Recommendations

I haven't recommended any books or movies in a good while. I don't know how I've resisted the urge, but I'm not going to do so any more. I've seen some good movies recently, and I've read some good books. And, of course, I have taste, and so it seems my duty to let you know about them.

First, not many of those Wow! reads come along anymore. They used to quite a bit, but now, I guess, I've read so much that I'm not a surprised by as much that I read. I always find myself enjoying things the things I read, but still, that sublime feel is rare. I guess it should be.

Recently though, I did happen across such a read in The Slave by the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Especially the first half of that novel just blew me away. It's a pretty basic sort of folk tale set in Poland sometime soon after 1648. The protagonist is Jacob, a Jewish man whose family had been killed in a massacre during a recent Cossack uprising. He had fled from the scene but was subsequently captured by some Pagan/Christians and enslaved in their village. Then, classically, he falls in love with his master's daughter and she with him, and they both struggle with all of those things dividing them: religions, cultures, social statuses, and personal histories. And, of course, God ends up deciding to play a bit of a hand in the story and make sure that nothing about it gets cliched or inauthentic. I'd recommend this to anyone.

So movies. I recently got on Netflix, so there's been a steady stream of really good ones this year:

1. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days - I'd actually never heard this story before. It's about Sophie Scholl, a young Catholic woman who was a member of the White Rose resistance group during World War II, who was executed by the Nazi government for her dissent. This was a really straightforward retelling of the story. In fact, as I watched it, I kept thinking that aspects of the film, especially the dialogue, seemed unmovielike. Eventually, I found out that most of the dialogue in the main scenes was taken word-for-word from the recently discovered transcripts of Scholl's interogation and trial. The film was all-the-more powerful for this authenticity.

2. Dear Frankie - This movie really sounded cheesy when I read about it, but it only sort of was. I remember reading somewhere, one time, that the best stories are the ones that almost reach sentimentality, that go right up to the border, but don't quite make it. This one is perfectly on that edge. The plot sounds silly. A mother, fleeing her abusive ex, moves from place-to-place with her young son who is deaf. Her son doesn't remember his father, and she tells him that her father is a sailor on the H.M.S. Acon (I'm pretty sure that's the wrong name, but it's something like that). She even goes so far as to forge letters for years from the imagined father, and the boy, of course, fantasizes about meeting his father. One day, fate steps in when the son sees in the paper that an actual ship named the H.M.S. Acon is coming into port. The mother has to take some fairly drastic steps to manage the situation. It's a far-fetched premise treated really realistically and really well. It doesn't end as you'd expect.

3. The Heart of the Game - I think the director of this documentary, Ward Serrill, has to be about the luckiest film-maker of all-time. He started out trying to make one-year-long documentary on a high school basketball coach's first year on the job. At the end of the year, he came back for more, and then, he came back again for a third year. This seems fairly normal. In that third year, though, a new player, Darnellia Russell, showed up, and once Serrill started filming the story of her high school basketball career, he had to keep going until it was done. Serrill, in Darnellia, had lucked onto one of the best stories I've ever seen. Honestly, its hard to believe that anybody could luck into filming a story that has the ending this movie has! It took seven years for Serril to reach that end. The film itself is a fairly straightforward documentary and a fairly classic story. It starts just following a basketball program, and the coach makes this fairly engaging. Once Russell shows up, though, the movie is all hers. She's a star basketball player who manages to overcome pretty extraordinary adversity to help the team become a success. It's pretty remarkable, and inspiring, seeing her journey.

My Review of 300 - I Can't Believe I Watched It

I guess "meaningless" wouldn't exactly be accurate; there's meaning in the story. It's just that what meaning there is in 300 has so little value.

My friends and I who went to see this really ended up laughing through most of this film. Sure, it was pretty. But that was about all there was to it. Everything in the story was just so trite, and there’s not a character in the film that’s not a stereotype. Plus, there's no plot. The Persians are coming, and the whole movie is just the Spartans battling wave upon wave of the different kinds of warriors that can be thrown at them. The repetitive battle scenes are only broken up by a couple of gratuitous sex scenes and speech after speech after speech (six or seven) that all say the same thing--the Spartans are the reasonable people in the world, fighting for freedom and justice. They even got a Mel Gibson look- and sound-alike, and they had him give a couple of Braveheart speeches (though I liked that movie, which made a little bit of sense).

Of course, there’s not a whole lot about the Spartan society in the movie that makes it seem so free or reasonable. Infants with the slightest imperfection are thrown to their deaths. Boys are ripped from their mothers and drafted into a violent warrior culture where, it is made clear, concepts of love and mercy are anathema. If these boys don’t survive their childhood, they don’t deserve to live anyway. The “philosophers” and “boy lovers” of Athens are mocked, and it’s made clear that Spartan society is socially and economically unjust. They even kill the defenseless enemy messengers in one of the opening scenes of the film. Also, King Leonidas’s wife tells him the standard Spartan line, “Either come back with your shield or on top of it.” Many of these things, I’m sure, are pretty accurate concerning Spartan society. But this isn’t a free or reasonable society. It’s ridiculous that the movie pretends so.

Honestly, there’s not a value in the movie that I could agree with. It's really out to appeal to peoples’ worst instincts. The film is at its heart about violence for violence's sake, and the concepts of "liberty" and "justice" and "duty" are only cheapened by being in it.

A common definition of pornography: “creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate desire.” Frankly, 300 comes pretty close to this.

Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth, in my opinion, is the most remarkable movie of the year, at least among those I've seen so far (and I've seen a couple of pretty good ones). I can't stop thinking about it's beautiful and disturbing images, and I'm trying to build up the courage to go and see it again. I recommend it highly.

But with strong reservations. I'll likely buy it once it appears on DVD, but once I own it, I'll likely not be able to watch it. Certainly, not very often. My recommendation comes with a warning. It's really difficult viewing. Really, really tough. And I'm usually not all that squeemish at movies.

It's not that there's a whole lot of violence. There's only four or five such scenes in the movie, but they are intense and graphic, the sort that'll stick with you for a long time. I went for a walk by myself in the park around twilight tonight, and I found myself walking home really quickly. I've taken that same walk several times a week for the last year and have never even thought about it. If you don't have a strong stomach, I'd not advise going to see this.

But it's a heck of a show. It's sort of a difficult plot to describe. The setting, as far as I could tell, was occupied Spain during WWII at a small army outpost in the mountains. The post is led by a sadistic, fascist captain who is trying to quell the last of the resistance. The protagonist is an imaginative little girl, Ofelia, whose pregnant mother has married the captain. Some members of the resistance are followed as well. The story is in the mode of magical realism, and so parts of it draw heavily on Norse mythology and (to a little lesser degree) on Christian theology. Ofelia ends up being visited by Pan, who informs her that she is a princess and gives her some tasks to accomplish so that she can save her magical realm and escape into it. So the movie then begins to follow parallel storylines, that of the resistance versus the captain and that of Ofelia's performing her quest. Of course, there's plenty of interplay between the stories, as they comment on one another, and in a pretty astonishing manner, converge.

That's a ridiculously simplified presentation of the plot, but hopefully enough to interest you. The story is grim, but rewarding. It explores, among other themes, the nature of fascism (and its disturbingly close proximity) and what it means and what it takes to resist. It gives you much to think about.

But don't say you weren't warned.

I saw Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth a while back. It was pretty scary. It was hopeful, too, but definitely scary. And well worth watching.

There were several really impressive things about it. First, I've looked for decent refutations of the arguments made in the film, and I just can't find them (Glenn Beck (who's even more stupid than Nancy Grace) comparing Gore to Hitler just doesn't quite cut it for me). Second, Gore addressed all of the normal arguments against the reality of global warming (i.e. that the earth goes through natural warming and cooling cycles, that scientists don't unanimously agree on global warming, and that things wouldn't really change that much) very, very strongly it seemed to me. Third, Gore himself was impressive. He typically seems so stiff and withdrawn. Not so, however, in this film. Somehow, he conveyed his humanity and sincerity.

Anyway, I recommend this.

Read this.

Read this book. I'm serious. This is the best book I've read this year.

Granted, I've done a lot of really light reading so far this year that would definitely not be to most people's tastes. But this was a heck of a book.

Just read it. Don't worry that it's children's literature. Don't worry that its title is Princess Academy. It's great despite the title.

And go ahead and visit the Shannon Hale's web site, too. It was sort of interesting.

A Book Recommendation

I just finished reading a really, really excellent book, and I thought I'd pass the title on to you. It's called Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World and is by Lee Camp. He's a Church of Christ professor, though he's sort of writing from an anabaptist perspective (which is more what the Church of Christ was 170 years ago). The basic idea is that Christians have largely compartmentalized our religion. We're very comfortable with the Gospel affecting our inner spirituality, our attitudes. We're not always overly comfortable with the Gospel influencing our lives. The Gospel, particularly the things that Jesus says, just seems a little too radical and a little too impractical to us. It's wrong, of course, to think that way though. If we're going to live under the governance of Christ, we have to take seriously what he says.

So anyway, this book's out to change things. It calls for more radical discipleship, and it examines what our society and Christianity within our society might look like if we were to take some of the more radical things Christ does a little more seriously.

This is one of those books that isn't overly comfortable to read. It challenged me continually. And it's not a book that anyone will agree with entirely. Being challenged isn't a bad thing though.

And the Oscar Goes To...

Crash!!!!!

I was really happy about this. What a great movie Crash was! I really can't imagine any of the other best picture nominees being more superbly done or more timely. Particularly in the year of Katrina, I thought that the film that deals with racism so poignantly ought to win.

Granted, I haven't yet seen Brokeback Mountain. I likely will eventually, but I just don't see how it can compare with Crash. Judging from the many clips I've seen of Brokeback, it seems too Hollywoodized. I grew up around plenty of real cowboys, and they don't sound or look anything like the cowboys in Brokeback. I may change my opinion when I see all of the other nominees, but I doubt I will. At the very least, Crash was outstanding--and much better than some of the recent best picture winners (Chicago, Gladiator, and Titanic leap to mind). If you've not seen it, go and do so.

I'm always suprised at how much I care about the Oscars. It's not generally something you would think I would care about. Since me and Kalyn were little (and didn't know better, I guess), though, we have loved them, and that's stuck. Anyway, this year's Oscars were pretty entertaining for me. John Stewart was funny, and I wasn't disappointed by many of the awards.

I did think that Dolly Parton's song should have won. She put on the performance of the night. I was also rooting for Amy Adams from Junebug (a really good movie) for supporting actress, and she lost (though Weisz was pretty decent in The Constant Gardener (which is, however, a much better book)).

Still, it was overall alright. I did beat Kalyn, after all, on predicting the most winners. I beat her soundly, and Crash won the top award. That made a good night.

Watch it now.

The other day, I was saying something stupid, like usual, to my roommate (probably something about my frustration with my admins), and he said, "Are you going crazy again?" And I said, "No, I'm not going crazy again. In order for me 'to go crazy again,' I would have had to have become uncrazy so that I could now be going crazy again, and I haven't done that recently." At least I'm logical when I'm not totally with it (or so I think).

Anyway, that's how it's been lately. And today, after I finished a pointless meeting with its bad pizza (have you ever seen pizza where all of the cheese had evaporated off of it?) and finished up my office hours, I needed to do something non-school. I had no time to do something like this, but I wasn't going to make it otherwise.

So, I went to Corpse Bride. And it was awesome. Burton created a world that's quite a bit like mine here in the desert (though mine doesn't have all that romance--just all the dead and nutty stuff) and it had a good ending. It made me feel good and much more sane. Go watch it.

Recent Recommendations

Not much has been going on here lately. Mainly, I’ve been sittin’ around working on my final project for my Masters degree. The result is that I haven’t had much to say (as if I ever do). I have taken a few small breaks, though, from my writing to watch a couple of movies. There have been some good ones.

In particular, I would recommend the movie A Very Long Engagement. It’s a foreign film that stars Audrey Tautou (the girl from Amelie, another good movie). She’s a woman who was engaged before the start of World War I, and her fiancé never came back. Everyone tells her that he was executed on the front lines for cowardice. Her instincts, however, continually tell her that he’s still alive, and she sets out to piece together the truth. The result is a surprisingly original and complex mystery/romance/war movie (you’d of thought the World War I love sage would have been done to death by now). I’d recommend this to just about anybody. There’s a nice mixture of romance, suspense, and (a little bit of) comedy that will please people of a lot of tastes. I found it really satisfying; I watched it twice. (And if you watch it and like it, I would recommend the classic novel Random Harvest by James Hilton.)

I’d also highly recommend Hotel Rwanda. Just about every blog that I read regularly had recommended this at one point or another, particularly for Christians to see, and I finally got around to watching it. The moviemaking was slightly flawed, but that couldn’t overcome the tremendous story that was being told. It’s about a man who saves hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. Everything about it was gut wrenching, particularly when you consider that the killing was done by Christians, that the west offered very little response it, that the west did nothing to prevent the genocide despite clear warning, and that the conditions that resulted in such bloodshed was largely brought about by western colonialism. This is really sort of a must-see for people in these times.

I’m also currently reading The Constant Gardener by John LeCarre. It’s another pretty chilling story set in Africa. So far, I’d recommend it highly, and considering the people who are involved in making the movie, I bet it’s good, too.