My Favorite Movies of 2011

9) Puss in Boots

This Shrek spin-off is another strong showing from Dreamworks Animation who, until last year’s How to Train Your Dragon, was churning out a lot of well made but more or less stupid movies. Puss hearkens back to the playful energy of Shrek 2, the fairy tale mash-ups of Shrek (which the sequel had little of at the narrative level), and the classical swashbuckling excitement of The Mask of Zorro. It’s loads of silly fun, and funny to boot. And did I mention it has kitties? Lots and lots of cuddly, mischievous cats and cat accessories and cat jokes? I have an alternate title suggestion: I Can Haz Fairy Tail Adventurz.

8) Captain America

It's what's on the inside that counts.

Like Iron Man in 2008, Captain America exudes stylishly muscular energy. It’s part snappy 30’s period piece, a la director Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer with a bigger budget, and it apes Raiders of the Lost Ark—successfully.  A sinister German general (Hugo Weaving) has taken the fuhrer’s supposed obsession with the occult to it’s logical conclusion: he is building an invincible army by way of an ancient mystical artifact.   Something more than the average soldier is needed to stop him.  For Steve Rogers, a scrawny idealist played by a CG-altered Chris Evans, all he can dream of is serving his country. He is spied out by a government scientist who understands that it is the values—not the strength—that makes the man, and the scrawny boy is transformed by science into a beefed-up hero. The rest of the film is exciting and great and of course good wins, but I think that this movie was noteworthy (and stands out among the Marvel canon) for taking the best of classical American ideals about self-sacrifice and personal nobility and embodying them so un-ironically in the person of Steve Rogers. I don’t consider Captain America propaganda, but it made even this skeptic feel a little patriotic.

7) The Muppets

The lovers, the dreamers...

A passion project of the lovable man-child Jason Segel, The Muppets is a warm, snarky nostagia trip through the days when children’s films weren’t dominated by pop-abusing CG rodents. Segel and his muppet brother search out Kermit once they learn Muppet Studios is to be demolished, meaning of course that everyone has to get back together to sing songs, tell jokes and be flummoxed with each other so it doesn’t get torn down. But the journey is the destination here, and the songs are wondrously joyous and winking, sparkling with the witty verve of Kiwi folk-comedy lyricist Brett Mckenzie of Flight of the Conchords. It brings heart back into the stale contemporary mix of prat falls and meta humor, affirming friendship, loyalty and family even among the most ragtag of misfits.

6) Source Code

Sisyphus much?

If you can imagine Groundhog Day and The Matrix having a love-child, that begins to get at what Source Code is like. Jake Gyllenhal plays an army veteran recruited without consent to relive the last eight minutes of another man’s life, which was ended by a train bombing that killed him and hundreds of others. Each iteration of the events is exactly the same except for how Gyllenhal’s character chooses to influence them, using his past experiences of that same eight minutes to his advantage in order to ferret out clues about the bomb and bomber. Unlike The Matrix, it wears its sci-fi conceits lightly, focusing on the brisk action of the investigation and Gyllenhal’s interest in the friend of his surrogate body played by Michelle Monaghan. It’s a smart, fun movie.

5) Attack the Block

"This is MY house.  I have to defend it!"

Attack comes from one of the minds (Joe Cornish) closely involved with the Britain-born genre mash-ups Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Here the setting isn’t suburban (Shaun) or country (Fuzz), but the block—i.e., the London projects. It’s a wickedly sly turn on E.T.—rather than strike up a friendship with a strange creature, these kids just kill the first alien when it gets aggressive, inciting the wrath of its cohorts and setting up the rest of the film. On the block, aliens don’t bear the Spielbergian hope of Close Encounters, but the Spielbergian splatter of Jaws and Jurassic Park.  It's an exciting but grim movie.  Writer/Director Cornish labors to root the proceedings in an almost anthropological sense of place and dialogue—my friend and I didn’t always understand what these poor kids from the block were saying—yet finds nobility and strength in these scrappy survivors for whom an alien invasion is just another setback in an already too cruel world.

4) Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2

Only a true heir of Godric Gryffindor could have received it.

Either the Harry Potter series took six films (and director Yates 2) before it found its cinematic vocabulary (Prisoner of Azkaban notwithstanding), or Rowling wrote Deathly Hallows in a more classically cinematic-epic style. I don’t think any of the Harry Potter films are Great, capital G, before Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1—a chilling, harrowing and lonely film carrying the emotional freight of its several predecessors. In Part 2, All the dark undercurrents of the series explode in a fantastic cataclysm of good and evil. The villains are primal and terrifying, the heroes desperate and noble. It’s visually fantastic and a satisfying conclusion to the series in terms of emotional closure with the beloved characters.

3) Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Animation auteur Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) has worked a marvelous kind of magic with the fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise. Its pure escapist fluff, but it’s the crème brulee of fluff. While the Bourne series had a stark, verite vibe (which the Bond revivals attempted to reproduce), Bird lets none of the post-9/11 spy seriousness weigh down the flat out awesomeness of the action. The plot is, as always disposable, but the set pieces are engrossing, multilayered, kinetic, yet never confusing. This was the most fun I had at the movies this year.

2) Midnight in Paris

Le sigh.

Owen Wilson stars as yet another stand-in for writer-director Woody Allen’s trademark persona of nervous hand-wringing, vulnerability and literary intellect. He’s a hack Hollywood script-writer vacationing in Paris with his bracing fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her in-laws.  He's also attempting to write a novel.* Needing escape from the blunt pragmatism of his co-travelers (who also include the trademark Allen foil: a pontificating pseudo-intellectual who doubles as an apparent romantic competitor) he starts taking midnight walks in the city of love where he is magically transported to the golden era of his imagination: 1920’s Paris and the Lost Generation. He rubs elbows with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Dali—and falls for a sweet but wounded French girl played by the beautiful Marion Cotillard. The movie critiques Wilson’s romanticist escapism, but ultimately celebrates romantic adventure: deep feeling and authenticity empowering one to take responsibility and face life, as Hemingway would have it, with grace and courage.

1) Certified Copy

Certified Copy depicts a vulnerable woman (Juliette Binoche) eager to love a cerebral and reserved academic (William Shimell) lecturing in the small Italian town where she runs an antiques shop. He preaches post-values aesthetics like an artless Oscar Wilde, and has written a book about collapsing the distance between original art and copies. But his heady hedonism seems untenable to Binoche’s single mom, and as their conflict increases over the course of one day in Italy (as their conversation spills from Italian into French into English and back to Italian over and over again), it becomes unclear whether they’re in a tentative courtship or a struggling marriage. The film takes on a moebius strip like quality, and the viewer’s perspective determines the meaning of their relationship. It sounds like a ponderous mess, but on screen the performances are fully, wonderfully human.

Special Mention
Hugo
Filmmaking legend Martin Scorsese’s first “family” film, Hugo is a dazzling picture nostalgic for the same time and place Owen Wilson pined for in Midnight in Paris. It has the all the chilling misery of a Dickensian fable, but the cathartic levity is missing. You’ll see no other film like it from the last year, and few as technically amazing. However, whereas the best family films have big-hearted uplift, Scorsese identifies overmuch with the lonely orphan of the streets. The film’s focus on the movie magic of George Melies is a pale comfort to the boy’s palpable losses.

Most visually spectacular
Tintin
Spielberg and Weta Digital have outdone their motion capture forebears (moreso Zemeckis than Cameron) and created a living, breathing world that has merged human and cartoon while somehow skipping the uncanny valley altogether. Yet I didn’t love the film because, though it was spectacular and entertaining, the whole show felt thin. Perhaps in working so hard to digitally simulate the appearance of human characters, the filmmakers forgot to actually write human characters.

Best Acting
Certified Copy
Juliette Binoche steals the show with a nuanced and vulnerable character without seeming to be acting at all. Her co-star, Shimell, who shares almost all of his screen time with her, achieves the difficult task of crafting an equally enfleshed character alongside her. Without their performances the film would be a cute, Tarantino-wannabe narrative game.

Best Music
Midnight in Paris
Classical, winsome and romantic.

Most Obtuse (and overrated?)
Tree of Life
This is the film on everyone’s top ten this year (along, mostly, with Certified Copy), but I’m not of the opinion that filmwatching means I have to labor diligently to piece together what a film is about. Tree of Life has some strong performances from Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. The vignettes showing mid-century life in the Texan suburbs are fascinating and deftly realized. And I’ll concede the film’s beauty and ambition—it showed me some things I’d never quite seen in a movie before (contemplative dinosaurs, for a start). Ultimately, though, the film was lost on me. There’s something to be said for the narratival directness of a movie like War Horse, which isn’t a great film but is certainly a good one. But hey, sometimes it’s go big or go home.

Most wanted (to see)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Drive
Cave of Forgotten Dreams

*The novel he's working on is about a man running an antique shop like the one Juliette Binoche is in Certified Copy. And Hugo is wistful for early 1900s Paris just like Marion Cotillard's character in Midnight in Paris. I guess Paris was hot at the producers' pitch meetings a year or two ago.

Bible ≠ Jesus

"In Jesus alone do the divine and human appear in complete hypostatic union. Jesus is therefore the Word of God absolutely. The Bible is the Word of God relatively. Yet the only vehicle possessed by the church for knowing the Incarnate Word is the written Word of the Bible. Church and Bible are found to be in a continuous and never-ending dialogue whose purpose is to discover the character of the Word of God with ever more faithfulness."

~ Charles Price in F.H. Borsch, ed., The Bible's Authority in Today's Church (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1993), 71.

Nimble, Futile Wit

"What good was it for me that my nimble wit could run through those studies and disentangle all those knotty volumes, without help from a human teacher, since all the while I was erring so hatefully and with such sacrilege as far as the right substance of pious faith was concerned? And what kind of burden was it for thy little ones to have a far slower wit, since they did not use it to depart from thee, and since they remained in the nest of thy Church to become safely fledged and to nourish the wings of love by the food of a sound faith."

~St. Augustine, Confessions, IV:31

Advent Reflections II: Exile & Promise in Isaiah

Obviously a full treatment of exile & promise throughout the whole book of Isaiah could fill several volumes. I have been looking at chapters 40-44 today (which could also serve as material for much more than a blog post) and thinking about them as an Advent text.

This morning was the first time I've turned on Handel's Messiah this year. The oratorio begins with Yahweh calling his prophet to declare comfort to his people. This is as good a thematic distillation of Advent as any--God's chosen people in pain, waiting for his promised comfort to come to fruition. Handel made a canny choice in his prologue, apparently grasping the primal appeal of the Messiah--comfort. It recalls Christ's promise of rest for the weary, of the Father's pledge to wipe every tear from our eyes. This comfort is best understood not as an explanation for the existence evil, but rather a concrete response to it. The over-arching theme of Scripture shouts, "God has acted for us!" This was my inspiration for opening my bible to Isaiah 40 today.

As I was reading through the following chapters, it struck me how knowing just a little context about the material illuminated a clear narrative unity. I have most often heard different selections from these chapters preached or expounded as though they were a jumble of disparate oracles to be applied in ways separate from each other. Rather, they fit together to address Israel's exile to Babylon, the idolatry that led her there and the respite Yahweh desired to bring to his people. Once I picked up on this in the first chapter, I was fascinated and kept reading.

God's prophetic purpose here seems to be to encourage his people in exile to continue their devotion to him despite their history of idolatry and their enslavement to the pagan Babylonians. Like the apocalypses of Daniel and Revelation, Isaiah wants to turn the tables on the evil empire: it is not Babylon, her idols and her "king of kings" that are in charge. Yahweh is in charge. The LORD is king.

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? ...It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing" (40:21-22).

God is in charge and Israel, though they have been judged and exiled, remains his people. "'I have chosen you and not cast you off'; do not fear, for I am with you" (41:9-10). In theology we call this "election" or "predestination" (I prefer the former); I think it is better to forget the controversial baggage of these terms and grasp them with warm-hearted enthusiasm as the bounteous kindness of God, who called forth a people for himself not because they were special but because he would make them special. It is thereby that we can understand how God can exile Israel yet remain faithful to her, how the whole story of the Old Testament proclaims the grace of the God who was faithful to an unfaithful people. We tell ourselves this story not to say we are better than the Jews, but because we should know that we are no better than them (cf. Rom. 11:17-24).

Israel, as a sort of test-case for humanity at large, showed through its unfaithfulness that the human race was unable to answer and resolve the problem of evil and the tragedy of our alienation from God. God's response comes in 41:25 and following--a divinely-called deliverer, a "servant". Cyrus of Persia (45:1) would in the nearer future physically deliver back to her homeland between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, yet they would remain dominated by foreign and pagan powers (read your Apocrypha, children) and finally Christ would come to enact the return from exile which no one expected: "This is the king of the Jews" (Mk. 15:26).

Yahweh makes it clear, however, that Israel's purpose extends beyond serving as "Exhibit A" in his case against humanity. "You are my witnesses," he declares, "and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (43:10). Israel not only proved humanity's sinister frailty, but also learned the strength of God's steadfast love: "I, I am Yahweh, and besides me there is no savior" (43:11). Israel's long and winding road formed a people who preserved a key theological insight for recognizing God in the flesh: only God can save. Their past, namely the deliverance from Egypt (43:16-17), points to the future:

"I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert" (43:18-19).

The first glimmer of hope.

Here is the comfort of Israel: God has saved, God will save. "O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me" (44:21). So the people of God, despite their dire situation in Babylon, will not benefit from idols, from man-made contrivances masquerading as saviors. They need not believe they are abandoned to the cruelty of Babylon. "Return to me," he pleads, "for I have redeemed you" (44:22). God, for Israel. By extension, God for the world.

The Advent season is a time for us to remember that while Christ has effectively brought an end to exile through his death and resurrection the world yet remains full of sin, suffering and the evil powers that foster them. In the face of loss, economic hardship, sickness or whatever might trouble us, it will always be tempting to believe that "Babylon" is in charge. When contemporary society frames Christianity as bigoted or irrelevant or nonsensical, it is tempting to believe that the idols of money, sex and power are what really count. Advent is a time to remember that affirming the lordship of Christ does not mean escaping from the very real problems which surround us.

I am reminded again of Simeon and Anna at the beginning of Luke, two faithful Israelites who lived long lives only to be introduced to the infant Savior in their twilight years. They are models for the people of God living among powerful idolaters (in their day the Romans and their Herodian puppet kings). We too stand between God's past and God's future, remembering the vindication of the resurrection yet groaning in anguish until his glorious return.

Try and hear these oft-cited words with me as Anna and Simeon would have heard them: as people standing in the painful middle between God's promises and their fulfillment.

"Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
‘My way is hidden from the Yahweh,
and my right is disregarded by my God’?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Yahweh is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint" (40:27-31).

Initial Advent Reflections

I pulled out my bible at the airport yesterday, and turned to the beginning of Luke. I figured it was a good place to start, what with Advent about to begin and everything. Of the gospels, Luke seems to me to have the strongest sense of exile and its coming end, especially because of the Magnificat and the story of Simeon and Anna.

Upon meeting the infant Jesus, Simeon says to the Lord:

"Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation... a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to you people Israel" (Luke 2:29-30, 32).

It's the poignant exultation of a faithful Israelite which expresses both the weariness and relief of a people who had been living for centuries with the central hope of their religious-ethnic identity in shambles. It was like if there had been several centuries between the middle and end of Avatar. The word for this in biblical parlance is "barrenness." It specifically refers to pregnancy and the inability of a woman to conceive, and its use has been a part of Israel's history since its beginning in Abraham. Everything in God's redemptive action can be summarized in that story, where the word of the Lord came to a barren couple with the promise of a child.

When God's people found themselves in the prolonged, dire barrenness of exile, God didn't answer them with fanfare and a quick fix, but rather with furtive promises on the edge of their corporate consciousness. The end to his centuries-long silence comes to Zechariah in Luke chapter one, promising the coming herald John the Baptist who would "make ready a people prepared for the Lord" (Lk 1:17). Such a situation rewards the careful contemplation of Mary, rather than the casual inattentiveness of nominal religion. It is because of her silent pondering of the words and events she witnesses that she is able to burst into the rich and theologically-reflective song of the Magnificat:

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant... His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation... He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty... according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever" (Lk 1:46-55).

It's a magnificent summary of God's redemptive history with Israel made present tense and realized in the person of Jesus. Mary serves as our exemplary model in these early chapters, standing alongside Simeon and Anna as properly comprehending and responding to the arrival of Christ.

For those of us for whom salvation seems far off, or hidden, or even non-existent, these stories from the beginning of Luke call us to quiet ourselves and listen. Because even in our hour of darkest need, we see that God may very well not come to us in the way we would like him to, but on his own terms. In a way that asks us to be faithful long-term, like Simeon and Anna, even when God's answer feels like it will never come. I have my own struggles with hopelessness, despair and frank impatience with God's timing; these stories encourage me to seek the hope of Christ even when I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not about insisting to oneself "One day all my problems will be solved and my hopes fulfilled!", but, rather, that there is a way of being faithful in times of exile, there is a living God waiting for us on the edges of our awareness--waiting for us to pull away from despair and towards the groaning expectation of those who put their trust in him.

"Sing, O barren one who did not bear; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate woman will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord. Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left, and your descendants will possess the nations and will settle the desolate towns. Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed; do not be discouraged, for you will not suffer disgrace; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the disgrace of you widowhood you will remember no more. For you Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like the wife of a man's youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer" (Isaiah 54:1-8).