Category Archives: Movies

Summer movie critic

Posted by Lee M. in Movies, Personal

Maybe it’s the delayed summer heat forcing us indoors, but my wife and I have recently seen two first-run movies right after they opened, a rarity for us.

I enjoyed Judd Apatow’s Funny People more than I thought I would and more than his other two flicks. Yes, it’s big, sprawling and doesn’t entirely hang together, but the performances and dialogue are winning. It also, as Ross Douthat astutely points out, has something of a conservative “family values” message, but a darker and more realistic one than his other films. And not the kind that makes for easy translation to a political platform.

Another movie I didn’t initially have much enthusiasm for seeing but ended up liking was Julie & Julia. Meryl Streep as Julia Child was fantastic, as you’d expect (as was Stanley Tucci as her husband Paul). Like most of the critics, I foudn Julie Powell’s story less than compelling and would’ve preferred an entire movie dedicated to Julia’s life. (And was any movie more designed to make you hungry after watching it? This vegetarian might not have been able to resist a bowl of Julia’s beef bourguignon had it been presented.)

Really looking forward to District 9, which comes out later this month. If the heat keeps up, I may just see it.

Anvil!

Posted by Lee M. in Metal mayhem, Movies, Music

Went and saw Anvil! The Story of Anvil with some friends tonight (including Camassia). It’s a documentary about a b-list (c-list?) 80s power metal band from Canada that never quite made it big, but never quit either. The movie was terrific and surprisingly affecting.

After the movie I consulted Ian Christe’s magisterial history of heavy metal, Sound of the Beast, and found this amusing nugget:

Power metal bands like Anvil, still dressing in red leather bondage outfits and playing guitar solos with phallus-shaped vibrators, felt the chance for mass popularity slipping through their fingers. They had paid their dues and paved the way for Metallica, but were lost now in the wake of dozens of faster bands. There had been an instant years earlier when Lars Ulrich bragged that his band would someday be bigger than Anvil…. (p. 136)

Here’s “School Love” from Tokyo in 1984, at a rock festival they played with Bon Jovi and the Scorpions, among others, and which seemed to be the peak of their career:

Boldly going

Posted by Lee M. in Movies, Science Fiction

A buddy of mine scored some tickets to an advanced screening of the new Star Trek movie last night, and was kind enough to invite me along. I enjoyed it a lot. I consider myself a fairly serious Trek fan, if not a true, hardcore Trekkie, and I thought it was great fun. It also takes a pretty clever approach to re-booting the series without disregarding past (future?) continuity.

Calling all Trekkies

Posted by Lee M. in Movies, pop culture, Science Fiction

I’m more of a casual Star Trek fan than a hardcore Trekkie (sorry, Trekker), but this Entertainment Weekly article makes J.J. Abram’s (of Lost fame) upcoming reboot of the franchise sound somewhat promising.

I thought this in particular was interesting:

Abrams says he was also drawn to the project because he believed in — and wanted to evangelize — Trek’s unabashed idealism. ”I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,” says Abrams, whose infectiously upbeat energy and disdain for cynicism are among his most marked attributes. (Not for nothing did Abrams give Randy Pausch, the now-late author of The Last Lecture and avowed Trekker, a cameo in the film.) That ethos may seem cornball to an America darkened by a decade’s worth of catastrophe, but after an election season that has seen both presidential nominees run on ”hope” and ”change,” Star Trek just may find itself on the leading wave of a zeitgeist shift — away from bleak, brooding blockbusters and toward the light. ”In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as The Dark Knight is raking in gazillions of dollars, Star Trek stands in stark contrast,” Abrams says. ”It was important to me that optimism be cool again.”

The original Star Trek, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, acted as a metaphor for Kennedy-era Great Frontier-style idealism, while the Next Generation had more of a globalist, multicultural vibe and less Kirk-style unilateralism. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of spin Abrams puts on the culture and politics of the Trek universe.

I Am Legend, human extinction, and theodicy

Posted by Lee M. in Environment, Movies, Science Fiction, Theology & Faith

We watched this the other night and I liked it quite a bit more than I expected. I think using CGI zombies was a mistake, but other than that it was a taut sci-fi/horror thriller with some interesting themes (the fate of humanity, providence, the nature of heroism, etc.). Will Smith nicely toned down his usual wisecracking everyman to deliver a more credible character who is hopeful, determined, despairing, and paranoid at various points.

The movie raised the interesting (to me, anyway) question of what stake God has in the survival of the human race. At one point, Smith’s character recites, in response to another character’s claim that God led her to find him, the statistics of the disease that has wiped out most of humanity: it’s killed 90% of the human race and the remnant is divided between bloodsucking nocturnal zombies and their victims. “There is no God,” he concludes.

Now, this could be just a variation on the problem of evil–why would God allow so much pointless suffering?–but you can also interpret it as a claim of God’s existence being falsified by the (impending) extinction of the human race. And, given that we have pretty good reason to believe that the human race will become extinct at some point in the real world, does this count against belief in God?

After all, science tells us that, as our sun dies out, the Earth will eventually become uninhabitable. Consequently, humanity will die off, assuming we haven’t already exploded, poisoned, cooked, or infected ourselves to extinction (or been destroyed by super-intelligent machines of our own creation) in the meantime. Does this mean that God’s project will be frustrated?

It seems to me that theists can take a variety of approaches to this, with varying degrees of plausibility:

1. God will supernaturally intervene before then to either whisk humanity away to heaven/hell or to remake the Earth prior to our solar system’s demise, effectively overriding the laws of nature as we know them;

2. God will leave the universe to wind down into either a lifeless entropic state or a “big crunch” that will give rise to a new universe, but the souls of dead humanity will be preserved and/or resurrected in heaven/a “new earth” existing in some kind of parallel reality;

3. the human race will, in fact, not go extinct, but will spread out into the universe, possibly becoming the kind of vast, artificial intelligences that believers in “the Singularity” like to talk about;

or

4. humanity will simply go extinct, there is no afterlife, and our existence will be one small part of the vast cosmic tapestry that, perhaps, adds some kind of value to God’s being, as in some forms of process theology.

(There are undoubtedly other possibilities, but these are the ones that occur to me.)

I lean toward something along the lines of option 2, but 4 intrigues me in its rigorously non-anthropocentric outlook. Christian theology, I think it’s safe to say, is still strongly anthropocentric, but how plausible is that? If humanity exists in only a tiny fraction of the space and time that makes up the life of the universe, are we supposed to think that the rest of it is entirely pointless?

A book came out recently called The World Without Us that, according to the website, tries to describe “how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence.” I haven’t read the book, but the idea is worth thinking about: if we disappeared, the world would go on, and most of the universe would be entirely unaffected.

I guess what I want to believe is that sentience does have a special significance and that God will gather in all his creatures–at least the sentient ones–into some final consummation. But, as H. Richard Niebuhr taught us, “radical” monotheism means seeing the world in relation to its Source, not in giving absolute value to any finite part of it, including us.