we are killing and subjugating and enslaving are inferior to us Greeks (like all those snobbish Macedonian advisors of his believe).” He actually says he is “freeing all peoples” to be under his rule. Wait a minute. Does anybody else see the obvious absurdity here, or am I just crazy? Freeing people by conquering and killing them? Let’s call him Alexander the Marauding Multiculturalist. Well, they got one thing right, multiculturalism’s kinship with Fascism. So Alexander is this “great” leader who is basically a man of action. This is another existential movie that scorns “those who think too much” and trumpets at the very beginning a quote from Virgil: “Fortune favors the bold.” Alexander spouts platitudes, half of which I couldn’t even hear in the midst of a noisey audio mix. “Fear of death is the cause of all our misfortunes.” “Conquer your fear, and I promise you, you will conquer death.” “We’ve all suffered. In the end, all that matters is what you’ve done.” So we are the sum total of our choices or actions. Action is elevated in this amoral universe, that again, Stone would attack if it was a person on the opposite side of his political beliefs doing all the “bold action.” You get it? These kind of filmmakers think they are being profound by exalting “action” without morality, and then cry like clubbed baby seals when a man of action does WHAT THEY DON’T LIKE. That’s called hypocrisy, self-deception. I mean, just apply this existential amoral “bold action” to Stone’s boogeyman, Bush again. Hey, Bush is bold and a man of action in invading Iraq. So I guess Oliver Stone must have voted for Bush. Not that I agree with Bush, but I know Stone has expressed his hate speech against him. Send out the word: Oliver Stone supports Bush’s bold invasion of Iraq. An odd moment that totally said, “Editing nightmare” occurred after we see this big battle with Babylon and then we see King Darius flee the battle. And then we cut to Alexander weeping over a soldier who died, looking very regretful and like a loser. Then we hear Ptolemy’s narration telling us Darius was defeated and Alexander won. What? What kind of a non-sequitur was that? And an anti-climactic one at that. This movie was so boring, that you would not miss a thing by not seeing it. The court intrigue was boring, just a bunch of people trying to speak with subtext that you don’t even care about, and the long boring war councils talking about stuff that simply wasn’t interesting, and of course, Ptolemy’s long boring narration throughout and over the transition periods. Who cares. I’ll take the pagan Gladiator any day over this broing drivel.
Woman, Thou Art Loosed
Partially recommended. Very thoughtful and poetic. This movie does for black Gospel culture what The Apostle did for Pentecostal culture, it breaks the negative stereotypes while showing both good and bad of that subculture. It’s supposedly based on a composite of true stories of abused women, while remaining a fictional story. Basic plot: little girl is abused by single mom’s boyfriend and turns to drugs, stripping and hooking and eventually lands in jail. She then grows up and tries to reform but ends up killing her molester out of vengeance. But it is not exploitative in any of these sins. It deals with them in a very realistic yet tasteful way. The fact that it is R rated is because it is dealing with such subject matter, not because it is exploiting it. The dialogue was rather poetic at times, and they did a cool occasional insert of various characters “interviewing” with the camera as if it were a documentary. I liked this about it. Gave great insight into motives, and was very true and real to the way people think who justify their lack of action, their hypocrisy, their self-deception. The single mother who justifies living in sin with a lowlife because she doesn’t think she can get better, the lowlife who justifies his laziness with an appeal to how hard it is and his own counterfeit conversion. I loved how this movie did not degenerate into Spike Lee type propaganda or multicultural victim accusations and claims of entitlement. It showed people as RESPONSIBLE for their choices in life, and did not blame it on “the man.” It showed how the Gospel culture is abused by many who use Jesus as a cover for falsehood, but it showed true Christians trying to be real with their Christianity too. Some who say “Praise Jesus” in black culture really mean it. Very balanced. Very odd, though, the movie ends on an almost hopeless ironic swapping of heroine and villain. Right at the point where the villain, the molester, seems to have true and genuine repentance at the altar of a revival, and is in the process of approaching the heroine to ask for forgiveness, to actually fess up to what he had denied and lied about for so long, the heroine, cannot take it and pulls out a gun and shoots him dead. So she ends up on death row. Interesting irony, that maybe is supposed to make us realize that those we think are heros can become villains, just as much as those who are villains can become heros, because in Christianity, we are all villainous at heart, and even the vilest sinner can truly repent. Then we see a most powerful moment when the molester, Reggie, has his interview with the audience and speaks about “just needing a little more time.” The perennial excuse or regret from those who wait too long to do the right thing. Unfortunately, the preacher who visits the heroine in jail, pushing for a reprieve (in an unbiblical moment), has a chance to challenge the heroine, but he doesn’t. She tells him to pray for her, and he says he will, “You gonna make it. I know you will.” Whereas, he should have said, “you need to do some yourself.” Favorite line of the movie, when the heroine, now in jail ready to die faces her own truth: “You can never really get even. What I did was wrong, no matter what he did to me.” You can never really get even. WHOA. What a repentant revelation. What a true repentance. You don’t see that too often in movies. An honest dealing with the worst of being wronged and yet an affirmation of responsibility. At the start, she is building a little model house without a door on it which symbolizes her own hopelessness and trapped feelings. But by the end, after the preacher talks to her, we see her little house has a door on it now. Hope for escape from her cycle of violence. WHAT I DID NOT LIKE ABOUT THE MOVIE: What really bothered me the most, and it’s one of the reasons why I don’t whole heartedly recommend the film is that it is a “glory piece” for an anti-Trinitarian heretic named T. D. Jakes. It’s one thing to have a marginalized theology, but a man who teaches outright heresy is the worst thing for the black community. (GO HERE to read an article about Jakes by CRI Journal: http://www.equip.org/free/DJ900.htm) He plays the preacher/wise man in the movie, and he plays himself, which is way too self-important in my opinion. Way too long scenes of the revival in the movie, too. Made it look way too much like a Black Billy Graham movie with its cliché stadium crusade in every movie.
King Arthur
Kinda recommended for it’s interesting take on an epic legend, but not really recommended because of its paganism. Trying to be a pagan Braveheart. Doesn’t work. Paganism simply does not provide the necessary preconditions of a world that gives things like courage, love, honor and nobility meangingfulness or validity. Okay, this was a cool concept of trying to “get to the true historical figure” behind the Arthur legends. The problem I have with it is that the actual historical information available is so scarce as to render this theory of Arthur as a 6th century Roman Briton named Artorius, to be basically a new legend replacing the conventional legend. Of course, I’m not against such speculation. It makes for interesting fodder and theory. The problem is that modernist storytellers like David Franzoni, the writer of this movie, are so awash in their own modernist “realist” mythology that they actually think their Demythology mythology is somehow the true and “objective” perspective of reality and history. Ahh, ignorance must be bliss. Couple that with the fact that so much of this story is actually made up that it is all quite dishonest to bill it as the real historical Arthur. These people must have no clue that they are in fact simply replacing one mythology for another. Modernist naturalistic realism for romantic idealism. One prejudice for another. Again, there may be some truth to it, but let us not fool ourselves into such prejudicial imperialism of history. One of the deliberate fabrications of this story is Arthur’s connection to the arch-heretic Pelagius. Very relevant that Franzoni picked this guy. Keep in mind, that Franzoni wrote Gladiator with the deliberate desire to downplay Christianity and exalt paganism, the opposite of what most sword and sandal epics used to do (and, I might add, the opposite of historical reality, as Christianity was one of the primary downfalls of the Roman Empire according to Gibbon, but alas, I digress). I quoted him saying as much in my book, Hollywood Worldviews. The guy knows what he is doing and he does it well. And this movie is no exception to Franzoni’s hate affair with Christianity. Unfortunately, since the movie takes place around the 5th century, when the Roman papacy was still not established, but getting there, then Franzoni is not merely criticizing Roman Catholicism, but Christianity itself. In this story, there are “uncivilized” pagans of the woods, who end up allying with Arthur and are good guys, and there are the barbaric Saxons, but the worst monsters are the Christians, who hold up torture chambers to torture people in the name of God like a Pre-Inquisition Inquisition. It always leads to Inquisition for these bigots of Hollywood. Rome is basically the center of the Faith and is described as “those who take what does not belong to them.” Well, the coagulation of Christianity with pagan Rome certainly did create monumental problems, but in this story, the “True” picture of Christianity is painted in the heretic Pelagius. Pelagius was the teacher who Augustine rightly condemned as negating the sovereign glory of God and elevating man’s autonomy to an idolatrous equality with God. Pelagius denied that man was born into sin and asserted that man’s will was entirely autonomous from God’s effect. Therefore, man, does, by his own autonomous power, do all that he does, both good and bad. Mankind has no sinful nature. Funny, but the Living God I worship says, “there is no one who is good, not even one,” (Romans 3) and that humans are by nature, evil (Ephesians 2:3; Matthew 7:11), and are slaves of sin (Romans 6:16-19), and that man is responsible for his actions, but is not free from the control of God in any way (Job 12:16-25; Ephesians 1:11; Acts 4:27-28). But IN THIS story, Pelagius is a hero championing individual rights, personal freedom and the like. Arthur believes in Pelagius’ teachings because he teaches that all men are free to choose their own destinies and are free by right from the control of others, such as the institutional church of course. It’s a very clever coupling with the theme of political and theological freedom that Franzoni creates, though ultimately philosophically invalid. Unfortunately, the freedom Pelagius espoused was humanistic self-idolatry, not true freedom. Man is the ultimate power in his own life, not God, man is the creator of his own destiny, or as Arthur chimes in, “The home we seek is not in some distant land (read: heaven) but in our hearts. As free men, we choose to make it so.” With the emphasis on WE CHOOSE TO MAKE IT SO. (Ahem – as in “not God” or anyone else) Okay, I can dig the whole free from the tyranny of other men thing, but so-called Free Will of man, which is actually the “autonomy of the human will from God” has lead only to the gulags and killing fields and cultural purges and gas chambers of the twentieth century. 100s of millions dead in the name of autonomous human will. And they complain about Inquisitions and Crusades? Sheesh. Religious intolerance is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the evils done in the name of man’s absolute freedom from God. Anyway, the whole point of the story is that Arthur begins as a loyal Christian man of integrity, who obeys his orders from the bishop in Rome, even when they are foolish. The Cardinal tells him to do one last quest before he and his knights are free from their Roman military duty. And that quest is a rather indulgent meaningless one, to rescue an important and utterly selfish Roman leader simply because his son is in line for leadership. But Arthur obeys authority. But the progress of the story step by step shows that this Christianity Arthur is committed to is cruel and despotic. It’s rulers are cowards, they throw away people and lands who have been loyal to them for years and years at a whim, when the Saxon’s invade. They leave those poor people to their deaths. But not Arthur, who tries to save a whole village from the Saxons. This Faith tortures people in the name of God, abuses people’s freedom, basically CONTROLS people. And that is the metaphor for the film, CONTROL VERSUS FREEDOM. Arthur starts out thinking Rome Is where “the greatest minds in all the world come together in one place to help make mankind free.” But by the end of the story, concludes that “The home we seek is not in some distant land (read: heaven) but in our hearts. As free men, we choose to make it so.”And ends up giving up that Faith of his fathers to marry a pagan wench, okay, one of the hottest pagan wenches in movies ever, in a pagan ceremony in the midst of a mini-Stonehenge (another pagan reference to the Druids) Ah, shades of Spinal Tap—mini-Stonehenge. That is the power of subversive drama. Make the hero be a committed loyal member of the worldview you want to discredit, a worldview that many in this world believe, so that by the end of the story, when the hero reluctantly changes his view about the world, it gives the audience the affirming encouragement to do so as well. After all, the hero is the good guy, right? And we want to cheer on the good guy, right? So, before you know it, you are cheering on leaving the Christian faith because of how cruel it is – or rather how cruel it has been portrayed. Interesting, this Pelagianism. Pelagius considers each human born to be an entirely innocent and autonomously free chooser. They create their own destinies by their own choices. God has no control in their lives at all. Therefore, man ultimately saves himself by his own power of doing good over doing evil. People do not need Christ to redeem them, because it is all up to their own choices and power. This is salvation by works, not “free will.” That is why Pelagianism is heresy, because it damns those to hell who believe in it because they do not place faith in Christ, but in their own “free will.” It is all up to them. As a matter of fact, this “salvation by works” is really what every other religion and worldview reduces to EXCEPT Christianity. Which is no surprise why pagan Franzoni chose Pelagius as a hero. Because his own humanism negates God and places man’s destiny in his own hands. Man is his own god. [If you want to read more on this issue of Free Will and God’s Sovereignty, click here for my very long article: “Whatsoever Comes to Pass: A Personal Journey Toward the Sovereignty of God”] ALSO, here is some sweet irony: Arthur praises Pelagius’s theology of the absolute free will of man, and yet, he prays this mighty prayer to God to help him in this last task of duty. As if God can do anything according to this man’s theology? He posits that man is absolutely free and then asks God to do something when all the events of history are accomplished by free acts of autonomous men. Dude! You just preached that man is free from God’s control! What the heck are you asking God to do anything in history for? But then, heresy and false doctrine is never very consistent anyway. And neither is the secular humanism that Franzoni writes into his otherwise interesting historical epics. Here is what I wrote about his movie Gladiator in my book:
The 2000 Academy Award winner Gladiator marks an achievement of respectability for paganism in modern filmmaking. Writer David Franzoni has said that he deliberately wanted to offer a contrast with the sword-and-sandal epics of yesteryear:
The film is about a hero who has morality, but that morality is a secular morality that transcends conventional religious morality. In other words, I believe there is room in our mythology for a character who is deeply moral, but who’s not traditionally religious: I loved that he was a pagan, not Christian or any other traditional/established religion. All those Roman Empire movies from the ’50s and ’60s were religious morality plays, and had to maintain the Christian status quo, it’s all very conventional. You would never have been able to portray a pagan afterlife back then, either. Maximus is a man who will die for his family, and he will die for what’s right. (1)
Apparently, the contradiction of a “secular morality” derived from Roman paganism does not bother Franzoni. Maximus does “what is right” as his religion conventionally defines it for him. (2) So Franzoni has replaced the Christian convention of morality with another religious convention, that of Roman paganism, thinking that this somehow points to a secular morality that transcends them both. (3) Be that as it may, Maximus’s pagan heaven was depicted as real, which is extremely rare in a mainstream movie of such prominence, and it marks the cinematic postmodern openness to religiosity that is decidedly non-Christian.
[(1)Quoted in John Soriano, “WGA.ORG’s Exclusive Interview with David Franzoni,” WGA(2)There was nothing more conventional in Rome than the religious belief in Elysium and in strength and honor.
(3)“Transcendent secular morality” is an oxymoron. Secularity cannot be transcendent, because by definition it is immanent, that is, of the world rather than of the transcendent spiritual realm. From Aristotle to Wittgenstein, if there is one thing that the history of the secular philosophy of ethics illustrates, it is that when people reason “secularly” (from themselves), rather than from the transcendent God, they can only end in subjectivism (each person decides for himself or herself), and that is certainly not transcendent. Without a transcendent absolute standard, this secular moral relativity reduces to the will to power—whoever is in power (the majority) defines what is right and wrong for the rest (the minority). This will to power is the essence of Rome, and it is the same will to power that was embodied in the German Nazi state of the 1930s and 1940s. The director Ridley Scott understood this, and that is why he modeled the look of the Roman cult in Gladiator after the fascist imagery of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.]
To End All Wars
Very Highly Recommended. Possibly one of the best films ever made. Okay, I wrote the screenplay so I might have a tiny conflict of interest here ☺. Here is what Gene Edward Veith said of it in World Magazine:
COMING SOON TO A THEATER near you: a World War II drama featuring Kiefer Sutherland, one of the movie industry’s hottest stars. It is rated R. It is a product of Hollywood. And it is one of the powerful cinematic expositions of the Christian faith.
To End All Wars might have been pitched to the mainline filmmakers as Chariots of Fire meets Saving Private Ryan. Fans of the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, the true story of an athlete who refused to run in the Olympics on the Sabbath, will note the same Scottish accents, a similar soon-to-be church worker positively portrayed, and comparably high production values. But whereas Chariots of Fire, for all of its virtues, never got around to mentioning the gospel, To End All Wars amounts to a sustained meditation on the core of Christianity: Christ dying for sinners, and what that means in the most extreme trials of life.
To End All Wars is based on the true story of Ernest Gordon, the long-time chaplain at Princeton University. Mr. Gordon, who died just a few months before the film was completed, was a captain in a Scottish Highland regiment in World War II. When the Japanese took Singapore—in those early days of the war when Japan was sweeping away all opposition—Mr. Gordon was captured. He spent the next three years in a Japanese POW camp, enduring hardships, brutality, and spiritual challenges that became for him a crucible of faith.
The film, based on Mr. Gordon’s autobiography Through the Valley of the Kwai, does not shrink away from the torture, degradation, and cruelty of the Japanese camp. It also dramatizes how evil breeds evil, even in its victims: Allied prisoners, struggling to survive in this dog-eat-dog environment, start adopting the values and behavior of their captors.
But then, to hold on to whatever shreds of their humanity are left, a number of prisoners remember their old vocations and decide to exercise their callings in the teeth of the most hostile surroundings. A former university instructor organizes a philosophy seminar, and prisoners get together, in the mud and squalor of the camp, to discuss Plato’s philosophy of justice.
Another prisoner had been an actor. He forms a troupe to perform plays by Shakespeare (which he had thankfully learned by heart). A group with musical talents carves recorders out of bamboo, making themselves into an orchestra that plays Bach.
They also form relationships with their guards, some of whom are transfigured from stereotyped villains into genuine human beings.
But the brutality reasserts itself. Prisoners are punished and pushed into betrayals, compromises, and impossible moral dilemmas.
The issues they had been learning about in their “Jungle University” are tested. What is justice and can it really be achieved in a sinful world? What does it mean to love one’s enemies? How could Christ take other people’s sins upon Himself? What does it mean that Christ died for sinners, atoning for them and granting them free forgiveness?
The movie climaxes in a shocking, yet unforgettable scene of redemption.
You can buy the movie at Amazon.com by clicking here.
Troy
Excellent production values, but hard to recommend. A hollow epic. This movie was well-written. It had all the necessary elements of a good epic: a strong warrior lead in Brad Pitt as Achilles, superb acting, superior supporting cast that fit their roles perfectly, excellent and profound dialogue, good slimmed down battle scenes, a focus on the individuals over the masses, bigger than life issues of honor, courage, love, nobility, revenge, greed, gods and country. The problem is that it lacked the most important ingredient that gives true meaning to everything else: transcendence. Oh, it tried to have transcendence, don’t get me wrong. But it quintessentially could not achieve transcendence because it appears that the storytellers (ie: the writer and director) did not themselves believe in transcendence so they fundamentally could not manufacture it no matter how hard they tried. Let me explain. Epics like Lord of the Rings, Braveheart, Patriot Games, Last of the Mohicans, Rob Roy, all achieve a profound moving of the heart that lingers in our souls because of the transcendence of the worldview in the story. The characters are fighting for things like freedom, love and honor because they are rooted in a higher reality, a higher law, a higher existence than mortal experience. Now, the truth is that only the triune God of Christianity can provide the necessary philosophical foundation of our belief in such things as human rights, universal freedom, and these things. These movies may reveal that truth to varying greater or lesser degrees, but they point to it nonetheless. And since we are created in the image of God, these truths, no matter how incompletely expressed, resonate in our souls. In Braveheart, we know that king Edward Longshanks is evil and the people of Scotland have a right to freedom because there is a higher king, a higher reality (ie: God and His law) upon which our belief in human rights is founded. But you see, if there is no higher reality, no transcendent law or God, then there is no such thing as evil, and one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter as they say. Without the idea of God, human rights, absolute wrongs are all illusions and reality reduces to the will to power (there goes Nietzsche again). There is no “right” there is only might. So within a worldview that negates transcendence, Longshanks would really be a hero (an “Overman”) because he rejects moral absolutes and creates his own values (As Nietzsche would have it). Longshanks would be beyond good and evil, and beyond criticism. As the Overman, he does not bow to the prejudices of tradition and society, etc.
My point is that this modern/postmodern belief of today, that morality and truth is relative is not workable and does not ring true to us if we play it out in our stories, and no matter how much they protesteth, no matter how much modernists and pomos try to persuade us that there is no objective truth, no absolute right and wrong, no transcendence, it does not resonate with our souls because we are created in the image of God. We know better. And epics are the profound expression of this transcendence. Now, the problem with Troy is not the paganism so much as the humanism. Of course, the paganism is silly superstition, and I concur with the filmmakers’ critique of it. The problem is that the critique comes out of a humanist immanence that ultimately rejects true transcendence and tries to replace it with an Existential appeal to living bravado. The two main warriors, Achilles and Hektor, are both humanists who mock the gods subtley (Hektor with his comments about how many battalions does Apollo command for Troy) or outright (Achilles defiantly cuts off the head of the Apollo statue, a blasphemous act, even to his fellow soldiers). They don’t believe in gods, only the peons and masses of mindless soldiers do. Of course, King Agamemnon doesn’t believe in gods either, but he uses them for his own selfish gain. The point is that through the protagonist and antagonist of Troy we see the storytellers’ contempt for religion. Achilles retorts to his lover that “The gods envy us because we are mortal” rather than the other way around. To him, this life and mortality is of more value than the next life and deity. This is also expressed when he seeks revenge for his cousin’s death because “there is nothing higher” than personal vengeance. In other words, there is no vengeance in the next world. There are no higher things than man’s own existence, than the natural world. There is no supernatural. Achilles is an Existentialist, “Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.” As if we could not appreciate this life if we are concerned about the next. Achilles is a western individualist as he is the lone warrior who defies King Agamemnon, doesn’t follow orders, is captain of his own fate and master of his own destiny, does what he wants, sleeps with several women at once, parties hardy and cares not for politics and politicians, princes and royalty. Achilles in this film is the American hero, the cowboy of the ancient world, a Greek James Dean. He is the Nietzschean Overman. So because of this nihilistic worldview that there is nothing higher than “this life,” he seeks greatness though glory, through being remembered. That is the dominant theme of this film, that immortality is not spiritual, but mortal. It is through being remembered and not forgotten in this world that we receive glory, not through spiritual transcendence in the next world or after life. It is this world that counts, not the next. The movie ends with the narration that “these names will never die. Men will say “I lived in the time of Hektor, I lived in the time of Achilles.” Okay, that is why the story is ultimately empty and we walk away without really caring about it. Because if there is no higher reality, no transcendence that roots our beliefs in eternity, then all of life is vain, no matter how full you think you may live it. Nothing is of ultimate value, not even personal gratification of the senses. The highest experience of life is but a blink of nothingness in the vast sea of time. All meaning and value is illusion, created by us to soothe us to the truth. Honor, nobility, courage are foolish delusions and are of equal moral value with dishonor, ignobility and cowardice.
Do you see what I mean? The story undercuts it’s own epic values. And this is why it is hard to recommend the film. It has some really great appeals to courage, honor, love, consequences of sin, love of country and loyalty. In the story, Achilles, finds a certain redemption from his selfishness when he realizes his pride and vegeance as wrong and allows the King of Troy to bury his son, rather than desecrating him. Achilles apologizes to his closest officer for his temper tantrum, and seeks true love with a captured priestess of Apollo. Paris starts out a cowardly child and redeems himself as a patriotic warrior willing to die and even fight Achilles. The loyalty of friends and family is seen in Achilles and his cousin and fellow warriors. Servant-like leadership is exalted in the king of Troy versus the power warmonger Agamemnon. These are all good epic values, I won’t deny that. And they were somewhat touching. But you see, all these revelations are empty and especially Achilles’ redemption is a delusion if there is no next life, no transcendence, no God. There is not one whit of a value difference between Achilles repenting or Achilles killing if there is no transcendent reality. There is no redemption and there is no meaning if there is no transcendent reality. So the movie rejects transcendence but then tries to rescue it by maintaining the transcendent values of courage, honor, love and valor that it has already negated. This rational/irrational dialectic makes it a very dissatisfying myth.
Another thing that makes Troy dissatisfying is the modern/postmodern negation of good and evil apparent in the story. There is no good guy or evil guy. Everyone is a mixture of both, with mostly evil. Now, this may satisfy the politically correct pomo agenda that there is no such thing as good and evil sides in any war (and I’m not against a certain amount of it within a bigger context of good and evil), but it makes for bad storytelling in this case because there is no one to root for. There is no good and evil, only the will to power of men and nations. You see? When you try to incarnate postmodernism, it results in empty storytelling. Hollow epics, delusionary love. That is another reason why we leave the theater not caring at all for anyone because they were all just tragically messed up. The closest it comes to good guys are the king of Troy and Hektor. But the king is a relic of an era past and is rather incidental. And Hektor, the most honorable one, good guy Hektor’s goodness and honorableness just leads to his death. So his goodness is his tragic weakness that we know will lead to his downfall in this world of will to power. Well, if you don’t really root for anyone, you’re not going to care at the end how it all turns out because you’re not going to really care for anyone. In short, contrary to the film’s thematic proposition, all of these characters and their story will be easily forgotten because there is no transcendence to the story or to their lives. Here’s what King Solomon said about remembrance:
Ecclesiastes 2:16 For there is no lasting remembrance of the wise man as with the fool, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man and the fool alike die!… 24 There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. 25 For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?… 12:13 The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. 14 For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.
NOW THAT’S WORTH REMEMBERING.