Film: The Lives of Others

A very thought provoking story that shows the persuasive beauty and power of a life well-lived. A deeply moving and thoughtful exploration of personhood and the evil of dehumanization.
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Some sexuality/nudity.

Set in 1980s East Berlin, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature (which earned an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) provides an exquisitely nuanced portrait of life under the watchful eye of the state police as a high-profile couple is bugged. When a successful playwright and his actress companion become subjects of the Stasi's secret surveillance program, their friends, family and even those doing the watching find their lives changed too.

Film: Away from Her

I watched this movie with my wife. It's a real heartbreaker that examines one couple's tragic experience with Alzheimer's disease. The acting is good, the story is fairly engaging, but I found it to be dissatisfying in the end. While I tried to empathize with the characters, the dark guilts of their pasts and their fatalistic approach to the future didn't leave me with much more than pity.

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Language and Adult Situations

Award-winning director Atom Egoyan produced this film by actress Sarah Polley about a long-married but still very much in love couple whose lives are torn asunder when one of them must enter a rest home. Julie Christie plays the wife, and Gordon Pinsent plays the husband desperate to ensure her comfort in the new setting while burdened with guilt over past behavior. Olympia Dukakis co-stars in this film inspired by an Alice Munro story.

Historic Fiction: The Emigrants

I finished book one of the four volume "Emigrants Series" by Vilhelm Moberg, and found it to be very interesting. As a Minnesotan of Scandinavian descent, my interest might be a little higher than the average reader, but I think the 19th century emigrant experience would be interesting for most mid-western Americans. The writing is as "salt of the earth" as the simple people it describes. Short and well-defined chapters made for good bedtime reading.
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From Library Journal
Published between 1951 and 1961, Moberg's four-volume "Emigrant" epic offers the saga of the Swedish immigrant's role in the settling of the American frontier.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Book One introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their 3 young children, and 11 others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Smland in 1850.

My Pentalogue of the Decalogue

I finished watching all ten of the Dekalog films by Krzysztof Kieslowski. There is a helpful synopsis and introduction of the films on the Facets Multimedia website.

Overall I found them to be really interesting and thought provoking. For a ten-film series, each with its own cinematographer, the collection of films is remarkably consistent. The stories are disturbingly interesting and the acting is very good.

My pick for the best five of the ten movies to be 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7.

Powerful and Profound

I'm currently watching an amazing series of films directed by Krzystof Kieslowski called Dekalog (The Decalogue). Ten masterful one-hour films with story lines that explore the human condition in the context of the Ten Commandments.

I found Dekalog 1 and Dekalog 2 to be very beautiful and profound. They have the depth and make the impact I usually only experience from reading a great book or story.

It's a set of films I will definitely be buying for my personal collection. The whole concept and approach of these films is so thoughtful, artistic, and complex that, after viewing them, they invite (almost demand) a long conversation with a friend over a cup of strong coffee. Definitely theatre for thinkers!

The Divinity Code

I read The DaVinci Code a couple years ago and thought it was a fun read. Brown's book, like most fun conspiracy theory books, plays fast and loose with facts and requires the reader to play along a bit. Enjoying a good conspiracy mystery isn't all that different from enjoying an illusionist do "magic." You've got to remember that part of the fun is the deception. It's a NOVEL, people!

I guess we shouldn't be surprised when readers get confused about this since even the author (judging from some of the things he has said on his website) seems to be confused about it too. Maybe so many people taking a fictional mystery novel too seriously has Brown taking himself too seriously. Trying to gain insight about church history or theology from The DaVinci Code is like trying to learn American civics from a John Grisham novel. It's would be like White House officials learning how to do their jobs by watching West Wing. Wait -- I guess that probably does happen. Okay, so lot's of people are mixed up. Anyway....

The divinity of Jesus isn't something Christians invented or schemed up over centuries. It's not something the apostle Paul invented either. The divinity of Jesus is central to his own claims about himself. Just read the last five chapters of Matthew and you'll see it for yourself. Read the opening sentence of Mark, the earliest of the gospels, and you'll see the deity of Jesus Christ as plain as day. Read the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of John, and you'll see Jesus, the Word, God made flesh, living among us full of grace and truth.

Here are a couple interesting recent articles I've come across lately that relate to all the DaVinci Code buzz:
So Who Is Dan Brown? (Terry Mattingly, On Religion)
Breaking the DaVinci Code (Collin Hansen, Christian History Newsletter)

Why Altered Faces?

My intent for this blog is to share thoughts and ideas provoked by books, music, movies, lectures, theology, church, and the arts. With that in mind, I began my search for a name for this blog by scanning the bookshelves in my personal library.

I started down the poetry and fiction section, moving my finger across each shelf from left to right, my eyes scanning the titles and authors. Bohoeffer... Buechner... Cather... Chesterton... Dickens... Dostoevsky... Hemingway... Kerouac... Lagerlöf... Lamott... Lee... Lewis... O'Connor...Flannery O'Connor - that's it! I took Everything that Rises Must Converge off the shelf and turned to my favorite of her short stories, "Revelation."

I was deeply moved by "Revelation" the first time I read it, and every new reading has made me love it more. On several occasions, I've enjoy reading it aloud to my family and friends as we sit around the living room near the flickering flames of the fireplace.

The main character of the story, Mrs. Turpin, is awakened to a radical new view of herself, the people around her, and the meaning of life. In the final scene, as the sun goes down at the end of a long and trying day, she has a burning moment of epiphany. Her eyes are opened and she now sees all things differently. As she watches the sunset, her mind's eye sees a great procession of souls rumbling and singing their way up the color-streaked sky toward heaven.

O'Connor's writing is so beautiful and three-dimensional that I feel as though I'm standing quietly alongside Mrs. Turpin—watching the sun sink down below the trees, undergoing an inner transformation of my own, and sharing in her profound revelation about self-concept and life.

That's what good writing does to me and for me. It draws me in and opens me up. It gives me a new way to see and refines my heart. So much so, that the change is visible in my altered face.

"And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah."