Supernatural Horror. A sequel about Vampires versus werewolves that quite frankly, I could not describe because it was too complex too follow.
I don’t have much to say here. It was okay as far as sequels go, but it was excessively violent, as sequels often go, and too complex to follow, as I said. The first one was clearly about racism and I thought was very intriguing, but this one, ah, whatever.
Jungle Thriller. A son explores returning to the stone age tribe that killed his missionary father in the 1950s.
This movie is a step in the right direction for Christian stories being told in Hollywood. I think it still has a long way to go. But we are getting there. We are getting better. I believe we need to support these kind of movies by paying to see them so the studios will distribute more of them and then we’ll get better at making them. And so I recommend seeing this, but I still think Christian filmmaking has a lot to learn. So let’s support it with our money so it can get better. This movie is miles ahead of those End Times obsessions that keep being made, and for that, I applaud it and support it.
I liked how they tried to avoid the Christianese of many Christian stories by downplaying the god talk of the missionaries. HOWEVER, this is a story about missionaries, and I never got to know the hearts of these people and what would drive them to risk their lives trying to get to these savages? And also, what would drive the women of the martyred men to go back into the village of the people who killed their husbands and bring their children? These are the most important moments of the story and they are never dealt with. It’s almost like they were so paranoid of sounding like a typical evangelical movie that the result was a lack of clarity of purpose behind characters as well as internal issues and struggles.
I thought it was an interesting idea to show the native’s perspective, but unfortunately, the actual result was a bit boring. I found the missionary stories to be more interesting, but less developed.
The final scene where the son of the matryed pilot confronts his father’s killer was a powerful opportunity, but I have to admit that it didn’t work for me the way it was done. I didn’t believe the kid’s acting or the way the whole thing was set up.
International Espionage Thriller. “Based on true events,” this is a self-loathing Jewish “Godfather” interpretation by Spielberg of the Israeli assassination of terrorists in response to the Munich slaughter of Jewish Athletes in 1972. Movies do not happen in a vacuum. Period pieces are ultimately interpretations of the present by using the past as an analogy, and this movie is no exception. It is more than an anti-Israel polemic about Munich, it is an attack on the American policy of hunting down terrorists in the wake of 9/11. In the film, one of the characters says, “What happened in Munich changes everything.” This is an obvious reference to the oft-quoted notion that this is a different world since 9/11, that 9/11 changed the way we as a nation respond to terrorists because of their cowardly cruelty and evil in killing innocent people in the name of Allah.
This movie is a shocking piece of insanity that concludes that hunting terrorists breeds terrorist attacks and perpetuates a “cycle of violence” and creates monsters like Osama Bin Laden (In this story, the claim is made that Carlos the Jackal came into being in response to these hits on evil criminal terrorist cowards—yeah, right). It is an attempt to establish moral equivalency of the US and Israel with evil criminal terrorist cowards. There is a cut that shows the Israelis going over the list of evil criminal terrorist cowards that they are about to kill, just after we are shown the list of innocent Jewish athletes targeted by the evil criminal terrorist cowards, as if this is the same kind of hit list. Another Jew says they won’t win unless they “learn to act like them.” Golda Meir is quoted as saying something she would never have even thought, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” This is supposed to somehow indicate that the Israelis considered what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway. The reality is that it is NOT a compromise to kill evil criminal terrorist cowards, but it is the incarnation of moral justice for a sovereign nation to do so.
Interestingly, “justice” is a concept that is never even addressed in the movie. The pursuit is pictured as revenge and bloodlust of people like the South African convert who says, “the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood,” thus making the Israelis out to be racist Nazis just like the evil Palestinian criminal terrorist cowards who hate Jewish blood. A key scene where the Hero has an argument with a PLO member who does not realize he is a Jew tries to redefine evil criminal terrorist cowards as merely wanting a place to call home, “home is everything.” Funny, how the storyteller leaves out an important bit of factual information that the real desire of Palestinian evil criminal terrorist cowards is to, and I quote from the Palestinian evil criminal terrorist cowards themselves, “Drive the Jews into the sea.” This is not some secret plan that nobody knows about, its documented all over the place, and reinforced every time in history that the Israelis would give in on negotiations and the Palestinian response would not be rejoicing but another murder bomber.
But there is an unwitting dialectical tension here, because Spielberg tries to show that killing evil criminal terrorist cowards breeds more killing by showing televised historical events that occurred in response to the assassinations. But what Spielberg does not seem to notice is that the evil criminal terrorist cowards respond by hijacking and killing innocent people. As if there is any comparison. Oh, so let’s not execute capital criminals because look at how criminals respond to law enforcement by engaging in more crime. It’s interesting that the movie portrays most all the evil criminal terrorist cowards as “normal” men being nice to people, teaching literature, being nice to his family, etc. so that it would be questionable as to who they are killing. What he should have done was that effect done in Run Lola Run, where you would show snapshots of each of these evil criminal terrorist cowards killing people, plotting their evil, making their bombs, killing Jews etc. But of course he doesn’t, that would show that it was justice and that these evil criminal terrorist cowards deserved it, and we can’t have that confusing concept enter into the discussion.
It is certainly bordering on lunacy to suggest that Israel should not respond to evil criminal terrorist cowards and that we should not fight crime because it might make criminals mad and they might do more crime in response. Since there is no nation where evil criminal terrorist cowards reside, and they parasitically and hypocritically live off the societies that they seek to destroy, then there is no other moral way to fight them than through international espionage. I think some of the truths that come through this otherwise politically correct drek is that justified killing does affect you negatively, regardless of its righteousness. The hero gets paranoid that others are trying to kill him, just like he is trying to kill others. He ends up distrusting Israel itself, believing that it will kill him because he knows so much and after all, Israel is just like the evil criminal terrorist cowards, right? Interestingly, Israel did not kill him. And they always sought to avoid killing innocents. What does that tell you? Maybe, just maybe, there is a difference between evil criminal terrorist cowards and imperfect nations seeking justice and righteousness. Another funny contradiction in the logic of the film is that the Jews are portrayed as stereotypical “moneygrubbers” who are worried about getting receipts and talking about the high cost of killing people, as if this is immoral reduction of people to objects of money. But then, the hero protects his information source and is loyal to them over his country, yet that source is the epitome of people who worship only money and no ideology. As if it is good to favor no government and betray anyone and everyone for money. This source betrays ALL sides to each other for money, as well as tipping off the hero’s whereabouts to his enemies. So this STUPID hero kills a whore who turned in his friend for money, but protects the worst of them all, the betrayers of everyone for money. You know, even though this story was an attempt to prove moral equivalency, I was unmoved by the attempt. Every time an evil criminal terrorist coward got assassinated, I cheered and felt justice was done. And I was affirmed that this is exactly how we need to respond to evil criminal terrorist cowards, the Winston Churchill way, not the Neville Chamberlain way of appeasement.
Horror. A couple of American tourists happen upon a hostel in Europe that captures unsuspecting tourists and uses them as torture subjects for high paying mafia customers. Nihilistic survival of the fittest worldview. I walked out. These are the kind of movies that truly scare me, knowing that there are people out there, mostly kids, who are entertained by this, as it breeds heartless violence against people as entertainment rather than moral lesson. And I might add that this movie highly profiled Quentin Tarantino as its producer, which does not surprise me in the least, given his postmodern-nihilistic-B-Movie-video-store-clerk worldview.
This docudrama type movie is about life in an American bomb squad in Iraq. As men diffuse IEDs they face the hardships of war. Its premise is listed in a quote at the beginning of the film saying “war is a drug.” The movie then follows a team of soldiers led by a wild man individualist Texan who lives on the edge of danger in defusing bombs. Half of the fighting is justified and half of it is confused delusion, as the lead wild man gets them into trouble with his “cowboy” antics. I think it is ultimately an anti-war film because at the end, the lead character cannot go back and live with his family. He tells his little daughter that as you get older you love fewer and fewer things, until you only love one thing. And we see that he doesn’t fit into the “insane” consumerist America of a thousand cereal choices in the supermarket (Is this what we fight for?). And we see he cannot connect with his wife or daughter anymore, and after saying that statement that you only love one thing, we see him back on another tour willingly. So according to this movie, being a soldier destroys your ability to connect with the humanity of family and turns you into a machine that can only relate to one thing: war.
Satire Comedy. A Jim Carrey vehicle about a married couple pressured to pursue the American Dream of keeping up with the Joneses, who turn to robbery when they both lose their jobs and face losing all they own. This is a “stick it to the Man” story about the corrupt greedy exploitation of the working man by Enron-like companies. Alec Baldwin does a great job playing himself as the heartless head of the greedy company who bails out of a collapsing hollow shell corporation with a golden parachute of millions, while all the company workers lose their pensions and lifelong savings. When Carrey and his wife, played by Tea Leoni, realize they should steal Baldwin’s money, not the innocent people around them, they plot a paper switch at a bank that would take his money and end up giving it back to the pensions of the jilted workers of the big company. So a Robin Hood movie. This is a complex issue in this story, because on the one hand, I do agree that the corporate exploitation of the little man is clearly a problem in our society, but on the other hand, I don’t think it is justifiable to break the law to “do good.” And that is exactly what the hero and heroine do in this story. Even though they turn from stealing from their neighbors, they do still end up stealing from another neighbor, he’s just a corrupt one. I do not like stories that try to get you to cheer on the hero if he is trying to accomplish a crime. They tend to reinforce vigilanteism even in non-violent forms. Trying to achieve justice while breaking the law is itself unjust. But one of the reasons why this did not bother me as much with this story as it did with others like Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve, is because it is a satire that seems more focused on the bad guy getting his comeuppance than on the hero’s own story. Of course, this doesn’t justify it as right, but it did make it less offensive. At the end the heros do not get the money, they give it to others, so it is less about them winning and more about the villain losing. Perhaps this is the powerful draw of Robin Hood mythology – it justifies crime by appealing to the pragmatic result of good. Evil is okay if it results in good. Pragmatic morality is the handmaiden of evil.
Romantic epic. Actually, the story of a high class call girl who finds love. A Japanese version of Pretty Woman? An interesting film, a very sad and tragic story. As I watched this story, I could not help but think how riled up multiculturalists would be at this injustice of slavery of women. And yet, what a major hypocrisy and how imperialistic it would be (according to their own standards) to criticize the Japanese culture for how they organize their male female relationships differently than we do in the West. Who are we to criticize another culture they say – unless of course, it is THEY who are criticizing a culture that THEY do not like – then it is all of a sudden okay to criticize what is otherwise sacred. Such hypocrisy betrays the truth that there is an absolute morality that is NOT a social construct that is relative to cultures. Sure, applications of morality may be relative, like what constitutes modesty, but things like murder or slavery are not justifiable on any cultural paradigm because there is an absolute standard that judges all our little standards. Of course, by Christian standards Geisha lifestyle is immoral objectification and prostitution of women, but one would have to confess Christianity to have the only valid means of criticizing it. Try as they may to justify it, the Japanese culture reveals its reduction of women to objects of male gratification when they say, “Geisha means artist. And to be a Geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art,” or “We sell our skills, not our bodies.” “With those eyes, you must be a great commodity.” “You must be able to stop a man with a single look.” I couldn’t help but think of the statement that a man must have made high heels for women because they hurt so much, when they would show the Geishas wearing their ridiculously high block sandals, an Eastern version of the high heels. And the “eel in the cave” story about sex for the young girls says it all, when the older woman explains to the young, that “every once in a while, a man’s eel likes to explore the woman’s cave.” Every once in a while? It’s really more like “all the time,” if we are honest, and of course that is the point, when they try to cover up the Geisha world as art and companionship and “not courtesanship” they are self-deceiving. The line “I want a life that is mine,” that the heroine expresses because she has fallen in love with someone other than her paying customers, and the response of her mentor, “We become Geishas because we have no choice” is no doubt the feminist egalitarian heart of the story, but feminists and egalitarians should still be angry because of this: The end of the story is the girl fulfilling her dreams of being the “long term” prostitute of a particular man (I don’t remember the fancy euphemism in Japanese that they use). This was a man who gave her a moment of grace in the midst of her miserable life. A man who gave her a snow cone when she was crying in the street as a little girl. This man would be the one she would do everything in her life to be with, “until I am his,” as she says, “Every step I have taken has been to be near you.” Well, that’s romantic and all, but then she explains as they walk away in the Eastern sunset that she is his long term Geisha, which isn’t as much as being a wife, but hey, it’s what she strove for etc. Well, this is still slavery to multiculturalists, but who are THEY to criticize another person’s choices or culture? Well, I would say that biblically, it is very unsatisfying in the story precisely because IT IS NOT MARRIAGE. Only marriage can satisfy the longing for human love in this life, not mere sexual relationship, and that’s the truthful power of Western fairy tales and Romances. Marriage is the “ever after” because it rings with truth. Of course, because of our narcissistic humanism, we have destroyed marriage, but the ideal is still real even if we only experience varying shades of that reality because of our falleness. And you know, I actually appreciated the statements of the beauty of a woman as a work of art, because I think it is both true and natural that a woman is an object of beauty. I absolutely spend hours adoring my wife’s beauty. BUT I don’t believe that woman should be reduced to a mere object for the sheer convenience of men. THAT kind of reductionism is wrong. We are BOTH object AND person, not either/or. I would like to take a moment though to say that I think the Western fairy tale that makes a love between two people the redemption of life is also seriously untruthful. Another human person can be a contact point with transcendence, a human is touching the eternal, but even that is a shadow if it is not rooted in the eternal transcendent of the Living God. Many Western Romances are also forms of idolatry because they ignore the transcendent, they are salvations of immanence. But this world is not eternal, it is not infinite, only God is, so it is folly to suggest that human love is the ultimate. Human love is a self-deception of meaninglessness without the Love of God, the living God of love who gives meaning to our human love.
Epic Action adventure. The remake of the famous story about the huge ape who falls in love with a woman. All right, I loved it. The first hour was 2x too long, cheesy acting, poorly written with very unbelievable obstacles in each scene that made it feel inauthentic. And Adrien Brody as the “human” love interest and Jack Black as the greedy movie producer were serious miscasts in my mind. They cheapened the class of the film. But once Kong enters, the exciting story begins. The middle hour may well be the most amazing CGI dinosaur and creature feature movie ever. And I am a huge fan of the original. It inspired my love for movies when I was a kid. So despite its flaws this remake is a worthy remake in my mind that brings the story to a whole new generation in a legitimate way, unlike remakes of Psycho and others. Okay, the power of this story is in the mythic nature of Beauty and the Beast. The reason it rings so true is its metaphoric analogy to how beauty tames or “kills” the beast in the hearts of men. This theme is particularly meaningful to me because I absolutely love the beautiful. Kong is of course the absolute extreme of the “animal” nature in men, but as such, I really relate to him, with how my wife’s presence in my life tames the negative wild side of me in some ways. God, however is the ultimate tamer of my sin nature, but the beauty of my wife (and not merely her outward, but also her inward beauty) is a means of grace for me. This is the power of beauty for affecting us. And this understanding I think is neglected by many in a world of modernity with its rationalism and obsession with logic and science. Beauty can be just as much a carrier of truth as logic or reason. But our modern minds have been raped by Enlightenment Rationality and as the Romantics suggested, we reduce everything to machines and mathematics and chemicals, thus losing beauty, and with it, truth. Anyway, in this story, the point about beauty is made very clearly when Kong sits on his ledge overlooking Skull Island and the vast ocean and he just looks out and Ann Darrow, his captive, motions to him with her hand to her chest, a gesture that means “Beautiful” obviously a reference to touching the heart. Later, on the Empire State Building, Kong looks out over the vast sea of New York and does the gesture for beauty to her. A very touching and powerful moment of grace. The weakness of this incarnation of Beauty and the Beast as compared to the original, however, is that at the end of the story, Kong is still just an ape, an animal, and as such is not created in God’s image, and cannot make true spiritual human connection – which is why Jackson has a human love interest for Naomi Watts (Ann) in Adrien Brody, who overcomes his “male” animal-like inadequacy of not communicating, and runs into her arms after Kong dies. It is in the realm of the human where eternal transcendence is achieved. HOWEVER, seeing this as myth or metaphor lightens the load a bit. It is not realism. I just prefer the original Beauty and the Beast in its humanity.
Mythological fantasy. A phenomenal adaptation of the C.S. Lewis classic. In fact, I would say that this is one of the few movies that are better than the book. I was not impressed with the book, but I teared up throughout the film because of its deep magic, that is, its mythological incarnation. Lucy is adorable. One of my favorite moments is when she smiles at her shocked unbelieving siblings, now in Narnia for the first time and quips satirically, “Don’t worry, it’s just your imagination.” The Ice Queen is wickedly well performed, and Aslan was not safe, but good. What struck me in the film was its positive Medieval culture of chivalry. In this, the filmmakers were true to Lewis’ own English background, as well as his degrees in Medieval Romance. It was so refreshing to see honor, courage, and duty in fighting against evil as the means to freedom and justice. Aslan allowing Peter to kill the evil wolf with his sword is a rite of his manhood and becoming a knight of honor. Boy is that politically incorrect – and truthful. And before this event, earlier in the story, Susan had tried to get Peter NOT to fight the big bad wolves as they surrounded them, but rather to “listen to them,” because, “just because you have a sword, doesn’t make you a hero.” Does that sound like the kind of politics that is going on in this world right now as fools seek to reason with terrorists and understand them and bow to their demands rather than kill them. In one of the beautiful key moments of the film, the White Witch appeals to the Deep Magic that is “more powerful than any of us, that rules over all destinies, yours and mine,” and claims that the law demands blood for true justice. This is certainly abhorred as primitive barbarism by those in our society who would blame victims, (unless it’s racism), seek to understand evildoers (like Islamofascists), rather than render justice, and think that letting criminals go because they “feel” sorry or have been good boys in prison is somehow justice. This movie shows that the Law’s requirements are eye for eye, and eye for eye is NOT unjust or unfair, but truly the ONLY fairness, otherwise evil reigns. It is the rejection of eye for eye which is barbaric and destroys civilization because lex talionis is simply a way of saying as we do that “the punishment should fit the crime.” Lex talionis is NOT a justification of revenge, it was meant to keep sinful people from extracting too much in punishment than what was deserved. Which leads us to the Christian mythology in the film. It was not strangled. Of course, the most primary essence of Christianity is the substitutionary atonement of Christ for his people. We are forgiven not because God just waved a hand and let criminals of the universe go – that would be cruelty to the victims. Rather, Jesus took upon himself the death penalty for all believers. In this and this alone is the philosophical and theological conundrum of love and justice perfectly united. God’s Law of justice requires the penalty is paid (justice), but his love is displayed in suffering that penalty on behalf of his people (Romans 5:6-10). This is called the Law and Gospel that is required for redemption to be sufficiently communicated. Like a mirror, God’s Law shows us we are guilty of sin, criminals of the universe (Romans 3:19-20). But the Gospel is the Good News that Jesus paid that penalty to free us (Romans 6:23). As Aslan explains, “when a willing victim who committed no treachery would take the place of a traitor,” then the “Deep magic” is fulfilled, that is, the Law is fulfilled in the sacrificial atonement of Christ. Some of the most powerful analogies to the Gospel are in this film. Of course, the Stone Table of sacrifice is a pagan symbol of appeasement to the gods, just like the crucifix was a Roman pagan mode of punishment. Aslan says nothing and is shaven before killed, just like Christ said nothing and was beat and bruised before being killed (Isaiah 53:5-7), The White Witch, before killing Aslan, says mockingly, “Behold, the Great Lion,” just like Christ’s persecutors mocked him saying, “Hail, the king of the Jews.” (John 19:3) There is an earthquake when Aslan raises from the dead, just like there was one at Jesus’s tomb when he was resurrected (Matthew 28:2). Oh, and it was two girls there when Aslan raised, just as it was the women who saw Christ raised (Matthew 28:1). When Aslan kills the White Witch, he says, “It is finished,” the final words of Jesus on the cross when salvation was secured and he destroyed the power of death and the devil (John 19:30; Hebrews 2:14). Aslan breathes on the statues to bring them to life, just like Jesus breathed on his disciples to give them the Holy Spirit that raises them spiritually from the dead (John 20:22). They left the phrases, “daughters of Eve,” and “sons of Adam,” which are references to our Genesis and Original Sin (Romans 5), but also the glory of man in the image of God as children of Adam and Eve (Acts 17:26). I loved a little tidbit they put in to mock the modernist demythologizing of religion. In Narnia, the “land of myth,” Lucy looks at some books, and one of them is titled, “The Myth of Man.” What a great jab. Two tiny disappointments: They mangled the classic phrase of Aslan, “Is he safe?” “Oh no, but he is good,” into “He’s not a tame lion, but he is good.” And also they only mentioned the phrase of Narnia, “It’s always winter but never Christmas” only once. Yet it should have been a repeated phrase because of course it is symbolic of how godless man seeks to take God out of society. Anyway, Lewis and Tolkien are two of the most potent forces against modernity in making it safe to “believe” again by showing the mythology of modernity as ultimately evil and destructive. I’ll have a booklet or a book out this year if you want to read more about the idea of using mythology or pagan mythological elements in Christian storytelling. It will be called, “Word Pictures.”
Family melodrama. A brilliant mathematician (Gwenyth Paltrow) must take care of her brilliant mathematician father (Anthony Hopkins) who is losing his mind with Alzheimers. This is a very touching story that also includes the ubiquitous Jake Gyllenhall as the love interest. Well, it started out like the play it was based on, a lot of talk that sounded staged and was redundant. We hear Gwenyth recount her entire last evening events with her sister that we already saw. And it is a bit difficult to believe Paltrow as a genius, but that is the genius of this movie because the dramatic question is Did she write the brilliant notebook full of breakthrough mathematics during her father’s brief remission or did he? Once the plot kicked in, the play-likeness faded and I was able to enjoy it more. And of course, the whole idea of how can she prove she wrote the proof is a reflection of the difficulty of modernity in which we live. What is proof? Her appeal to Jake is to trust her. Just as she has learned to trust him. A faint echo of the truth that all reason is based on a faith commitment or trust in the underlying uniformity of nature, something we assume but simply cannot prove. In other words, in order to our Reason to be legitimate, certain preconditions of reality must exist or our reasoning is unintelligible. And one of those is the law-likeness or regularity of nature. If nature is not uniform, that is, lawlike then we cannot use reason because in fact one moment the law of logic we appeal to may be valid, one moment it may not. Only if we assume that logic is always true can we even use it to prove anything. But it can only be a proof if nature is law-like, that is, the same everywhere at all times, past, present and future. But since we are finite and cannot be everywhere in the universe at all times to see or know that logic works, then we are ASSUMING or presupposing that it does outside of our little ignorant tiny corner of knowledge in a vast universe beyond our comprehension. In a non-Christian worldview we simply cannot know that the future will be like the past, therefore we cannot know that nature is uniform and will continue to operate the same in the future in a way that we can reliably count on it in our reasoning. The appeal to inductive reasoning of science as being valid because “that’s how it has always operated in the past” is begging the question. So our entire edifice of Reason and science is in fact founded on faith – faith in the uniformity of nature—just as Augustine said, “I believe in order to understand.” And I think that the Hopkins character is a great incarnation of the insanity which is the ultimate end of a modern Enlightenment metaphysic that reduces reality or truth to mathematical theorem.