Movie: Faith

 

Seeing the movie-poster-like image for this movie Faith on Amazon, and reading the blurb for it on the Amazon page, my thought was that I would be watching a pretty typical Christian movie. I’ll admit that I was surprised at what the movie was really like, and with a few caveats it was a nice surprise.

Summary

It’s not a complicated story. A farmer loses his teenage son to what seems to have been a drug and alcohol overdose suicide, and everything falls apart around him. Some people close to him try to help, but real solutions and answers are never to be found..

Cringe

Very little. The movie keeps a good level of realism throughout, and either avoids easy answer, or seems to show that the easy answers just aren’t working.

Acting

Not bad. There is no hysterical over-acting. The actor for the main character keeps him very grounded as a man who does not easily show his feelings.

Not Easy

This isn’t an easy movie to analyze, perhaps because it’s not a very typical movie, and certainly not a typical Christian movie.

There are essentially four main characters in this movie: the farmer, his wife, his father who lives a bit away but travels to seem him, and the pastor of his church. I’ll focus here on the pastor and father, and how they relate to the farmer.

In many ways, they are both shown to be good characters. They obviously care about the farmer after the son’s death. The pastor is there immediately after the son’s death, trying to comfort the farmer and his wife. The father shows up a bit later, but when he learns what happened, he makes a trip that is obviously difficult for him to be there for his son (the farmer’s wife has left to be her own parents at this time).

So, right at first, these two characters are put in a mostly good light.

But as the movie goes along, there is a change, and a subtle one. I’m not sure how much time goes by in the movie, though there were a few things said that hinted that it was a few weeks. The farmer has been missing services at the church, not to mention doing some other stupid stuff, so finally the pastor and father have an intervention with the farmer. Their basic message is essentially “Get back into church”, although I wonder if there wasn’t also a subtext under that, “Get back to normal”.

So, he does. With his father, he goes to the church. It’s a small-town charismatic church, complete with speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and a pastor more concerned with what he feels like God is saying than with what God has actually said in the Bible. The farmer gets involved, he goes down to the front, the pastor lays a hand on his head, and he goes to the floor. And while the usual kind of madness of such sermons is going on all around him, the farmer stares up at the ceiling, and it’s plain that he feels nothing. He says all the right things to his father, he goes through all the motions for the pastor, and it’s all empty to him.

And that’s pretty much where the movie ends.

What Is This Movie About?

So, what kind of movie is this?

Is it a Christian movie? Is it some kind of anti-Christian movie? Is it a movie that is Christian while also being critical of some aspects of the church? It’s not the typical fare in Christian movies, but nor is it what I would expect in the more virulent anti-Christian or ex-Christian type of story.

Did the farmer give up on his faith? I can’t say for sure. Did he keep his faith? Again, I’m not sure.

This isn’t a preachy movie, and that could be good as well a bad. There is no point where a character tells the viewer the overall message of the movie. There is some good that could be said for that. Still, when the viewer is told to just draw their own conclusions from a story, there is the chance that the viewer may draw a very wrong and even morally offensive conclusion from it.

Most stories don’t go that route. There are often clear divides between the good guys and bad guys. There is a lot of good to be said for this demarcation. Stories are meant to convey messages, to tell the viewer or the reader or the listener something. For all that, let’s say, a villain like The Joker may want to say that he and Batman are so very much alike and have so much in common, we know that even though those similarities may be true, there are even greater differences, and these differences are why those two characters are constantly at war with each other.

Does that make what Faith does wrong? No. If anything, it makes for a fascinating movie and a different kind of ending. But it can lead to a movie like this having a potentially confusing ending. It’s a risk, but if that’s the kind of movie you want to make, then fine.

Where Is Jesus?

Once again, we have a movie that could be considered Christian while also ignoring the Christ that is the reality behind Christian.

Conclusion

There is some stuff in this movie that the normal Christian movie viewer will not like, outside of the almost agnostic nature of the story's end. There is some language, especially in the first few minutes. There is a bedroom scene between the farmer and his wife. The farmer gets pretty heavily into alcohol. I’m not one who thinks Christians should never drink alcohol, but the farmer’s drinking was too much and for bad reasons. To be fair, I don’t think the movie was trying to glamourize his drinking, but was only showing him going downhill in his grief.

Understand that this isn’t a typical Christian movie, which is mostly good but with a bit of questionable stuff, too. Still, I think I can recommend it. But expect to watch a movie that is not light and fluffy, that will not offer cheap and silly answers, and that will make you think.

Movie: Chariots of Fire

 

I remembered watching this quite a few years ago, but I couldn’t remember it well, and probably understood it even less well. Decided to give it another look, and also thought it might be a good one to write about for this blog.

Summary

This is one of those movies that’s based on real-life events and real-life people, though the movie makers did take liberties with the events. It’s set in England and Scotland in the years after World War I, then goes to France for the 2024 Olympic games.

This is an unusual movie, because it is about two different characters, each of equal importance to the overall story, and they do not even spend much time together on the screen.

The two men are Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell. They are both training to be a part of England’s 2024 Olympic track team, yet both men live very different lives and have very different reasons for wanting to compete. Abrahams is a Jewish man, and he fights against discrimination he experiences at his college. Liddell is the son of Christian missionaries who plans to return to the mission field, but also has a great desire to run and compete.

Cringe

Very little, if any. This was a very well-made movie, and it is little wonder it was so popular at the time it was released.

Interesting Aspects

The movie does well in balancing the stories of each of its two main characters. I would guess this was a difficult thing to do. Most movies I can think of usually have one main character, or even if there is a group of character one of them will be the main focus or the center of the story, with the others in the group maybe getting a brief bit of focus. Time is a big issue when telling a story in a movie, and the time limit just won’t allow for great development for all characters.

And it’s not even as if Abtahams and Liddell were protagonst/antagonist. There is a bit or rivalry, at least at the one point where they race each other, but it’s not a central conflict,, and at the Olumpics they don’t race against each other (at least in the movie; in real life, they did both run together in one race during the Olympics). They each have their own reasons for running, and they aren’t the normal cliche reasons we might expect from most such sport movies.

And this lack of conflict between the two main characters is one thing that sets this movie apart. It isn’t that there is no conflict for each character, but that their conflicts have different sources.

Abrahams sees himself as an outsider to the society he wants to get into. As he tells Sybil at their first dinner date, “They lead me to water, but they won’t let me drink”.He sees his Jewish heritage and race as something people use against him, seeing him as unfit and unacceptable solely because he’s Jewish. Yet we also see how his fellow students seem to accept him with little reservation, he seems to fit right in with them. He sees his running as a way of showing that he’s worthy of such high society, that he can fit in with them. As he says before his last Olympic race, this race is so important to him that’s as if winning it would “justify me whole existence”.

Liddell fights with trying to reconcile his love of running with his duties as a Christian minister and his desire to return to the mission field in China. When he increases his running practice to compete for the Olympics, his sister thinks that he’s losing focus, that his life has become more about running than about God. And, as he’s boarding the boat to go to France for the games, he learns that his races are to be held on a Sunday, a day he considers the Sabbath, and to his mind it would be sinful for him to run on a day to be devoted to God.

So, the story has two very different men pursuing the same goal for two very different reasons, and it doesn’t portray one is a bad light and the other in a good way. It makes the movie more thought-provoking than a normal good guy/bad guy story.

Sabbath

I know this is a thorny issue. My own views are that the Sabbath laws are not in effect for the church. For one thing, Sunday itself is not the original sabbath, as it’s not the seventh day of the week. And while there are indications in the New Testament that the churches regularly met on the day we call Sunday, there is no hint that this Sunday was considered some kind of Sabbath.

But I’m also of the opinion that it’s not my place to judge anyone who does want to keep a Sunday or a Sabbath, or keep Sunday as a Sabbath. Let the one who keeps Sunday in that way do so to the Lord, and let the one who doesn’t keep Sunday in that way also do so to the Lord. I offer no judgment against either side.

Stand Fast

So, I can respect Liddell’s decision to not run on Sunday, even if I may not completely agree with his theological reasons. If he considered racing on a Sunday to be sinful, then he was wise to not race.

I don’t think this movie could be considered a “Christian” movie, yet it portrays Liddell with a great amount of respect, as a man who was serious about his beliefs, and even willing to upset people, even important and powerful people, to stand by his convictions.

Btw in looking up some info about Liddell, it seems the movie took some liberties with this part of the story. In the movie, Liddell doesn’t learn about the races being scheduled for Sunday until he’s boarding the boat to go the games. But from a few sources, it seems that he knew about this scheduling problem beforehand, and decided to qualify instead for another race that wasn’t on Sunday.

At about the 26 minute mark,there is a scene worth noting. Liddell has run and won a race. It’s a rainy day, and after the race people are gathered on the track itself, several holding umbrellas, listening to Liddell give something like an inspirational speech or a sermonette.

Still, I wish this scene had been a bit better in one way. He’s speaking about faith, but he’s speaking as if the people need to look inside themselves, instead of to what God has spoken to us in the Bible. I don’t know how true this sermonette is to what the real Liddell would have spoken on such occasions.

Much later in the movie, at about 1:35, there is another scene. On the Sunday of the races, Liddell is in a church, a Church of Scotland located in Paris, and he’s reading a passage from Isaiah 40.

Learning

Christian movie makers would do well, I think, to watch this movie and try to learn what these movie makers did right. How can a Christian character be shown holding true to his conviction without it becoming cringy or even obnoxious? That Liddell stood his ground without making a bore of himself is one thing worth thinking about.

The point is, we can make movies that convey the Christian messages we want to convey, and we can do it without being preach or cringy or annoying. We can make good movies, movies that portray Christians as real people with real hardship and real obstacles. We can show them having real hardships, and we can have them deal these hardships through a quiet and solid faith, one that may well believe in miracles but also knows God can work things for our good even if His work on us does not involve miracles.

It’ll take effort. But that effort will be worth while, if our Christian movies can escape this horrid cringe-filled place they all too often occupy.

Conclusion

I think I could write a lot more about this movie, these is a lot in it worth thinking about. That’s probably why it’s one of the best movies ever made, and I’ll give it a solid and hearty recommendation.

Series: Snow White with the Red Hair

 Although I intend to focus mostly on Christian entertainment, I don’t want to do so exclusively. For one thing, a lot of Christian entertainment is bad, even painfully bad. Why would I want to watch or listen to or read just that kind of stuff?

In examining good entertainment that doesn’t fit the category of “Christian”, I hope to do a couple of things: keep my own sanity after enduring some of the painful Christian stuff to review, and also to see how some things can simply be done better.

So, enough of all that, let’s get on with it…

This is one of my favorite anime series, as well as manga series (the story in the manga has now gone well past where the anime ended, but I’ll focus here on the anime).

Summary

Shirayuki is a young lady who works as an herbalist. When she receives some unwanted attention because of her hair, she has to flee to a neighboring country. She falls in with a prince of this new country, who treats her with respect and honor. Their friendship grows over time and a few adventures, and finally grows into a romance.

Yes, this is very much a romance story. While it does have some moments of action and fighting, it’s most a slowly unfolding love story.

Why this series?

A lot of Christian movies revolve around marriages, marital strife and restoration. In Daniel’s Lot, for example, perhaps the biggest conflict was between Daniel and his wife Christina. As such, then, it’s good to see examples in stories of good relationships, ones that are models of how a couple should treat each other.

Such examples are precious few.

Snow White with the Red Hair, despite its clunky name translation, is one of those precious few.

Respect and honor

I used those two words in the summary; now, to try to show what I mean.

I’ll start with a contrast, one between Prince Raj, whose unwanted attentions were the reason Shirayuki left her home country, and Prince Zen.

In the first episode, Raj treats Shirayuki as an object, a thing he wants, and what she wants is of no concern to him (if you want a tad bit of a spoiler, he gets better later in the story); Zen, when he meets Shirayuki and learns he can trust her (there first meeting is a bit awkward), sees her as a person, a woman to be protected from Raj’s rather crass attentions.

So, Zen treats her with respect, while Raj doesn’t. It’s a nice and effective contrast.

A few episodes later, Shirayuki is taking a test to become a court herbalist. The test involves overseeing a small green house. The lead court herbalist tells Zen that as a prince all he has to do is say the word, and Shirayuki will be accepted into the job she’s taking the test for.

Zen has seen Shirayuki study and prepare for this test, and knows her well enough to know that she would not want to be accepted into the position if she has not earned the position by passing the test. He honors her and her efforts by not sticking his nose in and trying to influence the outcome.

One of the big ways Zen shows his respect of Shirayuki is a bit subtler. In the first few episodes, Zen is a bit of a slacker when it comes to the paperwork aspects of his position as a prince. He’s someone who wants to be active, not sitting at a desk pouring over one paper after another. He wants to know for himself how the people in his country live, and while that is a good thing, it’s also an excuse he uses to ditch his responsibilities.

But seeing Shirayuki’s efforts causes him to see his own actions in a different way, and to decide to do better. It’s not something that’s made a big deal over, but it’s a nice bit of character development, a way of showing her influence on him, and how he learns from her.

I’m making a lot here of Zen showing honor and respect for Shirayuki, and while I’d say that’s what the story itself shows, it’s also something I want to emphasize. It’s pretty clear early in the series that Zen is the one who is drawn or attracted to Shirayuki in a way that will lead to romantic love. Shirayuki is in a new place, and trying to find her own place in that new place, so while she wants to in some way support Zen in his work and his position, it isn’t until later in the series that she starts taking her own growing feelings into account.

But I think it’s important that Zen showed so much honor and respect to Shirayuki. He respected her. He honored her efforts, and her expertise. He saw her as a person. He saw her as more than just a hair color, or a pretty face, or a beautiful object to be obtained and devoured, or in even crasser ways I’ll not go into here. In the context of this story, this gives her a measure of freedom and security to adjust to a new life, to continue learning and growing, and to prove herself capable.

I know real life is more complicated than any story, but for us guys, this respect and honor is a good place to start.

To try to strengthen this point, here’s another contrast, this time with Daniel’s Lot. One of the big problems between Daniel and Christina early in the movie is that neither one respects the other; quite the contrary, they both blame the other for their current struggling state. One of the movie’s failings is that this lack of respect is not really dealt with. Daniel gives a kind of general apology at one point toward the end, but that’s it. Even though the movie tries to end with them being together again, I don’t see much reason to hope. Daniel acts better because his circumstances are better, but if things go bad again, I saw no reason to think he wouldn’t act just the same way he had before; if anything, he may act worse, because now he thinks God is always on his side no matter what, he’s the one whose faith (or what the movie tried to portray as faith) was proven right, he’s the spiritual giant that God rewarded. If things go wrong again, it won’t be his fault.

To put it another way, I saw no reason to think that Daniel had any more respect and honor for Christina at the end of the movie than he did at the beginning.

Conclusion

A couple of years ago, I wrote a longer article for this series, and Beneath the Tangles accepted it and posted it on their side. You can find it here. 

Like I said at the first, Snow White with the Red Hair is a favorite of mine, and one I recommend strongly.

NF: How Could You Leave Us

I know that I’ve called this blog The Cringe, but for this first entry, I want to look at something that is good.

Cringe

I’ve listened to several of NF’s songs, and one word I not use to describe any of them is “cringe”, and that is especially true of this one.

Summary

The rapper NF performs a song about losing his mother to drugs, and about growing up with a mother he barely knows because of her addiction. There is nothing lite or frivolous about this song.

Thoughts

Many people have posted reaction videos while listening to this song, giving their insights and responses to what NF is saying. I’d recommend finding some of them, to see how much this song, and others he’s written and performed, have affected people.

What is the difference between “cringey” and “moving”? Between “painful” is the sense of it being cheesy and “painful” in the sense that it’s too real?

If most Christian musicians or song writers did a song about mother, either a specific mother or mothers in general, it would be much different than NF’s song. To revel a bit in alliteration, it would be soppy, sappy, syrupy, and saccharine. Heaven pays extra special attention when mother prays, or memories of mother draw the wayward back home. Mother would become the ultimate saint, perhaps no longer even a little lower than the angels.

It would be almost unheard of for a Christian music artists to put out a song like NF’s, where the mother is seen as the one in the wrong, where the mother is the one with the big faults, where the mother is the one not there for her children, and where the son is almost in a rage, grieving and accusing, remembering times she should been there but wasn’t, knowing that she will not be there when he has his own children because her addiction finally and ultimately took her from him.

In the world of yippy-skippy Christian music, or of yippy-skippy Christian entertainment in general, this song is an anomaly; rather, NF is an anomaly, and one much needed.

But it’s one thing to say all that, to point to NF and this song as good examples, but what does that mean?

I don’t think it means we need to be grittier. That kind of thing can be just as fake as yippy-skippy. Also, I know there are movies and shows that I like that aren’t “gritty”, some of them are not necessarily all that realistic, but they still say something worth hearing or seeing.

I don’t think it means we need to focus only on the ugly side of life. Again, that can be just as fake. And we know life isn’t all ugly.

I don’t think it means we need to downplay hope.

Let me give an example of something that may show what I’m trying to say.

When we arrive at Good Friday, it’s becoming common to want to rush past that day, to saying something like “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming”. We seem to want to get past the bad stuff, the bad feelings, and get on to the good stuff. We, we church people who at least claim to be Christians, at least those of us in the US or the west in general, don’t want to deal with the bad, the ugly, the terrible. We have, for example, created a theology that says that God wants us to have only good things, that he wants us to be healthy and wealthy, that he wants us to have nice families, that he wants us to feel fulfilled and happy, and all we have to do is say the right words, repeat affirmations to ourselves over and over and over, or do some other magical act to make it all work for us.

If we acknowledge Christian persecution, it is usually “over there”, or maybe when we want to feel like we’re being brave and heroic, we point to some little difficulty in the culture, maybe some cashier at a store who says “Happy Holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas”, and we paint that as if it’s real persecution.

We are silly and trite. It is any wonder that we can only produce silly and trite entertainment, and that we only want to watch and listen to silly and trite entertainment?

So, instead of jumping past Good Friday to get to Easter Sunday, let’s stay for a while in Friday. Let Good Friday have its fair 24 hours of our lives.

Let’s remember that God killed God. God the Father sacrificed God the Son, and God the Son willingly laid down his life as a sacrifice, as the Lamb of God sent to take away the sins of the world.

Let’s have at least one day of solemnity, of sober-mindedness, even of mourning. Let’s set aside this need to jump to the next good time. Let’s remember with sober gratitude the sacrifice of Jesus. If we do that, we may find that Easter will be all the more meaningful.

What makes a lot of Christian entertainment cringey is this need to get past the bad to get to the good. Even if the bad is acknowledged, it’s more to get to some quick hyper-spiritual answer, or teach some kind of lesson, or maybe get to a “Things are going bad for me so I’ll pray and everything will work out fine for me” resolution.

We can do better.

Ponderings

Keep it real: Of course, NF makes what he calls Real Music, and this song seems about as real as entertainment gets. Even for sci-fi and fantasy types of stories, there is a real-ness that can give those stories a bit of extra impact.

Emotions vs emotionalism: This is a distinction I heard in a Martin Lloyd Jones sermon, and it sums up the thing that often bugs me with entertainment, especially Christian entertainment.

Emotions are good, they have their place; emotionalism is just manipulation, a cheap reaction.

What’s the difference?

One big difference I see is this: emotions are linked to the mind, they are an informed response to what we’re learning; emotionalism tries to by-pass the mind to play at the heart.

NF’s song is highly emotional, but it’s emotional because it’s very thought-provoking. It’s not a detached philosophical musing about seeing a parent make choices that are both self-destructive and also damaging to her children, but it’s also not some kind maudlin pack of cheap sentiments and empty words meant to stir feelings without also causing self-reflection.

Get your theology in order: This relates to the first point, and it’s not something I’m really taking away from this song. I know little about NF. I know he considers him either a Christian rapper or a Christian who raps, and I can guess that his beliefs are not along the lines of “God wants us to be happy and never feel bad”, because he does have songs about his own bad feelings and struggles with mental issues, but that’s about the most I can about his beliefs.

Sound theology is real, sound theology is real life. The Christian is the last person who should not be able to face reality. Sound doctrine can help the Christian face the bad—ours sinfulness, the effects of sin on the world, and even the effects of sin on many people’s afterlife—and the good—God’s blessings and mercy, the gospel of Christ dying for our sins, and salvation from sin and Hell.

This is one reason I have little patience with fairy-tale theologies, those who teach that “You should never say that you are sick” and “You need to speak to yourself that you’re rich, that you’re a success”. They are essentially telling us to lie, and God would never tell us to lie. We would be better off to face the truths that sound theology teach us, the truths about our own sinfulness and helpless and how God has by his own hand worked to save us when we cannot save ourselves, than to believe such fantasies.

Conclusion

Give NF a shot, even if rap isn’t music you like very well. He is not the typical rapper in any respect, and that’s a very good thing.