Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven caught me as I was learning to use film as a way of understanding culture and ethics. Until I was twenty years old, film was entertainment, but after seeing Unforgiven, I was able to look at films with more appreciation…
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Bell is a wise man. He has cultivated skill, the skill of his fathers, in his sheriff’s work. But what profit is there in all his labor with which he has labored under the sun? In the end, all that awaits him is not the reward of his labors, but going the way of his father. Death is all that Bell sees before him in the film’s final scene…
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There are some films that just don’t click for me for various reasons. Try as I might, our relationship just doesn’t work. I saw two such films on day four of Sundance – Wish You Were Here and Predisposed…
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What are we to do with the fact that the world as we experience it belies the cause-effect economy advertised in books such as Proverbs? “The truth” of the world of Proverbs seems to be lies, “joy dies,” and Larry Gopnik doesn’t even have somebody to love…
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Without going into all of the details, my pastor would not marry us. Believing that God still wanted this for us, we made the choice to still get married, and subsequently left the church where I was a youth pastor. It wasn’t until after we left that church that I realized the power and my appreciation for this movie…
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Movies are a way we deal with all kinds of issues that impact our world. If Christians fail to take seriously the films they and the rest of society are seeing, we miss out on conversations that have the potential to have profound effects on individuals’ lives…
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Change is difficult whether it is personal or cultural or technological—it brings with it losses as well as gains. Hollywood, or at least some major parts of it, seem to be in a period of understandable mourning for what’s being lost, but there is also a bright horizon…
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Within the framework of established by Proverbs, the epigram of True Grit fits as one instance of a larger thematic whole: God ensures that a good life awaits the wise and, conversely that a life of evil results awaits the wicked…
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“Drink coffee. Watch films. Repeat.” And be broken by the brokenness in the world.
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There is and was something about this story that hits at the core of my understanding of relationships. For me the film stood as a reminder of fact that the call to love costs something and sometimes requires entering into dark and dangerous spaces…
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When the characters in The Descendants finally act hopefully, graciously, kindly, and forgivingly, it comes as a delightful surprise, as if a breath of life emanates from the screen and fills the audience with a force of life not too far removed from the life that filled Adam in Eden years and years ago…
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This is really the heart of the film—a life presented for us to see that hasn’t been airbrushed or Photoshopped. We’re invited to see how the broken pieces of each character have a genesis—how we are all descendants of our past experiences…
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Largely, Sundance films are marginalized films about marginalized people. The three films many of us saw yesterday are what some might call “stereotypical” Sundance films, because they focused on seldom-told stories, and they picture their characters as anything but stereotypes…
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