I would like to invite anyone who wishes to join me in prayer and fasting for the election tomorrow.
As I've said before, my political convictions are of a different kind than my religious ones. On matters of faith and morals I stand on the firm Rock of Peter, established by Christ.
But on uncertain issues, I can be very much in the wrong.
So please join me in offering up our prayers and fasting not for any particular candidate, but that the will of God will be done for our country.
I just read a lengthy article in Entertainment Weekly about the upcoming Les Miserables movie. And I am very concerned that the film-makers are totally misunderstanding the material.
They cast the story as a class warfare narrative, on par with Occupy Wall Street, that calls for radical political change. But that isn't what Les Mis is about.
Yes, there is a sharp distinction between the rich and poor. "At the End of the Day" is a harrowing indictment of the wealthy's indifference. But the musical does not idealize the student revolution. "Empty Chairs, Empty Tables" is a lament to the futility of the uprising.
The only guaranteed justice is the one in the next life. The only future God gives us is love. "To love another person is to see the face of God."
Misunderstanding a character or a story will kill it.
A movie executive once told Kevin Smith that they should cast Sean Penn as Superman because "he has the look of a cold-blooded killer and that, I think, is essential to Superman."
Unbelievable.
Speaking of Superman, his last movie outing was a bomb for a number of reasons, but I think I finally figured out why. Bryan Singer was interpreting Superman as a modern gay man.
Please don't misunderstand, Singer wasn't kicking the Man of Steel out of the closet, but the overtones are very strong:
He was in a long term relationship with a woman, until he had to leave to discover the truth about who he really is. When he returns, he finds that he still cares for her, but he cannot go back to that romantic relationship despite their connection. The whole movie revolves around him saying goodbye to the woman.
And while that would make a fascinating movie by itself, it is a misread of Superman. He loves Lois Lane. Lois loves him. It is one of the great romances of pop culture. To miss that is to miss the point is to miss the struggle between the "Super" and the "Man."
Michael Gambon's misread of Dumbledore is one of my big complaints about the Harry Potter series. Though he grows into the role eventually, Gambon plays the character too on-edge. Dumbledore is one of the most powerful wizards in the world, but he hides it, along with his pain, behind the demeanor of a silly old man. Gambon removes that mask and plays his hand way too early.
A few years ago a playhouse near where I live put on a production of The Merchant of Venice, but cast it as a tragedy, with Shylock as the heroic victim of anti-Semitism. While very few would argue that anti-semitism is in the play, this totally defeats the purpose of Shakespeare's play, which is to show that the true treasure is wisdom and virtue, not money.
Going back to Les Mis, I'm hoping that the narrative will speak for itself and won't be influenced by its misreading. I want this movie not only to be good, but great.
CS Lewis once made the point (that I think was given to him by Tolkien), that human beings cannot purely create. Everything we make is sub-creation. A unicorn is just a combination of things that already exist put into a new object.
But we cannot invent a new primary color or anything else purely original.
That is what I like about this poem: Trees. Kilmer understands this sub-creation and does not rail against it. Instead Kilmer honors God with meager words to reflect on His greater glory.
DECENT MOVIES
-Edward Scissorhands
-Big Fish
-Beetlejuice
-Pee Wee's Big Adventure
-Batman Returns
-Sweeny Todd
BAD MOVIES
-Sleepy Hollow
-Mars Attacks
Tim Burton has a very distinctive style. He inhabits a kookie view of the world and invites us to see life from that perspective. And in that sense, he overwhelmingly succeeds.
Burton's main asset is that he loves to create spectacle. You can feel the color oozing out of Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.
His take on Batman is important (though not the best version of the character) because he took the dark aspect of the Caped Crusader seriously. This seems like a now-brainer now, but the most prominent depiction of Batman up until Burton's movie was Adam West. But Burton's film shaped all of the other ones that followed. It is not a perfect movie. As Stan Lee points out, it isn't really a Batman movie; it's a Joker movie.
But Burton's masterpiece is the gloriously beautiful film Ed Wood. An homage to the person many consider the worst director of all time, Burton does something incredible. He emulates much of Wood's style, including angles, lighting, poor set design, etc. But this does not make the movie feel haphazard and cheap. Instead, it's as if he reaches into Edward D. Wood Jr.'s bag of cinematic skills and shows that you can still create a great work of art with those tools at hand. It is a fantastic movie for people who love movies. Martin Landau is fantastic as Bella Lugosi. My praise of this film might seem a bit over-the-top, but this movie is funny and touching and beautiful.
But Burton's biggest problem is his venom. Gene Siskel once said that directors either loves people or hate people and that Burton loves people. I respectfully disagree. I think that Burton actually hates people.
No, I don't mean that he is a misanthrope. He loves to shower sympathy on the outcast, the weird one.
What I mean is that if he thinks that you are unworthy of his esteem, he will refuse to portray you with any sympathy.
For Burton, he is consistently anti-Christian. We can see how one-dimmensionally bad and judgmental and villainous all of the explicitly Christian characters are in movies like Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and especially Sleepy Hollow. He also shows his disdain for average Americans in Mars Attacks! Granted, it is a work of satire, but he covers most everyone in the movie with an intense hatred. Burton stings at his perceived opponents with great venom. For that reason, he is kept from climbing any higher on the list of directors.
I'm sorry that my posts have been sporadic as of late. We lost power at our house Monday night and only 10 minutes ago did it finally come back on.
We were generously hosted by my in-laws and by sister's family. It was such a strange thing to be without a home for a week.
Our situation was nowhere nearly as dire as some on the East Coast. Some damage was done to the house, but nothing that appears dire. We have been very blessed.
I will return to our regularly scheduled blogging soon.
Please keep in your prayers all those who are still without power and are still suffering because of Hurricane Sandy.
I knew someone in high school who knew just a little bit of Eastern philosophy. But they thought they sounded so wise that they didn't realize how foolish the appeared.
I had that same impression with Cloud Atlas. To say that it is a bad movie is to miss the point. A bad movie that knows that it is bad is like a good friend who knows he's told a bad joke. You wink and go on enjoying their company.
But Cloud Atlas wants so much to be IMPORTANT. It hits you over the head that this movie MATTERS. That it is DEEP.
In fact, it SHOUTS it at you the entire time. Rather than letting the narrative simply unfold, they fill it with unecessary voiceovers. Narration is a short-cut in movie story-telling. Rarely does it work well (as it did in The Shawshank Redemption). But usually it is a simple cheat. The voice overs in Cloud Atlas tell us what is happening between the characters instead of letting the characters be discovered through their dialogue and action.
And the way the voiceovers hit the themes is about a subtle as a sledgehammer. This is not a movie that respects your intelligence. This is a movie that takes pauses to explain things to you because it doesn't think that you can follow its DEEP, IMPORTANT MESSAGE found in the story.
And what is the story?
Well, that gets a little complicated. There is a reason the trailer was 6-minutes long.
There are 6 stories set in different times that intercut throughout the film:
A. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (1849): A young lawyer (Jim Sturgess) makes a slave deal with a trader in the South Pacific. Along the way he becomes sick and is tended to by a strange doctor (Tom Hanks). And he also befriends a runaway slave (David Gyase).
B. Letters from Zedelghem (1931): A gay musician (Ben Wishaw) becomes an assistant to an old composer (Jim Broadbent)
C. Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (1975): A journalist (Halle Berry)uncovers an evil plot surrounding a nuclear power plant.
D. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (2012): An elderly book editor (Broadbent again) is tricked into being imprisoned in a nursing home.
E. An Orison of Sonmi~451 (2144): A clone servant (Boona Bae) is enlisted to start a rebellion in Neo Seoul
F. Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After (post-apocalyptic future): Zachry (Hanks again), a shepherd in the post-apocalypse must help a Precient (humans who are still technologically advanced) name Merynym (Berry again) to find a special place in the mountains, all the while he is tempted by the Devil (also called Ole' Georgie played by Hugo Weaving).
If that sounds like a strange combination of stories, it is.
And they don't connect.
That is probably the most frustrating thing about this movie. Sure, there is some overlap of some characters, but it is so tangential that it is maddening. The trailers imply that these characters are born and re-born and keep interacting with each other. Hence the use of the same actors over and over again.
But it becomes very clear in the first half hour that this is not the case. The leads appear in all 6 stories but to varying degrees. Tom Hanks does not play the same character re-incarnated in each of the 6 stories. In one story the character is born as Wishaw, the next as Halle Berry, and only later as Hanks. But this totally defeats the point of having the actors keep popping up in each timeline. At that point it does not help the story, but distracts from it.
On a side note, I know that some people were upset at making Caucasian actors look Asian through special make-up effects. As a half-Asian man, this didn't bother me. If anything crossed the stereotype line it was Halle Berry's make-up in Story B. In that she plays a Jewish woman, but did they have to pound home their point by giving her a giant hook nose?
The acting is not very good either. Hanks does some fine work in Story F, but not much else stands out. And I'm sorry, but Doona Bae is just awful. She is supposed to be a character so charismatic that she launches an uprising and is later revered as a god. But if her "rousing" speech was a youtube video, it would barely get 20 hits. She is duller than a clay spoon.
Again another digression: there is a not so subtle dig at Christ in this movie with the character Somni. The idea is that she teaches some moral lessons and stands up for what she believes. Then the primitives of the post-apocalypse worship her as a goddess, but the smarter Precients know better. The implication that good moral teachers will be worshipped as gods by the stupid, implying that this is the case with Christ.
But the main problem with Cloud Atlas is that most of the characters are worthless. I couldn't find myself caring about most of them. The lead in Story B is a self-centered, selfish idiot. Story C hinges on a love at first sight that is as believable as a Bill Clinton denying an affair. Story D revolves around a character who is despicable in morals and also deeply stupid (I actually turned to my wife at one point during the this storyline and asked "What the hell is he doing?"). And Story E only makes sense if the future does not have video cameras (which it does).
That leaves only Story A and Story F, which are actually not that bad. Story A may be trite and well trod (finding humanity in a slave), but it has an advantage of not have revolting heroes. Story F is actually kind of fascinating if you can get passed the future slang. Even the parts where the devil actually appears (and apparently is love-child of the Green Goblin and Michigan J. Frog) are fascinating. But even this story falls apart with large plot holes. Merynym, arrives on super-high tech ship and needs Zachry to guide her through mountains. Why not take a helicopter? Or did that piece of "advanced" technology get lost but super-floaty-speedboats are still around?
One more digression. One of the main themes of Cloud Atlas is that every life matters, whether it is a slave, an elderly person, a clone servant, or superstitious shepherd. But in Story D Hanks plays a mobster author who throws his biggest critic off of a roof. This is done not to fill you with horror or pity for the poor critic. It is done for shocking laughs. But you can't have respect for human life as one of your central points and then have someone horribly murder another for comedic effect. This kind of thematic schizophrenia serves to remind us that the makers or this movie (the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) have no idea what they are trying to say. They are repeating empty platitudes that they don't quite understand in order to sound profound.
Cloud Atlas is cinematic sophistry. It promises insight and wisdom and heart. But it is all as insubstantial as the cloud in its title.
There are times that I wish I had words that could move people.
I think of the great writers of the Revolution. Henry, Paine, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin. These were men with words not only of passion but substance. They knew how to win hearts and minds.
And I think about how small talents of rhetoric are in comparison. Perhaps it is for the best. I would probably use that skill to constantly harangue others into seeing the superiority of Star Wars to Star Trek or some other frivolity.
But there are times I wish I had their words because of the enormity of the challenge placed before us. I wish I had the power to convince the rational powers of the person while stirring their spirit.
I wish I had the words necessary to convince others to vote for religious freedom.
I watch political ad after political ad and I rarely see the most pressing matter of our times addressed. The economy is important, as well as foreign policy and matters of social values.
The Catholic Church is under assault. There is no other way to say it. The faith of our fathers is viewed as an obstacle to total state control.
I exaggerate? I do not think so.
Why would you force a Catholic to purchase something that they believe is evil? This is not on par with having our tax money pay for abortions. That is already happening. And that is an example of our fortunes being confiscated by the state, which then distributes the funds as those in power see fit.
What is happening now is that the Catholic Church is being forced to engage in immoral commerce.
Catholics are glad to render to Caesar what is Caesar's. If only Caesar returned the favor.
Notice that this is not done through the power of direct legislation. There is no "Force the Catholics to Bend the Knee Act." It is couched in the bewilderingly complex Affordable Healthcare Act. Broad, ill-defined powers are assigned to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Secretary has ordered that Catholics must violate their consciences and our representatives in Congress can wash their hands in Pilate's wash bin and abdicate any responsibility for this infringement of our rights.
The Secretary has started by mandating contraceptives and abortefacients. Sadly many Catholics have fallen away from the Church's guidance and are not bothered by this attack. But it is only the beginning.
Once the precedent is set, the state will begin encompassing the Church.
Give me an principle that says that the state can force Catholics to pay for contraceptives that does not also force the Church to pay for surgical abortions. In a state with legal assisted suicide, how could this principle prevent Catholics from opting out of paying to euthanize others?
For decades, Catholic Charities in Massachusetts helped find loving families for children in need of adoption. But their commitment to the truth of God's plan of human nature required them to not seek placement of children with those who violated the Divine structure of the family. But the state said that they had to bend the knee to the current draft of Caesar's plan for perfected humanity. The told the Church they had to place children with homosexual couples.
Understand, homosexual couples could still adopt in the state of Massachusetts. There was no absence of access in cases where gay couples sought children. But it was not enough that there were plenty of avenues to follow of homosexuals to adopt. The problem was that the Catholic Church did not bend the knee.
Contraceptives are relatively cheap. Walmart will give you a good rollback price on name-brand birth prevention. Or you can go to any number of places and get those contraceptives and abortefacients for free. Again, there is no absence of access.
But the Church will not bend the knee.
This is not about the Church standing in the way of others in their pursuit of happiness. This is the frustration of the state that Christ stands as a sign to be contradicted. The state is to be revered as the authority of our land. But God is the authority above the state.
The state argues that they are only executing the will of the people: vox populi vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God). Let us ignore the fact that the majority of the people disagree with this assault on the Church. The founding fathers understood that our rights were not based on whatever side held the majority opinion. They were wise enough to know that the shifting sand of popular issues was not the rock on which the house of America was to be built. It had to be built on the rock of rights, rights from God.
If our rights come from God, then no dictator, not even the dictatorship of a majority mob, can take them away. I do not have the right to worship freely because the majority of Americans say I do. I have that right because it is essential to my nature. The state cannot take that right away.
The state cannot make me bend the knee.
Standing up to Caesar has its consequences. And we need to be prepared for that. Blessed Miguel Pro gave his life because he would not bend the knee. He was placed before the firing squad. He spread his arms wide and shouted "Vive Cristo Rey!"
"Long live Christ the King!"
Those who crucified the Lord said, "We have no king but Caesar."
Christ or Caesar.
You cannot serve two masters.
I do not know if our religious liberties will be safe if Mitt Romney is elected.
I do know that they are not under President Obama.
