Faster

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A revenge story with redemption. A newly released ex-con, played by Dwayne Johnson, seeks to kill the men who killed his brother, while being tracked by a young assassin and a corrupt cop. It’s a kill by numbers formula that has a unique spiritual twist about forgiveness and redemption.

When the ex-con, Driver, gets to his last guy to kill, he turns out to be someone who became a Christian preacher and is now preaching in a revival tent like environment. When Driver gets him in his sights, the preacher talks about repentance and how he’s atoning for what he’s done with a changed life. But when the preacher is about to be shot dead, he looks the killer in the eye and asks for forgiveness for what he did. He all but accepts his fate as punishment for his actions (this could have been more clear). Driver is confronted for the first time with grace and real redemption that revenge cannot satisfy. Driver decides not to kill the preacher and ends up in the tent before God wondering what repentance means for him.

This movie has all the hallmarks of a “Christian movie” in terms of genre: A preacher telling a sinner to forgive, redemption in a sanctuary while looking up at a cross, hearing a gospel sermon on the radio. The difference is of course that this movie showed the gritty violent reality of revenge, so that when the church redemption occurs, it is not cliché, simply because the one extreme of blood revenge and violent death is countered by the equal extreme of blood atonement and salvation. The redemption is powerful and rings true because the evil is portrayed with clarity. Because Christian movies are too afraid to show sin as it really is, they become cliché ridden formulas of “preaching” that does not ring true like this movie does.

Unfortunately, the movie becomes morally incoherent in the end because, after Driver spares the preacher and survives being killed by the corrupt cop who started it all, Driver still ends up shooting that corrupt cop with revenge rather than pure self-defense. So a contradictory portrait is displayed in perpetuating the very revenge Driver was supposed to be redeemed from. A bit unsatisfying ending.

Skyline

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Low budget Sci-fi action rip off of Independence Day meets Cloverfield. A group of friends and acquaintances seek to stay alive when Los Angeles is invaded by alien space ships who seek out all humans to suck their brains out for energy. This movie seems to illustrate the emptiness and lack of meaning that many young filmmakers have. They come up with a “cool” idea about aliens invading and a “cool” visual chase film about survival, only to fall apart narratively at the end, which seems to reflect their own lack of depth or meaning to draw from in their own worldview. If they are taught there is no real transcendent meaning, then they have nothing to really say in their stories.

In this case, the hero and heroine, after spending an hour and a half trying with futility to stay free from the invaders, are finally sucked up into a big space ship, only to discover that the aliens are using human brains to feed on and in some cases inhabit their dying bodies. So, the hero’s brain becomes a part of some alien who then recognizes the heroine about to be eaten alive, and he then saves her from being chomped — for the moment. And that’s how it ends. What the…? In the trailers to the movie, they showed TV news clips (not in the movie that I remember) that editorialized that this invasion must be how the Indians felt when the bad evil Europeans invaded their land and took it over. A movie that starts out with a politically correct theme of anti-colonialism, ends up fizzling like a kid who started out real excited making up a story and then ran out of steam near the end when he realized he hadn’t thought it through to the end.

Paranormal Activity 2

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In this found footage horror sequel, we see a clever new version of the first story, but set as a prequel/sequel. In other words, this story starts before the first movie in time, intersects with it and finishes after it. This is the story of the first movie’s Katie’s sister, Kristi, who becomes plagued by a demon just as her sister was. It turns out they had occult problems in their family past and though they are separated by 60 miles or so, there are demons who want Kristi’s son as some kind of ransom to stop a curse on their family. That is how the two stories are tied together. When the demon possesses Katie in the first movie and she leaves, she is going to Kristi’s house to help get the little boy.

The new gimmick in this found footage story is that they put up security cameras around the house and so we are able to see a multiple angle cut version of the story, rather than one single camera as in the first movie.

The worldview of this story is confused and incoherent. The spiritual idea in the first movie was that Micah and Katie reject the power of the cross of Christ before they are overtaken by the demon. The idea being that when you reject God, you have no spiritual power or authority to fight demonic evil. So in this movie, Kristi’s husband actually does the opposite; he finds a cross and uses it on Kristi’s demon possessed head to exorcise her. And it works! And we see the flip side redemption of the lost redemption in the first movie. But then the problem occurs when, after this apparent victory, Katie shows up possessed by her demon and kills both Kristi and her husband and takes the boy. So, the very spiritual source of power over evil is first shown to provide victory and then winds up being useless in a contradictory and incoherent ending to the story.

Secretariat

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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.

The Social Network

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A drama about the invention of Facebook and its founders, written by Aaron Sorkin and shot by David Fincher. The movie starts with a long opening tete a tete between nerdish computer geek and autistic-like jerk, Mark Zuckerberg and a young college co-ed he is out on a date with, Erica. It’s a brilliant scene that sets the stage for the film’s drama and delivers the thematic message all in one: She is not going out with him and people do not like him, not because he is brilliant or wants to be on the inner ring of power, but plain and simple, because he is an a**hole. A simple but profound tale of character and integrity and what it means to be alone in the world. If you can’t make friends, it’s your own simple fault.

This will be a multiple Oscar nominated film for 2010. It basically makes the ironic argument that the young man who brought us the biggest most successful social connecting medium of the decade, was unable to maintain friendship himself. The film really touches on some relevant important issues for today: The rapidly changing “cool” culture, the seduction of power, the egalitarian force of the internet to make lives and destroy them, the corrupting process of the “inner ring” in aristocratic culture like Ivy League education and old money, but also that same inner ring mentality in the world of enterpreneurship. It’s a rich panoply of human nature, guilt and unrequited love and friendship.

This movie is so full of so many memorable lines, I can’t remember them all. A broken-hearted Eduard to Zuckerberg: “I was your only friend.” Zuckerberg to the rich Winklevoss twins who claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” Zuckerberg about the Winklevoss twins: “They’re just angry that for once in their life, things didn’t go the way they were supposed to for them.” There is a price for the witty arrogance and condescension of Zuckerberg, and his inability to be vulnerable, summed up in the last image of the film: his constant refreshing of the screen after he requests to be a friend with the one girl who didn’t want him for his success and reached out to him, the one he lashed out by posting his juvenile rantings of revenge against her. That little element of irony of a Facebook world: People “blog” or post their innermost thoughts without discretion to the whole world, and do not consider their public consequences, YET, they cannot be truly vulnerable to another human in person. Zuckerberg, after destroying the one woman he wanted on the internet, he hoped he could just erase what he had written, but he couldn’t, it was permanent, it was “not in pencil, it was in ink.” And so he longed for the intimacy he had sought, the sense of belonging that he obsessed over in trying to be in an insider’s “cool” “final club.” And when he betrays the only true friend he had, he ends all alone in the world, the one dread of existence.

Let Me In

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American remake of the superior Danish vampire movie, “Let the Right One In.” Story of a shy, sensitive and withdrawn young 12 year old boy, Owen, who unwittingly becomes good friends with a 12 year old girl vampire, Abby. Abby has just moved into the neighborhood with her dad, an older man who goes out to kill innocent young people and drain their blood for his vampire daughter to drink. Meanwhile, Owen is bullied by an increasingly violent older kid at school. Of course Owen doesn’t know Abby is a vampire at first but they become fast friends and her strange actions become more apparent to Owen.

The name of the film is the heart of the theme of this moral tale about the seduction and temptation of evil in our lives. The notion is that a vampire cannot enter the victim’s home dwelling unless she is invited in. Otherwise, she will die. So by the time Owen discovers Abby is this evil monster (he even calls his estranged dad to ask him is there real evil), he is already very fond of her, “going steady” and finds it hard to stomach her need for feasting, but finds it even harder to say goodbye to her. He is drawn to her. He is seduced by her sweetness toward him. There is no sexual aspect brought into this film, which keeps it on track thematically. There are several times where she is called “Sweetheart” or “Sweetie” by several people illustrating how sweet and innocent evil can come disguised into our lives. Is not Satan disguised as an Angel of Light? So, we are responsible for accepting the seduction of sin for a season.

So when Owen wants to see what happens to Abby if she is not asked into his home, she starts to bleed and die. He quickly yells out “you can come in!” to stop it. This is the point where Own has allowed his moral senses to be dulled by the friendliness of the temptation. He has stepped over the line. She has been so good to him, he can’t bear to see her in pain. And isn’t that exactly how all evil seduces us? It’s always “greyed” so that we blind ourselves to its true nature. She’s been a friend to him when no one else has, she’s taught him to stick up for himself with the bully, she’s even tried to share his candy with him, which causes her to vomit since vampires can’t eat candy of course.

It takes place in the 1980s and we see on the TV a news clip of Ronald Reagan talking about fighting evil by the power of Jesus Christ. Owen’s mother prays to Jesus Christ before their meals. Is this some kind of religious reference? Often, this is done to make political statements, but in interviews the director has indicated that it was not a political statement so much as a dealing with a state of mind in that era where the notion of evil being outside the United States instead of inside of us. So the movie deals with evil as an essence within us that takes us over.

By the end of the film, Abby’s father has died and so she needs someone to take over his task of providing blood. Owen takes that place as we see him traveling with her box that she sleeps inside. So Owen has embraced the dark side in this coming of age story, a demonic Romeo and Juliet that illustrates the subtle seduction of evil within us and how we succumb willingly and end up justifying the evil that we do.

Buried

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This thriller is based on a high concept that actually works surprisingly well. It’s the story of a US government contracted trucker in Iraq who wakes up after an attack, only to discover that he has been buried alive in a wooden coffin somewhere in the desert. His kidnappers leave him a cell phone to try to get a million dollars ransom or they’ll let him die. And the entire film takes place in the coffin with Paul, played by Ryan Reynolds. You would think no way could a feature film 1 hour and 40 minutes long be visually interesting enough to hold attention. But it does because it is dramatically entrapping.

As Paul seeks to call his loved ones and those who might help rescue him, we learn he is working for a government contracted company to drive supplies in Iraq for the US government. The film incarnates anti-war politics into the thriller plot. It’s message is that of guilt by complicity. The point is made several times that Paul sees himself as an innocent citizen just making a living doing his job, and he is therefore not responsible for the war. While the kidnappers are supposedly not terrorists, just Iraqis who are reacting out of desperation because their country is being decimated by the war brought on by the United States. As Paul says he’s not a soldier, just a guy with a family, we hear the kidnapper say that he is just an Iraqi citizen and his family is being destroyed by the US.

So the filmmaker makes the same moral equivalency argument that terrorists make, namely that innocent civilians are just as guilty as soldiers and deserve to die because they go along with the military. Knowing this is the moral, makes you immediately know how it has to end: with Paul’s death. He cannot ultimately be rescued because then his guilt would not be punished according the values that the filmmakers are espousing in this moral sermon.

An anti-corporate message is also communicated as we see the cold heartless bureaucrat from the corporation who hired him using a contractual technicality to fire him on the phone while he is in the coffin, thus freeing the corporation from responsibility and insurance accountability to his family.

The Town

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Crime Drama. The story of a bank robber in Charlestown NY who discovers love and tries to get out of the world of crime and violence he has succumbed to. The movie hook is that Charlestown is a small community in New York that has more bank robbers per square mile than anywhere in the US. The idea here is also family generations and the sins of the father. What does it cost to get out? What does it take to change your life? It’s a pretty formulaic story: Boy meets girl. Boy is a criminal so he loses girl. Boy tries to get out of crime in order to get girl.

The moral values in this film are confused. While Ben Affleck’s character Doug shows a moral soft spot – he doesn’t kill people, he keeps his insane step-brother in line, and he falls in love with the desire to get out, he protects his innocent girlfriend from violence – he ultimately does not do the right thing: accept justice and help the FBI. In this case, the FBI lead, Agent Frawley, is the pretty boy from Mad Men and while he is not the typical diabolical evil Lawman so often portrayed in these kind of movies, he is played without any depth. There is one moment meant to make this FBI guy ultimately cruel: When he brings Doug in and tells him that if he doesn’t help the FBI there will be a time when he will want to, and it will be too late and Lawley will tell him, with relish, to “go F— yourself.” Needless to say, when Doug gets away, he leaves a note for agent Lawley, telling him to “Go F— yourself,” thus winning the moral duel. Doug thinks that helping to turn in other criminals and their higher ups for their crimes is “ratting,” so instead he tries to run away with his new love. Only problem is the bad guys won’t let him. So he does this one last robbery.

The moral premise of the film is entirely unsatisfying storytelling because the audience is encouraged to root for a criminal to get away crimes and then not paying for his crimes. Doug never gives himself up to the law, never accepts his moral responsibility and never pays for his crimes. He thinks that feeling sorry, “getting out” and starting over, without paying for his crimes, is enough. One of the last lines of the film is Doug saying, “Even when you try to change, there are still consequences for the things you’ve done in life.” True enough, yet a cop-out, because this humanistic morality of a criminal feeling sorry and losing love seems to be all the payment required by these storytellers.

Doug does lose his chance at love because he runs away to Florida and apparently can’t have her. He gives her the bank robbery money to help out with a boy’s club. As if doing good with stolen money is redemption rather than returning it to the victims he violated. He tells a clerk while robbing the bank to not worry cause it’s “not her money.” No, it’s just thousands of other innocent people’s hard earned money. These are all manipulative tactics of trying to avoid the guilt from his actions, but they are not justice. Guilt would have been satisfied, justice appeased, had Doug accepted the penalty for his crime, helped the FBI to attain justice and accepted the rejection from evil criminals for doing so, or at least died fighting against his old life. So there certainly are morally satisfying conclusions that would have redeemed Doug. The filmmakers just didn’t choose them.

Devil

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Christian morality tale. This movie starts with a creative interesting open of establishing shots of the city – all of them upside down. No fancy effects, but it really sets the feel for what you are about to see – this is going to turn your worldview upside down.

It’s basically the story of five people trapped in an elevator in a business building and someone or something is killing them one by one. The protagonist is actually a cop on the outside trying to figure it all out as everyone is doing everything they can to free the people. The cop has his own “inner demons” as he works through his inability to forgive a kid who accidentally killed his family in a car accident. Thriller elements: the sound in the elevator is broken so the security can only talk to the people in the elevator, but cannot hear them, no pens to write on paper for the cameras and the cameras are too low resolution to see driver’s licenses. And of course cell phones won’t work here either. So the cop seeks to find out who each person is and to determine which one is killing each of them as the lights go out.

The cop soon discovers each of the trapped persons have records of crime, theft, lying, swindling or stealing. Not big crimes, but this movie reminds me of Phone Booth, in that it makes the point that there are no “little white sins.” We are responsible for every wrong we commit against others. The reason why each character is being taken by the devil is because they do not admit their evil. They do not accept the responsibility for the consequences of their life choices. This movie incarnates the very Bible verse put on the first screen of the movie:

“Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1Peter 5:8)

Devil is an incarnate parable of this Bible verse. It begins with Catholic folk religion through a religious Mexican character telling the story. He tells of how his grandma would tell a story of the devil becoming flesh to make people face the consequences of their choices in life. And of course, that is what is happening in this story. At one point the religious character tells the unbelieving cop, “Everyone believes in the devil a little. Even those who say they don’t.” At the end of the movie, the last thing the storyteller says is that his grandma would tell him, “Don’t worry (about all the scary stuff of the devil), it only proves that if there is a devil, there has to be a God.” By the time it all starts making sense to the cop, he asks the religious character, “hypothetically speaking, if your story is true, how does one get out of it?” In other words, how do we find redemption? And then we see the last character facing the devil and confessing his sin and guilt toward others whose lives he destroyed. We hear an amazingly non-humanist biblical line that “no one is good,” none of us. The devil then tells him that’s not enough to save him, it won’t make up for all the evil he did in life. To which he replies, “I know.” He accepts damnation as justice for the wrongs he has done in life, and that such moral crimes MUST be paid for with blood. This is no easy humanist “forgiveness” without consequence. In Christianity, this is called “repentance”. It’s a change of mind that acknowledges one’s own guilt and our inability to pay for that guilt apart from our own damnation.

But then something amazing happens. With the last person dying in his arms, this “self-admitted” guilty character tells the Devil three times (making thematic emphasis) to “take me instead” of her, “because I deserve it.” This is of course substitutionary atonement, a distinctly Christian concept.

Substitutionary atonement is the doctrine that Jesus Christ died in the place of sinners in order to pay the penalty for their sins so they would not go to hell. Kinda like dying in the electric chair in the place of a capital criminal. The guy is not trying to be his own Christ, I think the filmmaker is making a veiled reference to Christ’s dying in our place because he knows that the Hollywood censors would not allow clear Christian faith in movies. (the other possibility is that the filmmaker is a religious humanist who wants to have Christian ideas without Christ, but this seems less likely since there are veiled references to Christianity all throughout. Although one piece of evidence that the filmmaker is not deeply familiar with the Christian faith is that he quotes the Bible verse at the beginning about the devil like a roaring lion, but gets the citation wrong. He puts it as “Peter 5:8, instead of 1 Peter 5:8.). At one point, the religious character starts praying a Spanish prayer into the intercom that I would like to know what he is actually saying. That might enlighten the meaning or theme.

The themes in this movie reflect a Christian worldview: The reality of the devil and damnation, forgiveness, confession, repentance, and accepting of one’s guilt for the choices we make, and redemption through confession and repentance and forgiveness, along with substitutionary atonement. I would make one caveat: Shyamalan worked on the story, but another person wrote it and another person directed it, so I am not sure how much Shyamalan’s own worldview comes into play here. But one possible interpretation may be that Shyamalan has a Hindu universalist type religious heritage, so he may be trying to subvert American faith by using our western cultural symbols like the Devil and other Christian notions to communicate his own idea of Karma. Though there are no references to past lives in the story there is a reference to the idea that we are responsible for everything that comes our way in life as consequences for our choices. But even here, reaping what we sow is also a Biblical idea.

Inception

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Boy, where does one begin? This is another philosophical opus by Christopher Nolan that pretty much confirms his rein as the king of intelligent philosophical mainstream filmmaking. The success of his films prove that people DO like deep mythological, ethical, and philosophical foundations to their stories.

The life of the mind and the question of what constitutes reality is a common theme in Nolan’s films, and Inception takes this to the limit. It’s main purpose appears to be exploring the nature of how ideas take hold in our minds, and how our cherished presuppositions are held by faith and “locked away” in our minds to such an extent that they determine what we think of reality. Those “unproven” subjective presuppositions about reality then guide and determine our behavior regardless of objective reality.

DiCaprio’s Cobb character leads a team of people who use sophisticated technology to be able to enter into people’s dreams in order to steal their secrets for competing corporations of what have you. The metaphor here is incarnated in each person having some kind of locked safe deep in their consciousness where they hide away their secrets they don’t want discovered. The dramatic challenge of the movie is when a client hires them to do the reverse, to plant an idea into a person’s consciousness, in order to get them to do something the client wants. This is what is called “Inception.” So they seek to find the “safe” in a target’s dreams where they can deceive him and place the notion that he should “break up his father’s corporate empire upon his father’s death.”

Nolan employs a lot of concepts about dreams that we are familiar with. He uses the notion of falling or death as what wakes us up from a dream. He applies the notion that time in a dream goes by much slower than in our real world, so if they go deeper into his consciousness to a deeper level dream, the time slows down even more.

But the hero’s journey of Cobb is his own guilt over the suicide of his wife, Mal. His guilt over her death is manifested by her showing up in all his dreams as a killer of the dream that makes him and others wake up. In short, she is the reality waker. But when we discover why, it makes it quite a powerful postmodern tale of the questioning of our notions of reality. It turns out that they both indulged in this dream world escape by creating dreams where they could experience their fantasies together. When Mal wanted to stay longer and longer in their dreams, Cobb tried to snap her out of it by placing an inception in her mind that this wasn’t reality, so she needed to wake up. And how does one wake up in a dream? By killing one’s self. The only problem is that this planted presupposition stayed with her into the real world and she thought that it too was a dream, so she killed herself to “wake up.”

Wow, our presuppositions (faith commitments) have real world consequences on our behavior, and it is not always for the good. But also, this is raising the question “How do we know our notions of reality are true?” We act upon certain unproven notions that find their way into our minds through the narratives that we live or observe or construct. In a way, the movie is a metaphor for how those beliefs enter into our mental lockboxes. Through storytelling. The team of dream thieves are storytellers (like filmmakers) who craft entire worlds and pretend to be characters in a story that embodies a certain belief about reality. It implants themes about reality and how to behave into our consciousness, that we then hold onto and use as our basis for acting in our own world.

I entered the movie thinking, “This is about dreams. If he concludes, “it was all a dream,” I am going to be ticked off.” So I was happy when he ended on the note that left it ambiguous whether or not it was a dream for the hero. I think the point was that the movie is self-consciously NOT real, but a dream of reality that tries to engage in an inception in our minds. Therefore in the movie he can never conclude with an absolute statement about the “reality” of the film. I believe that is his point as a postmodern filmmaker: He wants us to question reality, and he is not going to conclude whether the “reality” in the movie is reality, precisely because of his epistemic commitment to questioning reality with the nature of stories. This explains why he mixes dream elements with reality elements. For example, the fact that he wears a wedding ring in the dream world, but not in the real world, and the kids are a couple years older at the last shot, BUT there are dream world indicators in the real world, such as the walls closing in on Cobb as he runs from the bad guys, and the fact that the kids are in the same exact position at the end “reality” scene as they are in the dream scenes. He wants us to question reality, but he is not going to give us an answer.

Quite clever. A story about how the power of stories accomplish their goal of affecting our consciousness and constructs of reality.