Machine Gun Preacher

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Relativity Media
Directed by Marc Forster
Written by Jason Keller

From the opening scene of a Sudanese village pillaged by LRA terrorists who force children to kill their parents to the closing credit monologue of the real life Sam Childers’ plea to rescue the kidnapped Sudanese orphans by any means necessary, Machine Gun Preacher packs a punch to the gut of our moral conscience. And it does so with a nuanced spiritual and moral reasoning that challenges our American couch potato activism that prides itself in political debates over moral action. Oh, and did I say it involves Jesus?

Machine Gun Preacher is based on the true story of Sam Childers, a drug addicted motorcycle riding criminal who gets saved by Jesus and goes to help rescue the orphans of Sudan from kidnapping, enslavement, torture and murder by rebel terrorists.

The story begins with an unrepentant Sam being released from prison, telling the Guards to go “F” themselves. What “poor” Sam learns is that his faithful wife has found Jesus and quit her stripping job to lead a respectable god fearing life raising their daughter. And now she wants him to come to church. Needless to say, that pisses Sam off big time and launches him on a self-destructive raging crime spree of drugs, robbery, and violence. But he is brought to the end of himself and believe it or not, gives his life to Jesus, being baptized and getting a respectable job in construction. This ain’t your low key Tender Mercies.

One day, Sam hears about the church mission project of building churches in Uganda and he takes off to go see how he can help. What he discovers on his trip is an evil world more wicked than he even realized. Joseph Kony’s terrorist group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), crosses from Uganda into Sudan and burns down villages, kills adults, tortures those who speak out, and forces children to become soldiers in their terrorist group. The result is myriads of orphans without much help from anyone to protect them.

Well, as you can guess, this pisses off Sam, and he gets a vision from God one day to build a church on his property for street people rejected by “proper” churchgoers, as well as an orphanage in the Sudan to help the children. Once, his new orphanage is burnt to the ground, he starts over, but this time with a new spirit – or rather, an old spirit redeemed with a new purpose. He joins the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), a counterinsurgent militia that protects the oppressed children with lethal force. Thus the title Machine Gun Preacher. Sam clings to his God and his guns. And thus the tremendous moral tale that asks the questions worthy of the Good Book itself: “How far will you go to save helpless innocent human life?”; “How does God’s redemption apply in a violent world of evil run amok?”; “Is self defense morally justifiable in rescuing women and orphans?”

A Christian Movie?

I have to be honest, this movie contains in it what I usually criticize in a typical “Christian movie.” Big bad biker dude’s wife finds God, brings him to a corny red-bricked church and he accepts Jesus into his heart, “gets saved” and baptized, turns his life around, starts his own church, and helps the poor children, yada yada. Christian clichés and memes we are all too familiar with in the Christian world.

However, this movie is not a cliché Christian movie. It is a deeply moving honest portrayal of “muscular” Christian faith alive in the complex real world we live in that draws respect even from unbelievers. So why do I say that? What makes it different if it carries some of the very same elements of Christian movies?

Well, first off, let’s be honest that the most obvious major differences are good production values, good writing, good directing, and good acting, that is so absent from “Christian movies.” Now, I am not going to go on a Christian movie bashing binge. And I am not going to make digs at specifically named Christian movies (and you know who you are :-). As a matter of fact, I think in general, they are getting better in all these categories as the years press on. I have been a part of some mediocre movies as well, so I know how hard it is to make a good movie, period. But there are several things in the storytelling itself that I think make this film work where Christian movies approaching similar themes often do not. First, in its moral and spiritual honesty and second, in its portrayal of evil and redemption.

Moral Honesty

While the movie wrestles with the moral issue of how to rescue widows and orphans oppressed by murderers, it does not promote hero worship or give pat answers and it deals honestly with the moral ambiguity of violence as a means to an end that exists in the real world.

First off, the villains in the film are fairly represented. Though the bulk of the murdering done in Southern Sudan has been by Muslims against Christians, Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, claims to be a Christian. Now, this would be a perfect opportunity for the typical Hollywood politically correct spin to ignore the Muslim violence and paint it as a picture of “Christian” terrorism. But the movie does not do this. It tells us about the Muslim violence and then communicates that Kony claims to be a Christian, but is clearly not a Christian, but a wolf in wolf’s clothing, using the Christian God’s name in vain. The issues are just more complicated than knee jerk moral equivalency will allow.

The movie also struggles honestly with the issue of using violence to defend the innocent against violence. Rather than creating another left/right divide of the issue or pacifism versus warmongering, this story promotes action, yet questions itself with an ambiguous thoughtfulness. When Sam sees the evil of the LRA cutting off the lips of protestors or the mine field death of a little boy, he realizes that this kind of evil cannot be stopped except by force and draws upon his past violence to overcome it. But his past nature is redeemed by channeling it to do good. Other than unborn babies, can there be any more helpless victims in need of protection than these? Can a pacifist in good conscience actually choose to allow orphan children to be murdered instead of stopping their murder with lethal force? As the Bible says, killing in self-defense is morally justifiable (Exodus 22:2-3) and rescuing widows and orphans from the wicked is commanded (Jeremiah 22:3; Psalm 82:4; Proverbs 24:11).

But neither does the movie degenerate into a bloodfest of vicarious catharsis of violent joy. It raises the issue, through a U.N. peace worker, that the use of violence even in service of a good cause can turn heroes into villains. She claims Kony too started out as Sam did, trying to do good with his violence but ended evil. But rather than capitulate to this simplistic moral reductionism, the movie goes deeper. Sam gets to the point where be becomes so filled with hate for his enemies that he gives up on God in the face of all the evil and is driven to suicidal thoughts. But he finds a way out back to God and draws a line of distinction between righteous and unrighteous violence based on the motive of hatred. One can achieve justice rather than vengeance by not allowing the hatred of the enemy to grip our own hearts. According to this movie, there is righteous violence in service of the good. In fact, Sam ends up rescuing that U.N. worker with his guns, providing delicious irony that reminds one of how American soldiers provide the freedom and protection to protestors to hate and accuse America of denying freedom.

Spiritual Honesty

And that brings me to the spiritual honesty. While Sam becomes a hero, the movie does not white wash him nor whitewash his faith. His faith and sensitive conscious create a complex moral tension in his life that is not completely solved by the end of the story. Sam becomes so focused on his cause of rescuing people on the other side of the earth that he neglects his own family given by God. Sure, he sells what he owns to save the children, but that means what he owns is taken from providing for his family. This is a common problem with “full time” charity and ministry workers. Christian salvation does not always result in a balanced life. Christians often continue on as a mixed bag of good and bad qualities that God uses in spite of our flaws. Kinda like the Bible. But all too often unlike the Christian movie genre.

When Sam cannot get donations from the selfish rich people around him and he sees that the kids are not being helped, he has a crisis of faith and gets angry with God to the point of cussing him out along with his family. Oh my goodness! A Christian who cusses when he gets angry? Heresy! The film portrays Sam repenting from his suicidal hatred and coming back to a justice orientation, but it does not show a spiritual resolution. Maybe this is just part of that uneasy ambiguity of the tensions in our own lives. The reality is that while Sam remains married, he remains a scarred and imperfect man with a bad attitude, who still screws up. It is a messy situation and no one gets away clean or undamaged. There is redemption, but it is no fairy tale happy talk prosperity salvation.

At the end of the film, we see a video of the real Sam Childers telling us he is not capable of clearly delineating the right and wrong of what he does. But he asks us the question, “If it was your child who was kidnapped, and I could bring them back to you, would it matter how I got them back?” Making it personal challenges the self-righteous who would sacrifice the lives of other’s children on the altar of convenient arm-chair philosophizing. These are real people’s children being kidnapped, raped, enslaved and murdered, not abstractions for an argument. Talk is not enough. Action is required. Evil can only be stopped with violent force. And violent force, even in service to righteousness, is not without its negative effects on us. But the evil will not listen to talk. So your only choices are: Allow innocent children to be kidnapped, raped and murdered or kill the evil perpetrators? Which will you choose?

Portrayal of Evil and Redemption

Straight up, this is a hard R-rated film. Unlike “Christian movies,” It is full of the F-word, has a crude sex scene and is very violent. In other words, many Christians will be offended by it. In my book, Hollywood Worldviews (Read the Preface free along with unused chapters of the book at the URL link) I have a chapter on sex and violence in the movies and the Bible where I explain that in a story, the power of the redemption is only equal to the power of the sin depicted. If you do not portray evil Biblically as the seductive yet destructive reality that it is, your message of redemption will not be truthful or believable.

While I do not condone all portrayals of sin in movies (some of it can be exploitative. Read my book :-), in this case, the depth of the depravity is essential to the potency of the redemption. The problem with some Christian movies is that when they portray real world evil with a filtered “protective” sugar coating like some 1970’s television bad guys, they degrade their redemption story to an unrealistic anachronism that doesn’t ring true to human nature. If the real world they portray is not real, how can the redemption be real? The reason why Sam’s Old time Religion salvation in a corny quirky Evangelical church is not off putting to unbelievers is because it is depicted as a polar opposite of Sam’s equally extreme pre-Christian lifestyle. We understand and accept that it takes extreme measures to save an extreme sinner.

Christians often have a hard time with the F-word in movies. They will sometimes accept violent shootings, stabbings, or riddling bullets (as long as they don’t show too much blood), but for some contradictory reason, they just think that the F-word is too harsh for their holy ears. Look, I’ll agree that sometimes it can become excessive, but I’m sorry, if I see a biker dude in a Christian movie saying “friggin” or “dang” or whatever other substitute cuss word for how they really talk, I do not believe the reality of the character and subsequently do not believe the storytellers understand human nature because they are afraid to face it like the Bible does. Their fear of accuracy is a reflection of a lack of faith, reminiscent of hagiographic biographies of saints. Just too good to be true. The book of Judges depicts far worse than Machine Gun Preacher ever does.

When Sam has quicky car sex with his wife in the car by the side of the road, we are saddened by the dehumanized crudity, and that is Biblical (Don’t worry, wives and girlfriends, they don’t show any skin). That is Biblical because it portrays exactly the kind of dehumanization that has destroyed Sam and destroyed his ability to find intimacy with his own loving wife. Every aspect of this man – love, sexuality, relationships, human concern — is spiritually damaged almost beyond repair. Why, that is almost as bad as the Bible’s detailed description of dehumanizing sexuality in Ezekiel 16 and 23 (Read my book for a whole lot more).

And of course, when we see a person whose lips have been cut off because they talked back to the terrorists, or when we see a child whose legs have been blown off by a mine, or a child forced to murder his own mother, we are repulsed because we cannot imagine such evil. But rather than being “sensitive” to family audiences or avoiding “excessive violence”, this movie does what is morally right: It shows the evil so our consciences will be convicted and we will act (I betya parents don’t let their children read Ezekiel 16 or 23 either). If we never saw the grotesque images of the skeletal myriads of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, we would not have the moral growth necessary to “never again” let it happen. If we do not see what is happening to the innocents in Sudan and around the world, we will remain ignorant and spiritually and morally immature, preferring political arguments in our safely removed lives to actual moral actions.

I will conclude this analysis with a translation of a famous Tony Campolo charge that struck my heart and never left me years ago:

Rebel terrorists have murdered over 400,000 Sudanese, and enslaved over 40,000 children and many Christians just don’t give a shit. And the most tragic fact of all is that many Christians who just read that statement were more offended by my use of the word “shit” than by the fact that 400,000 Sudanese have been killed and 40,000 enslaved by terrorists.

God, forgive us of this sin.
Jesus, thank you for Machine Gun Preacher.

Super 8

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Kid’s Creature Feature. E.T. gone bad. Well, not really, but that’s how it plays out until we discover that the alien that was captured by the US Air Force by the nefarious Colonel (Aren’t they all nefarious in Hollywood movies?) escapes and we learn he just wants to build a spaceship to get home. There is not much to this popcorn movie, but I must say, I was very partial toward it in a nostalgic sense, since it takes place in 1979, “my era,” and contains my era music and kids making movies, and monster models and Super 8 Filmmaking magazine, and a Eumig camera and projector – all stuff that I personally did when I was a young kid. Wow, I teared up with identification.

The negative thing that stood out to me was the cliché Hollywood worldview about the “military industrial complex.” Movies do not get made in a vacuum. They often reflect the prevailing zeitgeist of propaganda in the Media, and this movie is no exception. When the world changed on 9/11/01, terrorism came of age and took the spotlight in global politics. With the last ten years, it seems the new zeitgeist that has developed amongst the secular elites, and the Press has been to construct a theory that blames America and “western imperialism” for the violent jihad of Islamism. As the narrative goes, “we created these monsters” through our military industrial complex. They just want to “go home.” In classic blame-the-victim Marxist political religion, Imperialist Islamic terrorists were made violent because of American Expansionism or “colonialism.” They are the poor oppressed victims who are lashing out in desperation against the oppressive hegemony of imperialist western power. Never mind that Islamism has been imperialistic since its inception, seeking to conquer all peoples into subjection to Allah and Muslim law. No, that’s not imperialism, the American superpower is inherently imperialist with its military strength (since Left Wing radical theory defines all power as inherently oppressive UNLESS it is in the hands of Left Wing powers). So, this movie reflects that Hollywood pop political theory because we discover that the alien is a violent monster only because he is being oppressed by the evil US Air Force, and all he wants is just to go home. So the American military MADE the monster through it’s intent to oppressively control the alien.

The Tree of Life

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Arthouse family drama. Terrence Malik’s new cinematic exploration of the meaning of life and suffering through the experience of family and the universe. This is another poetically pondering, visually strong, story weak, humanly cold film in Malick’s portfolio of increasingly distant filmmaking. I must say, his films usually bore me with their self-absorbed pretention and lack of storytelling. But I have to say, with all its weaknesses, this one also had some strengths that made the overly long 2 hours and 15 minutes more bearable. It is the emotional journey of a family in the 1950s struggling with the death of their eldest of three sons, the youngest of which grows up (Sean Penn) and ponders it on the anniversary of his death many years later.

The movie begins with a legend of Job 38:4-7 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Eventually, the movie enters into a 15 minute or so cinematic evolutionary panorama of the universe that illustrates this Biblical concept of creation. We are introduced to a myriad of supernovas and condensing star galaxies all the way down to microbial ocean life on earth, up the chain to fish and amphibian, through dinosaurs, including the meteoric crash on earth and ultimately to the birth of a human baby. All of this is accompanied by an at times haunting ambience and at times operatic angelic chorus. It is all really quite spiritual, stunning, and grand, though an awkward tangent in terms of drama.

The theme of the movie is telegraphed through the interior thoughts of the mother of the family played as a silent longsuffering housewife by Jessica Chastain, as she ponders ponderingly, “There are two ways in life, the way of nature and the way of grace. You have two choices which to follow.” She then describes nature in Christian terms of selflessness and sacrifice, while the way of nature is selfish and concerned with its own survival. She and her husband, played by Brad Pitt become the symbolic living versions of these worldviews. The father [incarnating nature] raises his three boys by being firm to the point of harsh, making rules and punishing with a distantness that nevertheless also requires the affection of his sons to kiss him goodnight as one of the rules. He teaches them how to fight, and he teaches them how to become strong in life, in a survival of the fittest mentality. He says, “The wrong people go hungry, the wrong people get loved. The world succeeds by trickery. You can’t be too good.” To the eldest, “Your brothers are naïve. If you’re too good, you’ll be taken advantage of.” “You make yourself what you are. You make your own destiny.” At one point he gets angry with the mom [incarnating grace] for her comforting nurturing refusal to engage in the father’s discipline, “You undermine everything I do. You turn my own kids against me.” And this is inevitable, for grace undermines nature in this Thomistic dichotomy of reality.

Yet, all along, the movie is accented with multiple interior dialogues as voiceovers expressing the inner emotional questions that haunt them, even the father, “What I want to do, I can’t do. I do what I hate,” “Always you were calling me.” The mother, asks in her pain, “Lord, where were you? Why? Did you know? Who are we to you?” “Life by life, I search for you. My hope.” The eldest son, “Why did you let a boy die? Why should I be good if you aren’t?” This is certainly the authentic struggle that everyone of us has who has faith in God yet honestly tries to face the hard realities of the world’s suffering and pain. And in some ways, the pondering voiceovers are exactly what those of us do experience in our quiet moments that correspond to the long drawn out beautiful cinematic scenes of this film. It just doesn’t work well as drama.

We see the eldest’s son’s coming of age as he teases a girl he is attracted to, sneaks into the neighbor’s house to examine a woman’s lingerie with characteristic male curiosity, and becomes ashamed before his mother in an analogy of the loss of innocence. And then his gang of young boys who walk around with destructive tendencies, breaking windows, tying a frog to a bottle rocket, and finally defying mother, “NO! I don’t want to do what you say. I want to do what I want to do. You let him [father] run over you.” In today’s extreme storytelling of gang rapes, gunfights, and teen sex, this is a refreshingly sensitive portrayal of the essential truth of the loss of innocence and coming of age that youth experiences.

The father, though he is a sort of 50s cliché of the hard working chauvinistic male who has no intimacy with wife or kids, he has redemption in the end as we hear his own inner journey of repentance after his son dies and he loses his job. “I wanted to be loved because I was great. I’m nothing. I dishonored the glory. I am a foolish man.” The mother ponders, “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by. Do good, wonder, hope.” And in her prayers we hear “Keep us, guide us till the end of time.” “I give him to you. I give you my son.”

This is a deep exploration of a biblical spiritual journey with faith in God and suffering that resonates deeply at times. The biggest criticism I would make is that in the end it is so interior and isolated in it’s visual reality and lacking real intimacy of human drama that it tends to leave one sadly dissatisfied. One examines an intellectual spirituality that addresses the human and divine connection aesthetically, while lacking the human to human connection that is equally necessary to redemption of the human condition. It is not enough to experience a Gnostic monastic idea of God, we understand his fullness through humanity as well, human connection, community. It is the point of the Incarnation, God and man. After all, it was God who said, “It is not good for man to be alone” with God himself. We need community. Terrence Malik needs some community.

Priest

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Post-Apocalyptic Sci-fi horror. “Vampires have always been with us.” In the future, after the vampire threat has been nullified by the Church’s vampire warrior priests, life is back to normal, and those warrior priests are put back into normal life by the Church. Their vampire hunting is made illegal so that people will feel safe again in their walled in dystopic grungy city. Meanwhile, the vampires have been growing far away in huge hives. And they have been planning a takeover feast of the city. So, when vampire hunter Priest, played with stoic coolness by Paul Bettany, discovers his niece has been captured by vampires in order to turn her, he goes to rescue her against the commands of the Church, which is trying to lull everyone into an institutional sense of safety. So Priest becomes an outlaw.

This movie is what used to be called “anti-clericalism,” that is an attack on the institutional church in favor of individualistic spirituality. The phrase that is repeated multiple times throughout the film in order to make the point is, “To go against the church is to go against God.” Another phrase spoken by the high priests: “To question the authority of the clergy is absolutely forbidden.” This is an obvious reflection of the Roman Catholic Medieval Church’s phrase, “There is no salvation outside the Church.” But this is not quite so simple as an anticlerical call to Protestant Reformation of the priesthood of all believers, because the Priest at first decides that if he is going against God to save his niece, then he will give up on God. So he saves the day and destroys the vampires who reflect original sin because “they are what nature made them to be.”

The Priest concludes, “Out power does not come from the Church, it comes from God. With or without clergy, we’re still priests.” So, the theme is a confusing mixture of individualistic spirituality and anticlericalism with the residue of Protestant Reformed notions. Quite a bit different from say Martin Luther, who affirmed obedience to the authority of the Church as long as he possibly could until he was forced to deny his conscience, at which point he then asserted that God is the ultimate authority over even the Church. The Reformation may have resulted in creating an individualist piety that we suffer from today, but it did not necessarily start out that way. Still the resonances are there for a rather positive Protestant worldview.

Thor

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Comic book hero origin story. This movie was much better than I had expected. Probably because the director, Kenneth Branagh brought to it a nuanced Shakespearean quality that was appropriate for this story about the Norse god of thunder. Well, actually, it is a demythology of the Norse mythology. That is, it is one of those stories that explains religion as an ignorant misinterpretation of alien science. In this case, Thor is a warrior from the distant realm of Asgard, who is banished to earth without his power because of his impetuous and arrogance aspiring to the throne of his father, Odin. But in this film we learn that the Norse mythology was wrong. Thor and his breed are not gods, but are simply aliens from another part of the galaxy misunderstood as gods by primitive Vikings. This is a common theme in movies today and I intend to write more in depth on it for BioLogos.org soon.

Anyway, it was an interesting contrast of modern egalitarian culture with a more patriarchal culture in Thor. As he falls in love with the female scientist played by Natalie Portman, we see him treating her with the chivalry of the past and boy, she likes it! This is no feminist fantasy, but a return to a chivalry that feminists would call chauvinism. The big brawny earthy man protecting the female and treating her with gentility and noble language as the weaker vessel. It was quite a clever culture clash.

And the theme of the story is rather traditional as well. Thor’s mighty hammer is on earth, but because of Odin’s whispered spell over it, only a “worthy” man can pick it up and use it. And Thor cannot do so because of his own pride and arrogance and fighting temper. It is not until he chooses to sacrifice himself to be killed by a big marauding monster robot in order to protect the innocent that he is able to regain his powers and vanquish the enemy. And this, after his “resurrection” from the dead. All very religious in it’s theme.

Which brings me to another point. I am further confirmed that the hunger for comic book superheroes and the like is definitely a “God-substitute.” Even though our secular society has rejected the idea of supernatural deity (as evidenced in the demythology of this very story), it craves deity nonetheless and these superhero stories serve as a modernized religious impulse that replaces that “god-shaped vacuum” in all of us. Their ubiquity in our culture matches the prevalence of the polytheism of ancient culture, whether the Greek or Roman pantheon or those of Sumer and Babylon. But their presence shows us that humankind needs deity and will create its own if it has to.

Welcome to the Rileys

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A picture of grace. Doug (James Gandolfini) and Lois (Melissa Leo) have been married 30 years and they are virtually ships passing in the night without true connection. They function, but just barely. So Doug has a mistress who he wants to take with him on a plumbing convention instead of his neurotic wife who cannot leave her house since their daughter died years ago in an accident. But when Doug’s mistress dies on the eve of his trip, he goes with an attitude of despair – Until he meets stripper, Mallory (Kristen Stewart), who reminds him of his daughter, in fact, so much so, that he takes her on as his mission of salvation. So, this isn’t a sleazy exploitation romance, but rather a father daughter story of redemption.

On a lark, Doug sells his business, and tells his wife he doesn’t know when he’s coming back, but he doesn’t tell her why. Doug invades Mallory’s life, giving her new clothes, cleaning up and fixing up her hell hole apartment, and standing up to her abusers, and he starts to bring discipline into her lifestyle. Because she’s been nothing but abused all her life, she doesn’t even understand it at first. She’s never been cared for.  She’s never known grace. And grace is what this picture is about, unmerited love that gives a broken soul into redemption.

But when Lois surprisingly overcomes her phobia and shows up at the convention, these three embark on a journey of self discovery together, where they all learn that we cannot save each other, but we can inspire others to reach out for change in their own lives. For, as Doug soon learns, Mallory tells him, it’s too late to save her, she’s no one’s daughter, Doug realizes that he had his own need for redemption in unfairly replacing his daughter with this girl, which brings his own motivations into question. So when he finally lets her go, we discover that he has affected her life, and she is making her own baby steps in seeking to take more control of her life away from the abusive system that she was a part of. And we see that Doug and Lois have a new lease on their life to begin mending their own brokenness. Powerful story of redemption that does not deny the untidy realities of life or wrap up all loose ends. And it reinforces that we can be instruments of change in one another’s lives through grace and love, but we cannot redeem another person. They have their own journey of brokenness that they need to overcome for themselves.

Interestingly, Melissa Leo just won the best supporting actress for The Fighter, and yet, in this film, she shows her acting chops almost more beautifully, and Gandolfini is no Tony Soprano here. Even Kristen Stewart shines.

 

Season of the Witch

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Supernatural period horror. Behman and Felson start as Crusading knights fighting wars with Muslims (not mentioned as such in the movie) who appear to be more mercenaries than holy warriors. But when leaders start making them kill innocent women and children of conquered cities, they excommunicate themselves from the Crusades to result in being outlaws on the run. So when they come upon a town afflicted by the plague, they are commissioned to transport an accused witch to another city that hosts a holy monastery of priests with the ability to legally try the women to discover her innocence or guilt.

Because of their bad experience with the Crusades, Behman  and Felson are highly dubious of the woman’s guilt, but still maintain the hope of a fair trial by the church so they take on the task with hopes of being pardoned of their desertion.

The movie plays with the possibility of the woman’s innocence, but eventually we see that in fact, she is not a witch, but is possessed by a demon whose goal is to draw the men to the monastery, now destroyed, in order to capture the last book of exorcism ritual that they carry with them. If they can destroy that book, they can run amok in the world.

This movie is an interesting mixture of anti-institutional Christianity with a positive support for individual spirituality and the reality of the Christian vision of the supernatural. Okay, the “magic” book of exorcism is a fiction, but the movie uses the audience’s anti-Christian prejudice based on the Crusades to subvert that prejudice by depicting a world very supernatural where Christianity wins out. The monk who travels with the heroes is hinted at being a lecherous rapist (a common bigoted stereotype in the modern cinema) but alas turns out to be a good guy who is libeled by lies. Quite refreshing and original.

In contradiction to this subversion, there remains another modern libel against Christianity in the movie. It seems that the name of “Jesus Christ” is only mentioned in movies as a cuss word or in the mouth of an evil criminal and never as a positive expression of specific faith. So in this movie the only time “Jesus Christ” is mentioned is in the mouth of an evil Crusade Leader who yells to his soldiers to “kill all the infidels in the name of Jesus Christ!” (repeated later in the movie to make the poinkt) Interesting that they used a word that was not used by Christians, but Muslims. Christians used the word “heathen,” and the word “infidel” is commonly known to be connected to Islamic imperialism. So, maybe the filmmakers were trying to make a predictable moral equivalency of institutional Christianity and institutional Islam. In any case, Season of the Witch portrays a balanced world of false and true Christianity within a paradigm that affirms supernatural evil and supernatural good.

 

The Adjustment Bureau

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Humanism and Open Theism. I got a chance to see an advance screening of this theologically and philosophically rich film, so you’ll want to come back later after you’ve seen it. It does prove once again, along with the blockbusters The Matrix all the way to Inception, that you can tell a good story and make a good movie AND have a rich philosophical discussion as the essence of it all.

David Norris is an aspiring Senator in New York who loses his latest bid and in a fit of authentic honesty, admits that so much of politics is poll driven (by controlled research) and not from the heart. But then one day, we see strange men with hats who are following him and we learn they are from “the adjustment bureau” following the orders of the “Chairman” and are controlling David’s life, along with many others’ lives, or at least intervening at key moments to keep him on track with the Chairman’s plan for his life. They carry little books that show blueprint like pages with moving lines to show them directions of people’s lives as they are making choices.

One day, David is supposed to spill his coffee, but the agent who is supposed to cover him falls asleep and David does not spill his coffee, thus making it in time to a bus he was not supposed to be on, and thus having a second encounter with a woman he had fallen for in a chance encounter during his campaign. The thing is, according to the Chairman’s plan, they are no supposed to be together, so the rest of the movie is David pursuing this woman and the bureau agents trying to stop that from taking hold.

But when David spills his coffee he sets in motion a series of events that allow him to get out of the sight of the bureau agents, and he stumbles upon something he is not supposed to see: The agents are engaged in a “readjustment” by freezing everyone at David’s work and scanning their brains to make them change their minds and get back on course with the Chairman’s plan for them. When David sees them, lead Agent Richardson is in a predicament of having to explain to David the behind the scenes scenario. He then tells David that he must not get together with the woman, Elise, because it will ruin the Chairman’s plan for both of their lives. As it turns out, David eventually learns that the plans are for her to become a world class Ballet dancer and for David to eventually become president of the US, and both would do great good for people. But David does not understand why he can’t have both, and like Jacob fighting with the angel, he determines to make his own way in life with his free will and fight for Elise.

Though the movie judiciously avoids saying it explicitly, the metaphors are obvious, the agents are angels, and the Chairman is God. The entire struggle of this film is between free will and determinism, or predestination. Are we absolutely free to make our own way in this life or does God control everything? The view of the storytellers is Arminianism, and more particularly Open Theism. The Chairman has a plan for most everyone, but mostly very important people who will do great things. The rest of us are mostly on our own. So people have free will AND there are chance events that keep mucking up the Chairman’s (God’s) plan so God has to send angels to try to fix things to some degree to keep things on track. But there are not enough angels to do so, so there are quite a lot of things that get out of God’s control. One higher up explains to David that throughout history, God has tried to give man free will and he messes it all up so God takes control again to fix things. So, in this movie, God gave men over to free will and we had the Dark Ages, and then God took back control and we had the blessings of reason and the Enlightenment and Renaissance (The Reformation is studiously avoided), and then God gave free will back to us in 1910 and we had the World Wars, so now God is trying to fix it all again. This is exactly the viewpoint prejudice of the Enlightenment that created the derogatory term “Dark Ages” out of its antisupernatural bigotry.

This points to another theme of the movie, that ultimately the reasoning intellect of man is safe and in control (which is a parallel to the Chairman’s control), but the emotions of man are unpredictable and messy. So the battle between free will and determinism is also a battle between control and chance as well as a battle between the heart and the mind, or emotions and reason. They’re all linked. Thus, our hero is an impulsive man whose impulses get him in trouble in the story. But the real trouble happens when he learns that if he stays with this woman with whom he has fallen in love, they will both not meet their dreams, she will not become a famous dancer, but will end up a simple teacher, and he will not be president and help the nation. So his choice is: should he “follow the plan” and give up his dreams of love or should he pursue his dream and ruin both their potentialities for goodness in society? So for the sake of his love for her, he gives up their love and let’s her go, only to be haunted by that decision for years.

By chance, he stumbles onto her again much later, but by now, he has decided that he wants both. Why can’t they have both love and greatness? David’s original design to be a politician is revealed to come from his inner emptiness for meaning. He seeks the “love” of the masses to fill a hole that only true love can fill: Another humanistic theme – human love is the ultimate meaning in life. So David fights to stop Elise from marrying another man and to show her why he had avoided her all those years: Because of the angelic plan. But revealing the behind the scenes is a dangerous no-no, and David will have to have his brain erased, because they can’t have the secret get out.

With the help of a rebellious angel, David decides to grab Elise and make a run for it to the Chairman to plead his case. He never makes it, but his sheer “free will” for love has so impressed the God Chairman, that God changes his plans, and allows the two to be together. The last shot, we see the plan book, with the two moving lines of David and Elise moving out of the planned zone and into a white area of undetermined uncertain future, but we all know it is hopeful and free will gives us the hope of uncertain but unlimited possibilities

The problem with the scenario is that it is ultimately unsatisfying. The God of this film is unwittingly the best argument against the Arminian notion of absolute free will, by depicting a God whose will is so often thwarted by humans that he is virtually impotent, running around fretting over the mess that he cannot seem to keep up with. God here is the antagonist, the enemy that man must free himself from, much like The Truman Show. This God is not very all-knowing either, as he is the one who realizes his plan was wrong for David and Elise. Rather than David struggling with God and learning a lesson about meaning and purpose beyond himself, God is the one who learns a lesson from David that true human love is better than a deity’s plan, that people should make their own meaning instead of accept God’s meaningful intent for them. Also, it is the God of Open Theism that only knows the future in the way that a very intelligent being can know where someone is headed based on intimate knowledge of the way a person thinks and acts – but this foreknowledge is really an educated guess not actual foreknowledge.

This is Open Theism. This is not a satisfying deity that is worth worshipping. In fact, watching it makes one repulsed at the pathetic excuse for such a meddling, inferior, half-assed puppet master getting his strings tangled on the few puppets he is trying to manipulate. One can only think, “For God’s sake, if it’s all too much for you to maintain control, then get out of the way and let us try to make our own way in life.” And that is in fact what happens in the movie. God gets out of the hero’s way and lets him have his “freedom” to chart his course in an unknown uncertain future determined only by human “love,” NOT God’s purposes. This is the humanistic existential man telling God to let him alone to create his own meaning and purpose in life out of his own emotional desires. In this story, politics may appear to help people, but it is ultimately a form of control that is determined by polls and manipulation. So David’s redemption lies in giving up his dreams of politics for the sake of individual love, in the same way that God must do so.

The Sovereign God of the Bible may be in control of every sparrow that falls from the sky, but at least such omnipotent power also comes with a Shepherd’s loving promise that is worth trusting. At least this God can actually accomplish his promises to work all things out for the best, and maybe he knows a little more than me, and maybe the world does not revolve around me and my passionate desires. Maybe it’s not all about me, me, me

To be fair, there are resonances with many Biblical characters in this story. One is reminded of Job who complains to God for his misfortune; or Jacob who wrestles with God and won’t let go until he is blessed by God: or Moses who persuades God to change his mind about destroying the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness.

And yet, one cannot help but see the differences that make this deity a false idol of the one in the Bible. For we do not see a God who rebukes and humbles Job into submission, or the God who won’t let go of His purposes for Jacob. Nor do we see the God of Moses who changes his mind on the basis on his own glory, and who separated and destroyed the rebellious Israelites for the sake of a remnant.

The Rite

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A story of faith’s victory over skepticism through the supernatural. Michael Kovak is the son of a mortician whose only family directed choice is to be a mortician or become a priest. So he chooses to become a priest to get away from his pain. The only problem is, he doesn’t believe in God. So at the end of seminary when he is about to tender his resignation from his priesthood process, he discovers that if he does, his $100k scholarship will be converted into a loan. His mentor priest offers him the opportunity to get Exorcism training from the Vatican before he decides. The obvious goal is that maybe a face to face encounter with supernatural evil will persuade him of supernatural good.

It’s part of the formula in these supernatural stories for the hero to be a skeptic who can explain away demonic phenomena as psychological manifestations. The battle of worldviews, naturalism and supernaturalism. Well, Michael does explain them away in the presence of unorthodox yet experienced exorcist, Father Lucas, an old man who overcame his own youthful skepticism the same way. But when the possessed victims start telling him secrets and knowledge that only spirits could know of his past, of things said in secret, and of his own dreams, Michael becomes conflicted.

The spiritual manifestations in this movie are more realistic than a standard horror movie about demons. These are not so much special effects, but more about oddities like frogs showing up, or speaking in strange voices and other languages. Some body contortions and such, but not of the Exorcist variety. In fact, there’s even a line in the movie that Lucas gives Michael when confronted with the relatively unimpressive display of possession, “what did you expect, spinning heads and pea soup?” But there is one terror that is deeper than any shock scare: The demons do know your sins, your dark secrets that haunt you with pain. Thus, the perfect metaphor of fighting one’s inner demons is captured by the external fight with real demons.

There is another line that Lucas says to Michael that captures the theme about spiritual reality versus secular skepticism: “Choosing not to believe in the devil won’t protect you from him.” Other lines that carry a surprising strong Christian understanding to the worldview of this movie: “The terror is real. You won’t defeat it unless you believe.” And this bears out when Michael is faced with his ultimate challenge: Father Lucas is possessed by a demon named Baal (like the Canaanite deity in the Old Testament) and Michael must now cast him out. But how can a man so weak in faith, fight an entity so strong? A note written to Michael when he was young echoes in his mind, “You are not alone. He is always with you.” Michael then names the demon, adjures him in the name of the Father, the creator and casts him out in the name of Jesus. I have not heard the name of Jesus uttered in such a positive way in a movie in a looooooong time. So the storytellers don’t hide the connection of the power of the cross of Jesus Christ over these demons. Impressive and faith affirming.

So Michael discovers faith in the face of true spiritual evil and becomes a priest, affirming the thing he once rejected.

The Way Back

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An epic road movie. Based on a true story that was probably plagiarized by author Slavomir Rawicz as his own experience. A handful of Polish prisoners in the Russian Gulag in Siberia during WWII, escape their prison in the freezing tundra and travel 4000 miles to freedom in India, going through the Gobi Desert AND over the freezing Himilayas.

This survival story was most amazing to me in that it is probably the first Hollywood movie about the Russian Gulags. There are dozens and dozens of movies and television stories about the German concentration camps in WWII, but what most of the public does not know is that the Soviet Communist Gulag system makes the Nazi camps look like children’s play pens. Problem is, they didn’t get the exposure they should have. It reveals how uneducated many people are about the truly evil empire of Soviet Russia and the atrocities that dwarfed the Nazi machine by 3x. Stalin starved over 20 million of his own people. 20 million of his own people. And that is not counting the other 30 million killed in the entire Stalin era for a grand total near 50 MILLION PEOPLE – savagely and brutally killed, many of them tortured as “political dissidents” because they were not Communist party members. Yet, this is the FIRST movie about the Soviet Gulags? All I can say is Peter Weir is a heroic filmmaker to bring out this essence of Communism in an era that seems to deny it was even a threat.