More Movie Reviews

The title introduces well enough. So here goes:

• Ray. This movie was phenomenal, and if I watch Million Dollar Baby and am not utterly blown away, I'm going to call foul on its not winning Best Picture. Jamie Foxx steps out of the way and lets Ray's story carry the movie, and for that alone he deserves Best Actor (this is no slam against Jamie Foxx; I don't think many actors could have let Ray come through the way he did). The music, of course, was wonderful, and the sex and drugs were present in the story without dominating the screen. Neither making Ray an idealized racial justice crusader nor an utter jerk, the movie brings across a humanity that only adds to a great musician. It was so good, I can even forgive the sometimes heavy-handed psychoanalytic stuff that creeps into some scenes (I'll let you readers either watch and see or figure it out).
• Closer. Y'know how I liked Ray so much because the sex wasn't all over the screen? Yeah, that's why I didn't much like this one. This movie, from early in the game, dares the viewer to object to the mostly pointless, completely un-erotic sex that is typed into computers, discussed as one might discuss baseball or politics (except with more dirty words), and splayed all over the movie screen for two hours. Alright, I'll take your dare. Most on-screen sex does nothing to enhance a movie's story, and this movie was different only in that it had no story to accompany the on-screen sex. All four major actors are talented folks, but they were straitjacketed by the writers' obsessions with discussing, alluding to, and performing sex. Yeah, I took the dare. Now what?

So there's my movie reviews for today. Mary and I just got Citizen Kane and Sideways in the mail from Blockbuster; if we have a chance to watch them between getting ready for Mom's visit and closing on the house, I might just comment here later.

Micah sleeps well knowing the Colts drafted some defensive help this year

Micah making merry in his bassinet (he's nearly too big for it)

Got milk?

Micah in the bouncy seat (or at least the top half of Micah--it's hard to aim and to amuse a baby)

Micah in his shorts (before an untimely spit-up put an end to that)

Some Movie Reviews

Mary and I, tired of watching the same game show reruns while we fed and napped with Micah, decided to sign up for Blockbuster's online program, and we've enjoyed it so far. The movies get here on time (in general), and we've caught up on some titles we were meaning to see (at some point) but never got to. So here's my uneducated take on a few that we've seen since joining:

• Finding Neverland. Not a bad film--I particularly liked the (relatively) understated blurring between the author's imagination and reality as everyone else sees it. Even better were the blurrings that happened while he was playing with chlidren. The end was pretty standard tear-jerking fare, but the visual and plotline statements about imagination and adulthood make this one worth seeing.
• The Manchurian Candidate. When I see an action movie, I don't want to feel this violated. Instead of the clean-cut international intrigue story I'd hoped for, this movie spent most of its time plumbing the depths of war's scarring of the human mind, the machinations of biotech, and a mother's drive to see her son rule the world that shades (for a scene or two) into the incestuous. Yechh. On the plus side, Denzel just can't seem to do a role halfway, so his portrayal of a psychologically-scarred career soldier is wonderful even as it disturbs.
• Friday Night Lights. Don't try to remake Hoosiers. Coach Carter did somewhat, but the strong pro-education, pro-black overtones made it a movie worth watching beyond the feel-good sports appeal. This one didn't have any such focus. The games that received significant screen time in the first half of the movie were so devastatingly one-sided against Team Mojo (the protagonists of the film) that their meteoric rise to the state championship game (which lasts all of four minutes for five rounds) and subsequent nail-biter championship game with the invincible Dallas high school team (the game's ups and downs seem nothing short of deus ex machina) lack any plausibility. On the other hand, I have to hand it to any script writer who puts this couplet into a movie script: "You want to win? Put Boobie in!"
• I Heart Huckabees. I don't know what I want to think of this one yet. On the one hand, it's a feature-length joke at the expense of philosophy majors. On another, it's a lovely look at intersecting thought-worlds and their inability to reconcile unless the people who think hard also learn to love one another. If you live in any two of the worlds staged in this film (environmentalists, nihilists, idealists, evangelicals, capitalists, and many others) and wonder what would happen if too many of those worlds collided in one room, this is one that will at least give you one possibility of what it might look like.
• The Notebook. Never being one to begrudge my wife a good chick flick, this gem led off our Blockbuster trial period. It was too chick-flicky even for her.
• Garden State This one was genuinely good. J.D. from Scrubs (can't think of the actor's name) tells his story with fairly convincing (though obscenity-laced) dialogue, cinematography that reflects the scene-POV's mental state, an archetypal journey into the underworld set in suburban New Jersey, and a sound track that I've been told is quite hip (I'm a poor judge of that). The ending scene was a hair over-the-top (reminded me of the Friends finale), but that doesn't diminish a really good movie.

My in-laws also purchased Rudy on DVD for me for my birthday--not bad stuff. I can see why Sean Astin got cast as another emotional favorite in the LOTR trilogy.

So there's the movies I've seen since Micah was born. I think Mary and I are going to watch Ray here in the next couple nights--I'm looking forward to seeing Jamie Foxx's continuing emergence as a serious actor. I was impressed enough by Collateral that I go into Ray expecting great things, not waiting for Foxx to redeem himself for Booty Call.

Latest Book Updates

Well, I've been posting pictures so much lately that I haven't put much into writing here. Newborn baby, I say, newborn baby!

But here are a couple reading updates. I finished, not too long ago, N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, and I feel like I could write a syllabus for and teach a New Testament Introduction course now. Wright carefully set up a framework that takes into acocunt the historical and the literary and the theological, the Jewish and the Greek and the Roman, the preacher and the scholar and the skeptic. And he held it together for four hundred-plus pages.

I've also received a couple books as birthday gifts (I turn 28 tomorrow): The Barbarian Way by Edwin McManus and Overhearing the Gospel by Fred Craddock. I'm probably going to use McManus as a brief break from Wright's dense prose, then read the rest of Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God (just dying to put in a joke about 'rithmetic here), then take on Craddock. All these are books I want to tackle before the summer's out.

In the fall, I'm taking two Shakespeare classes and hopefully working on a "Hebrew Bible and/as Literature" syllabus to present to the English department. Part of my motivation is to get another "classes taught" line on my CV (that list grew this semester at Emmanuel), but I'd also like to teach some Bible, and this seems like a challenging context in which to try it. So I'm off to UGA on Wednesday (probably) to get some paperwork and start writing! Woo hoo!

Micah's livin' large and lovin' it

Micah playing in his bassinet after church

Micah's first bottle (He ate somewhere around three and a half ounces--no wonder he's such a hoss!)

Micah at one month old (April 7, 2005)

More diapers, less despair

Four more weeks. Then the house will be closed, Mary will be back to work, my term at Emmanuel College will be over, Mom will have arrived from Indiana, and I'll be in the process of setting up a new home while taking care of my new son. Four weeks, and everything changes.

Yeah, I know everyone told me that everything would change on March 7, and it did. But for whatever reason, this seems even bigger. Perhaps it's because I read up on that. This, the prospects of taking care of my son without Mary's help all day, the idea that I own (and owe for) a house (the most expensive item I've ever been involved with)--that's spooky.

To return to somewhat normal business for this blog, I've nearly finished the first volume of N.T. Wright's Christian Origins trilogy, and it stands to be one of the theology-changing books in my life. Not that much has changed, necessarily; rather, now I've been given a scholarly vocabulary to articulate what I've wanted to think for so long (at least as long as I've started into the scholarly study of the Scriptures). Wright is at once theologian and scholar, at once faithful and acute. I'm looking forward, once I finish the 470-page volume 1, to digging into the 700-page volume 2. And that's saying something.

Micah relaxing with Mom

Micah playing on his turtle playpen