Tag Archive - movies

Behold the… Lobster?

November 23, 2011 in Culture with 0 Comments

Last night Laura and I engaged in a moment of post-SBL de-tox by watching Brooklyn Lobster. A film about a lobster company that is on the verge of going under is a film about family, raw reality, and forgiveness.

The father figure in the film, Frank Giorgio, is depicted as rather lobster-like himself in a couple of scenes. In one, he is sitting in his car at a stoplight, and the red light makes him as red as any lobster in the film.

Frank is attempting, through various shenanigans, to save his business. And he is refusing the help of everyone around him–many of whom actually offer viable ideas for keeping the business afloat.

The turning point in the movie comes when Frank confronts a wayward lobster on the floor of his shop. As the scene begins, we get the God’s eye view of the escapee, which has its claws out a curiously right angles from his body. Cruciform lobster, anyone?

When Frank goes to apprehend the culprit, it pinches him. Frank shrinks back, but then as he grabs the lobster to put it back in the tank he says, “It’s o.k. I forgive you. It wasn’t your fault.”

Frank needed to forgive; most of all, I think, he needed to forgive himself.

Not everything becomes perfect at this moment, but the needful transformation has begun.

Frank is the lobster. And the lobster is forgiven.

Telling the Stories

March 15, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture, Media with 7 Comments

If you want to be an effective communicator of the Christian message, remember that ours is first and foremost a story. Become a great story teller, and don’t think that when you’re “presenting the gospel” you are supposed to shift in to didactic theology mode, and you’ll be well on your way.

Telling stories well usually means being able to read and understand stories well. This explains half of my advice to undergrads who would be biblical scholars: Double major in (English) Literature and Classics. Classics so you understand the world and languages of the New Testament, Literature so that you can cultivate the skill of reading and the art of interpretation.

This is also why learning how to watch and interpret and talk about movies can be an important part of engaging the twenty-first century North American world.

Enter Windrider.

Last night Fuller Northern California did a warm-up film watching event, in anticipation of the upcoming Windrider Film Forum in April (April 28-30).

The short films we watched were “The Little Gorilla” and “Kavi.” Both were about children who were faced with opportunities to overcome obstacles that stood in their way: internal and external. Both raised significant issues about family and its ability to help or hinder the realization of a child’s potential. Kavi also opened the audience’s eyes to the horrors of modern slavery.

You can watch Kavi here. Also, check out the website.

But the things that I took away from the film were less about the films themselves than a few conversations that ensued afterward.

One line of conversation that developed was prompted by the messy ending of one of the movies. It’s not all neat and tied together. The deliverer does not deliver a full redemption. In response to this observation by an audience member, Chap Clark spoke for a few minutes about how that is not only what “life” is really like, but that is what the Christian life is like as well. We too often present the gospel, especially at camps and to young people, as though accepting the gospel is the end-point that ties all the loose ends together.

But that’s not reality. And we need to learn to be comfortable with the loose ends and to think about how we tell the story such that it matches up a bit better. How do we tell our story? And do we tell the story as well as these film makers?

Another line of conversation was opened up by someone asking about the spate of spiritually-interested Hollywood films. Ralph Winter spoke about this being a long-running theme in the entertainment industry, but one that’s getting more press right now. He talked about the opportunities that are opened up for us to address spiritual issues by the films and TV shows that serve them up for us.

But what I really wanted to know was not so much how we as Christians can sponge off the great stuff already being done. I wanted to know what he thought we as Christians needed to learn in order to make better movies and write better shows. Why is it that the Coen Brothers make the best Christian movies in Hollywood even though they aren’t Christian?

His response was spot on, in my opinion:

    Christians think the most important thing is content. The entertainment industry only cares about telling a good story.

The way that Winter explains Christianity’s failure in the entertainment industry parallels what I would say is its failure, overall, to understand itself. We have too often forgotten that our faith is a story. It’s not a statement.

We think that to tell about Jesus we have to give an atonement theory. The early Christians thought that to tell about Jesus they had to narrate his death: in Gospels, in a meal, in a baptismal ritual.

As Winter suggested, we should be the greatest story tellers of all. But before that will be true of us, we have to really start believing that the story’s the thing.

Once we do that, not only can we, perhaps, make better films and write better fiction. Perhaps we can even engage good stories, stories without the particular content we would have put in, and see there the stories, or even the Story, we wish to tell.

True Grit

January 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture, Media with 7 Comments

Last night I was finally able to break away and see True Grit.

Dear Christians, stop making movies. Stop writing books. Go ahead. Put your cameras down. Fold up your laptops.

Now, go watch True Grit, Ladykillers, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, and learn from Joel and Ethan Coen how to tell the Christian story in popular media.


The film begins with an invitation to recognize that the biblical world is operative here: a citation of Proverbs 28:1 from the KJV, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”

This raises all sorts of interesting questions–is there something especially apropos in this film’s particular bad guy being chased by a girl? Should we supply the second half of the proverb to epitomize our heroine, “but the righteous are bold as a lion”?

As is so often the case in Coen Brothers films, the place of God in the storyline is undergirded by the soundtrack. In this case, the music for Leaning on the Everlasting Arms provides the wordless motif. But again, are we supposed to supply the words ourselves? “What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms?” Cf. the Proverb quoted above.

The composer/ arranger of the film’s music, Carter Burwell, had this to say, ““Ethan and Joel and I had the same idea—a score rooted in 19th-century hymns. The songs Mattie would sing if she had time for such frivolity. Our model was the hymn ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’, composed in 1888 by Anthony Showalter, an elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Dalton, Georgia, and used memorably in the film The Night of the Hunter. This, together with other hymns of the period, forms the backbone of the score, which grows from church piano to orchestra as Mattie gets farther and farther from home.”

As the voice of the grown-up heroine (25 years after the events of the film) introduces the story, she says of the man who murdered her father:

    “No doubt Chaney fancied himself scot-free, but he was wrong. You must pay for everything in this life, one way and another. There is nothing free, except the grace of God.“

As we follow Mattie on her quest for justice, we are acutely aware that hers is not an errand of grace, and in the end she must pay a price for the justice she seeks.

The performance of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie is oscar-worthy, and Jeff Bridges somehow manages to pull of the role of drunk hero. Who’d have thought?!

The Coen Brothers have done it again. This is a fantastic film.

Death for Good? Thoughts on Donnie Darko

August 2, 2010 in Culture, Media with 6 Comments

This weekend we watched the cult classic, Donnie Darko.

The film is disturbing, challenging, and at least a little bit confusing.

The plot involves Donnie, a teenager with emotional problems and apparent hallucinations, in a series of acts guided by a mysterious, disturbing looking 6-foot-tall rabbit. (Harvey, anyone?)

As Donnie is led by the rabbit to go back and change the past, I was left to ponder the extent to which his changing of the story was a good thing. He was able to act selflessly to transform his own story into one of redemption, to save a couple of lives along the way, also.

But the rabbit had led Donnie to do a couple of things that would now be left undone. One chain of events initiated by the rabbit put Donnie in the right place to keep a girl from being harassed by the school bullies. One action the rabbit led Donnie to perform led to the discovery of a secret child pornography studio and/or distribution center.

It seems that the scary rabbit led Donnie to create a better world–right up the end where Donnie returns to undo what had been done.

Have you seen the movie? Do you think the undoing of the past at the end is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing?

Cuckoo Redeemer

July 26, 2010 in Media with 4 Comments

We just rewatched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last week. It is an amazing, troubling film, worthy of its five Oscars et al.

It is a story of redemption, of deliverance–a story in which Jack Nicholson’s character, R. P. McMurphy, plays a leading role.

But what struck me in the film is that for all of McMurphy’s agitating, and for all this his own death is a a means of deliverance, it is (surprisingly) Billy Bibbit who is the Christ figure in the film.

We’re keyed into this on a couple of occasions when R. P. shoots a “Jesus Christ” exclamation his way. And his own death seems to be the self-giving that truly turns the tide on the ward.

So while R. P.’s own death is, in its way, redemptive, it seems that it’s redemptive as a following in the way of death that truly turned the story, the death of the would-be minor character Billy Bibbit.