I am in love again, seems to happen about once a year… and usually by surprise. The less I know going in, the better it is. I have had my disappointments, so it is true that I am a bit jaded. But all it takes is one great night and I am all in again.

Something similar happened to me about 10 years ago. Walking through the parking lot afterward, I knew something special happened, but I could not quite describe it… merely enjoy it and relive it in my mind and later conversations with friends. Well, I did return for subsequent reunions, maybe a dozen or so in public… and who knows how many in private…

A few months ago something of promise along the same lines occurred… but it was mostly hype and in hindsight I had to admit it was pretty juvenile… much like my experiences of 10 years ago. But this time, entering into the reality of someones mind was more than entertaining… it was by far the best movie watching experience of this year, and I am in love with movies all over again.

Inception = Near Perfect, but I will settle for amazing…

• 
  Inception
  Artist: WaterTower Music

Ok, give me a few more days to back down from the infatuation… but this film really is good.

It’s true, I am a big fan of the first (only) Matrix film and I do consider it a modern-day masterpiece. So anything that takes the best elements of that story / film and re-meshes them into a retelling that has even deeper philosophical / spiritual relevancy scores very well with the shape of my film appreciating palette.

Avatar was a fun ride, and I do love big robots… but in the end I do believe its environmental charm is shallow and its neon 3D beauty will be fleeting.

Inception mashes up something better, by taking the very best visuals and metaphors of The Matrix and intertwining them with the emotional / psychological quandaries of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into a package that is not only entertaining, but I do believe chock full of poignant commentary on the life of the mind, what it means to be human, the context of relationships as defining reality, and the search for authenticity.

When a film imaginatively invites me into exploring the reality of my own relational and spiritual issues; I am initially delighted, then horribly uncomfortable, but in the end… thankful.

It is when we are most aware of the factitude of things that we are most aware of our need of God, and most able to trust in Him… The recognition of inexorable reality in any shape, or kind, or way, tends to rouse the soul to the yet more real, to its relations with higher and deeper existence. it is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good. All who dream life instead of living it, require some similar shock.

~George MacDonald, Realism

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Reality, Film, George MacDonald, Movies
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Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

~Agent Smith

• 
  The Matrix
  Director: Lana Wachowski

The program of control (Smith) describes to Morpheus the reason for the failure of a Utopian world with human inhabitants, us.

This is actually a premise that is recycled over and over again as a plot line for man vs machine dystopic futures. Asimov’s, I-Robot and the Terminator series would be the common references. Mankind creates a simple machine with some basic programming to protect humanity, and the program works out the logical conclusion of the annihilation of humanity being the only way to help us reach our ultimate goals of peace and tranquility without compromising the programing in the process.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

~Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

• 
  I, Robot
  Author: Isaac Asimov

I believe these narrative expressions of our fear of self-aware technologies powered by our rules of behavior says a lot about our hopes for the future of humanity. The safe happy worlds we imagine tend to turn into nightmares when we have the power to enact them.

It is not really a problem of power and control, but more so of imagination. We don’t quite know how to imagine a world that is lacking evil and is still interesting enough to keep us involved. We pass up the obvious solution for the annihilation of evil, because it is directly connected to us. So instead, we are engaged in a very long conversation of changing what we imagine “the good life” to be such that everyone could actually accept “the program” that leads us there.


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Categories: N.T. Wright, Advertising, Society, Heaven, Evil, C.S. Lewis, Movies, Books, Culture, Christianity, Theology
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It is an interesting moment of value when a graffiti tagged wall is worth more than the bricks themselves, perhaps even all the bricks of the entire structure that has been adorned with its tagging. Detroit is dealing with this strange irony and all the randomly ridiculous quarrels around the un-rules of street art, thanks to the international spray paint sensation known as Banksy.

I was recently treated to the fascinating film documentary surrounding the subversive world of the graffiti artists; Exit Through the Gift Shop.

In so many ways, the title says it all… once you can buy it in the “gift shop” (even a really high priced one)… have you exited the opportunity for authentic artistic expression, have you sold out? Well, of course the answer is no… right? But there does seem to be an obvious inverse relationship between the consciousness of the marketing campaign and the authenticity of the art. The better you are at selling it… the cheaper it seems to get…

I do like the Banksy character as I met him in this film, which was not really about him in the end… more produced by him out of a sense of responsibility. I think there are going to be some great quotes from this film about art… all I can do now is paraphrase.

I used to encourage everyone to create and just make art… (long pause as he considers the travesty of art gone awry that is Mr. Brainwash)…

I don’t do that anymore…

~Banksy

Categories: Authenticity, Creativity, Art, Movies
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I love post apocalyptic stories, and especially their cinematic portrayals. I just dipped into the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy…

• 
  The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2009) (Vintage International)
  Author: Cormac McCarthy

…but I did not last long before watching the film of the same name.

• 
  The Road
  Director: Sony

With all the rage around the zombie scenario in films and the modern psyche, I am continually curious to explore where this fascination comes from and what truths the “zombie” reveals about the fears of humanity.


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Categories: Hope, Morality, Zombies, Film, Books, Movies
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The more we read about Jesus and the background to his life, it was quite obvious that there was very little to ridicule in his life, and therefore we were onto a loser.

~Michael Palin of Monty Python

• 
  Monty Python’s Life Of Brian - The Immaculate Edition
  Director: SONY PICTURES

As far as comical satire goes, it could be argued that no one does it better than Monty Python. Nothing is sacred or beyond the scope of their intellectual buffoonery… except perhaps the very life of Christ.


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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Monty Python, Satire, Jesus, Christianity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Books, College, Culture, Malcolm Muggeridge, Movies
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I probably have no moment of greater indulgent film pleasure than that of watching mechanized forces of good and evil tear each other apart via ballistic fisticuffs of glory.

For this reason, a movie like Iron Man is my saccharine technolust desire and completion, I cannot refuse its allure any more than I can resist a handful of peanut M&Ms.

But try to pawn off a bag of regular M&Ms on me, and I will most likely turn up my nose with scoffing resignation… much like my derisive laughter at the horrible beer commercial excuse of a movie Transformers…

I want and need something beyond the candy shell…

One could hardly call computer generated robo-scrimmages “high art”, but if we attempt to get beyond that shellacked candy surface and dig in for the chocolate and the nut, do we find anything that satisfies?

Being a self proclaimed film aficionado and having expressed deep admiration for the first Iron Man film, many people have been asking me for my opinion on the latest sequel.

And as I begin my reply by restating the grand triumph of the first film as perhaps my favorite “super hero” film of all time… most folks get where I am going with what is at best going to be a second hand compliment to an attempt at a worthy sequel.

• 
  Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition + BD Live) [Blu-ray]
  Director: Paramount

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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Film, Reviews, Art, Movies, Books, Criticisms
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Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?

You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it–tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest–if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself–you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ we cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

• 
  The Problem of Pain
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Upon reading this summary statement of the mystical hidden desires common to humanity that seem to find utterance in faint moments of relationship and life lived, I immediately pictured this moment from The Matrix in my mind. The careful whisper of a question from the Trinity to Neo.

Please just listen. I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer. You’re looking for him. I know, because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us mad. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did.

~Trinity

It is for this reason that this movie remains a masterpiece in my estimation. Sure it had ground breaking special-fx and over the top gun play extravaganza scenes of action-cool gluttony; but more so, it is this sensibility of the whisper of transcendence and the possibility of imaginative gateways to a new world that is more real than the one I presume to be living in that made it stand out in a more permanent mode of appreciation.


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Categories: Desire, C.S. Lewis, Books, Movies
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This is a statement many of us have leaned on when trying to describe a culture of uncritical acceptance of ideology in some group or movement usually focused on the charismatic leadership of a single figurehead, a cult.

Those people are drinking the Kool-Aid…

I think I may have even looked up the origins of this colloquial phrase a few years back, but it was not until I watched this PBS documentary on Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide that I realized what a grave tragedy I was flippantly recalling when I uttered this snarky put-down in reference to Steve Jobs and Apple consumers.

• 
  Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple
  Director: Stanley Nelson

Going down in infamy as the greatest loss of American lives (915) in a single day next to only the attacks of September 11th; I see why atheists contend for the end of religion being a good step towards a more reasonable and safe society.

Was Christianity or Jim Jones at fault for nearly 1000 people drinking a fatal cyanide laced kool-aid mixture?


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Categories: Cults, Progressivism, Orthodoxy, Christianity, Bible Study, Faith, Movies
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Bill: So-crates - “The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing”.
Ted: That’s us, dude.

~ Bill & Ted, on Socratic Ignorance

• 
  Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  Director: Stephen Herek

I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.

~ Plato, on Socratic Ignorance, Apology 21 d

I experienced something like this: in my investigation in the service of the god I found that those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable.

~ Plato, Apology 22 a

• 
  Plato Complete Works
  Author: D. S. Hutchinson

I sat down for a much belated yet most bodacious viewing of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” this weekend. I have to admit, that when it comes to history… I am still pretty much about as ignorant as the portrayal of these dudes from the 1988 cult classic… and what’s more, their fictional characters are wiser than I in that they meet the fundamental requirement for the beginning of wisdom, they know they don’t know anything.

3For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.

~Romans 12:3; Paul

Reading through the Socratic dialogues is an exercise in humility, and the irony is… it’s very hard to escape the pretension of knowing that you are enjoying some of the best philosophical discussions of all time.

Pretty much every page reveals a new layer of my modern inclination for self preserving sophistry.

I see why Paul enjoyed taking the Good News to these ancient minds… what an excellent conversation.

Party on, dudes!

Categories: Wisdom, Philosophy, Books, Movies
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Although the official (business) connection seems to now be severed, I originally discovered Despair as the only distributor of the amazing short film More. I believe this film is one of the most powerful communicators of everything that is wrong with our current culture of commercialism and consumerism. It goes way beyond lamenting isms and grabs hold of the emotional response so many of us have experienced in the moment of despair as we realize the lies we have bought from our culture.

And I do believe that despair connection is what struck me as so powerful and ironically appropriate to have a company named Despair, selling a “Happy Product” as a film with the subversive power to challenge our trust in products as the bringers of hope for those selling and buying.

Every time I come back to watch this short film; the sad grays, smeared faces, and haunting music remind me again of where so many of us live. I truly believe it is a masterpiece for our time.

• Happy Product . com
• Despair Inc.

Categories: Consumerism, Despair, Animation, Movies
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Jean-Claude Van Damme, arguably the toughest action movie star of the last 20 years (Just consider Bloodsport of 1988) now stands in my estimation as the reigning champion of male vulnerability. I knew a little bit about the autobiographical nature of the film “JCVD“. But when I finally got around to watching it this year on DVD, I was not prepared for the 7 minute soliloquy of this brave and broken man.

• 
  JCVD
  Director: Mabrouk El Mechri

It’s something totally other than the sneering and vulgar posturing of repressed male aggression I experienced in “Fight Club”, this is just one man finally being honest with himself and his audience. He is about 20 years my senior, but at 32 I can still identify with that lost feeling of realizing that you have been given far too many answers before you were able to ask the right questions. Mistakes made, time lost, people unappreciated, meaning slipping away…

I am not sure how much of this monologue came straight from Jean-Claude or how many takes it took to get it right or if these life anecdotes and reflections are fabricated or not; but I still get it, and I want to learn from it.

Transcribed from the subtitles…

This movie is for me

There we are, you and me.

Why did you do that?

Or why did I do that?

You made my dream come true.

I asked you for it.

I promised you something in return and I haven’t delivered yet.

You win, I lose.

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Categories: Manhood, Confessions, Movies
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