Chris Farley in 'Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation'

Deserve's Got Nothin' To Do With It

Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) "I don't deserve this… to die like this. I was building a house."
William Munny (Clint Eastwood) "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."
From Unforgiven

Ain't that the truth! I am so glad God will not give me what I deserve, he gave to Christ what I deserved and gave to me what Christ deserved, thats grace.

The Lion Awakes - The Story Of Lewis and Tolkien

Ordinary Heroism

A good word from my friend Geoff Ziegler on Hollywood's latest unwitting depiction of the consummated eschatology that every fallen-but-God-imaging-and-thus-Eden-remembering human longs for.

As the film progresses we discover that the only hope for the city is found in people who devote their lives to making it better. “You don’t owe these people anymore. You’ve given them everything,” someone says to Bruce Wayne. His response reveals the heart of the film: “Not everything, not yet.” The fate of Gotham will be determined by just how much he and others are willing to give.

At the risk of being over-dramatic, it strikes me that each of us are called by God to just this sort of heroism. Though tempted to remain content in our own prosperity, or to complain against the mistakes of others, or to simply try to “wait things out,” we are summoned by God to lay down our lives in service to the world around us. “A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have loved you.” We have been loved completely by one who gave everything for us, and that very love compels us to do likewise. And unlike the superheroes of our age who must only rely on themselves, we can give ourselves without fear, for our lives are hidden in Christ, securely kept for us.

I am left with two simple questions: what does it mean for me to give my life to the family and community God has placed me in? And will I be willing to do it?

The more blockbusters I see the more clear it becomes that every one of them is a shadow of which Jesus is the substance. 

 

Dane Ortlund

New poster for Will Ferrell’s Spanish-language movie, Casa de mi Padre

And here’s the trailer…

Poster for Tim Burton's upcoming Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is a thriller/horror movie coming June 2012.
 President Lincoln’s mother is killed by a supernatural creature, which fuels his passion to crush vampires and their slave-owning helpers.

The Tree of Life: An (un)Review

In the world of cinema, there are two basic kinds of people: those who “go to the movies,” and those who love the art of film itself. For the latter group, the release date of  Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life in their respective city was tantamount to a high holy day. Malick—the reclusive director—has only made four films in the past 40 years before this current release. Each piece has in turn been critically acclaimed. The Tree of Life was certainly no exception to the rule, receiving the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the festival’s most prestigious award. This all took place despite the fact that Malick did not personally appear in support of the film at Cannes (although he was there), and refuses to do any publicity.

Confession: I believe that The Tree of Life is a masterpiece and a deeply important film. As someone who teaches courses in philosophy of film, and having seen the film multiple times myself, I have repeatedly told all interested parties that this is not a film for the folks who like to “go to the movies.” In fact, I have actively discouraged people from going to see it. Terrence Malick is a highly philosophical auteur filmmaker whose works defy the traditional conventions of dialogue, narrative, and story arc. Complicating matters, however, The Tree of Life stars three of Hollywood’s biggest names: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain. Consequently, people have shelled out their hard-earned dollars and filed into the theater to see a blockbuster. They were in for a rude awakening.
Each time I have seen the film, I have felt like I was entering a zone demarcated for spiritual warfare. It opens with an epigram from Job 38:4,7 (“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”), and immerses its viewers into what I can only describe as an intense experience of emotional vertigo for the next two and a half hours. The film arrests the individual’s senses at every level: intellectual, psychological, and visual. The cinematography is stunning. The portrayals of the O’Brien family, set in 1950s Waco, Texas, provide what can only be described as the most moving repristination of childhood ever captured on film. The voiceovers from the film’s protagonist, Jack, confront the audience directly with the existence of God.

Legendary Reactions

Reactions to The Tree of Life have already become the stuff of legend. Some respond to what they are seeing with deep, sensate weeping. Others grow visibly angry and verbalize their protests before storming out of the theater. Still others emerge from the auditorium in a state of shock. But everyone leaves talking about what they have just seen. Personally, I felt the right response for me afterward was a period of silence.
Film criticism has fallen decidedly on hard times, and nowhere has this been more evident in the reviews of The Tree of Life. Although Roger Ebert has heralded the film as the most ambitious film he has seen since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, reviewers have struggled to wrap their minds around Malick’s magnum opus.
For secular audiences, the content borders on offensive given the work’s explicit theism and anomalous ending (e.g. is this an evocation of the afterlife or not?). The general line of attack for them has been: “Malick has taken on the meaning of life, but we remain very piously unconvinced by what we perceive as his ‘answers.’”  Perhaps more enlightening are those who apply a Freudian/Lacanian grid to the story, referencing the Oedipal impulses they see tacit in Jack’s relationship to his father and his mother.
Christian reviewers, by way of contrast, appear almost desperate to figure out what every scene “means” in the film. We would like to believe that Malick’s genius is a catalog of one-to-one correspondences with orthodoxy, ready-made for illustrative sermon material. To be sure, there is plenty of fodder for such interpretations: the nature vs. grace dichotomy, the explicit and latent references to Scripture, the themes of darkness and shame versus light and love, the seemingly weak church and pale Christ juxtaposed to the youthful passions of Jack, and the redemption/reconciliation sequence that closes the film.
The whole work overflows with theological intensity. For example, what other filmmaker besides Malick would have such a high view of the sanctity of human life so as to suggest that the significance of one child’s birth can only be understood in light of the totality of the universe’s creation? And what do we make of the sequences with the older Jack among the skyscrapers of Houston? Could it be, as one colleague suggested, that you can go running from your emotional and psychological “stuff,” but sooner or later, your “stuff” is going to come looking for you?
But whereas we are driven to do theological analysis on The Tree of Life, I wonder if we might be missing the film’s own internal governing hermeneutic. Terrence Malick transports the individual into the pure feeling and wonder of existence in light of our experience. Could it be that the analogue for this film is not Western Christianity, but rather Eastern Orthodoxy? Is The Tree of Life meant to be dissected and explained, or does the filmmaker intend for us to think of his piece as an icon, transporting us into another world in which restoration, reconciliation, and grace are not scorned by mockers and enervated by skeptical disavowals?

High Priests of Culture

Recently, philosophers have begun asking the question of whether or not film has/will become a new form of thought itself. In his massive two volume work on Cinema, Gilles Deleuze argues that film is not merely a medium for communicating messages or stories, but also a means to fuse thought and image together in an instant of ecstatic realization. Similarly, Jacques Rancière has written that film gives us the ability to do something that ideologies have wanted to do for centuries: make the abstract and unrepresentable, representable. It has the potential to combine image, sound, and thought into form that has a distinctive power to explain the world around us.
If these analyses turn out to be apt, then The Tree of Life may well be remembered as a turning point in the importance of how we think about film itself. It may well accelerate the feeling of many people today that their aesthetic experiences through the arts are religion enough for them. Anton Chekov once reflected on his ambivalence toward the theater and the “high priests of the sacred art”—that the actors show us how to live, what to do, and who to be. Today, there can be no doubt that the high priests, priests, and acolytes of our culture are the producers, directors, writers, and actors. As film increasingly presents people with opportunities to replicate certain aspects of religious experience, we must pause to reflect upon the growing reality of “theater as temple.”
This phenomenon puts us back, curiously enough, in the position of the ancient Mediterranean world, in which Greek dramas brought together the worship of the gods, the understanding of the state, and the norms of society. In such a world, we have no choice but to repair to the foolishness of preaching, return to what Luther called the “poor tokens of the Word of God alone” . . . and hope at the end of the day that Terrence Malick is on our side.
The Gospel Coalition

Why Johnny Ringo, it looks like somebody just walked over your grave

The expression on someone's face reminded me of this quote and movie scene from the great Western Tombstone

A Tale of Two Trees -Terrence Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life

In his essay “Christianity and Literature,” C. S. Lewis said “an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.” Terrence Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life, has been called a prayer and a magisterial symphony precisely because it accomplishes this task. It is art that masterfully reflects the eternal tale of two trees. There is a wide gate and a narrow gate (Matt. 7:13-14), light and darkness (John 1:5). Or as the film puts it, “There are two ways through life—the way of nature and the way of grace.”
Initially, the tree of nature appears vibrant, good for food, a delight to the eyes, and capable of making one wise (Gen. 3:6). We see a healthy tree with ripe, low-hanging fruit. Overwhelmed by desire for this fruit, we disregard the fence around the tree, steal the fruit, and eat. We have become addicted to something not meant for us and dedicate ourselves and everything around us to quenching that addiction. “Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it.”
We become consumed with ourselves, our jobs, our homes, our reputations, and dedicate ourselves to the “fierce will it takes to get ahead in this world.” We labor, like the father in the film, to get the weeds out of our yard, but miss the glory of the birds singing, the breeze in the air, and the sun on our backs. We miss it all just to get one more taste of the fruit. In the end we “dishonor it all” and fail to “notice the glory all around.”
By contrast, the tree of grace at first glance appears to be a dead stump. We see a weak and run-down tree. “Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” Instead of taking fruit off the tree we nailed the Lamb to it. But with the blood spilled on this tree a shoot comes forth from the root (Isa. 11:1), and branches are grafted in (Rom. 11:17).
In the same “Christianity and Literature” essay, Lewis writes, “Our whole destiny seems to lie . . . in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours.” Only after being grafted to the stump do we acquire that fragrance.  Only then do our eyes see what is truly alive. Only then can we sing with never-ending joy the old hymn:

The tree of life, my soul hath seen
Laden with fruit and always green,
The trees of nature, fruitless be,
Compared with Christ the apple tree.

Jason Bohm

100 Best Movie Lines in 200 Seconds

22 words

Coen Brothers Working On A Movie About 1960s NYC Folk Scene - Who would you cast as Bob Dylan?

Joel and Ethan Coen, beloved auteurs of such fine films as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men, to name a few, are in a New York state of mind for their next film, which focuses on '60s-era Greenwich Village and its burgeoning folk music scene.
The LA Times says the brothers are working on a script loosely based on the life of Dave van Ronk, a "legendary musician who presided over New York's iconoclastic coffeehouse period." van Ronk helped guide the early careers of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs, amongst others, and posthumously published a memoir titled after his nickname "The Mayor of MacDougal Street."
The Coens said at a Lincoln Center talk earlier this month, "We’re working on a movie now that has music in it [that's] pretty much all performed live, single instrument." There's been no word on casting yet, but fingers crossed for a transgender Dylan cameo (a la Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There.)



22 words

Life, A Little Unsatisfying Until the End - A Look At Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris

Woody Allen still believes in movie magic. His latest film, Midnight in Paris, requires no CGI or pyrotechnics to transport his main character, Gil (played in great neurotic bursts by Owen Wilson) back to the jazz age of the 1920s. Only the sound of church bells marks the change, when suddenly an old car appears and Gil is whisked inside, taken to a roaring party where Cole Porter sings at the piano and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald draw Gil into his world.
It’s Gil’s dream coming true. Gil is an American writer who once lived in Paris and regrets ever leaving. Instead of inspired years walking the Paris streets, he moved to California, became a very successful “Hollywood hack,” and is now poised to marry the self-centered Inez, played brilliantly by Rachel McAdams. Inez wants to enjoy their trip and go back home, marry, and settle down to a luxury life in Malibu. While she and her obnoxious mother press Gil to buy $18,000 dining room chairs, his heart departs for the Paris streets, and Allen presents the city to us in all its glory, unapologetically showing off the clichés of the city with beautiful cinematography. David Denby, writing about the film in the New Yorker, observes, “[Allen] seems to be saying, “Yes, these are clichés, but they’ve become clichés because this is the most beautiful place on earth.”

Wandering, Wondering

During their trip to Paris, the rift between Gil’s romanticism and Inez’s realism is continually exposed, and they begin drifting in different directions. Paul, an old flame of Inez’s, shows up with a strong dose of pseudo-intellectualism, using the streets and museums as a prop to continually pontificate. Everyone who runs across him finds him pedantic except Inez, and the rift between her and Gil grows wider. (Like other pseudo-intellectuals in Allen’s films, Paul is thoroughly skewered before too long.)

Each night Gil returns to the streets, and finds himself again in the 1920s, wondering aloud about his career, his novel, and his discontent. Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Salvador Dali, and Ernest Hemingway listen, encourage him, and welcome him into their inner circle. Corey Stoll is hilarious as Hemingway, perpetually talking about death, love, and courage, swilling wine and asking if anyone will fight him. He confronts Gil’s weakness and fear, challenging him to make the brave decision, whatever that particular decision might be. One scene in particular seems like a glimpse inside the mind of any artist (or perhaps even Allen himself), where Gil airs all of his fears about success and failure in work and love, and Hemingway confronts him in bursts of characteristic prose, pushing him onward.
When whisked away in time, Gil doesn’t escape to the real roaring twenties. Instead, it’s an idealized world, perfectly tailored (by either his imagination or the power of movie magic) to prepare him to make his bold decision (ending his dead-end engagement and leaving his career as a movie hack). It’s a funny take on providence; something had to intervene to prepare Gil to make the fearless decision. For him it comes from the affirmation of Gertrude Stein and the punch in the gut from Ernest Hemingway. Artists battle fear constantly; fear their work is actually bad, fear they’ll be rejected, fear they’ll be forgotten. Allen’s world of the twenties seems like a laboratory for overcoming that fear.

Nostalgic Longing

Of course, real life doesn’t work that way, but we can be reminded by this fairy tale of the value that community contributes to creativity. We need mentors (like Stein) and brutally honest critics (like Hemmingway) whom we allow to speak into our work. This, of course, is true in any field, but is particularly true for creatives.
Gil eventually meets Adriana, a beautiful girl who’s taken up with Picasso. Just as he begins to dream of staying with her in the twenties, she confesses her own nostalgic longing for the turn of the century, the “Belle Epoque,” which she sees as the golden age of Paris. When they’re magically drawn back into that era, Gil begins to see that any era will be unsatisfying “because life is a little unsatisfying,” as he tells Adriana. In a moment that is pure Woody Allen, he says, after all, “these people don’t have antibiotics.” Thus Gil’s romantic love of the past is revealed, ultimately, to be escapist and disappointing.
Still, he finally follows his dreams to stay in Paris, and by all appearances, is better and happier for it. Romanticism points to a deep discontent in the human heart for a better time, a better age, and a better way of living. Creative angst is a powerful force, driving an inventor to build a better widget or an artist to tell a better story. It can also be an endless rabbit trail that leads us to conclude with the author of Ecclesiastes that there must be something more satisfying than money, power, and sex.
Allen’s conclusion—in this film and others—is lowered expectations. There is no “Golden Age,” only life, which was as full of dissatisfaction in the past as it is now. Christians shouldn’t be too quick to toss this conclusion off as fatalistic or too humanist. We live an incredibly narcissistic time where our expectations for life, love, marriage, and happiness are grandiose. We throw holy water on narcissism and count on our religious lives to generate the results we want. We romanticize all kinds of “Golden Ages” or “Golden Relationships,” imagining that Christian celebrities and leaders have the perfect lives we want, wishing we could step into their world, and imagining that the right combination of circumstances and religious obedience could earn them for us. “If I were married to (blank),” “If I worked at (blank).” Such narcissism needs the gospel to remind us that there has yet to be a “golden age” or a perfect situation, and that sin’s effects make all of life “a little unsatisfying.” We would do well to simply expect a little less.

Ironically Present

The irony is that such an acceptance actually frees us to be more present to our given circumstances. If an ideal world is impossibly out ofMike Cosper reach, we may as well make the most of whatever place we occupy. Getting our head out of the clouds of “what if” can open our eyes to what’s really occurring around us, and it frees us to be fully invested in where we are.
It also gives us a greater reason for hope. Movies rarely tell the “whole” story. It could be that Gil’s decision to stay in Paris merely delays his ultimate unhappiness a bit longer, and soon he’ll be looking for satisfaction somewhere else. That would be true to life, but it’s not necessarily a good story. Happy endings in movies ring a little false because a million things can go wrong. The beautiful French woman Gil meets at the end could be a complete lunatic. Or he could get robbed on the Metro the next day. Or his book could flop.
We either have to see the happy endings of movies as deeply flawed, as though there were an asterisk indicating, *of course, great tragedy is inevitable in the near future. Or we could see them as indicative of the human heart’s need for resolution. Happy endings, in that sense, are always eschatological. While we acknowledge that there has yet to be a golden age, every time a hero rides off into the sunset or a couple finds love just as the closing credits begin to roll, it’s a stammering effort within creation to say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” It’s a whisper of hope, longing for the day when all of our stories find a satisfying and joy-filled conclusion.
That will truly be a Belle Epoque.
by Mike Cosper  Gospel Coalition

‘The Adjustment Bureau’ Adjusted

Our family recently went to see The Adjustment Bureau and thoroughly enjoyed it. Matt Damon leads in a fast-moving story about an aspiring politician who falls in love with a girl he was “not supposed to meet.”
The plan for his life is set by “the chairman” who, while never seen in the movie, operates from the top floor of a tall building. He is remote, invisible, and inaccessible. All of us, we are told, have met him, though we know him by different names.
The chairman has agents whose work is to make sure that people’s lives follow the chairman’s template, and if they get off course, to make an adjustment. That’s what happens to Damon after encountering a girl he was not supposed to meet. The agents make an adjustment to ensure that he does not meet her again, and Damon has to pit the power of his choices against the chairman’s plan.
I enjoyed the movie, not least because it provoked some great discussion, especially about free will and the sovereignty of God. But here is where The Adjustment Bureau needs to be . . . adjusted.

1. The chairman’s agents in The Adjustment Bureau are dark and shady characters.

One of them has redeeming features, but the overall picture is clear: the sovereign is sinister. The almighty has a plan, but your plan is better.
But what if the Sovereign is good? What if his plan for my life is better than any plan I could ever conceive? What if, knowing all things, the Sovereign protects me from choices with consequences and outcomes I cannot imagine or foresee? Far from rising up to resist his plan, my best interest would be to pursue it and submit to it in faith.
Those who have discovered that the Sovereign is good know that true wisdom lies in turning away from the impulsive arrogance that says, “I know what is best and I will pursue what I want at any cost,” and embracing the humility that says, “God knows what is best, and I will follow what he wants at any cost.”

2. The Adjustment Bureau raises good questions about free will. If God is sovereign, what kind of choices do we have?

The Bible never uses the phrase “free will,” but God calls on us to make choices and holds us accountable for them. So what kind of freedom do we have?
a. We make real choices, and we make them freely.
God created people, not puppets. The choices we make are real, and they shape the course of our lives. “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15).
b. We are responsible for the choices that we make.
Adam tried blaming Eve for his sin, and Eve tried blaming the Devil. But God holds us responsible for our choices, and we cannot shift the blame (Gen. 3:12, 13; James 1:13-14).
c. We choose according to the prevailing desires of our hearts.
Your heart governs your choices, so the freedom you have is freedom to follow the deepest desires of your heart. Writing in his Systematic Theology, Louis Berkhof states it well: “There is a certain liberty that is the inalienable possession of the free agent, namely, the liberty to choose as he pleases, in full accord with the prevailing dispositions and tendencies of his soul.”
The power governing our choices is not external (as if God were forcing you into something you would not choose) but internal. We choose according to the prevailing inclinations of our own hearts.
To put it more simply: you have the freedom to do what you most want to do. And therein lies the problem. I cannot be anything I want to be. I cannot do anything I want to do. My choices are governed by my heart, and my heart is the heart of a sinner, unless and until it is changed by the intervention of God.
“Free will” is a slippery term, and that is why I prefer not to use it. If you take it to mean that we make real choices for which we are responsible, there is no doubt that this is a gift we have been given. But if it means (as is usually the case) that we have the ability to pursue any path by the power of our choosing, then the Bible would surely correct us and remind us that sin puts this beyond our power. “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” Only when the Son of God sets us free are we “free indeed” (John 8:34, 36).

3. The Adjustment Bureau presents a world in which a sinister power above us moves our lives along a certain path, and true happiness is found in freeing ourselves from this power by exercising the power of our own will. Freedom from the power above is found by the application of the power within.

But what if it’s entirely the other way round? Suppose the dark, sinister power is not above us but within us. What if that dark power has attached itself to you and become part of who you are? What if it has infiltrated your choices so that they are no longer as free as you would like to think, but are weighted and biased against your own best interest? What if the enemy is not above but within?
If that were true, everything would be reversed. Instead of finding freedom from the power above by exercising the power within, your hope would lie in finding freedom from the power within by the intervention of the power above. And that gets to the heart of the gospel.
The problem we face does not lie in God but in us. Our battle is not against a sinister sovereign but against the dark power of sin that lies in our own nature, affecting our thinking, feeling, remembering, imagining, and choosing.
The Adjustment Bureau suggests that you need to make choices that will deliver you from a dark and sinister God. But the real story is about how you need the sovereign God to deliver you from the dark and sinister power that inhabits your choices. The film suggests that your will is supremely good and that God cannot be trusted. But the real story is that God is supremely good and that you dare not trust your own will. The Adjustment Bureau suggests that the best plan for your life is the one that originates with you. The real story is that pleasures beyond anything you can imagine are at God’s right hand, and he is able to deliver you from the self indulgent choices that would keep you from them.
The Adjustment Bureau is a good film worth seeing, but it puts God in the place of man and man in the place of God. Its message needs not so much an adjustment as an inversion.

Colin Smith is senior pastor of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church in Arlington Heights, Illinois and a Council member with The Gospel Coalition. For more resources by Colin Smith visit Unlocking the Bible. 

Gospel Coalition

Considering True Grit

¹ The wicked flee when no one pursues, … Proverbs 28
So begins True Grit.  The rest of it reads “… but the righteous are bold as a lion.”  Sounds like they have true grit.  The unseen narrator, an older Mattie Ross, informs us that a coward named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) shot and killed her father, and ran though no one followed.  Nothing in this life is free, she says, but the grace of God.  Like a lion, she is going to pursue.  The music in the background for much of the movie is the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
The Coen brothers say it is not a remake of the John Wayne classic.  But it pretty much follows the plot line except for a few minor deviations.  It is far more stark, however.  It takes place during winter in the Midwest.  Gone is technicolor, and Glen Campbell singing.  But added is the Coen brothers’ flair for dialogue, and Mattie gives them a great opportunity.  Her delivery reminds me of Holly Hunter in their also brilliant Raising Arizona.
She is also tougher than in the 1969 version.  She spends a night in a coffin.  She is dogged in her persistence in negotiation as well as pursuit.  Before she pursues Chaney, she must pursue Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn.  What we discover is not a woman marked by grace, but by law.  The daughter of a Mason, she is a hard teenager.  Like Javert she is going to pursue Chaney, except she is not the long arm of the law.  This movie is about vengeance, not justice.
With the search for Osama bin Laden over, I couldn’t help but note the parallel.  I’m not sure if this was their intended message, but it sure fits.  Vengeance is accomplished, but the price was high both personally and collaterally.  The starkness of the Coen brothers’ cinematography is matched by the brutality in the movie, particularly Cogburn’s.  While not the best marshal in the territory, he is exactly the one Mattie wants.  Though a drunk, Rooster knows no fear and offers no compassion.  He’d rather bring back a corpse.
Jeff Bridges is not the Duke, but is a better actor than the Duke.  What he lacked in aura, he more than makes up for in acting chops.  The brothers Coen help create the aura of brutishness they need to sell the character.  We first “meet” him in the outhouse behind the saloon.  His testimony at trial seals the deal.  But he is not a monster.  He tries to leave Mattie behind so she is not a part of all that will follow.
Matt Damon is a huge improvement over Glen Campbell as Ranger LaBoeuf.  His is an odd character.  Though much older, he seems to have something for the teenaged Mattie.  He talks a good game, but he seems fairly incompetent when the pressure is on.  He and Rooster don’t get along, and there is much verbal sparring.  Every time they seem to part ways, something happens to bring them back on the same path.
LaBoeuf claims Chaney is very smart, and only acts stupid.  Could have fooled me.  Brolin does a great job playing the mentally challenged villain.  But to bring justice to Chaney, Rooster has to deal with the rest of Lucky Ned Pepper’s (Barry Pepper with really bad teeth) gang.  And that brings us to the most famous scene in the movie, with the lines I love so much.  They keep it intact much to my delight.  The Duke may have done it better, but Bridges pulls it off pretty well.
The brothers Coen excel at telling stories with an odd twist.  They do a great job telling this story.  It is not a pleasant story, but they usually aren’t.  Early on in the movie there is a hanging scene which sets part of the tone.  Sin brings misery, misery that spreads far and wide.  Yet, like another dying outlaw, we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re okay enough and going to get into heaven.  As usual, the Coens provide an interesting glimpse into the human heart and its fallenness.
Caveman Considers

The Most Redeeming Films of 2010

Our film critics are not on Pixar's payroll. Nor are they getting any under-the-table perks from the animation studio. There's a much less sinister reason that a Pixar movie—in this case, Toy Story 3—tops our Most Redeeming Films list for the third consecutive year: We think their movies rock.

It's not just the astonishingly good animation. It's the phenomenal storytelling, the depth of character development, the keen insight into the human condition—even from the perspective of plastic playthings. One of our critics confesses that he cried at the end of TS3 all three times he watched it—and will likely do so the next three times. That's what Pixar films do to us.

As for what makes Woody and Buzz's final adventure so redeeming, there's plenty: The usual themes of love and loyalty run loud and clear. Toys though they may be, the friends are willing to risk their lives for one another. And their owner, Andy, now college-bound, isn't about to relegate his old playtime buddies to a box in the attic, never to be played with again—or at least for decades. Instead, he takes a selfless step in the end, giving Woody and Buzz and the rest a new lease on life—a rebirth, so to speak. It's no surprise that many of the creative types at Pixar are Christians, as they churn out soul-stirring stories year after year. (For the record, Up topped our Most Redeeming list in 2009, as did Wall-E in 2008.)

Our Most Redeeming Films of 2010 list below is precisely that—the year's best movies that include stories of redemption. Several of the films feature characters who are redeemers themselves; all have characters who experience redemption to some degree. Some are feel-good flicks; others, a little less so. Several of the films are rated R and PG-13 and are not intended for young viewers, so please use discretion. But in all of these films, redemption is certainly one of the main characters.

The Most Redeeming Films of 2010

1. Toy Story 3

Directed by Lee Unkrich
(Disney / Pixar) | Rated G

2. The King's Speech

Directed by Tom Hooper
(Weinstein) | Rated R

3. Get Low

Directed by Aaron Schneider
(Sony Pictures Classics) | Rated PG-13

4. True Grit

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
(Paramount) | Rated PG-13

5. Winter's Bone

Directed by Debra Granik
(Roadside Attractions) | Rated R

6. Despicable Me

Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud
(Universal) | Rated PG

7. Tangled

Directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard
(Disney) | Rated PG

8. The Fighter

Directed by David O. Russell
(Paramount) | Rated R

9. Letters to Father Jacob

Directed by Klaus Härö
(Olive Films) | Not Rated

10. Like Dandelion Dust

Directed by Jon Gunn
(Blue Collar Releasing) | Rated PG-13

Honorable mention:

Babies, Biutiful, The Book of Eli, How to Train Your Dragon, Please Give, Rabbit Hole, The Secret of Kells, Waiting for Superman  

Christianity Today

True Grit -The Coens make their first Western — and it's one of the best movies of their career.

True enough: The 2010 movie True Grit—film No. 15 for the Coen Brothers—bears certain resemblance to the 1969 film of the same title, which starred John Wayne and featured some campy singing from Glen Campbell. The new one doesn't have any singing, but it's hard to miss a few parallels. The plot's almost the same as the original. And the character names.

But the Coens insist it's not a remake, and in fact, they haven't seen The Duke's movie since they were kids. It is, rather, a more faithful adaptation of the classic American novel by Charles Portis, which provided a slightly looser basis for the 1969 film. Not everyone quite buys it, but if you see this new version, you'll be convinced that the Coens are as steadfastly true as ever to their own spirit—and the relationship of the original to this one is simply an interesting historical footnote.

The 2010 version really is a more faithful adaptation of the Portis novel—much of the dialogue is lifted straight from the book—and yet it still plays out like the quintessential Coen Brothers. There's a lot of deadpan humor, interspersed with outbursts of violence, and as the bodies stack higher the humor becomes blacker, and more ridiculous. The characters speak in a slightly exaggerated dialect that isn't based on any particular land or geographic locale, but rather takes joy in the sheer sound of the words and rhythmic poetry of the backwoods cadence. And though this is arguably the first true Western for the Coens, the formal similarities—to movies like No Country for Old Men and even The Big Lebowski—are difficult to miss.

Here is a girl who has been forced to grow up too fast. More than once we see her literally sleeping with death surrounding her—she spends a night in a funeral home, sleeping in a coffin with corpses all around, and later she spends the night in a house where there's just been a gunfight, and the bodies are still warm as they lay out on the front porch—but her attitude toward it is dispassionate. It's just part of her life and her world.

So she heads into town, her father's death still fresh on her mind, and seeks to put his affairs in order. When some townspeople try to take advantage of her youth, she informs them in no uncertain terms of her legal rights and the lengths she will go to to see justice served, and she comes out the victor in every one of her run-ins. She wields the law like a sword, unhesitant to sick her attorney on people or turn to the courts for aid when it suits her needs. But we know that, for Mattie, the law is just a means to an end; she is not out for justice, but vengeance, and though she learns that the man who killed her father is wanted in another state for another crime, seeing him brought to justice under those circumstances isn't enough. He must pay for the crimes he committed against the Ross family particularly, or else she simply doesn't care.

So she turns to a gruff, unkempt drunkard of a man named Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). We first see him in a court room and later learn that when he was a younger man he studied law, ultimately deciding it just wasn't for him; like Mattie, he sees the wheels of justice as useful means to an end, but he is unable to actually keep the law in his own life, and so he operates outside it. She deems his unorthodox methods to be a better match for her purposes, and so the two of them set out to find the man who shot her papa.

What might need to be said is this: For all its pleasures, there is a sort of lingering melancholy that makes the movie stay with you. In the theater, I thought it was a zany Coen comedy along the lines of Raising Arizona or Lebowski, but as I reflected on it later I realized it to be a much sadder and wiser film than it initially seems. It's a movie about death, and about justice and revenge. It's also a movie about manhood, as seen through the eyes of a young girl whose only examples of manhood are limited and flawed. (Aren't we all?) We see these men through her eyes, and we see how it shapes her into the woman she becomes. In some ways, the way all this plays out is a little bit subversive for a Western; of course, it's also about as pure and unironic a genre picture as these filmmakers have yet made. In other words, typical Coen Brothers.

Christianity Today Entertainment

270 Movies from 2010 Edited Into One Surprisingly Riviting 6-Minute video

The Chronicles Of Narnia : Voyage of the Dawn Treader - Coming 12/10

Buzz and Woody Saved by an 'Alien Righteousness'

Spoiler Alert! Watching Toy Story 3 for the second time now with my son has given me some pause. In particular, I've been thinking of the sequence where all of the toys are in the incinerator and they're drifting downward in the garbage towards the burning furnace. Realizing their impending doom, the toys stop fighting, because they know that the flow of garbage is too fast and too difficult to escape from. They are trapped, and they are doomed.

Let me just pause to say that watching that scene puts a lump in my throat because I cannot watch this scene and not think of the condition of a lost person - myself included - apart from God's grace. Are not all human beings in this helpless position, ultimately unable to do anything to save themselves from the coming wrath?

So the toys are drifting towards the furnace, about to be burned to smithereens, and Woody bows his head in prayerful repose. Only moments later, after Woody has accepted the reality of his position, does a light shine down upon them from above, and their rescue arrives. The scoop - operated by none other than the Pizza Planet aliens - comes to their rescue, scooping all of them up and delivering them to safety.

I just love the picture because the rescue comes ultimately when the toys are completely helpless. The rescue is not synergistic. There is no 'cooperation' on the part of the rescued. Instead, the scoop drops and rescues the toys, garbage and all, to the glory of the aliens who save them. The toys were rescued by an 'alien righteousness,' if we might call it that.

Why yes, I do think that's funny.
Bring The Books

Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms