The Soloist

For reasons that fascinate me but don't belong here, I'm not going to give a full review of The Soloist. You will enjoy this movie as much as you can relate to its subject, homelessness. If you have a schizophrenic homeless person in your life, this movie will resonate deeply with you. If you care about the homeless at all, it will touch you. It is based on a true story, and you feel the reality of it the whole way through.

The moral of the movie is simple. The homeless don't need to be fixed nearly so badly as each homeless person needs to be known as a person, and every person needs a friend. It's a great moral.

Here's the rub of the movie. You can't always fix the things that make a man choose homelessness. Sure, sometimes you can do things that make room for a miracle, but when a person has chosen a life outside of the culture there's always some root cause. We like to think they just misunderstood something or had a run of bad luck, but sometimes it's nothing like that. Sometimes it's nothing anyone can explain, fix, or prevent. The co-protagonists of this movie tried everything to improve this man's life and got nowhere the hard way.

The movie asks a tough question (and answers it to its own satisfaction) that I think Christians need to answer.

Can you be a friend to a broken man, apart from needing to save him?

Movie Review: Juno

Not much to say about this one. It hits every note right. I could get all gushy with the praise, but if you watch movies, you will want to watch this one.

I really cannot think of a single thing about which to criticize it. It asks every question, and it answers them pretty well for 2008. I may buy this one as a message to Hollywood.

The Christian Republican Bloomers

Last week I was watching "Michael Collins," which was billed as the Irish, "Braveheart." Produced in 1996, it tells the story of maybe the largest figure in the establishment of the Irish Republican Army in 1916.

The movie starts in the middle of a toe-to-toe symmetric battle between Irish freedom fighters and British soldiers. The Irish, not being a nation and all, are hopelessly outgunned and eventually surrender. Mr. Collins is thrown in jail and, after couple years, released to start the battle all over again. There's lots of stuff about how cruel the Brits were and how crafty Mr. Collins was, but I was arrested by one line out of this movie.

You see, I feel a certain affinity for the freedom fighter.

We live in the colonial era of Christianity, under the rule of denominational monarchies. In my deepest heart of hearts, I cannot feel free in the church.

There's an Irish freedom song called, "The Town I Loved So Well." It's about a lad who returns as a man to Derry, the town where he grew up. It spends three verses talking about what the town meant to him as a child, adolescent, and finally a young man. Then it says this:

But when I returned how my eyes have burned
to see how a town could be brought to its knees
By the armoured cars and the bombed out bars
and the gas that hangs on to every tree
Now the army's installed by that old gasyard wall
and the damned barbed wire gets higher and higher
With their tanks and their guns, oh my God, what have they done
to the town I loved so well

When I look at the church, this is precisely how I feel.

My eyes burn as I see how children of God can be brought to their knees by armoured doctrines and bombed out shells of worship. There's a haze in the air because the fresh wind of thought is shielded away. The denominational HQ looks over every teaching and practice, and the damned barbed policies get higher and higher. With their rules and their tools, what must God think of what they've done to the church I loved so well.

The song concludes like this:

Now the music's gone but they carry on
For their spirit's been bruised, never broken
They will not forget but their hearts are set
on tomorrow and peace once again
For what's done is done and what's won is won
and what's lost is lost and gone forever
I can only pray for a bright, brand new day
in the town I loved so well

I cannot tell you what that song does to me. I've sung it for half-hours at a stretch, and never quit crying the whole time. I could not resist singing it again just now. And every time I sing, I see the same thing. I see 20 of us brothers and sisters sharing our lives and love. I see us daring and living and loving in Christ, without a single other care in the world than Him and each other. I see prayers and laughter and sermonettes and Christians blooming on the Earth in Christ's Name.

And I then see faces in a crowd looking up at a pastor.

I see brothers who have to whisper their thoughts and questions in coffee shops and ideas that will never be tried. I see songs conceived in sisters' hearts that will never be written, and never be sung. I see meals that will never be offered, and risks that will never be shared. All because the government of man cannot handle the dynamic confusion of God's sheep unchained.

The Shepherd doesn't bind the sheep. They know His voice, and they follow Him. But no denomination can abide that kind of gamble. Without chains and leashes the sheep could end up anywhere. So they add a rule here, and a principle there, and soon the house of God is ordered. Soon, wherever the lead sheep goes, the flock must follow.

Paul said it was for freedom we were made free.

In the movie, Michael Collins is dealing with the British government. Offscreen I know the Brits are doing many "good" things for the Irish, and they are "helping" in so many fine ways, but a nation's worth of services won't make up for liberty stolen. The government'll do anything but let the Irish be free. Mayhap you can see how I might identify a bit with the situation. If not, it's OK.

One of Mr. Collins' compatriots, the intellectual leader of the bunch and president of free Ireland, writes a letter to him that concludes with this line:

We defeat the British Empire by ignoring it.

Brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

I have been looking for a way to free the church for 25 years. If you think I've shown dedication to tennis or to any other thing about which I write, you've not seen my heart. The children of God deserve to be free. God deserves free children. This thing needs to happen.

But there's nowhere to start. There's nowhere to put a lever, no fulcrum, and no force to apply. What's more, there's no coaches. There's loads of amateurs with wonderful ideas, but none of them with the convincing "ring" of expertise.

I get loads of coaching from amateur tennis players, even players who are better than I am, but they're just getting lucky out there. They can hit the ball because they've got serious talent and received enough coaching, but they don't know how they hit it. They cannot teach anyone else how to do what they do because they don't understand it themselves. And when they get in trouble, their game collapses.

In trying to change the church, the problems are goliath. For starters, the sheep don't want to be free - but then nobody wanted to fly either. And then the establishment got that name by being so well established. They are firmly entrenched. And there's nothing they say that's false. They lead their chained sheep around speaking accurate truths about freedom, and the sheep nod and feel lucky.

I learned the hard way 10 years ago that I cannot fight the establishment.

But what if I ignore them?

What if I don't change them, but just quietly forget they exist, even as I fellowship wh brothers and sisters in their sanctuary?

What if I hang with the other sheep, and kindly refuse to put on their chains? They are all voluntary, you know.

I cannot field a government that can beat theirs. So what? I didn't want to end up with a government anyway.

That's the most I can fit in this post. More another day.

Movie Review: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is a hard movie to review. What do I mean, you ask? For example, I will buy this movie on DVD, but I'm not sure I'll ever watch it again. I simply must own this movie and want the director to know someone out there thought it was worth the $10 and another $15 too. I just don't know whether I could sit through it again. It's that intense.

Reviewing most movies, you have to dance around plot spoilers. Not so much with NCfOM. I could tell you the whole plot, and not feel too badly about doing so. This movie is not about plot. It's the ambience I don't want to spoil, the feelings the movie creates as it goes from point A to point B.

I think I can safely say this. NCfOM is a profoundly disturbing movie. If you don't like to be disturbed by movies, then write this one off and enjoy the rest of this review. If you don't mind violence and some of the thoughts and feelings that go along with that, then maybe you should watch the move yourself before reading any more. RottenTomatoes's critics gave NCfOM a 95% rating and the public gave it 90%. Those are some wicked-high numbers for a mass opinion site, and I would call them underrated. The movie is storytelling par excellance.

==== Here there be spoilers ====

For those of you who remain, and those of you who returned to talk about the movie, here's my take on this one.

I liken NCfOM to a 2-hour chase scene done at a cowboy's rambling, steady gait. Everything happens in slow, cowboy motion. And somehow that keeps you from tiring of the suspense. The modern chase scene is packed with harrowing close calls, loud explosions, flashing lights and a hundred other moments of fear. But those chase scenes fatigue me and seem to go on and on and on. After a relatively short while, I just want them to end. By doing the entire chase in NCfOM at a panicky saunter they increased my hunger for every grain of sand to fall through the hourglass.

There is a scene where you see the bad guy's feet casting a shadow under the door. And then those feet walk away. And then the lights go out. You knew it was going to happen from the moment it began, and still they tell the story at their own pace. The whole scene could have been done in 15 seconds. It probably takes over a minute, and feels like a quarter hour. I was gesturing wildly the whole time, because I just could not stand to sit there and do nothing. I was literally on the edge of my seat, and that does not happen often.

But the biggest thing about this movie is the delivery of its message.

I am fed up with the Anne Rice/Quentin Tarantino thing. All their movies explore evil as wrapped in lovely cinematography, dramatic passion, and high sympathy for those driven to act out the lusts they cannot defeat. It is what I call the beautiful portrayal of evil. I hope there's a better term for it, but that's the best I can do.

They show us evil, and call it evil just as they should, but they give it a pomp and circumstance welcome into the room. They rain flourishes and glory all around it, though not directly on it, as they warn us of the badness of the whole affair. They present the evil man bedecked in chains, but in their stories he steps out from a strech limo for a red carpet entrance into the 5-star restaurant at which they've arranged for us to learn about him, about evil.

It's the conflict between presentation and message that gets me. The message of their movies is "this is bad," but the presentation says, "and don't you wish you could get you some of this?"

NCfOM does no such thing.

The movie's three primary characters are evil, bad and good respectively, with no mixing of the three. The evil is evil to the core. The bad is just foolish. The good has no hidden evil streak against which to spend the movie wrestling. In this, the characters are true to form from beginning to end.

And now we get to real spoilers so, seriously, if you are going to see the movie - tune out now. I'm going to blow the whole message of the movie here, and you really don't want to hear this.

The point of the movie is one with which only a Christian can honestly disagree. It is that American society has lost. The evil has won, and there's no more point in fighting it. Bad, the movie shows, cannot even oppose evil and win, much less good. Good never even gets a chance to try. Evil is relentless, overpowering, and victorious at every turn.

NCfOM is absolutely the best feel-bad movie I've ever seen.

And it accomplishes what no Anne Rice or Quentin Tarantino movie could ever hope to accomplish. It makes the audience walk out wondering how to fight evil, how to win, how to find the courage to stand up against the times, or at least how to be good enough to stay out of evil's way. When you are done with this movie, you don't want any part of evil, and while you may fear to fight it, you know opposing it is the only answer.

Lastly, NCfOM is an art film.

The message of NCfOM is delivered in crushingly understated moves. Most of the true violence happens just off-screen - not all of it, they're not afraid of blood - but so much of it that you're kept on the edge of your seat for 2 solid hours. So many things are left unsaid as to astound. At one point, you only know one victim is dead because the possible killer checks his boots for blood. It's a brutal scene, but you didn't see a thing.

I have to find a real cine-buff's review, but I think the movie used every device in moderation. There's a 1 minute space at the very beginning in which only 6 words are spoken. The same three words are uttered by two of the three main characters. It's a powerful device, and since the whole movie has so few words (it has to have one of the lowest dialogue counts I've ever seen), it's that much more powerful. But I never saw the device used again. There were dozens of such tricks spread throughout the movie, and none too thick or too thin.

Anyway, I pretty much stink at movie reviews so I don't know how helpful or not this was to anyone. I just know I liked the movie, and highly recommend it to the right people.