"God's Not Dead". Quality Filmmaking May Not Be So Lucky

So, I posted a few days ago with a review of Darren Aronofsky's Noah, and said that it would be the first in a series of three posts. This post is the second of that series, in which I will review the surprising box office hit, Christian movie God's Not Dead.

Now, as you may have surmised from the title, I'm going to be pretty harsh on this movie, because it was terrible. Now, I am sure that many people who worked on this movie are good Christians, and I'm sure that many of the people who have enjoyed it and made it such a surprise hit are committed believers. That does not, however, make it a good movie.

The Review

So, I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated it. It actually made me angry the more I thought about it. I knew I was probably going to hate it, but I went anyway (these are the sacrifices I make) and it was even worse than I was expecting it to be. The strange thing is, I firmly expected the classroom "debate" to be the most infuriating part of it, basically like a Jack Chick tract writ large. It's not though. In fact, up until the very last class, those scenes are pretty tame (still fairly stupid, but tame). The film seems remarkably uninterested in the actual argument the main character is making.

Instead, the movie has roughly 100 different side plots that all intersect in increasingly stupid ways. There's a Muslim girl who gets kicked out of her family for being a Christian. There's a Chinese boy whose father won't let him mention God on the phone because "you never know who might be listening". Then, *deep breath" there's a Christian woman who is, inexplicably, dating Kevin Sorbo's Professor Radisson and has a mother with dementia (only "dementia" apparently means staring straight ahead like a statue, asking "who are you, again?" to all family members, and giving a long, out-of-the-blue monologue about trusting God) and a brother (Dean Cain) who is dating a liberal blogger until she gets cancer. There's also a sub-plot with a pastor and a missionary that intersects with half of these and is what constitutes comic relief in this movie. Also, the main character (Josh) has a girlfriend who breaks up with him because he's committing "academic suicide". As bad as all that sounds on paper, I promise that it is 100x worse on the screen. None of these people can act, with Josh's terrible girlfriend coming off the worst. To be fair though, even great actors weren't going to be doing much with the caricatures in this script.

- Dean Cain is literally the world's biggest jerk (which is quite an accomplishment in this movie). When told by his date that she has cancer, his response is "you couldn't have waited till tomorrow?" and then goes on a long screed about how love is the most overused word in the English language and how of course he isn't in love with her, they've had a good run, but now it's over. In a movie littered with painful scenes, it stands out as particularly tone-deaf.

- The blogger responds to hearing she has cancer with a matter-of-fact "I don't have time for cancer." She is informed of this by a doctor with the world's worst bedside manner, who informs her (I'm paraphrasing) "I know you feel like the world can't get on without you, but it looks like it's getting ready to do just that."

- The pastor and the missionary are going to leave on a trip, only the pastor's car won't start. Then the rental car they get won't start (even though it was just driven to them). Then the second rental car won't start (by the way, the rental car guy is the best character in this whole stupid film). Ostensibly, this is all God's doing to keep them in town so that the pastor can intersect with all these other dumb characters and quote Bible verses at them.

- Ugh, I just can't with this movie...I've known people with dementia/Alzheimer's, they are not cute proverb spewing machines. It's a terrifying thing to watch a friend/relative go through, and this movie trivializes it.

The movie wants to make serious commentary about everything, and as a result it says nothing meaningful about anything. Muslims who convert to Christianity sometimes do get ostracized from their families. People do get cancer. People do have dementia. These are serious issues, some of the most serious issues, and you can't properly deal with them in two or three short scenes. God's Not Dead doesn't really care about these issues or these characters, they're just emotionally manipulative. Because there is no nuance or development to all these story lines, they end up just being insulting.

Poor Kevin Sorbo. I genuinely felt bad for the guy, because he's trying really hard and is clearly the best actor in this movie, but his character is just the worst. For a philosophy professor, it's incredible how utterly uninterested he is in philosophy. He won't stand for debate or questioning. He's irrationally angry at a student for doing the very thing that he assigned him to do. He never actually offers a philosophical rebuttal, instead choosing to appeal to authority to question Josh's points. The only reason he's not the most contemptible character in the film is because this movie also features a character who insults a dementia patient and breaks up with a woman with cancer (did anyone actually read this script?). Radisson is not just the world's worst professor, he's also a terrible boyfriend. He apparently started dated this girl when she was a student in his class, despite the fact that she is a Christian, which he hates, and he thinks she's stupid, which is shown when he and his fellow professors from the philosophy department mock her mercilessly at a dinner party (there is a moment where everyone acts like she's is the world's greatest simpleton because she doesn't know Latin. I wish I were making all this up). When she breaks up with him, his answer is "No. I won't allow it," and when she ignores that and walks away he says "did you hear what I said?" It's just...UGH. At the end he gets run over by a car and, of course, the pastor is there to help him make a deathbed repentance, in a scene that literally made me want to throw whatever was at hand at the screen. Just like all the other characters, he's a caricature, a straw man, an evil atheist boogeyman.

The actor playing Josh is...okay? It's hard to tell because he's given so very little to work with, but in a film full of embarrassing performances, he at least made me go "I bet this guy could be okay given a small part in a better movie". His character is the least troublesome in the movie, so...kudos for that, I guess? Frankly, what we see of his speeches are pretty well in line with what you might expect from a freshman philosophy student trying to argue his faith (only with extraordinarily elaborate powerpoint presentations that he apparently found time to make in the space of a few days). He isn't making sophisticated points, but he's dancing around the edges of some of the classic arguments. He even has a moment at the end of the first speech where the professor questions him with a Stephen Hawking quote (because, again, this philosophy professor cannot think for himself and must quote others), and Josh answers "I don't know", which is an admirable moment to include in this film. If the film wants to portray a freshman student awkwardly fumbling with a defense of his faith in an unreasonably hostile setting, than it actually didn't do a terrible job at that. However, the movie wants to be more than that. It wants to have this freshman soundly defeat the evil atheist philosophy professor, proving once and for all the intellectual validity of theism. For that, his arguments aren't nearly good enough, and his opponent is far too much of an evil straw man.

The film also ends the "debate" by concluding that Professor Radisson doesn't really think God doesn't exist, he just hates him because his mother died when he was young. Now, there is some truth to the idea expressed here. The Bible says that all men know God, but we deny the truth. I don't think there's any such thing as a purely intellectual belief or disbelief in God. Many objections to God do have their root in an emotional hatred of God (Tim Keller writes very eloquently about this in The Reason For God). However, tackling that emotional bias against God is seldom as easy as pinpointing one event in a person's past, and even then, that doesn't mean you can ignore the intellectual arguments that people forward. You should respectfully engage with the philosophical arguments against God, and this movie has no interest in doing so. Again, these things require nuance, and because this film is so focused on so many things, there's no room for nuance. As a result, it just comes off as insultingly ignorant.

I haven't even really talked about the film-making yet, but boy howdy is it bad. You need a deft hand to make lots of interweaving stories work. Lets just be charitable and say that this movie's hand was slightly less than deft. It jumps jarringly from scene to scene, storyline to storyline. There are times when it cuts to a different scene in the middle of one of Josh's classroom speeches, not because the point he is making illuminates what is going on in the other scene, but because...I guess they just thought they needed to cut away? Who knows. Then they'll abruptly snap back to Josh as he finishes whatever thought he was in the middle of when we cut away. It's baffling. Also, close-ups. Man, this movie had all the close-ups, on all the faces. And hey, do you love dramatic piano in the background of your close-ups? You do? Well, do I have the movie for you! Someone apparently didn't get the message that if you try to make every scene in your movie weighty and dramatic, none of them are. I feel like in this script, essentially every line is underlined and in bold.

Then there's the end. Look, I get that they probably needed to have the Duck Dynasty dude and the Newsboys in there to get this thing made and make some money with it. Whatever. It's idiotic and terrible and the most "preaching-to-the-choir"est thing they could do. Fine, I'll live with that. However, at the end of the film, everybody ends up converging on this Newsboys concert. In the middle of the concert, Duck Dynasty dude shows up on the big screen up front and tells everyone in the crowd to get out their phones and text everyone they know "God's Not Dead" (and the film echoes this challenge to the film viewer at the end right before the credits roll), and how this is a way they can show how much they love Jesus. NO IT ISN'T! What better way to show you love Jesus? Literally any other thing than that. How about call one single solitary friend and ask them about their life and genuinely care about them. That's better. Give even a single dollar to someone who needs it. That's better. Dip your cell phone in gravy and eat it rather than sending those stupid text messages. That's better. Can you imagine the incandescent rage that would pour out from the religious right if any film dared to instruct its viewers to text everyone they know with "God is dead"? You know what all those people who get your text message are going to do? They're going to be angry that you wasted their 5 seconds with a platitude. They will, like Dean Cain's character (In literally the only moment of the movie where his character made sense), take one look at the message, then toss their phone into the backseat and not give it another thought. It's the dumbest call to action I've ever seen. It made me so, so angry.

Look, there is a way in which I genuinely believe Christianity is persecuted in the academic world. There are ways in which your faith will be attacked and undermined in the culture of the US today. It's not going to be from a comically aggressive atheist professor though. It's going to be much more subtle and much more dangerous. If you're hunting for an atheist boogeyman or constantly crying out about persecution, you're never going to be able to actually identify and engage with other worldviews. God's Not Dead isn't interested in making a case for God, nor is it interested in truly portraying faith. It wants to scare you with evil, irrational atheists, then let you laugh and cheer when they get defeated by a freshman kid. It's insulting to film, it's insulting to intelligence, it's insulting to atheists, and it's insulting to Christianity.

A Flood Without a Rainbow: Thoughts on "Noah"

This is going to be a series of three blog posts. Two films came out recently that had a fair amount of buzz in Christian circles, for different reasons. One is Darren Aronofsky's blockbuster Noah, and the other is the "Christian" film God's Not Dead. I have subjected myself to both of them, and now I'm going to write about them. Today's post is on Noah, I'll have a second post up soon reviewing God's Not Dead, and then I plan to write a third post on the spiritual-secular divide in cinema.

Fair warning: This is a massive post. Really, it's an essay. If you just want a short summation of whether I thought the movie was worthwhile entertainment, check the first paragraph of the review. Also, I've read lots of interesting articles about this film in the last few days (along with lots of uninteresting and, quite frankly, stupid ones). A couple that I'd recommend are this interview with the film's two writers by Christianity Today, and this blog post by Brian Mattson. Just a few notes on that later one (as it's been making the rounds): I think it's really important to recognize that Aronofsky is using a lot of gnostic and kabbalistic (is that a word?) symbolism in this movie, but I don't really think that's what the movie is interested in thematically. As I'll argue below, I think this is essentially a secular humanist interpretation of the Noah story, which is why it's problematic. Anyway, with that dispensed, on to the review!

The Review

I'll start with this: as a piece of filmmaking, I think it's a misstep, but an ambitious one with much to commend it. Darren Aronofky is a tremendously talented filmmaker (I thought his last, Black Swan, bordered on brilliant), and there are moments of brilliant visual storytelling. A scene where Noah recounts the creation story is staggering. There are images here that will stick with you (in a good way). It fails in a lot of ways on the script level though. Setting aside the thematic problems that I'll address later, it's a mess tonally. There are goofy comic relief elements that feel completely at odds with what's going on around them. There are good ways to add levity to serious stories, but making Methuselah a less serious Yoda is not one of them. An even bigger problem is the lack of development of secondary characters. Everyone not named "Noah" in this movie gets the short end of the stick. There is little characterization to any of them, and they have no agency. Ham gets the worst of it. He's a mopey, despondent teenager who changes motivations on a dime. Emma Watson's Ila comes off best, but that's almost entirely due to Watson's charm. There is some very silly soap opera stuff going on here, and little of it works. On the whole, I think it's the least of Aronofsky's films (that I've seen, at least), but if you don't mind some scripting that will make you roll your eyes, you'll find plenty to enjoy in the visuals. And, as you'll see below, it's given me plenty to think about over the last few days.

But what of the theology of the film? That's what we really want to know. How badly did this atheist Hollywood director screw things up? I went to go see this the other night with some high school students, and afterwards we talked about what the movie got right, what it got wrong, and what was, shall we say, "interesting use of artistic license". I think that's a pretty good way to look at it, so I'll look at those categories.

What it Got Right

1) The Depravity of Man - There is no doubt that mankind in Noah is evil and depraved. Yes, as you may have read, a lot of that depravity is conveyed as mankind's abuse of the environment (we'll get to that later), but the film does not stop there. Man is violent and domineering, with women being sold as slaves and a mass grave running through their camp. It's an ugly picture. Moreover, the villain, Tubal-Cain, shows us the condition of man's heart (if we're paying attention). Both Noah and Tubal-Cain call out to God to answer them. However, in the case of Tubal-Cain, he comes to God not as a servant to a master or a son to a father, but as one lord challenging another. In a fascinating scene, Tubal-Cain rallies his forces to storm the ark as the rains begin to fall. As one review I read stated,

"Tubal-Cain stands before his people and delivers a speech about how men, united, cannot be defeated. It’s a speech that Aragorn might give in Lord of the Rings that would have the audience on its feet; in Noah it’s the words of the villain."

The villain stands in direct defiance of the creator, and the power of man fails. That's an important moment.

In addition to this, we also have the perspective of Noah, who is adamant in his belief that man is wicked. It's not just those outside the ark who are depraved, it's those inside as well. At one point in the film, Noah's wife implores him to realize that their children are innocent and good, and Noah will not be budged. Man, including Noah and his family, are wicked. Now, there's a shift in this at the end of the movie, and I'll argue later that it's one of the real failings of the film that it doesn't follow through on this idea.

2) The Violence of the Flood - This might be the biggest one for me. We think of Noah and the flood, and we picture the story we heard in Sunday School, with pictures like this:

It's a bright sunny picture of the surviving people and the happy animals. Now, I don't think that's necessarily wrong for a little kid's story, but often we fail to move past that initial image. The truth is that the flood was God's righteous wrath against wicked humanity, and everyone on Earth was violently wiped out. Aronofsky's movie makes you confront that fact. There is a scene where we see an exterior shot of the ark floating on the water, and a few feet away we see a mass of people desperately clinging to a rock as the water rises and waves pummel them. It's harrowing, and it's an image that has stuck with me. We see Noah and his family inside the ark, and they can hear the screaming voices of people dying outside. That's the part of the flood that we don't like to think about, and it's the part that we really need to wrestle with.

3) The Humanity of Noah - Just like with the flood, it is easy for us to paint a rosy picture of Noah. After all, he was "a righteous man, blameless in his generation," (Gen 6) right? Well, yes, but that doesn't mean he's perfect. The Bible doesn't tell us a whole lot about Noah, so it's easier for us to just think of him as a saintly, mythological figure. What this movie did extremely well is make Noah an actual human being. I'd honestly never given much thought to the psychological trauma that whole experience must have been. Noah spends years and years building the ark, all the time knowing that everyone else in the world is going to die while he lives. Then he spends 40 days in the darkness of the ark, hearing the rain and the floods and the people screaming and dying outside. You think that might mess you up a bit? That's some wicked survivor's guilt right there. I told some people afterwards, the episode with Noah getting drunk in a cave makes a lot more sense now. I do think there are some problems with his characterization, but I think there is tremendous value in making us consider Noah as an actual person, and not just as a heroic figure.

"Interesting Use of Artistic License"

1) The Watchers - Likely the thing that made you go "What!?" the most in Noah, the Watchers are the fallen angel/rock giants that help Noah build the ark and defend it in the film. Now, this is certainly not in the Biblical story. However, as mentioned in the articles I linked to above, Aronofsky isn't just drawing from the biblical story. He's drawing from various extra-biblical texts and Jewish midrash tradition to flesh out the story. The Watchers are extrapolated from the "nephilim" in Gen 6, and while it's a silly interpretation, that passage is, admittedly, an odd one. I'm okay with using them to add some big blockbuster action to this, and while they're silly, they don't really change anything as far as the theological thrust of the film.

2) The Creation Sequence - Above, I called this sequence "staggering", and I absolutely mean that. On a purely cinematic level, it's one of the best scenes I've seen in a long time. It also portrays a version of creation that is definitely theistic evolution. Now, theistic evolution is not a view I hold. I think it has some serious problems, and that even a non-literal interpretation of Genesis doesn't really support it. However, I found it extremely interesting that Aronofsky chooses to show theistic evolution up until the creation of man. At that point, he doesn't show a continuing chain of evolution, but cuts to "and God created man" and shows Adam and Eve in the garden. Since theistic evolution usually also involves a non-historic Adam and Eve, I found that particularly interesting. While it isn't an interpretation I agree with, it's also not a hill I'm going to die on. And if you're going to go with that interpretation, you could hardly do it better than Aronofsky does it here.

3) Noah's Visions - I'm a little bit torn on this. On the one hand, we don't really know exactly how God conveyed his message to Noah. I think we picture a booming voice from the heavens, but we don't really know. There's a lot of room for interpretation there. On the other hand, we definitely do know that God gave Noah much more specific commands than the vague visions we see in the movie. Honestly, I think having God convey his message to Noah simply through visions is absolutely the right decision for a movie. The visions in Noah are visually striking, they work like gangbusters cinematically. The problem I have is that, when combined with the rest of the film, they contribute to a picture of a highly impersonal, distant God.

4) Environmentalism - There's been a lot of talk about how Noah is a big piece of environmental propaganda, which is not entirely wrong, but it's overly simplistic. There are actually some environmental aspects intrinsic to the Noah story. Noah and his family are vegetarians, he does save all the animals, and God does call us to be good stewards of creation. Environmental stewardship is something that we tend to underemphasize in conservative Christianity, so there's a real value in being reminded of our responsibility to treat God's creation well. However, Aronofsky goes a step further than good stewardship. One of the primary examples of man's depravity in this film is that Cain's descendents are ravenous carnivores. Given that the biblical Noah story includes God's recommendation to eat meat (Gen 9:2-4), that's a misguided point of emphasis. Part of Tubal-Cain's villainy is that he takes "dominion" of nature too far, but that view has aspects of truth too. The biblical truth lies somewhere between Noah and Tubal-Cain in this movie.

What It Got Wrong

1) Noah's Family - So, in order to take the movie in the direction he wanted to go, Aronofsky had to take a lot of liberties with Noah's family, and it just doesn't work. In the Biblical account, all of Noah's sons have wives. In the film, only Shem has a wife, and she is barren (until she's healed by Methuselah...we'll get to that in a second). The change makes Ham into a mopey teenager pining for a wife, and it adds all the dumb soap opera drama I talked about above. It's not an ambiguity in the text that the movie is fleshing out, it's a direct contradiction, and not only does it lead to a misguided message in the end, it also doesn't work dramatically.

2) Methuselah is Magic - In the film, Methuselah is a weird kind of hippie shaman with vague magical powers. He puts Shem to sleep by touching his forehead. He gives Noah a seed from the garden of Eden to grow the wood to build the ark. He heals Ila's womb to allow her to give birth. It's all very strange. The primary problem isn't that he's doing some weird sort of magic though. Aronofsky is merging biblical epic with fantasy epic, and this character fits in that. The problem is that there's no connection between what Methuselah is doing and God. He isn't a prophet working miracles by God's power, he's a weird hermit who just so happens to have mystical powers. It's weird, and just like the visions I mentioned above, it serves to make God feel more distant and impersonal.

3) There's no Grace - This is the big one. For all the weird touches and all the things it gets right, the film fails because it drastically misunderstands the point of the Noah story. As I mentioned earlier, their is a strong emphasis on the depravity of man throughout the beginning and middle of the film. Man is wicked. Noah is not ambiguous on this. The big climax of the film is that Noah feels like God wants him to kill his newborn granddaughters because they will allow humanity to continue to survive. He knows that man corrupted the world once, and will do so again, so it must be God's plan for them to perish. If you look at that interview I posted above, you can see the two writers wrestling with this:

"you finish reading Noah and all the wicked people have been wiped out, and one family survived, and you flip the page and it's Babel. So it immediately raises the question, what does that mean? If you look at the context of the story within the Bible, what is that trying to say about the sinfulness and wickedness within us? That was what we had to explore, not the good guys and the bad guys, but both the good and the bad within us."

So here's the problem: the film has set up a situation where man is thoroughly evil and corrupted. If man continues after the flood, there will certainly be more wickedness. So the film must answer why humanity should carry on. And it's here that the filmmakers cave. Aronofsky is a secular humanist, so he has to find his answer in the goodness of humanity. Despite the evidence we've seen to the contrary, the film ultimately says that mankind is worth saving. At the end, Ila says just this in her speech to Noah:

"He chose you for a reason. He showed you the wickedness of man, and knew you would not look away. But you saw goodness too. He asked you to decide if we were worth saving. And you chose mercy, you chose love."

The film pulls a 180. Noah chooses to save mankind because there is goodness mixed in with the evil. Man is worth saving. If man is intrinsically worth saving, then there is no need for grace ("unmerited favor"). So we are left with a God who is only vengeance and wrath, who is distant and uncaring towards his creation. Mankind survives not because God is gracious, but because one man is good enough and wise enough to see the goodness and love in other men. It's explicitly humanist.

Ultimately, Noah completely misses the point of the biblical story. It's often been pointed out that yes, Noah is "a righteous man", but not until after "Noah found favor (grace) in the eyes of the Lord" (Gen 6:8). God does not choose Noah because he is righteous, Noah is righteous because of God's grace towards him. And look at the end of the flood account, in Gen 8:21. God says "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth." He does not say that he preserves man because of man's goodness. In fact, he says the opposite. The biblical account says that man is still evil to the core, and yet God saves them anyway because of his great mercy. The point of the flood story isn't that mankind is worth saving, it's that they aren't worth saving, and yet God still shows grace to them. That's the whole reason for the rainbow. It's God's promise that no matter how bad mankind is in the future, he will never wipe the Earth clean like this again. If man is good enough to be worth saving, then the promise is unnecessary.

More than any liberty taken with the text (small or large), this is the problem with Noah. It's all wrath and no grace. It's all man and no God. It's a flood without a rainbow.

No Better Than Herod

When I write my sermons, I generally don't write them out in full. However, I had to preach an evangelistic sermon for preaching lab recently and, for whatever reason, I ended up writing out most all of it and preached it pretty close to how it was written. So, I figured I might as well just post it here. A couple notes:
1) In general I write sermons how I speak, which means the grammar here is less than perfect in places. I've also preserved the many paragraph breaks to give a sense of how it flows and where the pauses might fall.
2) The setting we were assigned was a 10-15 minute evangelistic sermon based on a Christmas narrative passage, the idea being a sermon you might preach around Christmas, when lots of people will be in church who wouldn't normally be there.

Anyway, here it is:

My Year in Movies - 2012

Well, last year I made it kind of a goal of mine to watch a lot of movies, and I ended up watching 103 for the year. This year, I backed off that quite a bit, watching only 52 films I hadn't seen before. If you want to see the whole list, and my thoughts on them (though I'm not sure why anyone would), here it is.

That said, it's been a great year for movies. I have plenty of movies I still want to see, but most of my favorite movies were films that came out this year. When thinking back over the year, 8 movies stood out as a cut above the rest (though shout out to Warrior, which just misses the cut, and is well worth checking out on Netflix Instant). So, without further ado, here's the top 8 movies I watched for the first time in 2012.


8) The Raid: Redemption

Absolute insanity, but in the best possible way. It's a pure action movie. Sure, there's a plot in there, some story to hold the thing together, but mostly it's just an excuse to string awesome action scenes together. And awesome they are. Seriously, I cannot overstate how fantastic the martial arts action in this film is. It's fluid, imaginative, and bone-crushing. It's also just a really well put together movie. Director Gareth Evans understands that you can't just have all action all the time. He paces everything extremely well, and maybe the best scene in the movie isn't one of crazy action, but a scene that is as tense as anything I saw in a movie this year.

7) Margaret

Oh Margaret...what am I to make of you? Ostensibly, Margaret is about a girl who witnesses a bus accident and how she processes that. Really though, it's about way more than that. It was filmed in 2007, but the director struggled for 4 years trying to make a final cut. You understand why when you watch the film, there's a ton of stuff going on in here. Anna Paquin plays perhaps the most convincing teenager I've ever seen in film. More than anything else, the movie is a great depiction of the self-absorption and drama that so define being a high schooler. At times, the movie feels like a bit of a mess, but that's forgivable given how epic and sweeping its scope is. Is it the movie I enjoyed most this year? Nope. Is it the movie that burrowed into my brain and had me thinking about it the most? Probably.

6) Adventureland

One of my new favorite comedies. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are both perfectly cast as the leads, their understated style working really well with the laid-back feel of the movie. The real stars here, though, are the supporting cast, who are uniformly excellent. Martin Starr is fantastic, and Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig steal every single scene they're in. I saw this on Netflix Instant and decided to check it out, and it was one of the more pleasant surprises of the year for me.

5) Moonrise Kingdom

And speaking of surprises, here's Wes Anderson's latest. When I saw the trailer for this, it seemed like it was going to be Anderson overindulging his worst instincts, just an overabundance of twee quirkiness. To my surprise (and delight), it's absolutely great. It's still unmistakably a Wes Anderson film, but it isn't overindulgent and it works perfectly for the coming-of-age story being told here. Gone is Anderson's usual focus on daddy issues, and in its place is a fantastical tale of young romance. It's beautifully shot, absolutely hilarious, and filled with great performances (the two child leads in particular). Seriously, I was shocked by how much I loved this, it's just great.

4) The Avengers

Look, I wasn't going to not like this movie. It's the Avengers, it's all my nerdy dreams come true on the big screen. More than that, it's directed by Joss Whedon, and if you've read this blog you know that I have no shortage of love for that guy. My expectations for this movie could not possibly have been higher, and it delivered. It's everything I wanted it to be. It's a perfect summer blockbuster film. I saw it 3 times in theaters and loved it every time. It's big spectacle, but it's also genuinely funny and character-oriented. Whedon gets the team dynamics of the Avengers and manages a fantastic balancing act, giving every character their moments. In particular, Whedon gets the Hulk. Both individual Hulk movies are failures on different levels, but here, as part of an ensemble, Whedon and Mark Ruffalo find the heart of the character and really make him work. I could go on and on about this, but I'll stop. It's a movie just chock-full of amazing, memorable moments, and perfect for what it is.

3) Chronicle

And with all that said about The Avengers, it wasn't my favorite super-hero movie of the year. WHAT??? Well, that honor goes to a little movie called Chronicle. I rewatched this recently, and it holds up brilliantly. On multiple viewings, I'm even more forgiving of the found-footage aspect of it, though I still don't think it's completely necessary for the second half of the movie. That's neither here nor there, though. I love that Chronicle doesn't care about how the boys got super powers, it's concerned with what they do with them and how that changes them. The scenes of them playing around with their powers and learning what they can do are fantastic. In particular, the scene where they learn to fly is awesome, just filled with joyous exuberance. Once those scenes are done though, the film is equally successful depicting Andrew's descent into villain-hood, finishing with an Akira-inspired, building-destroying telekinetic battle. On the whole, it's a brilliant twist on two genres which have felt stale and overdone in recent years (found-footage and super heroes) that feels fresh and exciting.

2) Looper

I came out of the theater twice this year feeling like I'd just witnessed a new classic of the genre. I'll get to the other in a second, but Looper genuinely feels like a new sci-fi standard. First of all, it builds a convincing and interesting world. The world of Looper is both familiar and strange, gritty and fantastical. Like the best sci-fi/fantasy, it feels deep, like there are other stories going on in this universe and we're just seeing one of them. I love Joseph Gordon Levitt and he's great, but the real stars here are Emily Blunt and Jeff Daniels (who makes great use of his screen time). And then there's Pierce Gagnon, who gives an absolutely stunning performance for a child actor. There's so much to love here, it's a smart, well-made, wildly entertaining piece of sci-fi. I've made no secret of my love for director Rian Johnson, and this is another home run for him. He's one of the best directors working right now. If you want to jump on, there's still space on the bandwagon :).

1) The Cabin in the Woods

Gosh, this film is so good. I said above that I felt like I'd seen two new genre classics this year, Looper and this one. The thing is, I'm not even sure Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie. I mean, it is a horror movie, but it's more than that, it's both a love letter to horror films and at the same time a deconstruction of the genre. I'm not much of a horror fan, but I adored this movie. For one, it's absolutely hilarious. Fran Kranz's stoner character is one of my favorite things in film this year, with several scenes that had me just dying. It's also filled with some genuinely freaky, scary stuff, and the end is just a glorious explosion of craziness. The whole movie is wildly inventive and ballsy. It's a movie with a twist, but it isn't a "gotcha" twist, it's a twist that is gradually peeled back in the most awesome and engaging way. Honestly, I can't recommend this highly enough. Even if you don't like horror movies, there's so much here to love.

Bountifully Dealt With

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
² How long must I take counsel in my soul
    and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³ Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
    light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
⁴ lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
    lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵ But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
    my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
⁶ I will sing to the Lord,
    because he has dealt bountifully with me.

- Psalm 13

My favorite Psalm is Psalm 13. I love it because of the incredible, glorious turn it takes at the end. The first 4 verse find the Psalmist in complete despair. He feels persecuted on all sides. He feels like God has abandoned him. He feels like the world is beating him down, to the point of death. He is crying out to God in pain and despair.

And if the Psalm ended here, it would be a very depressing Psalm. But it doesn't. It doesn't end there, it goes on to verse  5, and verse 5 offers hope. In the midst of his struggles, in the midst of his pain, the Psalmist still trusts in the love of God. He trusts that God will save him, that he will not be left alone by God, even though it feels like he is sometimes. God's promises and his sovereignty can be trusted.

And if the Psalm ended here, it would offer some hope. It would be dark, but with a light at the end of the tunnel. But it doesn't end there. It goes on to verse 6, and verse 6 is glorious. The Psalmist declares that the will sing to the LORD because God HAS dealt bountifully with him. Not because God WILL deal bountifully with him, but because God HAS. Even in the midst of pain, even in the midst of persecution, God STILL is dealing bountifully with him. What a phrase! "He has dealt bountifully with me". Amazing. God hasn't just provided, he has been abundantly good to the Psalmist, even in suffering. 

There is hardship and suffering in a broken world. There is heartbreak, there is pain. Sin has devastated the world. All of us experience it, in various degrees at various times. Sometimes it seems, as the Psalmist says, like it will overwhelm us, that God has hidden his face and we have sorrow in our hearts all the day. And yet, even in these times, the mighty lord of the universe is good to us. It is not only in the good times that God provides, but in the bad times as well. In the midst of hardship, he deals bountifully with us. What a wonderful God.

Why Yes, I Am A Comics Nerd

A few years ago, at Christmas, someone in my family (I think my mom) got me a pair of Justice League pajama pants, adorned with pictures of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, etc. (and they're awesome, but that is neither here nor there). This led to my sister and I having the following exchange:

Bethany: "What's Green Lantern's power anyway?"
Me: "He's got a power ring that can make anything he can think of."
Bethany: "A power ring? Why is he called 'Green Lantern' then?"
Me: "Well, the ring has a limited power supply, so he has this lantern to recharge it. And to recharge it, he holds the ring in front of the lantern and says 'In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might beware my power, Green Lantern's light.'"
Bethany: "..."

Yes, folks, I am a tremendous nerd. I am a nerd about many, many things, but one of those things is comic books. I love comics. I spent large quantities of my youth pretending to be a superhero of some sort or another. And its not just superhero comics I love, its the medium itself. Comics, when done well, can tell stories in a way that no other medium can.

Now, as a nerd, I'm all about introducing people to the nerdy things I love. Comics have much less of a stigma now than they did even 5-10 years ago, helped mightily by the popularity of superhero movies. Still, I'd imagine that most people reading this don't read comics. I don't blame you, it's a tough world to dive into. Much of the comics universe (much like any medium) is crappy, and especially the mainstream stuff (again, much like any medium). Not only that, but all the superhero comics have huge, elaborate continuities that are daunting to dive into. So, if you're interested in taking a chance on comics (and you should), I offer my services as a guide into that world. Mostly, I just want to talk about things I love :).

Just as a preface to my recommendations, let me say that it is pretty easy to find comics in your local library. Most libraries I've seen carry a lot of trade paperbacks (collections of individual comics into story arcs), so they're easy to get, and free, so that makes it easy for you. Anyway, on to the recommendations

Non-Superheroes

That's right, there are comics that aren't about superheroes. It's not all about capes and powers. The medium has been used in a lot of different ways, and these comics, due to the lack of huge continuities, are often better introductions to the comics world.

Bone, by Jeff Smith - If you've never read comics, I can't think of any better place to start than Bone. The best description I can give is Calvin and Hobbes mixed with Lord of the Rings. It feels like a simple cartoon in the beginning, like something you'd find in a newspaper strip. However, you soon find that there's a deeper mythology under the surface, and it unravels into an epic adventure full of humor and heart. It's easy to pick up and hard to put down, and accessible to anyone. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Sandman, by Neil Gaiman - Sandman is my all-time favorite comic series, and among the best things I've ever read in any medium. It's entirely unique, with a really spectacular premise and amazing execution. I don't know exactly how to describe it without going into great detail, but I can just tell you that it's absolutely amazing and you should give it a try. The art is gorgeous, and the 75 issue run is full of loosely connected vignettes about the power of stories and dreams. As "adult comics" go, it doesn't get any better.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman - If you want to see the uniqueness of the comics medium, Maus is a shining example. Spiegelman tells his father's story of being a Holocaust survivor, as well as the story of him hearing that story from his father. His brilliant twist is that all the people are portrayed as animals. By anthropomorphizing the people, Spiegelman is able to universalize the story and let the reader insert himself into the story and empathize. It's a brilliant, powerful comic and, oh yeah, it won the Pulitzer.

Y:The Last Man, by Brian K Vaughn - If its an epic adventure you want, Y: The Last Man is a great choice. It's a fantastic sci-fi premise: One day, inexplicably, all the men on earth die, except for one nerdy escape artist and his monkey. As with all great science fiction, Y isn't concerned with the "how?", it's concerned with the "what now?" It's a sweeping adventure, as the last male in the world makes his way across the country and tries not to get in trouble. It's really fantastic, and it sticks the landing with one of the best last issues I've ever read in a comic run.

So, there's a start for getting into non-superhero comics. These run the gamut from light (Bone) to heavy (Maus) and showcase a variety of writing and artwork styles. They're all great, and all worth your time, even if you have no interest in capes and masks.

Superheroes

Now, moving on to the world of superheroes is a little trickier. Where do you start with a character like Superman, who has nearly a century worth of backstory? Well, it's not easy, but I'll do my best to recommend some of the stronger comic runs that are largely self-contained.

Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller - This is the story that really created the modern Batman. The dark, gritty character you see in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight got his start here, in Frank Miller's comic. Miller was one of the best comics writers on the planet for about 15 years, and this is him in his prime. It's also an origin story, so it doesn't get much more self-contained. If the character of Batman interests you, this is the place to start. (also, while we're on Batman, I'll recommend The Long Halloween, another largely self-contained story that is extremely well done and features some great artwork).

Ultimate Spider-Man, by Brian Michael Bendis - Back in 2000, Marvel comics decided that their characters had way too much backstory and convoluted continuities to draw in new readers. So, they relaunched a bunch of their characters in the "Ultimate" line. They started over with them and told brand new stories with new versions of the characters, unburdened by decades of backstory. Most of these titles were not very good. However, in Ultimate Spider-Man, they found a winner. It's a modern version of Spider-Man, told from the origin on, and for the most part it's consistently great. The writer/artist combination lasted the first 110 issues of the run, which is absolutely unprecedented longevity in the comics world. That led to a comic that is consistently strong and has a great handle on its characters. It's a great gateway into superhero comics.

All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison - All-Star Superman is one of the most fun comics you'll ever read. It's a completely self-contained take on Superman in a futuristic setting, and Morrison uses it as a canvas to tell a bunch of amazing, over-the-top stories that are just pure fun, and a complete encapsulation of what makes Superman a beloved character. Morrison's writing is often overly convoluted, but here it's simple, straightforward, and just a joyous celebration of the character. It's the best Superman story ever written, and it's completely accessible, even if you've never picked up a comic in your life.


Where Not To Start

X-Men: I love the X-Men. Growing up they were my favorite superheroes. However, they do not lend themselves well to new readers. X-Men comics have easily the most convoluted continuity of any comic franchise (which is saying something). There are a million characters, alternate timelines, aliens, and characters who come back from the dead (multiple times!). Frankly, it's a mess. There are some truly great X-Men stories out there (The Dark Phoenix Saga, Astonishing X-Men, to name a couple), but there's also a whole lot of crap, and the long, winding history can make it very frustrating to newbies.

Alan Moore - If you ever look up lists of the greatest comics of all time, you're going to see the name "Alan Moore" a lot. Specifically, you're going to see his comic Watchmen, which is almost universally praised as the greatest comic of all time. Now, don't get me wrong, Moore is terrific. He's a kind of mad, eccentric genius (and I mean that, the guy is an odd fellow) and writes comics unlike anyone else. For newer readers though, Moore's eccentricities can be off-putting. A lot of what he does is riffing off how comics are traditionally done, but that's going to go over your head if you aren't familiar with comics. Watchmen is kind of like the "Citizen Kane" of comics, in that it totally changed the way comics were written. If you want to give Moore a go, a good place to start is his series Top Ten, which presents a world in which everyone is a superhero, and is a whole lot of fun.

Love and Amendment One

I should be writing a paper right now. That's what I've been doing this afternoon, and it's what I'll be doing all night, because it is due tomorrow. However, this was on my head and my heart, and I thought it was important to write about.

This is not about whether Amendment One is right or wrong. That discussion has been had time and time again, and I can contribute nothing to it that you have not already heard. I, like most of you, know people on both sides of the issue. Not stupid people. Not ungodly people. Not bigots. I know lots of very intelligent, undeniably Godly people who stand on both sides of the issue. This is not about who is right or who is wrong. The amendment has passed, that's over with. This post is about how we respond to it.

Here is the fact of the matter: Because Amendment One passed yesterday, there is a large portion of the population who have heard the message "Christians hate homosexuals". It does not matter what your personal reasons for voting for or against the amendment were. It does not matter what the actual reason behind the amendment was. Again, I know many Godly, loving Christians who had well thought out, biblically based reasons for voting for the amendment. Doesn't matter, nobody wants to hear those reasons. Because the tone of discourse has been so polarized on both sides, the message that has been received by the vast majority on the losing side is "Christians hate homosexuals", or at very least "Christians fear homosexuals". That's the resulting message of this amendment, whether it was intended or not. A simple perusal of Facebook or Twitter will tell you that this is the case.

Where does that leave us then? The responsibility of the church, the responsibility of us as individual Christians is to prove that this is not the case. The church cannot sit back, cross its arms and say "mission accomplished". There is fallout from this which must be dealt with, work that must be done. The only way to prove that this amendment was not motivated out of fear and hate is for us to do the opposite in our lives, to love. By no means am I advocating that homosexuality is not a sin or that it should be ignored, I am saying that you should love homosexuals anyway, as God loved you, a poor and desperate sinner.

This amendment is not going to change anyone's heart. You cannot legislate people to righteousness. This issue will never be solved by laws and regulations, but only by Jesus Christ working in the hearts of sinful people. Our job, therefore, is to bring Christ to people in love. We love in order to be Christ on this earth to people who are hurting and struggling, who are bound in a sin that they can't even see. The power of the Gospel, which is a Gospel of the overwhelming and undeserved love which God has for a broken and sinful people, is the only thing that will change hearts.

This is not the end just because the vote is over with, it's just the beginning. Over the coming months and years, the church has the opportunity to prove its critics right, that we are bigots and hypocrites, or to prove them wrong, by showing that we are fueled by the great and powerful gospel and love of our Lord, and that we show his extravagant love even to, and especially to, sinful people.