Bolt: A Review

Last week, I finished what was certainly one of the most unique books I’ve read this year: Mark Barrowcliffe’s The Elfish Gene. In it, Barrowcliffe shares his memories as a teenager in industrial England in the mid-70’s. Already a bit of a strange kid and a misfit, he discovered a new game, Dungeons and Dragons, and quickly it came to consume his life. He writes with a strong self-disparaging tone, dismissing the person that he was. While he understands that adolescents, and particularly adolescent boys are prone to obsessions, the world of fantasy and role-playing games was a kind of obsession that to his mind worked much destruction on his life. Uncomfortable with the person that he was (and what teenager isn’t) he threw himself into a fantasy world that was for him more real than than the real world.

With an entertainment culture that can’t quite shake the “reality TV” bug, we have seen a number of movies that have served up various levels of reflection on this notion of reality verses fantasy. Bolt stands in this tradition, a kind of Truman Show for kids. In it, we are introduced to our central character, Bolt, a dog who is the centerpiece of a popular television show. He stars as a dog with superpowers, charged each week with fighting evil and typically doing his best to save his owner, Penny. The trick is that the show has been elaborately designed to convince Bolt that he is this superdog, and so every aspect of his life is designed to convey the fiction. This is fine, until a series of events sets him loose in the real world, on a search for Penny, with no knowledge that he is in fact just a normal dog.

Since this is a Truman Show theme aimed for younger audiences, the level of reflection in the film is more muted, but even so, it is driving towards some worthwhile themes. Bolt eventually discovers what he really is, and so he must wrestle with anything of his old life was real, and particularly his relationship with Penny. I’ll leave the plot points aside, but as he goes on his journey in a way that serves up some worthwhile entertainment, we witness his growth in character as he embraces who he is even given his newfound limitations.

Watching it, I couldn’t help but setting the film alongside Barrowcliffe’s reflections in The Elfish Gene. Emerging from years of extreme devotion to roleplaying and fantasy (and trust me, D&Ders, this dude was weird by anyone’s standards!), he eventually carved out a fairly ordinary existence. Years later, he reconnected with one of those old friends, a gamer that he hadn’t seen in decades. As they got to know each other, he learned that after years of hard living, his friend had become a Christian and was now living a very different kind of existence.

As the agnostic Barrowcliffe considered his gamer friend turned believer, he mused on the connection. Perhaps (I paraphrase) the desire to spark the imagination is something needed for one to turn to faith. He writes with an outsider’s perspective, but as he does, I find myself resonating from the insider’s perspective. Indeed, the blessing of faith is largely a blessing of imagination, to conceive that the impossible can be possible, that the supernatural might engage the natural, that are hopes might become real because of a truth that, as Rich Mullins once said, “is too good to be real, but is more real than the air we breathe.”

And so I return to Bolt, who must come down to earth and realize that his life as a superhero was merely an illusion. What is left for him, though, is a kind of heroism that emerges because of a fierce devotion to those he loves, and a willingness to sacrifice himself for others. The marriage of imagination and vital relationship creates a kind of character that is winsome and inviting. For Barrowcliffe, he discovered the one without the other, and it proved destructive. We need both, and Bolt offers an entertaining reminder of that need.

Quantum of Solace: A Review

“Christ, I miss the Cold War.” - M

I grew up in the Roger Moore era of James Bond. Considered anathema by Connery fans, I knew no better, and so enjoyed Octopussy and A View to a Kill, the latter considered by many to be among the worst of the Bond legacy. Still, the Bond I knew was quirky, with plenty of comedic panache and a lot of innuendo that my 9-year old self never really picked up on. As my Bond horizons broadened over the years, I came to appreciate the different looks that the character has gotten over the years, an evolving character trying to keep pace with the times. Clearly, in movies like Goldeneye, the first for Brosnan’s Bond, it was clear that the creators were concerned that their character was a relic of a time that had past, and have struggled to find a beat for the misogynistic, relationally aloof, arrogant master spy that has been Bond through the years.

And so we turn to Daniel Craig’s sophomore outing as a young and novice Bond. It may be worthy of comment on the creators and their approach to the character, on the marketplace for spy heroes in film, or on the culture itself, and is probably a comment on all three, but we are reminded this time out that this is a Bond for a new day. In Casino Royale, we saw a brilliant interpretation of an arrogant but green Bond, growing into his character and figuring things out. He fought with rawness rather than with the precision of other interpretations. He made mistakes and had to compensate for those mistakes along the way. But the real gift of Royale was the one thing that Bond never had much of: passion.

The love interests of Bond through the years have been fine when they’ve been treated like the playthings that Bond uses them for. Every now and then the films have tried to take some of these interests seriously, and that almost always feel thin. Here, though, we saw Bond falling for Vesper Lynne, showing a real vulnerability and a viable explanation for his approach to women through the years. Her betrayal and death gave him motivation at the end of the film, a motivation that drives him in this film.

The villain here is a secret organization, an international group whose complexity is beyond Bond’s imagination and whose ultimate purpose remains elusive. What they learn at every corner is that their corrupting influence seems to know no bounds, penetrating even the ranks of MI-6, and that they always seem to be working a step behind this group.

I’d like to tell you that the machinations of the organization is fun to watch, but honestly, Quantum of Solace rarely slows down to really explain what’s going on. The film opts instead for movement and action, constant movement and action. This version of Bond should probably pay royalties to Jason Bourne, because he is certainly cut off the same cloth. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the Bourne trilogy clearly figured out spy thrillers for a post-Cold War era. But it does mean that the pacing and cutting of the film is frenetic. I expect most will spend the film not sure what’s going on, but knowing that whatever it is it is really tense and exciting.

I’m not sure that any version of Bond has offered much of a positive character worthy of emulation, but this version has his own unique challenges. You still have his low view of women and his arrogance, but this time you get a fierce and unrelenting anger. Constantly he pushes against M and MI-6, not because he is right and they are wrong, but he is personally driven and they have broader concerns. This Bond is a modern-day cowboy, pushing against the system to find his “quantum of solace,” a solace that will only be found in blood-spilling vengeance.

Thus, this Bond is mostly a revenge fantasy, but unlike the Bourne trilogy, which plays with the same themes, the film doesn’t wind up with much of a redemptive voice. This Bond will get his revenge, will feel less than complete from it, but will press on and keep moving. No time for reflection when there’s a chase to run.

All of this is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the film. While this film can’t top Casino Royale, that was a hard one to live up to. Still, as I see this anger played out on screen, I can’t help but thinking of the irony that the Bourne trilogy, which road the coattails of Bond’s success, has in many ways offered us a more substantive reflection on revenge that Bond has. Bond’s pursuit in this film often seem hollow, and its merit found mostly in the fact that his pursuit by happenstance serves the end of his job. As an action movie, it’s a great ride. As a character study, I can’t help but feel that something is missing.

Humboldt County: A Review

Humboldt County is a film that largely fails because of the inability of the filmmakers to sustain their faith in their subject. What begins as a fairly routine setup takes on a unique turn, which gives the film promise that they simply can’t deliver on.

In the opening moments, we are introduced to Peter, a med student in the midst of a final exam. It’s obvious to us non-specialists that he’s failing, as he seems totally disengaged from every aspect of the work, displaying some of the worst bedside manner of a medical professional. We learn soon that he has failed this exam, primarily due to a potentially fatal misdiagnosis, a failure that will cost him a prestigious internship. We also learn that the professor who failed him is his father, and so we glimpse the broken nature of his relationships and some insight to his disengagement.

Working through that failure leads him to a one-night stand with the woman that acted as his patient in the exam. After their night together, he hops in the car with her for her drive home. What he didn’t know is that she’s taking him to Humboldt County, a rural county in Northern California, and a long way from his LA home. Her family is an eccentric collection of marijuana growers, living a simple existence that understandably places high value on living below the radar.

The idea of drawing us into a community of marijuana farmers is a fascinating and unique setup, and is filled with unfulfilled potential. His new friend quickly leaves town, leaving him stranded with her family. His discomfort slowly cools as he finds himself drawn to the genuineness of their community. The family lives under the leadership of Jack, played by Brad Dourif who delivers easily the strongest performance in the film. Jack was once a professor at UC Berkeley, but left that life behind for a life lived close to the land and in quiet peace. The film wants us to be drawn to their genuine community, as Jack models and preaches a message of a quiet family life, growing his marijuana without ambition, key to keeping the crops small and the feds at bay. Unfortunately, his family is struggling with his message, as his son is secretly growing a large stash with the hopes of striking it rich. Capitalism has invaded this contrarian culture, and with it comes the threat of federal interest and a crushing of this dream life they have assembled.

Obviously, for most of us peering into a community built around marijuana and asking us to admire this community is a pretty tough hurdle to jump. Had the filmmakers stayed committed to this, though, they may have been able to pull it off. The acting, with the exception of Jack, is pretty lethargic, but it is serviceable, and we still see the genuine nature of their community and contrast with the coldness of Peter’s world. We can understand why he might find this alternative life inviting.

And yet, the filmmakers fail us, opting by the end for routine melodrama and emotional manipulation instead of the genuine, if alternative community that the film celebrates throughout. The plot falls apart by the end, and with it our trust in the filmmakers’ world. The community that seems to offer much promise ultimately appears hollow, and Peter’s final decisions seem scripted rather than driven by genuine human connection.

Still, the film offers intriguing moments as it reflects on the desire for genuine human connection and the fragmentation that results in lives that are consumed with career or money. This is a theme that should resonate and is worth wrestling with, and the admiration of the alternative community seems to serve as a mere storytelling foil rather than an authentic anchor for genuine community. Pulling the question away from Humboldt County, the film caused me to reflect on the emptiness that results in our modern culture, and the need for an alternative vision for living life together. It’s a vision that the film can’t deliver, but a vision that is worth pursuing.

Burn After Reading: A Review

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the brothers who gave us O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski know how to put on a farce. And from the opening moments of Burn After Reading we know that’s what we’re getting. Things just feel different after the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning turn at No Country for Old Men.

Apparently, the brothers wrote the scripts for Burn and No Country at the same time, alternating days on each. It explains a lot, as Burn brings us over-the-top comedy in the same way that No Country gave us gut-wrenching looks at a dark world. It is as if the former was the constant cleansing they needed from writing the latter. And yet, the worldviews that the two films seem to express just don’t seem that far apart.

Burn After Reading initially introduces us to Osborne Cox, played by John Malkovich, a frustrated middle-aged CIA analyst who quits his job rather than being transferred by his higher-ups. A self-proclaimed genius surrounded by lesser mortals, he decides to devote himself to writing his memoirs of his time in the CIA. His wife, played by Tilda Swinton, is less than excited about the idea. But then again, she’s less than excited about Osborne himself, taking up with their family friend Harry Pfarrer, a hyper-active, endorphin-addicted sex junkie played broadly by George Clooney.

Alongside this love triangle and its complications, we also get to know Linda Litzke, as Francis McDormand gives us an echo of her turn in Fargo, as a gym employee frustrated by her insurance’s refusal to pay for extensive elective plastic surgery. She sees her opportunity when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), discovers a disc left by a gym patron that looks to be “spy stuff.” Thinking that they would get a reward for turning it over, they call the owner of the disc, who turns out to be Osborne. Rather than locating good espionage material, they have found a copy of his memoirs. And so the chase is on.

This is a comedy of errors where nobody is innocent, and nobody has it together. The CIA is keeping close tabs on the situation, as Litzke tries to sell the information to the Russians after failing to get money out of Cox. They show remarkable prowess at gathering information, as the CIA higher-ups get wonderfully detailed reports of everything that’s happening, but nobody, including them, can seem to make sense of why this is happening or what information Litzke actually has. Long on resources but short on intelligence, the CIA is no better off here than anyone else.

I’ll leave the plot to your own experience, because this is one that is worth seeing for the adults that can handle it, but I’m interested in the film’s connections with No Country. Last year’s Oscar winner looked at a world that was spinning out of control, and saw decent men who try to fight for good causes feeling lost and powerless in the face of incomprehensible evil. In that film, you had three central characters - a good guy, a bad guy, and one that sat in the middle.

Here, there is no clear distinction among the characters. Everybody in this film is radically self-involved, or arrogant, or broken by their addictions, and bent on pursuing their own interests at all times even in the face of great tragedy that befalls their supposed friends and lovers. The characters are richly drawn and richly acted, and so they are a delight to watch on screen, but they would be decidedly abhorrent people to actually know. But even in their caricature, they are reminiscent of everyday people, and shine a light on the basic flaws that we all share.

In a particular insightful comment on the entire movie, the CIA head asks as he hears the story, “So what did we learn from this?” His underling shrugs and says, “Um... I don’t know.” “I don’t know either.” That’s it. Nothing learned. Nothing gained. Just weathering another story unfolding involve radically self-involved people, pursuing their own selfish ends to the destruction of others around them.

In a sense, Burn offers an even bleaker view of the universe than No Country, though wrapped in hilarious packaging. It is perhaps possible to dismiss the evil of No Country because of our temptation to identify with the good guy who ultimately just escapes from dealing with it, rather than identifying with the middle guy who gets taken down by this evil. Here, the film gently prods us to see ourselves in this middle light, with the same capacity for selfishness and evil as anyone else we encounter. What neither film conceives us is a way out, an escape valve for this kind of doomed story.

Burn After Reading may offer a useful reminder to a Christian audience who can be tempted to forget the diagnosis before offering a prescription. I find myself resonating with their diagnosis, which increases my desire to share the prescription. And that’s more than worth a few laughs along the way.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

As my wife and I walked out of the theater after seeing Clone Wars, we were behind several young boys. They were in the midst of a massive lightsaber battle, fully intent on declaring themselves the victor and the others the champions of the dark side. The battle made its way along the hall, until the parents made sure it didn’t make its way to the middle of the concessions. Of course, we both were cracking up through this experience. The curmudgeons have been in full force with this latest Star Wars effort, but the kids didn’t seem to notice.

Clone Wars offers an interesting, if odd, position in the Star Wars universe. At one level, you could say it doesn’t count as a movie, since at some level it’s simply a compendium of the pilot episodes of a coming TV show, albeit with a single story line. It takes us to the 5-year period between Episodes 2 and 3 (that’s Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith for the amateurs), when the Clone Wars is raging throughout the galaxy. This is the heyday of the partnership of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, when Anakin emerges as an uber-talented Jedi and earns his reputation as “the best star-pilot in the galaxy,” even while the darkness that ultimately consumes him peeks out now and then. It is the last great breath of the Jedi, whose multi-millennial defense of the galaxy culminates in their command of the clone army. It is the culmination of the decades-long machinations of Emperor Palpatine, who is in the midst of orchestrating the most complicated political seizure in the history of politics.

In other words, this is a fascinating time in the story, and a season that’s ripe for some rich storytelling. Fanboys across the globe have been thrilled to follow the development of this show, and with the fan’s expectations in mind, Clone Wars succeeds on a lot of fronts. Whereas Episode 2 gave us a few fleeting glimpses of the opening salvo of the Clone Wars, here we get an extended battle sequence that keeps its pace going long past the point where a traditional film would have had to cut it off. It’s a setting that plays to so many of the strengths of Star Wars’ prequel era, and avoids so many of its weaknesses.

Imagine a prequel movie with no Hayden Christiansen (Anakin in the prequel trilogy), with only the barest glimpse of the romance that was the source of so much of the trilogy’s wooden dialogue. In his place, his “sound-alike” actor, as with the bulk of the cast, does a fine job of echoing the original actor while still investing some real personality in the role. We get a few nods to the films with returns from several actors, but the quality of voice acting from the unknowns gives some real hope for the coming series.

For this round, the opening act of the film finds Skywalker and Kenobi leading Clones in a heated defense against an overpowering Droid army. In the midst of this attack, they receive a visit from Ahsoka Tano, a Padawan learner (Jedi-in-training) who comes to begin training under her master. While Kenobi had requested and was expecting a new Padawan, it turns out that she was assigned to Anakin by Yoda. This relationship provides an interesting a new outlet to see Anakin’s character emerge. They develop a sharp repartee, but slowly we start to see Anakin assume the role of Jedi and willingly teach her.

While this battle is going on, both the Jedi and the Separatists, led by Count Dooku, find themselves competing for the affections of Jabba the Hutt, the Hutt leader who controls vital trade lanes that would prove valuable to both sides. In the course of their collective efforts to woo the Hutts, Jabba’s child is kidnapped, and both commit to finding the child. Without digging into the plot, suffice it to say that the story becomes a leap-frog effort to outmaneuver the other, as Anakin and Dooku race to the finish line, all the while with Palpatine lingering in the shadows, working towards an end that none of the others can fully see.

The TV show is positioning itself to appeal to long-time fans and to young audiences, and with that latter in mind, my hope is that it fulfills its potential in exploring the slow fall of Anakin Skywalker. From what we see in the film, it gets Anakin right in a lot of ways. We have to deal with a character that is enormously talented, and whose flaws, while apparent, don’t overwhelm the fact that some of wisest and most insightful people in the galaxy found themselves trusting him with immense responsibility. We get glimpses of his greatness and his likability, both of which are necessary to see fully to experience the tragedy that is the rise of Darth Vader.

There are probably too many laser blasts and lightsabers flying around this film to spend too much time exploring deep themes, but as I delighted in the experience of this film, I concluded that this was exactly the point. The strength of Star Wars, a strength that has fanboys like me still coming back to it 30 years later, is in the sheer experience of joy that we are drawn to in the midst of a rich and rewarding mythology of the nature of evil and the power of good. Certainly the kids in front of me in that hallway seemed to capture the magic. But even in the midst of that fun battle, it is a sobering reality that the tragic rise of the evil Sith Lord came out of a life that seemed to thrive most in the midst of a great battle against evil. This is that battle.

Wall-E: A Review

Wall-E is about as ambitious a project I’ve seen from a major animation studio in recent memory. Animation isn’t cheap, and Wall-E’s published $185 million budget (plus the exorbitant marketing costs) mean that Pixar needs a lot of ticket sales to turn a profit on this effort. Because of this, the temptation in animation is to play as broadly as possible, pandering to a young humor with a few references for the parents to appreciate.

Instead, Wall-E gives us... silence. Well, not silence so much as just the absence of dialogue. About 45 minutes worth of no dialogue. That means that they gamble on the power of the robot to engage the audience, to bring us into the story, to make us understand what’s happening and why, and to make us root for the hero without saying a thing for the first half of the film. As far as mainstream summer fare goes, that’s pretty ambitious.

Fortunately, it works. Wall-E is a janitor robot (actually a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class). Left behind on a junked up world, his job is to keep things clean. It’s obviously been a long while since he’s seen anyone, and somewhere along the line he’s developed something of a personality. Despite the seeming inanity of his existence, Wall-E is fascinated by the world around him, searching among the junk for items of wonder that he can add to his collection. He has a collection of old romantic movies, and finds pleasure in the old dance numbers. The film takes its time drawing us into this charmer’s little world, who has somehow find a way to experience joy and pleasure even in his lonely existence.

But then one day Wall-E’s world changes. A new robot lands on earth. As he marvels at EVE, following her around and trying to strike up a friendship (and avoid being blown up by her), we’re slowly introduced to her mission. EVE is on a search for life, looking for evidence that earth, long abandoned by humans, is now ready for their return. She finds evidence of life, and sets off to return to the humans to report on her success.

Wall-E tags along, and so we are introduced to the rest of reality. In abandoning the planet, humans have settled into the ultimate leisurely existence, having lived for generations on a kind of space cruise ship. Few can walk anymore, as they have given themselves over to an entirely lethargic existence. All have long since given up on any hope of returning to earth, and they now seem at ease in this new existence.

As the adventure heightens, Wall-E devotes himself to EVE, showing a determination that slowly wins her over. Meanwhile, some humans slowly wake to the opportunity that EVE has discovered, and find themselves fighting to return to earth, facing opposition that rises at every turn.

The film has an interesting parabolic quality, with this lurking warning lingering about creation care and the cost of earthly neglect. But more interesting is the experience of humans who have learned to disengage from reality because of their obsession with gadgets. Of course, I’m watching the film as some lunkhead nearby tries to blind the rest of the audience with the light of their cell phone, checking their text messages throughout the film. It’s a connection they would probably miss.

On the one hand, we get Wall-E, who experiences wonder and joy at creation (even the gadgets), and finds his experience of the things in his life bringing out greater delight, even drawing him more to other people (well, other robots, in the form of EVE). On the other hand, we have the humans, who enjoy every convenience and comfort, but struggle to find anything joyful in their existence.

It was this beat of the film that was most engaging for me, and most interesting. As a self-confessed gadget guy, I own the warning the film offers, that I want my fascination with the stuff of life to bring out my sense of wonder, not quench it. I think our sense of wonder is a divine gift, and is meant to draw us to divine things. The pleasure that we can experience here is meant to draw us to the source of ultimate pleasure. Wall-E is a grand celebration of the gift of wonder, a gift that we can easily lose in a culture of entertainment and excess. If the message of Wall-E is to engage life grandly and discover the wonders within, then I celebrate with them.

Wanted: A Review

There are times in movies when the desire to wrestle with interesting ideas must compete with the (often deeper) desire to look cool. Wanted is just such a film. For the first two acts, it seems to be doing little more than combining the work of two better films. By the end, it actually wrestles with something in a unique way, and almost has a great finish.

First, it’s tribute to other films. In the opening sequences, we are introduced to Wesley Gibson (played by the consistently impressive James McAvoy). Wesley is a mid-level accountant in a faceless corporation. He hates his boss, an oppressive petty woman, and hates his job. He hates his girlfriend, who is sleeping with his best friend (he hates him too). In all, this life that he hates has left him a muted man, going through the motions knowing that the next day promises nothing better than what today has given. His life has become a celebration of banality.

This is ground that Fight Club explored better than about any film, and in these moments I was struck by how little the reflection on these issues has really changed in ten years. The sense that modern life is an emasculating force in our lives is still very present, and this observation seems as timely now as Fight Club did then.

But Wanted doesn’t stop there, and moves from Fight Club to The Matrix. The film’s opening moments (at times directly quoting The Matrix), get explained as we learn that Wesley’s father, who abandoned him when he was young, is part of a secret society of assassins, who have operated for over 1000 years. His father, and Wesley, have a gift in the form of an ability that few possess, an ability that enables them to be skilled assassins. This organization calls Wesley to take his father’s place, to train so that he can accept his first mission: hunt down his father’s killer.

This hero’s call, laced with a framework from Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, will look familiar to viewers of The Matrix, Star Wars, and other fantasy narratives. There’s very little new here, except for some cool special effects and fun action. For a large portion of the film, it doesn’t appear as if Wanted is going to do anything more either. And that wouldn’t be that bad. After all, they were fun movies, and if we don’t get much more out of a summer action flick than a reminder of better films, I doubt many will complain.

But the film suddenly becomes much more interesting as the group reveals how they choose their targets. The organization discovered in the early years a secret contained in the weaving of fabric, that small blemishes could be read and interpreted to name the targets for assassination. Thus, they live to serve “Fate,” which uses them to reorder reality around its mysterious purposes.

As Wesley learns his skills and carries out his assassinations, he slowly learns to embrace his place, though not without some skepticism. How do you assassinate someone who hasn’t done anything yet, only because Fate has determined that they will do greater harm in the future? This doubt reaches its pinnacle when, after a number of critical plot points I won’t reveal here, Wesley and other members are faced with a difficult choice. Do they follow their orders and trust Fate, or do they trust in their own choice as better than the mysteries of fate?

Fate vs. free will. Now we’re talking! Of course, discussions around fatalism and free will are nothing new to film. But what is interesting for Wanted is that the choice they seem to make is that trusting to Fate is a better, even a more freeing choice than exercising an unrestricted free will. While the question they pose is nothing new to film, the answer they arrive at is somewhat novel.

Having said that, it’s worth noting how different their dichotomy of fatalism and free will is from robust Christian theology. As much as large swaths of the Christian world today embrace the language of free will as indisputable theology, I don’t think most of them mean what they mean in a film like this, nor should a notion of Fate as seen here be familiar to Christians who live in a theistic universe. Their understanding of Fate is locked in mystery, whose purposes are always kept fully secret, and who gives nothing but orders for followers to obey. Such is not the God of the Bible. His otherness means mystery abounds, but His revelation speaks to a moral order to the universe, who calls people into action but drives home again and again the motivation for doing so. We trust not to an impersonal Fate, but to a personal Father.

Similarly, regardless of debates and diversity within Christian tradition, popular notions of free will should prove unfamiliar to us. After all, we don’t live an unbound existence, but instead spend our lives in tension between two types of bonded existence: bonded to sin, or bonded to Christ. One of the key BIblical revelations is that a life bonded to Christ is the true life of freedom.


As I said, the film winds up touching on profoundly interesting ideas, and almost makes a good point. But in the end, the need to be cool wins out, and what we’re left with is a kind of “theology light.” Still, Wanted offers a pretty interesting journey with a unique detour that certainly offers a unique point of view for popular film, and that alone makes it worth the journey.

The Incredible Hulk: A Review

The Incredible Hulk is one of the odder “reboots” in recent films. Five years after The Hulk, the comic book cash cow shows no sign of slowing down for the summer blockbuster machine, and Marvel has drawn from that well better than anyone. It makes sense to have the Hulk, one of the most recognizable of the Marvel universe characters, in play during this boon season. And the impression of the 2003 film depends greatly on who you talk to. At the time, Ang Lee had convinced the US of his action chops as a director with the remarkable Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (the more controversial Brokeback Mountain was still to come). His approach to the film was fascinating, seeking to convey visually the look and feel of a comic book through the use of panels. While the visual experience was to my mind largely successful, the story left many tepid. In lieu of a broad summer action film, Lee sought to layer the film with a deeper theme of father relationships as a way of exploring Hulk’s origin.

Along comes The Incredible Hulk. Lee is replaced with Louis Leterrier, unknown to any except fans of The Transporter 2 (both of them). Eric Bana is replaced by Ed Norton (a worthy upgrade), and Jennifer Connelly is replaced with Liv Tyler (a small downgrade). The film joins Bruce Banner in South America, where the last film left him, so while they don’t deny that the last film took place, they disconnect you from it enough that they don’t invite tight comparisons.

The Hulk is a tough character to pull off, especially within the rules of the summer movies. It’s hard to describe him as a hero, the beast full of rage with an uncontrollable bent on destruction. The first film captured that, dealing more with Banner’s creation of the monster and his failed attempts to control it. This film picks up on that last theme, as we find Banner fighting to live an anonymous life, thus below the radar of the US military that is hunting him down, fighting to control the rage that unleashed the monster, and searching as much as he can for some kind of cure. These are complicated goals, and despite his acumen at managing his life, it’s clear from the beginning that it’s doomed to fail.

And it does. The military finds out about him through a little mistake, and General Ross, now with William Hurt for Sam Elliott, unleashes his military machine to find him. The ensuing panic convinces Banner that it is time to head back to the US, and to pursue in earnest a cure that he has been chasing with the help of a New York scientist.

To get there, he winds up bringing Betty back into the picture. The love of his life, she seems to have moved on, but quickly abandons that life when she gets to spend time with him. As they spend time together, it quickly becomes fully apparent to her just how much of a beast he’s trying to deal with.

It’s at this point that the film starts to turn, and I think for the first time in these two films starts to position this character for a longer life in film. The way they have spun his origin, the Hulk is a product of Banner’s arrogance in his scientific pursuit, and his pent-up anger. It is a monster, and Banner’s passion is to cure himself. Through Betty, he starts to realize that the monster is in fact a part of him, and that while a cure may be preferred, the challenge that may be more realistically before him is to harness this beast and use him for good.


I’m not enough of a Hulk historian to speak to these dimensions in the comic book, but it strikes me that this concept, constructing Hulk as a kind of tragic anti-hero, makes for some interesting storytelling. To the extent that he emerges in coming films as a hero, it offers an interesting dimension to these stories, as his heroics must always be tempered by a viable ability to be consumed by the rage that creates his heroism.

The Marvel characters explore many similar themes. Many of these heroes emerge from accidents that came from arrogant science or through the overreaching of power. While Spiderman reminded us that “With great power comes great responsibility,” for characters like Hulk, that power emerges from their own failings as people. It strikes me as an odd thing that the multi-billion dollar comic book movie industry keeps coming back to the theme of humility, but it does in its own way. These films see passions become obsessions, government desire for order turn to government desire for control, and unresolved anger become a kind of madness. In all, there is a positing that heroism emerges in the midst of flaws, and as much through harnessing of those flaws than in defeating them.

The Incredible Hulk is a good, if not great movie, that is a victim of bad timing by being released around the far superior Iron Man (and hopefully, far superior Dark Knight). Still, despite Ed Norton’s apparent objections to the final cut (I'd love to see his version), they have positioned the character to find its way into the larger Marvel film universe, including an apparently forthcoming Avengers movie. I’m glad their keeping him around, if for not other reason than to see how honestly they maintain these tensions in the midst of this character’s emerging heroism.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: A Review

Raiders of the Lost Ark may serve as one of the greatest, meaningless films ever. I mean, sure, I could try to pontificate about some of the deeper meaning of the film, about its view of heroism and humility before the mysteries of the world, but it wouldn’t take me long to get past where I think the creative voices wanted us to go. Raiders wanted to give a nod to the experience of the Saturday matinee, the serials that caught the eye of George Lucas and so many other children in their day. It was about the spirit of adventure and wonder more than anything else, and was meant to keep us glued to the seats and coming back for more. In the course of doing this, of course, it propelled Harrison Ford on to superstar status, giving him two signature characters (couldn’t escape without a Star Wars reference, could we?) that in many ways defined masculinity for a culture.

While the two sequels almost by necessity couldn’t reach Raiders’ level, they nonetheless kept the mystique alive. But how do you return to this mythology after two decades? Filmmaking has definitely changed. Special effects are now computer-driven. Lucas demonstrated through three films that he lost some knack for dialogue, Spielberg got serious and respectable, and Ford either gave up on acting or at least on finding good scripts. Can these three come together and make it work again?

Well, opinions are divided, but for me, they largely succeed. These guys ask us to make a big leap for this one, and some don’t seem to be able to make it. No longer are we giving a nod to the serials of the ’30’s and ’40’s, full of Nazis and jungle adventures in exotic locations. Instead, they shift their attention to the Saturday matinee of the 1950’s. The Nazis are replaced by communists, and the real mysteries are alien in nature. Hence, we open in Roswell, New Mexico, and pursue an object that is not of this world.

Indiana Jones with aliens and poodle skirts? I admit, it took me a bit to make the leap, but once I did, the film delivers a satisfying nod to its past. The character has aged as much as the actor, and after we are immediately reminded of his action chops (a great choice for an opening act), we catch up with his life. He’s lost his friend Marcus, he’s lost his father, and we find the swagger diminished somewhat, as he seems to be mostly sad at the loss around him in his life. Still, his sadness doesn’t keep him from getting caught up in this adventure. He meets Mutt Williams (rotten name, there), a greaser kid with attitude, who asks Indy to help him find his mother.

The details of the search are secondary to the energy of the chase. I expect many will need a couple of viewings to actually figure out what he’s after and why. But we know with certainty that everybody is after this thing, and everybody in Indiana’s life, including Indy himself, are threatened because of it. Their adventure takes us from New Mexico, to the streets of a university town, to the jungles of South America (yes, we get to go back to the jungle). In the course of the adventure, he reconnects with Marion, a great nod to Raiders. While the chemistry of their relationships is pretty muted in comparison, it was still great to see the connection drawn.

The character of Indiana Jones was never a clean-cut hero. He was a non-committal womanizer, whose passion for adventure got him into trouble as much as it kept him out of it. This time, the film revisits the power of family, echoing themes explored in The Last Crusade. Moving away from the rugged cowboy from the first film, he finds himself drawing people around him, and wanting it. For all the rugged individualism that the character of Indiana Jones represents in our culture, his later films, including this one, are more a celebration of friendship, family, and the power of connection.


Still, at the heart of Indiana Jones is the adventure. Even as he ages, and the gruffness of his character reflects his age, he is still a character that has seen the wonders of this world and still both marvels and respects them. It’s Spielberg’s strength, a strength that made him a rich man long before he got respect. Whether it is the jungle adventurer, or a little alien friend, or the clone dinosaurs, he invites to the theater to marvel. That this sense of wonder is embodied by a 60-year old with more loss than gain in life is simply a reminder that, for all of the marketing power of teenagers in the film market, this desire, even need, for wonder is ultimately ageless.

Glad to have you back, Indy. It’s been too long.

Prince Caspian: A Review

I suppose that the Narnia film series, however long it winds up being, will always be saddled with its associations with Lord of the Rings. The source material comes from two close friends who in their own way were both significant Christian writers in the mid-20th century. The two book series are both still much loved and have found wider audiences than their religious roots. The impetus for the Narnia series was certainly driven in part by the breathtaking success of LOTR, and even the film location in New Zealand and the use of Peter Jackson’s WETA Workshop as the special effects house for Narnia create associations that the series will probably never shake.

With all that in mind, it is extremely difficult for me to watch Narnia without thinking of LOTR, and unfortunately, Prince Caspian isn’t helping that cause. The opening moments of the film have us rejoin the 4 Pevensie children a year after the events of LWW (apologies for all the acronyms, I feel like I’m navigating government bureaucracies!). This is post-war London, and so life seems to be beginning again, but all of them, Peter especially, seem restless to head back to Narnia. They get their wish as their whisked away, but as they explore their adopted homeland, they realize that this is not the same land they left. Indeed, 1300 years have passed since they returned to the wardrobe. Narnia has long been conquered by an invading people, the Telmarines. They are involved in their royal fight, as Prince Caspian, the heir apparent to the throne, finds himself hunted by his uncle, who tolerated his existence until the birth of his son. Fleeing from this power grab, Caspian stumbles upon Narnians, and eventually meets the Pevensies, who were summoned by his blowing of Susan’s horn.

The movie makes significant departures from the book, perhaps the largest being an additional battle inserted into the middle. Peter and Caspian seem to compete for authority, but join together in an effort to take down Caspian’s uncle. The battle fails, and many Narnians fall. While this move seems to frustrate a number of fans, it’s these kinds of scenes, the large scale CGI battles, that play to the director Adamson’s strengths, as well as to his seeming interests. These battles are fun summer spectacles, and this one is no different. To his credit, Adamson does find a way to make the Caspian battles look and feel different from each other and from LWW. Some will say that he is expanding the vision of what a PG-rated action movie can be. I’d argue that he gets his rating because it’s a Disney movie more than because he’s earned it.

The actors who play the four kids have grown well, and while their acting was mainly serviceable in the first film, they actually become a strength this time around. That being said, Adamson often gives them little to work with, and his choices in how he is developing these characters is somewhat suspect. Arguably, these kids have a lifetime of experience in Narnia where they had time to become masters as swordsmen and bowmen, but they are still kids, and having these kids play the role of fighting heroes often comes across a bit awkward.

As I said, the LOTR parallels abound, and it is in these two areas, the battle sequences and the place of the heroes, that Caspian suffers from these parallels. Moments in these battles seemed ripped straight from Jackson’s storyboards (there’s Minas Tirith, and there’s Helms Deep, etc.). While homage and quotation are certainly appropriate in film, here it seems to stem from a lack of creativity. Similarly, when Susan becomes the expert archer, it looks like a lesser version of Legolas, and she simply can’t hold up to that kind of comparison. Taken together, my concern is that the creative team is inviting the comparison between the two franchises, and they will almost always come up short in the comparison.

My largest criticism, though, is in the weakening role of Aslan. In terms of the larger series, he is obviously the key figure, and his role in the lives of the children and the Narnians, even when he is off-screen, is key. Here, he has taken a backseat, and while his appearance doesn’t obliterate his message from the source material, it is muted. Some of the more interesting themes, including the loss of faith over time and the recovery of faith in the midst of hardship, only get scant mention here.

While I enjoyed the film, I find myself hesitant when I think of what it might have been. In a sense, this film is the price of success. To land the big budget for this series, they have to make sure they can fill the seats. To fill the seats, in typical Hollywood creativity they try to make the thing look like something else that filled the seats. The price for this is the particular unique voice that Lewis’ books offer to young children and to the many adults that love the series. There is a warmth to these books that seems lost in the spectacle of these movies. So while Caspian remains enjoyable summer fare at the movies, the series is unfortunately positioning itself as the weaker cousin of a better franchise.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Review

Jean-Dominique Bauby would have been the envy of many. In his early 40’s, he was the chief editor of the fashion magazine Elle, living the high life in Paris. His kids lived with their mother in the country, and he embodied the “fast cars and fast women” lifestyle in the city with a vengeance. The world was indeed his oyster.

Then came December 8, 1995. At the age of 42, he experienced a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed, what the professionals call “locked-in syndrome. “ Left only with the use of his eyes, he was quickly further restricted when his right eye had to be sewn shut. Now, he was confined to a hospital bed, dependent on full-time care for his every need, with the use of only one eye. All of this, while his mind was completely intact.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins as Bauby opens his eyes for the first time, waking up from a 3-week coma. He learns what happens to him, and we learn of the great dissonance as we hear his thoughts but realize he cannot communicate them. Literally trapped by his body, his therapist comes to his rescue as she teaches him how to communicate through blinking. It is a slow cumbersome process, but is the only way he is able to communicate.

Before his accident, Bauby had negotiated a book contract. As he learns his communication style, his therapist contacts his publisher and announces the surprise that he intends to keep his contract. Over the course of the next 18 months, he works with an assistant to write his book. As he puts it, “I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.”

The history of this story is profound enough that it would seem the film could add very little. But the great success of this as a film is the way it invites us to experience Bauby’s world, the thought life that was his means of keeping his sanity in the midst of this extraordinary challenge. The director makes wise us of his camera, spending the bulk of the film looking at the world through Bauby’s eyes. We are invited to experience his entrapment. Through this great struggle the former playboy has to wrestle with the meaning of his existence, his misplaced values, and the sense of regret over the ways in which he failed in life. At one point, he reflects that his life has been a series of missed opportunities, and only now in this trapped existence can he see how he might have lived.

One Christian reviewer I respect put this film on his “10 Most Redemptive Films of 2007”, and indeed there is much here to chew on from a spiritual perspective. In the Christian world, much is being written about the need to see the reality of the “Kingdom of God” in the present world, a calling to Christians to engage in social action, and in transformative activity at every level of culture. The challenge to have a “realized eschatology” is a Biblical one, but the history of the Christian church is to fall into two extremes. The first is an “underrealized eschatology,” where Christians show no concern for the problems of this world, and withdraw to wait for their reward “in the sweet by and by.” The other is an “overrealized eschatology” where Christians so look for the reality of the kingdom of God in the present that they equate the gospel of Christ itself with social and political activity and with “good works.” Both extremes distort the Christian message in fundamental ways. Both are extremes that Christians in general and evangelicals in particular have shown affinities to run to.

The Diving Bell is an exceptional reminder of the tension that Christians must live in. On the one hand, we witness people engage Bauby as a human being with real value, and work to allow him to express himself. Through this redemptive work, he does more of a service for humanity than any would have thought possible in his condition. It is a celebration of the value of life that speaks with power to the “quality of life” discussions that go on in medical circles.

At the same time, we see in this film the limits of our redemptive work in this life. Bauby’s imagination, his “butterfly”, helps him keep his sanity, and gives him a sense of purpose. But it is a “butterfly” that allows him to escape his “diving bell,” his body that has failed him so deeply. Even as people expose him to their own faiths, his agnosticism fails to keep him from searching for deeper meanings. He wants something more, and as he is left with only his imagination and his memory, he recognizes that it is not enough. His body has failed. This world has failed to deliver the deepest needs of his soul.

The film leaves us with a certain ambivalence because this challenge remained unresolved in Bauby’s life. Even as we seek to recognize the redemptive reality of God’s kingdom in this world, The Diving Bell is a powerful reminder that the gospel points to something deeper still. At its best, the ways in which God’s kingdom is seen in this world are but a pale reflection of the world that is to come, where the limitations that we feel, and which this film vividly calls us to experience, will be gone, and “real life” can be truly experienced. Even as Christians yearn to see the gospel made manifest now, we should never leave behind the deeper yearning for the “far country,” the true home that we are heading to.

The Darjeeling Limited: A Review

There aren’t many directors active today that inspire stronger emotions than Wes Anderson. In a true auteur-styled career, with writer-director credits for 5 feature-length films in 12 years, he has fashioned a unique visual and story-telling style. Some love it, some hate it. I’m one of the few that often finds myself somewhere in between, wanting to like it, but realizing that my own mood swings may keep me from doing so.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Wes extends this style but also themes that have been explored in his previous film, mainly his interest in the theme of family. In this venture, we begin with a fascinating opening shot, showing Bill Murray and Adrien Brody running to catch up with a train. Murray is one of Anderson’s favorite actors, and so fans of his films almost expect Murray to board the train. But he doesn’t, and as Brody hops aboard, it’s as if we leave behind Murray’s character and his presumably fascinating story to follow Brody’s character.

But I get ahead of myself. The film has a prologue, The Hotel Chevalier, that sets the stage in a unique way. There, we are introduced to Jason Schwartzman’s character Jack, who is spending time in a hotel in Paris when his girlfriend from America, played by Natalie Portman, shows up for a rendezvous. In a short few minutes, we see his emotional barrenness, his inability to communicate, and even his cruel way of mistreating her. While it’s played with Anderson’s quirky sense of comedy, we realize that something is wrong with this guy.

Darjeeling explains to us what is wrong. Jack, Peter (Brody), and Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), are brothers who haven’t seen each other in a year. Some time ago, their mother left their father and moved to India. She didn’t even return last year when their father died unexpectedly, the last time the brothers have seen each other. Now, Francis has brought them together to travel through India as a way of rediscovering themselves and, unbeknown to them, reunite them with their mother.

So begins their spiritual quest. What becomes clear is that each of them bears the scars of a youth that remains in the background. Francis is a control freak, Jack seems incapable of expressing emotion, and Peter displays a weird process of mourning his father’s death. Each of the quirks becomes occasion for odd comedy in the Anderson universe, but each emerges with a common narcissism as a way of dealing with their past. This kind of self-involvement quickly shows each of them as an unlikely candidate for a spiritual quest of any sort, and the journey quickly becomes a farce as a result.

While they set out to find themselves along the road, they slowly come to recognize the inadequacy of this kind of search. Their answer will not be found in a mystical encounter, something that each of them is grossly unsuited for. Nonetheless, their journey is not without hope.

In the course of this journey, there is occasion to explore their relationships, and in that exploration lies the strength of the piece. Along with a unique visual and writing style, Anderson is cultivating a unique commentary on family, letting Darjeeling build on Life Aquatic and The Royal Tennenbuams in particular. He seems to see in family a safe place within which to express our eccentricities and to find healing for the challenges of the past. In his creative expressions, here as in the other films, he invites us to consider the complexity and the diverse ways of expressing this healing. In that light, the metaphor of journey, seen through the train of Darjeeling and the boat of Life Aquatic, seems to support his vision of healing.

Darjeeling seems to embrace the tension of family life, that there are equal parts acceptance and change as we learn to live with one another. The characters that emerge at the end are pretty much the characters that we meet at the beginning, though perhaps a little wiser, a little more sympathetic to each other, and a little more capable of handling the challenges that they face in each of their lives. I like that idea, as it invites us to consider family as healing place in a life of incremental change. In a fast food world, where we are bombarded with false promises of instant life change, I embrace the reminder that change, whether that is overcoming the failures of the past, mourning for loss, or the emotional hiccups of our lives, does not come quickly, and that one of the most powerful salves we can hope for is family to walk with us along the way.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Review

Fatalism runs throughout The Assassination of Jesse James. The title reveals the direction the movie’s heading, and most everything in the movie, from the lighting, the camera work, the music, even the characters themselves seem to have that sense of doomed destiny.

Not that the essential story is so invested. As the movie unfolds, Jesse James met Robert Ford as a 19-year old who was meeting his boyhood hero. Enamored with the mystique of Jesse and his fame and notoriety, he and Ford’s brother eventually convince him to let him join the gang and to become part of his inner circle of trust. In a matter of months, James would die at the Ford’s hand, shot in the back in his own home. In terms of history, it is not a death that was invited or expected. At least, not on the surface.

The film depicts the final months of James’ life. This is a time when he is already an iconic figure, with years of robberies behind him. But he is also seeing an unwinding of his work, as most of his original gang is now dead or in prison. In the opening moments of the film, we see them pull off a train robbery, after which even his brother Frank leaves Missouri and heads back east. It’s as if we are joining the film at the end of Jesse’s story, celebrating what should be his last hurrah and his final sendoff.

What follows then is a kind of working through of the aftermath of Jesse’s career, even though nobody acknowledges or knows it as such. Even as Jesse talks about pulling off other crimes, mostly he seems to wander from gang member to gang member, some of whom are feeling the pressure of the law. In the midst of this is Bob. When we first meet him, Bob, remarkably played by Casey Affleck, comes across as awkward, even a bit slow, and definitely playing over his head. His hero, Jesse, starts out as a relaxed and winsome person, but over time his personality changes provokes Bob to change his view. What begins as hero worship becomes increasing jealousy at his success, his fame and notoriety. Couple that with an increasing fear of Jesse, and the groundwork is laid for Bob’s betrayal.

The place where the film invites the most discussion is on the portrayal of Jesse James by Brad Pitt. When we see his early charms, it seems a natural place for us to connect with a character played by a Hollywood megastar. But over time we see his explosive violence, his erratic depression, and his looming sense of despair. What becomes increasingly apparent throughout the story is Jesse’s foreknowledge that his death is coming quick, and at times a seeming acceptance, even invitation, for that relief.

Where the film takes off for me is in its final 25 minutes. After Jesse’s death, the film considers the aftermath of the assassination for Bob. In a sense, he achieves his dreams, as he becomes a household name throughout the country. In that single act, the film posits, he achieves as much fame as Jesse did in his entire career. But it’s a success that charges an enormous price. When he killed Jesse, he thought he’d be appointed a hero. The film’s title reminds us that neither history nor his contemporary audience were so kind. Instead, as he retells the story on stage, something the film claims he did over 800 times in the years following Jesse’s death, he deals with the increasing knowledge that he is seen as a coward. It’s a sense of failure that shapes his life and leaves him, like Jesse, seeming to long for death as his release.

The film provoked my thinking on at least a couple of topics. Jesse’s foreboding sense of doom seems to stem from a kind of saddling of sin. Weighed down by years of guilt, he seems here to long for escape. We don’t see him enjoying his fame or the fruits of his crimes. Instead, the only moments he seems somewhat happy is when he hides in his private life, living with his wife and kids under an assumed name. Having chosen his lot, he seems full of regret, but not knowing any way to escape.

Whether it’s Jesse or Robert, the film offers interesting commentary on our contemporary celebrity culture. Historically, it is a reminder that our celebrity culture may not be as new as we think, as we witness the appointment of legendary status to an outlaw. More importantly, though, the film invites us to consider the stories of fruitless pursuits. Whether it’s Jesse or Robert, their pursuit of wealth and fame winds up hollow, though for different reasons. For Jesse, he seems to glimpse happiness in the mundane life of a family man, but it is a life that eludes him because of a lifetime of sinful choices.

For Robert, his ambition gets the best of him. Admiration turns to jealousy, and so he achieves his dreams in the form of wealth and fame. But the price is heavy indeed, costing him friends and family, and dumping on him an isolation that must be lived out in the public eye.

While the film invites us to be careful about what we seek, it’s interesting that it sees no redemption for these choices. It only lets the characters live out the consequences of what they pursued.

Lord, save me from myself, my ambitions, and my pursuits.

Horton Hears a Who!: A Review

My daughter has learned to crawl over the last few weeks. Among the many changes that this brings to her parents’ world, I find myself musing about how she sees our home, the people in her life, and the world that we are now both mobile in. After all, when I need to get by her, I can just step over her without any trouble, and when she’s crawling around, we literally tower over her. Her perspective is no doubt different because of her small size, and it amuses me to consider how big our world must seem to her, turning a modest bedroom into a grand playground and a walk around the neighborhood into a trip into the great yonder.

It was with those thoughts swirling around in my head that I saw Horton Hears a Who!, the latest and most successful attempt to adapt Dr. Seuss to the big screen. The story centers on Horton, a gentle spirited elephant making his way through his home jungle. He is a self-appointed teacher, telling his friends about the world around him. His efforts to teach are turned on their head one day when he hears a tiny voice. He figures out that the voice is coming from a tiny speck that has come to rest on a small dandelion. The voice is that of the Mayor of Whoville, a delightful place where life is celebration and bad things never happen. In an amusing connection to the end of Men in Black, Whoville’s residents are entirely oblivious to the reality that their world is but a speck in an entire universe. The connection between the two worlds has never been made until now.

Whoville has a problem. Their life on the dandelion is uncertain, and for all of their spirit of celebration, they need Horton to bring their dandelion to a safe place where their world will be protected from the dangers of Horton’s world. Trying to do this for them, Horton encounters one obstacle after another, driven mainly by the fact that nobody in his world believes him. He’s the only one who can hear the Whos, and as his nemesis the Kangaroo reminds all of them: "If you can't hear, see or feel something, it does not exist.” Skepticism abounds, and it runs the risk of destroying the people Horton is trying to protect.

As Horton fights for the Whos, the mayor encounters similar problems. For a world that has never known things to go wrong, he must convince them that something is quite wrong, and that they need the help of a big voice that none of them can hear. In pursuing their best ends, he must endanger his relationship with his family, his friends, and the grand tradition of his office.

For a movie directed at children, Horton raises fascinating questions that are worth wrestling with at various levels. The film reflects on the need for imagination and wonder, a gift that can lie instinctively within children but that can be lost as we grow older. The Kangaroo, offering a great summary of a secularist perspective, is herself filled with jealousy and envy, and mostly joylessness. It is Horton and those who can live lives of imagination and wonder who experience the richness that life has to offer, especially the richness to see an entire dimension to his world that nobody had ever experienced before. The film is a celebration of imagination, and succeeds in inviting us to join them in their sense of wonder.

Alongside this is Seuss’ signature phrase: “a person's a person, no matter how small,” the tagline for the film that invites reflection through its deceptively simple message. It intrigues me to think about this line, written in the early 50’s, and its easy later co-opting by the pro-life movement. Of course, that kind of political commentary is far beyond Seuss’ intent, but it’s interesting to see the line come back in a 2008 film release, where the political implications would seem to be obvious.

While I expect that this kind of political jockeying is well beyond the filmmakers’ intent, I celebrate the idea and like its connection with Horton’s call to imagination. Just as our need for imagination is a celebration of life, so is our calling to protect the smallest voices. We embrace a life-giving message when we reach for those who can’t speak for themselves, who find their voices drowned out by the loud arguments of politicians or the deceptive ends of agenda-setters. Seuss’ twin values, very much alive here in the film adaptation, are as pressing and present for us today as it was when he first wrote the words.

Horton is not a perfect movie, but I was pleased to see a Seuss adaptation that could sustain the simple and complex nature of his messages without losing itself in the gimmicks that come with converting his books to feature-length films. Whether it’s the nieces that I saw the picture with, or the daughter that I step over to get where I’m going, I realize that Seuss’ messages are worth them knowing about, mostly for the deeper truths that they will point them to as they live in a world that loves to steal imagination and step on the innocent.

Be Kind, Rewind: A Review

Be Kind, Rewind has a quirky concept that I expect will leave some cold, but I found worth a chuckle. Mos Def stars as Mike, an employee of an aging video rental store owned by Danny Glover’s Elroy Fletcher. It’s an aging store, hanging onto VHS against the DVD revolution, in an aging section of a decrepit New Jersey town, fighting to hang onto its life in the face of “urban renewal.” Trying to figure out how to keep the business going, Fletcher heads out of town and leaves the business in Mike’s hands. Struggling to prove himself, Mike tries to keep it all together, including trying to enforce the one clear rule: “Keep Jerry Out.”

Jerry, played by Jack Black, is Mike’s odd friend with lots of odd notions. Quickly after Fletcher takes off, Jerry gets the idea for he and Mike to sabotage the nearby electric power plant, trying to get them back for causing his headaches. After Mike bails, Jerry somehow is able to get himself magnetized, something that they slowly discover over the next few days as complaining customers bring Mike to realize that his friend has inadvertently demagnetized every single one of his tapes.

Panicked at the destruction of the business, Mike and Jerry concoct their grand act of desperation (and the grand suspension of disbelief for the film) to save the business: instead of buying new tapes, they pull out a camcorder and decide to film their own versions of the films. The film takes the most time with their filming of Ghostbuster’s, which was pretty hilarious. Everything is done uber-cheap and uber-fast, making for a great recreation of this and other films. They’re dependent on their memory of these films, which is sometimes less than perfect, adding greatly to the comedy.

The second act of the film shows their budding success. The real comedy is not that they pull off these films, but that increasingly people find out about their work and demand more. They become local celebrities, and their efforts, now dubbed “Sweding,” morphs to involve incorporating the customers into the films.

Running underneath the comedy are some fascinating social commentaries. The film is itself a celebration of film and its ability to bring people together in community. Despite the individual nature of watching a film at a theater, the film delights in showing the ways in which popular film becomes the lingua franca of a community. One discussion about The Lion King engages strangers who are decades apart, but share in their delight in particular aspects of the film.

The “Sweding” process reflects on our desire to be participants in the elements of our pop culture. While film unites, it also isolates, as it can keep us from creatively participating in our culture. This process reminds us of our own desire to participate. Whether it’s the internet boon and its interaction with the celebrity culture, the You Tube generation, or the rise of “fandom” for all aspects of pop culture, the entertainment industry itself is acutely aware of the power of encouraging this kind of participation, and the film seems to understand the power that participation brings.

Still, the film takes a significant plot turn as the studios find about Mike and Jerry’s creative efforts. Showing up with injunctions and damage awards, Mike and Jerry are quickly faced with the challenge of saving the business again, as well as saving the community itself. Without walking too much into the third act, they decide to make their own film, this one focusing on their own town’s history. As much as “Sweding” has brought their town together, so will their film unite people around their own community.

It is here that Be Kind, Rewind offers the most intriguing commentary, and one that I think extends far beyond the films boundaries. As they pour themselves into their town history, they encounter the reality that legends have built up that just aren’t historical. Rather than seeking to find the truth, or to describe legend as legend, they, and the participants in the story, just decide to make up their town’s history as they go along. Truth takes a backseat to this celebration of community.

It is a fascinating example of a postmodern treatment of history. Community is celebrated, and the experience of telling history, even fabricated history, is unifying and thus good. Within the context of the film, it works. We’re rooting for these people and their struggling town, and aren’t too worried about the veracity of their story. We just want them to find some pride in their town and enjoy the experience of working together for a better community.

Even as their story comes together, though, I could only wonder about the places in life where this kind of story would ultimately be destructive. Within the contemporary American church, there are a number of voices who offer a version of the church’s history that show about as much fabrication or simplistic misinterpretation as Be Kind’s storytellers. There is a spirit among many that echoes the film’s values and shows less concern about the veracity of our telling of history than of the emotive power that our telling has for our present community. We don’t care about whether the story is true, only that the story has emotional power for us.

It is in this place that Be Kind offers an interesting caution. For a community trying to save itself from dreadful poverty, I expect there’s not much harm in a little homegrown story about a community legend that isn’t grounded much in fact. But the story of the church is rooted in the Story itself, and the Story’s only meaning is found in the historical reality that it actually happened. The testimony of the Christian church is that it finds its strength when it tells its story well, and that includes that it tells the story how it really happened.

The ultimate value of Be Kind, Rewind is in elevating community over truth. The church has the same temptation today, but the testimony of the past, indeed the testimony of Scripture, is that those two values aren’t in opposition to each other, and in fact depend on each other for their real meaning.

Once: A Review

One of my favorite music moments was about 13 years ago. Spending some time in Britain, I traveled up one weekend to St. Andrews to visit a friend who was spending a year studying there. We had forged a friendship first through our shared love of the guitar, and after we spent some time touring this great town, we found ourselves holed up in his room passing his guitar back and forth. We shared songs we knew, songs we were working on, and in the course of conversation, spent some time writing a couple of tunes. We certainly weren’t masters (well, I wasn’t, he was actually quite talented) but in the rich moments of sharing music and poetry, the quality faded to the background as we drank deeply from the beautiful bonds of music.

It’s this kind of experience that drives Once, the fascinating ultra-low budget “modern-day musical” that just took home an Oscar for Best Song. It stars Glen Hansard, who plays “Guy,” a true starving musician who makes his living playing guitar on the streets of Dublin. One night, “Girl”, played by Marketa Irglova, listens to him singing some of his original work, songs that he tends to only play during the slow hours. She is impressed, and over the next few days they get to know each other a little bit. She herself is a keyboardist, and as they start to share their lives, they start to share their songs.

The film could quickly turn into a traditional romantic comedy, but it avoids the pitfalls. It is a love story, though, it’s just a love story about the music. She connects him with a friend that runs a studio and persuades him to take a weekend and record some of his stuff. They gather some musicians together, and thus begins a rich weekend of musical creation.

“Guy” is an amazing talent, and in the course of the weekend we get to witness the process of musical creation. The style of the film dominates, and I expect that one’s enjoyment of the movie hinges greatly on one’s ability to enjoy its documentary/reality style and the Irish folk/pop style of the music. I enjoyed the first, and was captivated by the second. As the music unfolds, their conversation becomes the occasion to talk about the hurts of their past, their hopes for the future, and the anxieties they carry in the present. In all, the healing salve for both of them will be found in the music.

I love the sense of restraint in Once. It’s hard to watch these two interact and not root for some kind of relationship to emerge. But that isn’t what this is about. As one reviewer put it, this movie is “a little ditty about a girl he once knew.” But in that restraint is the film’s strength. It believes in its own message about the power of music to connect, to process our past, and to heal.

As I’ve thought about the movie, I’ve thought about musical moments with friends like the one I opened with. I’ve had a lot of enjoyable musical moments, and a few especially powerful ones. Many of these people aren’t still in my life, but I’m grateful for the healing power the shared moments we had provided and the meaning they had for me along the way. It’s a picture of grace for the moment, the grace that comes into our lives and provides us what we need when we need it. It doesn’t solve everything, but it doesn’t have to. It just helps us keep on moving.

I’m glad to see this movie get some attention, because it offers an intimate picture of relationship and healing that’s worth talking about. It certainly made me pull out my guitar and sing a few songs from my own past, enjoying singing a few stories about life along the road.

Atonement: A Review

Arguably, the scene in Atonement that does the most to take us out of the story’s emotional journey may invite us directly to its thematic center. Towards the middle of the film, we join Robbie Turner, played by the remarkable James McAvoy, as a soldier making his way through the beach of Dunkirk, in the midst of the British Army’s miraculous retreat across the sea. Over the course of a 5 minute tracking shot, we walk with him through the madness, seeing the sense of panic, injury, organization and madness in this strange scene. Yet, for all of its madness, we stay on Turner, as he somehow tries to climb through the madness, much of it beyond him and most of it out of his control, as he seeks to find the most basic of needs, in this case food, sleep and first aid. Without a word, we see in the madness that somehow even these basic needs may elude him.

Atonement should be a pretty straightforward period love story. In 1935, Robbie Turner is the son of the housekeeper for a aristocratic British family. Due to their long tenure, the family sent him to Cambridge, and so even as he works around the elaborate gardens of the family estate, we quickly realize he is an intelligent man with ambitions to rise above his station. He is friends with Kiera Knightley’s Cecilia Tallis, the oldest daughter of the hosting family. As she lounges with friends and plays arrogant with Robbie, one sees the romantic tension underneath. This is a relationship-in-waiting, searching for the right moment for their youthful passions to come together.

But then there’s Briony, Cee’s 13-year old daughter. She clearly has a crush on Robbie, and we quickly realize that this is the kind of thing that should make us nervous. An aspiring writer, we see her in early scenes trying to convince her playmates to act out her play, and in her failure we see her desire to control, her deep imagination, and her unintuitive interaction with other people.

It is a formula for disaster, as a series of events unfolds that puts her misunderstandings at center stage. Catching Cee and Robbie by themselves, she misinterprets their actions and comes to falsely accuse Robbie of other crimes. It is this fateful moment that changes the lives of all three of them.

The first act of 1935 sets the stage for the flash forward to the early days of World War 2. Given the opportunity to get out of prison, Robbie is fighting in France. Cee and Briony have both become a nurse, though Cee has no interaction with her family since the false accusation. Each are searching to rebuild a life destroyed by that one night. Robbie longs for a relationship with Cee, Cee longs for Robbie to return safely, and Briony somehow wants to find a way to make peace with both of them. At every turn, the world seems to orchestrate to keep them from achieving any of their ends.

The title is of course intentional, and it invites us to consider the nature of “atonement.” What can we do to make up for the mistakes of our past? The bleak perspective of the film is that sometimes there is nothing. Sometimes the mistakes we make, even the innocent ones or those that are most understandable, yield consequences far beyond our imaginations. From the film’s perspective, Briony’s act set in motion events that would unwind their lives, and nothing she can do can put that back together.

It’s not a message we want to hear, but it may be a message that we need to hear. Searching for justice, reconciliation, or harmony is at times an impossible or unreachable goal when left to human efforts. The inability to find this peace can be the very thing that drives us to the Divine. We cannot achieve “atonement” by our own power, and must contend with the consequences of our actions. Our hope is not that we will make it all right, but that He will work redemptively to make things right, both here and now and, ultimately, in the age to come.

At a number of points in Atonement, we find characters looking back on their life, wishing moments could be redone or that their choices could be undone. But of course they can’t. And so we come back to that tracking shot. In the midst of this bleak picture of war, the shot comes upon a group singing a hymn, and leaves them behind singing the simple refrain, “the still small voice of God,” words that are echoed again at the end of the shot. In the midst of madness, as we deal with choices we make, the choices others make, and the seemingly random events of our lives that at times drive us towards messy ends, we have the single hope, the promise even, that God is at work, if quietly, and is directing all things to His own good purposes. It is that faith that can sustain us when everything else around us seems bleak. It is that faith that points to the real atonement that we can hope for.

Juno: A Review

And so we cap 2007, Hollywood’s “Celebration of Life.” So that might be a little extreme, but it is interesting that at least four mainstream films (Waitress, Knocked Up, Bella, and Juno) deal quite explicitly with the question of new life from a somewhat consistent perspective. While it is clear at least in the cases of Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno (I haven’t seen Bella yet) that the creative force behind them are probably not NRLC members, they allow the key character to “choose life” and explore the consequences along that journey, even as they take decidedly different turns.

Of those three films, Juno certainly should have the broadest audience. For folks that can appreciate a certain juvenile, frat-house male humor (and if you read my review of Knocked Up, you’ll figure out that I do), then Apatow’s Knocked Up is for you. But for the rest, Juno offers a much more accessible comedy that manages to achieve much with well-drawn and well-delivered characters.

Juno is a clever and charming 16-year old girl who has her life changed after a single sexual encounter with her boyfriend. As she slowly awakens to the reality that she might be pregnant, she heads to her local convenience store to be sure. The tests aren’t lying, and as her friend working checkout reminds her as she shakes one of the tests, “That ain't no Etch-A-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be un-did, Homeskillet.”

Dealing with the shock, she rises to the occasion and starts working through her options. She reaches the place where she is going to get an abortion, but an encounter with a pro-life advocating friend and her experience at the fairly creepy abortion clinic convinces her otherwise. As she tells her father later, “I mean, it has fingernails, allegedly.” She’s going to have the child.

While she wrestles with the option of raising the child herself, she settles pretty quickly on the idea of finding an adopted family. Even in the midst of the comedy, we sense the creeping reality of just how much Juno is stepping into an adult world. What began as a single sexual experience that was as much born out of boredom as deep desire has now given her the responsibility for a life inside her. While she has a glib and casual manner, beneath the quips we see her slowly realizing what she’s walked into.

She takes it on herself to find an adopted family, and finds what seems to be an ideal match. The Lorings, played ably by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, are the ideal suburban couple. Wealthy, beautiful, they seem a perfect home for her child, and so Juno agrees to give the baby up. In the course of the pregnancy, she gets to know them better, especially Mark. Mark is a former member of a rock band who now writes music for commercials, and their shared love of music, guitars, and film helps them strike up a quirky friendship. The film wisely avoids any kind of sexual dimension to the relationship, which allows us to relax and watch Juno as she slowly understands the challenges in the Lorings’ relationship.

All is not right in the pretty Loring household. Vanessa is very serious about adopting a child, as she is very serious about everything else in her life, including presenting a clean and beautiful existence. Meanwhile, Mark has within him something of the old rocker, and we see him wrestling, if quietly, with the banal trappings of his suburban existence.

Each step along the way, Juno rises to the occasion, even while she is facing more responsibility than she ought. The plot twists along the way are yours to experience, but throughout the gentle comedy and the naturalist approach of the actors reinforce how this film has moved from the art-house to the mainstream. The strength of the film is that it doesn’t allow it’s quirky beat and intelligent writing to detract from the journey.

As polarizing as contemporary political discussions are about abortion, I wonder if a film like Juno offers something of a pathway to healthier conversation. As Juno navigates decisions that she shouldn’t have to make and deals with an adult world that has come to her to soon, she is aided by the support of those who stand behind her, even when they do so quietly or from a distance. I was intrigued in watching it at how much she needed this help to make her way.

For those of us who bemoan our culture’s sacrifice of the unborn, I was challenged by Juno to be thinking more deliberately about how I can be a part of a “culture of life,” and help cultivate environments where people can ably choose to work for life.

No Country for Old Men: A Review

It’s taken me awhile to write about No Country for Old Men, the latest film from the Coen brothers. I saw it over a month ago, and it still is sticking with me. Yet, the darkness of the film is just so deep, it eludes comment. Maybe that darkness can best be described by the words of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the hero played by Tommy Lee Jones. As he looks out over a vast Texas landscape, he mumbles the words, “I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come into my life somehow. And he didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I would have the same opinion of me that he does.” And so there isn’t much reason to feel hope.

The film starts as a slow-moving chase. It begins with Llewelyn Moss, a ordinary guy in West Texas that happens to be out hunting one day when he comes across the leftovers of what appears to be a drug deal gone bad. Out in the middle of nowhere, he finds several vehicles, a few dead bodies, one guy who is clearly on the verge of dying, and a briefcase full of cash. Without too much hesitation, Moss ignores the dying man’s request for water and takes the briefcase and leaves. He heads home to his trailer, hides the briefcase underneath the building, and spends the evening with his wife.

It would be a clean getaway until, appropriately enough, his conscience gets the better of him. Lying awake in the middle of the night, he decides that he needs to give that man some water, and so he heads back out to the site. While there, his truck is discovered by men who are trying to retrieve the case, and so the chase is on.

We then wind up witnessing the story through three views. Moss is on the run, trying to stay ahead of the men who are hunting him down. Despite moments of cleverness and his best efforts to conceal, we quickly get the sense that he is simply over his head, and barring intervention, the end game for him will not be a positive one. He has several men after him, but none more ominous than Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem. Chigurh is a Frankenstein-like monster who seems indifferent to life itself. He kills casually wherever he goes, and seems undeterred in his intent to hunt down Moss and kill him.

The third view is the Sheriff. He is the wise man of the film, trying to train a young deputy in the details of criminal investigation, while he seems to be growing increasingly concerned about the nature of this search. Throughout, it is Bell who seems to understand where this is heading, and supported by Jones’ typically excellent understated delivery, helps us feel his own sense of helplessness.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, he visits his dad, himself a retired sheriff. Ed Tom Bell’s conversation with his dad has the makings of a pretty typical conversation between old men (remember the title), as he pontificates about how much worse things seem to be getting. His dad provides the tough response that shapes a lot of this film, by essentially telling him that things really aren’t getting worse, they’re just as bad as they’ve always been.

His dad gives Ed Tom Bell a tough call for any that want to fight for good things in the world, but it’s a realistic call. Those that are called to work for good must deal with the reality that their work will often appear vain, as if they are merely providing the thumb in the dike when the flood is coming. It’s a call to work without any sense of immediate reward, and I expect it’s the experience of many who work for good in our world.

I tend to find myself drawn to the Coen brothers’ comedic fare, like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski. But there seems to be a connection between these films. In all of them, there is a searching for grace in the world that struggles to offer it. In No Country, they seem to propose an answer that in God’s silence, there simply is going to be no answer found.

It’s pretty bleak, but it has forced me to reflect on the rich tradition of lament within the Biblical corpus. It an important tradition that comprises much of the voice of the Psalms. But it’s also a voice that we don’t use much within the church today. No Country is a challenging reminder that we lose something when we lose that voice.

No Country deals with God’s silence and seems to conclude that no answer is coming because there is no one to offer an answer. The lament tradition within Scripture offers us a reminder that believers will in fact experience seasons where we feel God’s silence as vividly as this film. But it offers a language to pour that aching over God’s seeming absence back to God Himself, converting what would be a kind of rejection into a form of worship. The wisdom of the lament tradition is that in can offer us a path that can take us from the darkest places to the true source of comfort.

As I said, I struggled with what to say about No Country for Old Men. When one encounters such a pervasive picture of depravity and emptiness, my own gut reaction is simply to remain silent. Scripture’s lament tradition offers a different voice, modeling for us a way to speak to the Silence, longing for the day when the Voice will be heard again.

There Will Be Blood: A Review

I found myself surprised in the early moments of There Will Be Blood, the latest critical hit from one of my favorite directors, P.T. Anderson. The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a prospector turned oil baron, documenting his rise to power and the consequences of his success. The last time I saw Lewis it was in The Gangs of New York, where he played Bill ‘The Butcher” Cutting, one of the most deliciously evil characters in recent film history. The look of the character Plainview is a clear echo, intentional I’m sure, of Cutting, and so anytime we look at him early in the film, there is a natural instinct to dislike him or to not trust him.

But then we watch Plainview. In a fascinating sequence, the opening moments of the film, without using a single word, draws us into this man’s existence. We see him as a lonely prospector, risking his life mining for silver on his own. We see him with a small crew a few years later, working hard to dig his first oil well. When one of his crew member’s is killed, we see him take the man’s son in his arms, embracing him as his own. And we flash forward again, this time to Plainview as a legitimate “oil man,” trying to convince a town to lease him their land. As he talks, he speaks of family values and integrity, and even walks away from the deal because of the dissenting voices in the room. And we think, maybe, just maybe, this guy really wants to do it right.

We’re left with those lingering impressions even as the story slowly takes an ominous turn. The heart of the tale is found when Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday, the son of a poor goat farmer in remote Texas. Paul knows that there is oil on his land, and wants to work a deal with Plainview to let him mine it. Daniel pays Paul $500 as a finder’s fee, and then begins his investigation. This is a time when oil companies are jumping over each other to find the next big claim, and so Daniel has a deliberate process that he must go through as he begins his efforts to buy up the mining rights for the town.

It is at this point that we are introduced to the other key character, Paul’s brother Eli. Played by the same actor, it can be a bit confusing to make the connection, but where Paul has quietly put together a business deal than can give him his start in the world, Eli is concerned with weightier matters. He is the minister of the “Church of the Third Revelation,” the local charismatic church that is a major influence in the town. Because of his influence, Eli wields power, and despite his somewhat restrained demeanor, we quickly realize that he is very deliberately using that power to accomplish what he wants.

It is here that we begin to see Plainview’s character emerge. He is passionate about mining his oil and building a pipeline to the sea, and to do that he must placate those who can stand in his way. He does his best to get along with Eli, even as we get glimpses of his antipathy for him and his brand of religion. But as his efforts encounter barriers, Plainview finds himself required to play to Eli’s world more than he would like.

As I was watching the film, I kept thinking of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the classic Huston/Bogart film that deals with the emerging greed and obsession among three prospectors. Afterwards, I was intrigued to read that Anderson would watch Madre every night before filming. But where Madre dealt with an emerging greed that consumes otherwise decent people, Blood seems more interested in exploring a rage that is suppressed and finds ways to emerge. Looking at the film from the end, I don’t think he’s asking us to think of Plainview as a good man gone wrong, but to think of him as a man whose evil inclinations found their voice through a lifetime of self-serving pursuits.

That kind of picture of Plainview sits alongside a view of Eli that is pretty similar. While his brother uses his fee to start a nice business and to care for others, Eli continues to use his religion as a way of gaining power, influence, and wealth. In one of the most poignant scenes in the film, Plainview is able to get Eli to shout out “I am a false prophet and God is a superstition” over and over. It is exactly what we have come to know that Plainview thinks of Eli, and our opinion of him by that point isn’t much different.

There Will Be Blood is a powerful picture of greed and the consuming nature of sin. Plainview is consumed with himself and his own greed, and oil becomes the means by which he pushes away every good thing in his life. Eli finds that religion serves the same ends. Both are tools to pursue what it is they want. “God” for Eli seems nothing more than a word to speak that offers the prospect of power and control. Even when both get what they want, it is clear that their end is hollow, as everything of meaning is lost to them by the end.

The film is filled with quietly modest people that offer a different kind of model for living. But what it doesn’t see is how the search for power and control, whether that is gained through wealth or religion, can end up well. There’s a healthy challenge there, to recognize our own inclinations for evil desire and our ability to justify using good things, even the best of things, to serve those ends.