Disclosure Day, A Few Thoughts

We all want to believe that in this universe we are not alone...even as Christians, why else would God have created this entire universe?  

And we all want to believe that Steven Spielberg will make a great movie about our place as not alone people in this universe.  After all, he gave us Close Encounters, ET, and so many other great movies.  

But full disclosure...Disclosure Day wasn't good.  My normal rating system feels violated in having to give 'ol Steve a 5.  For me, 7 means 'good'.  10 is Schindler's List.  A 5 means it's slightly worse than just OK.  Not bad (that's a 4).  But not good enough for a the average mediocrity of a 6.  Five.  

Oh my.  How do we explain the problems of a movie that good editing might have made into the first episode of a decent Apple TV series?  A few things...

First, the cliches.

-This ain't just a Spielberg problem, but can we call a moratorium on the whole 'anywhere we ever need them, there's always a small army of black-clothed government agents ready to break up the good works of the good guys' trope?  I know we live in a world of ICE goons and FBI agents being re-tasked to do bad things...but the same guys who sixty years ago were Star Trek Red Shirts are now Sucky World Black Shirts?  That explains a lot about our world.  

-Second, can we please for the love of all that is good ditch the very modern technique of shows and movies spending half their time with characters talking on the phone to each other?  A subset of this rant is the ubiquitous burner phone which gets broken each time, because smart phones are always so trackable to the point that at least once somebody breaks/runs over/throws them into the river so as to get some privacy.

-A third tiresome cliche is how multiple times the end of an action scene we see our heroes getting away from trouble carless/cashless/phoneless.  There they are, alone in this world...and in the next scene they are two states away, checked into a small town motel?  Maybe that's the boring part of the script that got left on the editing room floor, the scene where they meet a helpful and kind stranger that fills our heart with hope.  That would make the movie too long, but sometimes reality is important to explain.

OK.  Now we can get to the particulars of this story (big spoiler alert).  

-First we come to the premise of the movie.  We aren't alone, and we haven't been for at least 79 years.  Aliens have appeared (always, it seems, within the continental United States).  Many, many people saw spaceships and lights in the sky and the bug eyed green little men.  Yet the conspiracy is that this has all been covered up. Until now!  And one of our heroes (the man) has somehow compiled all the hundreds of random videos of our contacts on a whole bunch of 23rd century-looking flash drives that have to be uploaded at a TV studio in Kansas City one by one.  Our masculine hero was contacted by the aliens in a very intensive way back when he was 10 years old or so, but he and he alone was given the ability to speak to them in the language of the universe, Math.  He's let this ability lapse for some 30 years or so as he did his ketamine years in college and then deflowered an aspiring nun, but now it's been reawakened in him as he safeguards the 23rd century flash drives that hold onto the truth.  

-But then there's the other hero (the woman), who is a rather pleasant but unstable morning weather lady from the Kansas City TV station.  I gotta say, her NBC affiliate (channel 4, KCXE, not real, as the real NBC affiliate in KC is channel 41 KSHB, but many years ago NBC in KC used to be channel 4 WDAF, which became a Fox station when they got the NFL.  Whatever.) must be truly splashing the cash to look at the studio and production values they are able to put out each morning for that mid-market show.  She, too, was contacted when she was 10 years old, and likewise forgot about everything until a cardinal flew flew through her window yesterday and reawakened the Calling within her.  That morning her weather report turns into an alien message to the world, which in fact was only understood by the male hero as everyone else thought she had had a seizure or something.  This hero, unlike the male, has been given the gift of ultimate empathy, able to look into the eyes of anybody and know exactly what they need to hear at that moment in whatever language they happen to speak...a really good trick to walk into any dangerous situation and out of any problem! Carol, we just want to help! (Pluribus shout-out)

-Yet her performance inspired the ever-ready and ever-vigilant Bad Government agents who want to destroy her and the message, even as they are also tracking down the hundreds of 23rd century flash drives.  The chief bad guy, who tries to silence it all because We Can't Handle The Truth, also has a magical alien artifact power to mind meld with anybody and everybody in the world as long as he can look at their face on a screen and know kinda-sorta where they are.  He's susceptible, however, to a pretty face and really only does what he does because his wife died and he broke down and went all government secrety on everybody, turning half of his staff against him so as to make them Good Guys.  

-Side note...there's a Secondary Bad Guy whose motivation is undeveloped but he has both the smirk and the muscle.  He's serious about following orders, and will even try to kill the good people, even pushing their car into the path of an oncoming train.  At the end of the story, he's so mad that chief bad guy won't do Whatever Is Necessary To Stop This that he...storms out of the room, followed by other like-minded black-clothed henchmen.  

-Alongisde our male and female heroes is the former (top scientist? high-level administrator? waterboy?) who turned against him five years ago.  His kind-hearted search for truth prompts him to build a house replica of the female hero's childhood so that she can, somehow, reconnect to what it was like to be contacted as a 10 year old?  I get how the bad guys always have an endless stream of money and resources to silence the truth.  But how did this GS-14 build such a war peace chest of presumably millions in order that truth can be told?  And does his wife and kids know where he's been off to all this time?

-Yet this isn't the best trick of GS-14.  No, at the end of the Good Morning Kansas City chatfest, out of nowhere, he's also shown to be the caretaker of an old, frail alien!  Where said alien had been living for the past 79 years is not known.  Nixon and his big name Hollywood buddy had gloated over the corpses of dead aliens in '73, but this one somehow got away and has (perhaps) been living in a cottage at a Florida retirement community all this time?  And now that he/she/it/they needs to be seen, 'ol bug eye decides to get wheelchaired from the back of a u-haul to the TV studio to make a grand appearance?  I don't know...Apple TV would at least have waited til the 3rd or 4th episode of the season to throw this plot twist in.  

-And so finally The Truth is disclosed, free to everyone who wants to hear.  "Listen!" says the female hero to a worldwide TV audience at the last scene...and...CUT, roll credits.  I guess it's time to start planning for the sequel, Disclosure Day Two, in which even more disclosures are disclosed?  What on earth is going to happen???

-Needless to say, throughout all this the world has been falling apart.  We're at DEFCON 2, war seems imminent.  But then our crazy weather lady starts speaking alien math language on the local TV station and now the poop really hits the fan...even small town convenience stores are being cleaned out.  But once The Truth is being announced, everybody is ready to Listen...by just looking at their phones?  Even Russian troops getting ready to go to battle?  To me, this seems the hardest part of everything to believe in a movie with a hundred jumps of disbelief.  I mean, it's 2026.  Can we anymore believe that we can all be united in an alien message of love and harmony when in fact 38% of people still believe that Donald Trump is doing a good job?  Yeah, I don't buy it.  As quick as the female hero starts to tell people about The Truth, you just know that Newsmax is cutting to commercial for boner pills, that Sean Hannity starts to scream about this being some liberal plot, that the movie version of Donnie Dimwit complains again about elections being stolen.  People WILL be watching their phones...but there's no longer any universal truth that some people believe in.  And inevitably, somebody in this world on verge of war will look at this as an opportunity to fire the missiles.  Maybe that's why the credits rolled when they did, 'cuz we're all dead.  Kumbayah, no.  

-One final thing...the animals (deer, fox, cardinal, raccoon) just wanna stare into your eyes and talk.  Ain't that sweet. Where is Dr. Doolittle when you need him?  

Three Dark Ones

I'm in my quiet season of being down to one job, so I've been catching up on some shows and movies that have been building up in my queue.  While I'm more of a series guy at this point, I decided to knock out the three Max movies I'd been wanting to watch.  

Last night I watched Mickey 17.  It's about a worker in space named Mickey, an expendable type who can continually die and then be 're-printed' as many times as needed.  Mickey 17 nearly dies after a terrible fall, and since it's assumed that he died, on his way back to the ship Mickey 18 takes his place.  All along the way a egomaniacal ex-congressman who is leading the space expedition/religious cult wants to destroy the mostly friendly inhabitants of the planet at which they have arrived.  In the end Mickey 18 blows him and the blowhard up and everyone lives happily ever after.

Today I endured the Brutalist, a brutal 3+ hour movie about a Hungarian architect trying to rebuild his life in the United States.  Actually I only made it through the first two hours before I started skipping ahead, but I got the gist, that our hero gets raped by his boss, becomes a heroin addict, and watches his wife suffer before he finds international success and is celebrated in old age by a Holocaust-surviving niece who was once mute but then kinda regains her voice.  

The final movie this evening was a brand-new release, Mountainhead.  Four tech bros, with real-life counterparts like Elon Musk and Jeff Zuckerburg the most obvious, go for a boys' weekend at the poorest one's new Utah ski mansion.  Along the way the world is melting down because of the deepfakes made possible one of them, they have lots of bad quasi-philosophical discussions about how to creats coups to overthrow the government and push us towards a post-human life before deciding that such things are too much trouble, and the one with the slightest bit of a conscience about what they are doing is almost murdered by the other three.  The four survive the weekend, the world seems to regain a sense of balance, and they go back to their crappy and self-important lives.  

Whatever the quality of movies these were, I'm always a bit of a believer that movies reflect a lot about the world in which we live.  Maybe it's just me and what I watch (very possible), but it seems quite possible that these movies are so dark because we live in a dark time.  I'm starting to think that we have never really recovered from COVID, that maybe the final symptom of that disease was not something physical but something very social.  We are paranoid, angry, and for all the talk from the pseudo-religious right, we really don't like people much at all.  Maybe going into quarantine zapped out of us the social skills we'd taken generations to build.  Maybe coming out of quarantine was never a great idea, that perhaps we should have simply loaded our souls into the matrix and found a way to stay there.  

I think I do better with shorter shows.  Maybe the White Lotus or Veep or Stranger Things has its own form of darkness, but at least 45 minutes doesn't affect me nearly as long as 2+ hours of troublesome thoughts.  

Twisters, a Slightly Unhinged Reaction (spoiler alterts!)

As a native Oklahoman who has lived most of his life in Tornado Alley, when the original Twister movie came out 28 years ago it felt like I and my people had been Seen.  Finally, here was a movie about living and surviving the storms that are native to our land.  

Having watched that movie again a few weeks ago, I felt that perhaps I needed to revise my original assessment.  It's a somewhat dopey movie about a dysfunctional couple that should never have been together in the first place and who get back together in the name of scientific discovery, with all kinds of cool special effects thrown in.  While the motivations and the actions of the leads haven't aged well, it's still a watchable movie that proved the truth that all we really need to do to survive a storm is run away from it, or at least not drive into the path of the storm.  

So this summer, almost three decades later, we finally have a sequel: Twisters.  Sure, there are no returning characters, only the tragic figure of Muskogee State College's once-proud doctoral program in Tornadology, town event planners who can't read the freakin' weather forecast and pray their liability coverage will absolve them of responsibility in case of a natural disaster, and the evil villains of Corporate Funding.  Seriously, Helen Hunt didn't need the paycheck?  We couldn't have at least gotten a cameo from Preacher whose near-death experience all those years ago helped him start a TV ministry about the glories of Aunt Meg's steak and eggs?

Instead, in our new movie tornado chasing has become a cross of big business, redneck freedom signaling, and YouTube stupidity.  Our heroine needs to be convinced 5 long years after watching her boyfriend and employees get sucked into the maw of the beast that she needs to return to Oklahoma, but only for One More Job.  See, it's gonna be the tornado outbreak of the century!  Whereas once she failed to kill a tornado, killing Sally Draper instead and only narrowing escaping a charge of manslaughter, her old corporate friend wants her back to guide around the countryside a pack of the most educated Ph.Ds he can afford but who have no storm-chasing instincts.  At first she won't come, because now she's a New Yorker, because, as we know, that's where the hot weather action is now (after all, there was an F1 in Brooklyn only two years ago!).  We know it's New York because she has a meaningful conversation with corporate friend in a coffee shop near a subway station (at least we think it is, but none of the subway lines are listed).  She wakes up with a ghost in her bed as a subway train rolls by her window, and realizes that she's got unfinished business to do.  

After a long and relatively pointless scene where she negotiates her vacation time with the HR office of the National Weather Service, back she comes to lead the polished flock of clueless men.  She doesn't know their equipment, plans, or goals, much less the evil funding behind it all, but she'll immediately direct the day-to-day operations of the new startup.  Soon, though, she's confronted with a YouTuber with a heart of gold, who was raised by wolves in the foreign country of Arkansas and is recognized in the deleted scene as the bastard unknown son of Bill Paxton.  His motley crew, who likely all were inspired by the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Duffy (he'll tell you why he is who he is, OK?), rally around their hero as they seek to engage in the profit sharing of his videos.  

Tornados immediately sprout from the depths of the plains like sea monsters off the Japanese coast.  Everybody cheers, though, whether for profit or simply for entertainment.  To the side a tiny child tells the adults in broken English, 'Tornado is a friend to all children everywhere!'  The child is quickly obliterated by a flying windmill that was uprooted by a tornado (see, Trump is a genius when it comes to windmills!), but the heroine quickly recovers to survive increasingly powerful twisters that wipe out rodeos, movie theaters, oil refineries, and random houses both in towns and fields.  All the while she and YouTuber come increasingly close as they share their love of tornados under the watchful eye of mama Maura Tierney, whose barn remains to this day a shrine to her daughter's precocious middle school science project.

It's worth noting that all the while the effects of global warming (more tornados! higher seed prices! crazy weather!) are discussed but never named.  It is evident that the producers of this Peabody-winning documentary know that the greater portion of audiences will not be the smug New Yorkers who have a subway train outside their bedroom window, but honest Red-State Americans who know that global warming is as much a hoax as foreign pickups.  The terrible tornados who are not the friend of children everywhere might well be defeated, however, as long as fireworks are shot into the tornado before the diapers.  

Finally, cut to the money shot of the Biggest Tornado Ever Seen descending upon El Reno, Oklahoma.  Lots of running in 200 mile winds enables most of the endangered children at a softball game and vendors at a  downtown street fair (dang it, doesn't ANYBODY have a weather app on their phone to advise them to stay home instead???) to smartly run away from a flying trolley and into a movie theater playing a 1930s monster movie.  Fortunately the power stays on throughout the total destruction of the town and its paper-mache water tower, so we can see what happened in that movie, which would have been a better use of my $6 than this turkey.  

In the midst of the storm, however, our heroine tosses aside sanity and runs out through the swirling debris to the YouTubers' pickup and steals it in order to run it straight into the path of the ongoing tornado.  Much like the original movie, they fortunately over the course of 6 hours had revised their entire game plan, loaded up 30 barrels of diapers, and bought a trailer (aluminum) to carry it all, as well as created a whole new class of fireworks to shoot at the enemy of plains-loving people everywhere.  The hard-charging non-foreign pickup takes our heroine straight into the storm where she immediately demolishes the tornado just as it's sadly bringing to a end the monster movie, and YouTuber and corporate friend run out to celebrate her heroism as she complains about the slight scratch on her forehead.  

Our heroine is ready to go back to New York, but sadly Will Rogers World Airport is closed because of a slight wind.  YouTuber has just enough time to cause two weeks of maintenance closure to the airport drop off line (oh, that lovable scamp!) before running into the airport to sweep the heroine off her feet.  And they live for happily ever after, we think, or at least until the adrenaline wears off.  The End. 

 -------

Wild horses couldn't have kept me from seeing this movie.  A 4pm Saturday showing was as packed as any movie I've seen in awhile, because here in the heartland we LOVE our tornados.  If last summer was the year of Barbenheimer, then can we say that this is the summer of Inside Despicable Twisters?  

But once is enough.  I was entertained and annoyed all at once, but most importantly I feel dumber for having watched this movie, and this comes from a guy who has watched every episode of the Dukes of Hazard.   

6/10

Wonka, a Review

Tonight I went with my wife and son and some friends from church to go see Wonka, a PG movie that was a thinly-veiled re-imagination of the drug wars of the 1980s.  Young and idealistic Wonka comes to town to move his product, a drug that is far better than anything anyone has ever seen, causing people to get high in a delirious kind of way.  But the drug cartels that exist plot to have Wonka put out of business, robbing him of his initial profits and confiscating what remains of his stock.  They did this because they know his product is far superior and fear what might happen if Wonka is allowed to push in their territories.  Eventually, Wonka finds himself destitute and working in a sweatshop under the cruel terrors of local profiteers.  

Yet Wonka won't give up, and with the aid of a young girl and others who have been imprisoned, he finds a way to get his product out on the street, once again driving its consumers to ecstasy, so good is his drug. Eventually through various slights of hand, he becomes a 'legitimate' dealer alongside the more established pushers in town, but seeing how their profits have gone down, the cartel seeks to have Wonka decimated.  They utilize Wonka's former sweatshop masters to poison his product, and bribe various corrupted police and religious entities to do their bidding.  Eventually Wonka himself gets discouraged, and having won the release of his fellow prisoners (or so he thinks), he leaves town.  But the cartel owners know that Wonka will eventually return, so they plot to kill him by blowing up his boat.  

Wonka discovers in a nick of time the plot, and miraculously survives the assassination attempt.  As he makes his way back to the city, he plots his revenge.  With the help of his former fellow prisoners, he exposes the corruption of the cartel and the police.  His plan works at first, as he is on the verge of finding their secret records.  But the cartel leaders quickly discover the plan, and Wonka is captured and left to die a terrible death of drowning in the drug mixture.  Fortunately once again Wonka is saved by somebody he had once thought to be his blood enemy and he escapes.  

Finally out in the town square Wonka confronts the cartel leaders and corrupted authorities.  The drug bosses think they have the upper hand, but soon are hoisted upon their own petard because they had so enjoyed Wonka's product.  Wonka is now free to be the sole drug kingpin in his new adopted city, and everybody lives happily ever after.  

Oh, and there's a giraffe and an orange midget and a lot of great song and dance numbers along the way.

7/10

Yesterday

Last weekend we went and saw Yesterday, a movie that asks the question, 'What if the Beatles (and ciagarettes and Coca-Cola and Harry Potter) had never existed, except in the minds of a few people'?  It wasn't a great movie, and my IMDB rating of 8 is probably inflated by the fact that I simply love the Beatles and will pump up anything that has their music in it.  And Lily James is quite nice to look at for two hours. 

One would think that the world would impoverished today had not John Lennon and Paul McCartney and George Harrison not had that first gig in the basement of the church building long ago.  But the world of this movie acted as if nothing of real importance had still been lost.  Ed Sheerin could still write songs; music really wasn't too much different (but Oasis never existed, whatever); people lived their lives just as we would today.  We wouldn't be teaching our kids about Sgt Peppers, or the sadness of John Lennon being shot (would Forrest Gump exist, then?), or Paul McCartney asking us whether or not it's OK to like Silly Love Songs.  This, likely, was the great weakness of the movie.

Watching this movie, though, posed two great questions for me as a Christian who really struggles with our post-Christian world...first, if Christ had not been born, what difference would it make?  All of history hinges upon him.  Many evil things have been done in his name, of course, but the genius of all civilization really rests on his bringing Life to people.  There have been books written about this topic, of course...but I daresay that books as they now exist would not have been available without him. 

But there's a second question that keeps coming to mind: if everybody woke up tomorrow and only a half-dozen people remembered Jesus and what he means, would that make a difference in the lives of many people?  Or let me ask it this way: does Jesus really make a difference in the lives of many people?  Would him not being real make a difference in the lives of 10% of Americans?  Or would people keep going on as they always do? 

We live in a country that claims to follow after Jesus...but how do we sync this up with the fact that most Americans claim to think that a wicked and vulgar man like Donald Trump is a great president, God's own man in the White House?  I struggle with this question everyday.  Am I one of the few people on this earth who remember who Jesus really was?  And what this means for how we live?  Or am I just deluding myself, and everybody is else is right on him and I'm just prejudiced?  Am I just going crazy worrying about things that don't really matter? 

I'd like to think that I'd be singing his praises even if nobody else on earth knows who he really was.  And maybe there are others who would do the same, even as they have that look on their faces of confusion at just what on earth is going on with everybody else.  But I don't know...and I'm glad that Jesus really does exist!  May he be praised. 

Aladdin, the Movie

My family and in-laws and niece bought tickets to go see the new Aladdin movie today.  I had no desire to see this movie, but because here in the city on holidays you have to buy tickets to movies early, we bought one for my sister-in-law, who at the last moment decided she couldn't go because she had nobody to watch her two youngest kids.  I volunteered to watch the kids and let her go but that was not acceptable, so we had an extra ticket.  So I decided to go.  It was at one of those newer theater that have reclining heated seats but we were near the front, and about the only way to watch it was on your back. 

Solid 6, I think. Costumes were great, and at least I didn't fall asleep.  But Will Smith as the geanie?  Ugh . I would have preferred the corpse of Robin Williams being revived for this movie.  And, as in most mega-budget Hollywood movies, the story just spun out of control in the second act.  Why is it that they no longer can create a viable ending without fourteen twists, eleven improbable escapes, and at least two musical numbers and a magical creature?  I really wish I had chased my nieces around Wal-Mart for an hour with a few thousand dollars in damages to account for. 

I suppose that there's a reason I don't really like movies anymore.  They're just not that interesting.  Movies think they have to resolve a whole world-creating plot within two hours.  TV can take years to finish the story, and even then sometimes it's not enough.  Maybe next time they can sell my ticket and I can wander around Home Depot instead. 

Beauty and the Beast...so gay, so sad

So the new Beauty and the Beast movie will have a repressed gay henchman longing to love his Gaston.  Some of my fellow Christians, of course, are up in arms about this.  A drive-in movie theater in Alabama has refused to show it, stating that they absolutely will not compromise on what the Bible teaches.  We're horrified...SHOCKED...that something like this could come out of a Disney studio.

So...what's my feeling on this?  I'm not even going to begin to justify what others are doing, but instead say that I believe that a lot of this is overblown.  First, if you are expecting Disney movies to teach morals to your children, that's a problem.  Second, homosexuality is now a part of American life, whether you like it or not.  It's part of what America IS now...and so when a Disney channel shows have a character who has two moms, it's not that surprising.  Should be shocked that even 'family' movies reflect this trend, much as they historically treated Asian as slanty-eyed lispers or blacks as subservient farmhands?

And third, and most importantly...if you want to do away with movies that, as one Facebook post I saw said, you couldn't watch with Jesus sitting next to you, then how many Hollywood movies could you really watch?  Why are you so mad about this and so ready to pony up $10 for everything else?
-A chick-flick in which the unmarried couple sleeps together half-way through the movie...is that Christian?
-An action movie with lots of gratuitous violence as a man takes vengeance on a gang that hurts his family...is that Christian?
-A buddy cop movie with lots of foul language...is that Christian?
-A romantic family flick in which a woman falls in love with a beast who wears fancy garments...ummmm...

The point is this...getting freaked out that a gay character is in a Disney movie is most likely counter-productive.  See it, don't see it, have a conversation about your family values with your kids...do whatever you want.  But stop it with the outrage.  You don't own the studio, though you've given them a ton of your money over the years.  Your whiny self-righteous bitterness brings more shame onto Jesus than this movie ever will, and others can see it.  No wonder people don't take your Jesus seriously.

United Passions

Tonight, being a lover of pain and soccer and having a free movie credit on Vudu, I decided to stream United Passions.  This is a movie about the history of FIFA, the soccer governing body.  In case you know nothing of FIFA, it has been shown in recent years to wholly corrupt, and many of its leaders have been indicted for taking bribes and kickbacks, even as soccer has continued to grow in popularity around the world.

This movie came out last year just as many of the scandals were getting full blown, and it was roundly mocked.  Every review has savaged it; IMDB gives it a critic metascore of 1 (out of 100), and its ability to not make money (it cost $32 million to make, FIFA putting up most of the money) has become legendary...supposedly a theater in Phoenix sold one ticket for an entire weekend.  You would think, from the reviews from critics, that it is the worst movie of all time.

Except that it's not.  I've seen some bad movies over the years, and this wasn't the worst. Yes, it was not good...I gave it a 5 out of 10, which on my scale means 'not very good', but that's better than bad.  It got the same rating as Aloha and a better rating that Cowboys & Aliens.  Some of the cinematography was pretty good, there were moments of actual tension on the story, and the acting could have been worse.  Again, it's not Schindler's List or anything and would make a nice selection for the upcoming MST3K reboot...but it wasn't as bad as it was made out to be.

Something like this is a reminder that it's easy to listen to what everybody else has to say and be swayed by it.  I was hoping to go onto Facebook and make jokes about it (example: 'if the makers of this movie had been in charge of Spotlight, the heroes would have been the pedophile priests!'), but to do so would have been dishonest.  How many of the haters (over 3000 ratings on IMDB that give it an average of 2.0) didn't actually watch the movie?  Have they heard so much about how bad FIFA is and just assumed that this is propaganda?  Is it just an easy target for people who are lazy in their criticism?

In a way, this could have actually been two very good movies.  It's a movie of three acts, lionizing the three non-English leaders of FIFA: Rimet, Havelange, and Blatter.  But the substance behind the stories was actually interesting; in competent film directors who were more interested in the organization than the men leading them this could have been well done.  The first movie could have been about the need for an organizing body for soccer and how difficult it was to pull things together pre-WWI.  The second movie could have been about how FIFA re-directed piles of cash to poor nations to boost their soccer programs.  Yes, of course, this has led to abject corruption, but good PR could have made this better.

Perhaps the biggest credit to this movie was that I watched the whole thing, and I don't always do that for movies I did not pay to see.  A few weeks ago I finally got around to watching Birdman, which won a best picture award a few years ago...it was pure excrement, and I turned it off 45 minutes into the movie.  It was just as self-glorifying as anything one could find in United Passions ("Oh, the beauty of live theater!"), but it was written to please the artistic crowd rather than the administrative professionals crowd.  And so Birdman is considered a masterpiece while United Passions is considered the worst movie of all time.  Doesn't seem quite right to me.

Yo, Adrian!

The other day I was lounging around and one of the cable networks had a 'Rocky' marathon going on. Rocky is one of those iconic movie franchises that's always on TV, so I remember it in bits and pieces rather than as a whole.  It's unlikely that I've ever seen most of the movies in their entirety, uncut, but I've seen some of the scenes a half-hundred times.  How many times have I seen Rocky running to the top of the mountain somewhere in Siberia and think, yeah, I need to get outside more?

But the other day I caught the beginning of the first Rocky, when he's in the middle of the fight at Resurrection A.C. and after getting head butted he knocks the crap out of Spider Rico before going back to the locker room to get his $65 (minus the cost for the towel, locker, cutman, and taxes).  Since I had little else to do (actually I did, but didn't want to) I tuned on in.  A few thoughts on Rocky, 38 years later.

1)Adrian isn't nearly as much a wet blanket in this movie as she is in later years ("YOU CAN"T WIN!"); she's just a homely girl from the neighborhood who lives with her abusive and drunk brother.  To me she's one of the more fascinating characters at this point.  I fear that at some point she was molested by her brother or another relative.  But what gets me about Adrian and Rocky's relationship in this movie is how at first he's really a bit of a stalker, and second, when she finally goes out on a date with him that he basically date-rapes her in the end.  She walks him home (!?), then he practically forces her to come inside of his apartment.  Then, when she keeps trying over and over again to leave, he won't let her go...and then they do the deed. Society had a much different perspective on power roles of men and women in those days.  Today if that scene was re-made, there would be huge protests about how Rocky forced himself onto her, and rightly so.  Hey Rock, NO MEANS NO.  Creep.

2)During his training Rocky goes into a frozen meat locker and finds that he likes hitting a side of beef.  Paulie says that his boss says it's OK...but is it really?  And if it is, aren't there huge health code violations there?  Where is the USDA?  Yes, there's prime, choice, and select cuts of beef, and finally beef that has been used for a punching bag.  And who, after the news report of what he's been doing, does any reputable restaurant or grocery in the area want to buy meat from Shamrock meats?

3)Apollo Creed didn't know it was a damn fight, he thought it was a damn show!  That's why he allows himself to be knocked around for 15 rounds before winning in a split decision.  Apollo, after a long period of being champion (had he beaten Smokin' Joe Frazier into retirement?  And where was Foreman and Ali?  Jerry Quarry, anybody?) really was focusing too much on the PR stuff and wasn't ready to fight.  But then, what about Rocky 2?  Was Apollo simply past it at that point?  Had the first fight ("AIN'T GONNA BE NO REMATCH!") taken too much out of him?  Not really...he really whipped up on Rocky most of that fight, and only lost because of a lucky punch at the end.  The reality is this: Rocky was lucky to land in that period between the great heavyweights of the early 70s and the reality that was Larry Holmes.  That's why in the first montage of Rocky 3 he was able to beat all those tomato cans that Mickey set up him up to beat.  To sum up: Rocky wasn't a great fighter, just a really tough guy who a)got lucky to catch fat Apollo b)then got lucky to get Apollo at the end, be way behind on the cards and get a lucky punch in and c)finally got lucky to face tomato cans before Clubber Lang came along who, truth be told, was a much better fighter.

4)If Rocky was made today, he'd never get the chance.  Two days after the announcement, Outside the Lines would report that that Rocky beat up deadbeats and broke their thumbs and hung around with the mob.  Fight off.  Either that, or the story would have to be that he had spent time in jail and was now trying to be reformed and put his life back together.  The backstory would have to be totally different to fit in our times, and it would fundamentally change the story.  Rocky was too much a bum as he was to survive today.

IMDB Ratings

I love IMDB, the 'Internet Movie Database'.  I have loved this site ever since I first discovered it...it allows me to always answer that nagging question of 'Where did I see that person before?'  I love that it lets me see parental guides about movies before seeing them with my kids (so I can stop them from watching them or at least know what's going on).

And I love the fact that, by its rating system, it allows me to know what I've seen before, or at least since I started rating movies and TV shows.  Anytime I watch a movie now (or at least a few episodes of a TV show) I go on and give a rating, adding my stats to millions of others.  I know my numbers don't affect the big picture, but it's becoming a more interesting part of community to me than seeing the silliness that is Facebook.

But how do I rate?  That's what this post is about.

My median rate is, I suppose, a 7.  A 7 is a score that says something is good.  It means I enjoyed watching the show, but it wasn't the greatest thing I've ever seen, in fact, far from it.  It was a movie or show that had some issues, but all in all it was still enjoyable.  Here are some 7s:  Mamma Mia!  Anchorman 2.  Oblivion.  Flight.  Heaven is For Real.  Most of these will be movies that I forget about rather quickly...but now I can at least know I watched them.

An 8 is something that is very good, though not great.  Many times I rate something an 8 when I really wanted to love something, but instead I just liked it.  The other night I watched the Book Thief, and I wanted to think it was wonderful and life changing, but I just couldn't pull the trigger on anything higher than an 8.  So it got an 8.  8s are also something that can be very surprising to me.  Frankenweenie was an 8, as was 42.  TV shows that I watch on a regular basis often get 8s: I Dream of Jeannie, Parks and Recreation, and Game of Thrones.  Hard to put those three in the same sentence, but all get 8 for general excellence, but not brilliance.

A 9 is something inspired, something Oscar-worthy.  Here we start getting into rarified air.  Gravity was a solid 9.  So was the old show Mr. Bean.  Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog also gets a nine.  It's hard to punch any holes in a nine or to sit around and think, "If they had done _____, it could have been better."  As it is, a 9 makes my Hall of Fame.

(I do feel compelled at this point to speak about Mad Men.  Mad Men is a 9 unlike any other, because there are episodes of Mad Men I've been sorely confused about and wished it would go away.  But then it sometimes reaches heights where individual episodes make me go back through and watch them 3-4 times just to soak in the brilliance.  Maybe Mad Men should be an 8 with an asterisk, but I love it too much to let it be any less than a 9.)

I have given one 10:  Schindler's List.  It's not like I want to watch this movie all the time.  But every few years I feel compelled to go back and watch it.  It's a movie I want to share with my children when they get old enough to understand.  I don't see a lot of other 10s out there and am afraid to dilute a 10 based on a few great memories.  I have seen pieces of the TV version of The Shawshank Redemption a hundred times, but I can't remember the last time I saw the entire movie as it was meant to be seen.  So I will wait and judge it if I ever watch it on DVD.

Going the other direction, the ratings start to slide rather quickly.  A 6 is a show that is mediocre.  It's not a bad thing that I spent some time watching it, but I can't imagine watching it again.  The remake of Red Dawn, which surprisingly was not lower than this, qualifies as a 6.  Looking at my list I see a lot of remakes and sequels: the remake of Footloose; Star Trek into Darkness; the 2012 remake of Total Recall; Muppets Most Wanted; Iron Man 2.  Maybe a six can best be described as something that simply had no inspiration behind it.  Maybe a six is a money grab.

A 5 is something where we start getting into 'not very good' territory.  The 'Bean' movie sits here.  The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.  This is where we watch a show and through most of it think, "you know, I really wish I was doing something else, but there's too much talent here to give up.  How many more minutes does this last?"  And then I keep hitting the 'Display' button on the remote and look back and forth at the clock.  But you stick it out because you have nothing better to do.

By the time we get to a 4 we get to not a lot of movies, because a)I won't rate a movie or show I don't sit through completely and b)Some movies get turned off, especially if I only spent a buck at Redbox or got them free through the library.  I did make it through Battleship and Tower Heist, though.  Not sure how.

I only have two movies rated a 3:  Cowboys & Aliens (wow, that sucked) and Mulholland Dr. (wow, that was a hot mess).  By this point concepts like 'suckitude' and 'craptacular' come into the discussion.

And as you might have figured out by this point, I have never rated anything a 1 or 2.  But why?  Aren't there a lot of terrible movies out there that can be mocked in ratings perpetuity?  Maybe it's just that I give three points for the very fact that a movie or TV show somehow came to my attention, so it at least deserves that, like an SAT student getting a few hundred points for spelling his name right.

More likely, though, I've seen a lot of movies in this category, and they are the movies used in Mystery Science Theater 3000.  I went through IMDB's master list of the 'Bottom 100', which identify the worst movies ever made, to see what I have seen.  I can be proud not to have seen Disaster Movie and The Hottie & the Nottie (that just sounds terrible)...but I have seen (via MST3K) Manos: The Hands of Fate, Final Justice, Track of the Moon Beast, Space Mutiny, and The Creeping Terror, among many others on that list.  I'm not sure why I don't pour on the hate, but the MST3K versions make them all bearable.  Maybe that's why I gave it a 9.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time..."

So tonight I watched the 2012 movie "This Means War" with the ever-hot Reese Witherspoon and a few random dudes.


Movies like this that combine action, sex, and supposedly a few laughs are getting tiresome for me in my middle age, as they are so predictable and dull and without any common sense, but once in awhile I watch if it's free at the library.  Maybe I'll be surprised, I think.  But not this one...I ended up rating it a 5 on IMDB, and was thinking of going lower by the end.  Amazingly, Wikipedia says it made $156 million.

Here's the reason for this post:  2 CIA agents are trying to date the same woman and use every available CIA resource at their disposal.  They wiretap her house, follow her everywhere, and not just from one team, but two teams of agents working against each other.  Likely, millions of dollars of federal dollars are used to track this woman so that each agent can get an advantage.  Sound familiar?

It's really not a good movie, but I couldn't help watching this movie through the lens of all that NSA mess not long ago, in which the federal government is basically watching everything we do and say and  post on the internet.  What was meant in this movie to be Good Clean Harmless Fun is in fact that which has exposed much malfeasance on the part of the government.  It's can't be GCHF anymore, because we're all just sick and tired of what they may know about us.  And so in the end, why on earth would Reese Witherspoon decide to stick with random dude #2?  Any woman who learned what she learned about him in the end, why would she stick with such a moral generate?  C'mon, Reese, you're much hotter than that.

A movie like this could never get made in today's climate because of all the spying stuff.  But it should never have been made in the first place because it just really wasn't very good to begin with.

Movie Pitch: Buy Your Life

I have loved movies for most of my life.  They have affected the way that I look at life, at relationships, even at faith.  I've preached sermon series about movies, and I'm convinced that Hollywood isn't missing out at not using the Bible as an almost-endless supply of source material (and no, I'm not talking about junk like 'Left Behind').  The Bible is filled with terrific stories of intrigue, sex, violence, and forgiveness.  Just look at the book of Judges or the lives of Saul and David.  I'm preaching through David's life right now in fact and would think that the story of David and Bathsheba definitely ought to be made a movie.  Michael Douglas as the aged king who falls from nobility into lechery.  Some young hollywood babe to be Bathsheba.  Al Pacino as Joab, the military commander who has a past of his own.  Denzel Washington as Uriah, a man sent from the palace carrying his own death orders.

Instead, we get Fast and Furious, part six.  Oh well.

But I have other ideas as well.  One of them takes the best elements of The Hunger Games, Death Race, Running Man, and our current resentment and fascination of the wealth class of this country.

Imagine a dystopian future (they are all that, these days)...the wealth have secluded themselves into little islands of fortune, while the rest of civilization is poor, strung out, and does nothing but seek entertainment.  Revolution is in the air, but it is stifled...why?  The biggest show in entertainment: Buy Your Life.  (OK, I know...better titles can be made than this...but we're just brainstorming here).  Once a month the wealthy offer up a sacrifice to the proletarian masses.  In an arena, the wealth superstar (picked at random, of course, or so it seems) has to defend his/her life in some way.  Maybe it's in mortal combat with killer.  Maybe it's in escaping from a hunt by expert hunters. Maybe it's in a race to buy their freedom by making an agreement with a group of rag-tag people who might (or might not) be able to be bought.  The beauty of this is that the rules of the game are always changing...and there is a chance for freedom, or a chance for death.  Sometimes the end is gruesome...a beautiful heiress gets raped and tortured.  Sometimes the end is heart-warming...the wealthy creep pays for a new, well-maintained village for a few hundred families out of his fortune and finally learns the most important lesson of life.

The first 20 minutes set up this world...but what then?  There's several ways to go.  One of them is about how the game is rigged...maybe a business tycoon pays off the 'random selection' committee in order to have his main rival put into the arena.  Maybe a trophy wife, having had her husband caught, sells him in much the same way.  Or maybe, just maybe, we find out that the people being sacrificed all along were not the wealthy ones.  Instead, they were stand-ins for somebody else.  The powerful continue to get their own way, and the poor are instead unknowingly killing their own.

Maybe it's a personal story about an oblivious young wealthy person who gets entered into the arena.  He's done some bad things, but nothing too horrible, but his name is selected.  At first he is terrified and does all the wrong things, but eventually his heart and his courage (not to mention his good looks) make him into somebody that the viewers can identify with.  What's this?  Can we really root for the rich man?  But I'm not sure where this story ends up.

Or maybe it's a story of the sneering wealthy guy whose death is not enough.  The arena erupts, and violence begins spilling out into the streets.  If one wealthy person is killed, why not all of them?  Homes are invaded, rebellion comes, and a new world order comes out of it all.

Maybe somebody competent will take this idea and run with it.  But I think it's a good start.  I'd pay to see this...or at least get it from Redbox.

Kick off your Sunday shoes

The other day I watched on Netflix the remake of Footloose that came out a few years ago.  Some of the same songs, same plot lines, same names.  Hey kids, wouldn't it be freaky if your life was exactly like a movie that had occurred 25 years ago?  You'll know not to cross that bridge while drunk or you'll get hit by a semi and the reactionary town council will ban dancing!  Don't people ever learn?

Sure, there are differences.  The part of Sarah Jessica Parker is now played by a girl of indeterminate ethnicity.  It's located in Georgia (since, of course, the south is where backwards religious people live now, right?).  The preacher's daughter is a skank with mental problems, not just a bit wild and rebellious.  The uncle is a much more sympathetic character.  The chicken/tractor scene is replaced by a bizarre school bus race.  But it's mostly the same thing.

I would wonder if the original of this movie has helped to change the evangelical church's position on dancing more than anything in my lifetime.  When I was a kid we heard sermons and classes about the evils of dancing.  Now?  Except in the most conservative churches it's a given, and in some places it's encouraged.  Heck, I go now to an evangelical Christian university that has dances.  Who knows if it's always been that way, but nobody thinks anything of it.

In both movies there is a climax scene in which bad-boy Ren comes before the town council to plead his case for the big dance.  Helped by the preacher's daughter finding him some Bible verses, he passionately speaks about the need to dance, and hey, it's in the Bible, too!  A psalm speaks of dancing.  David danced before the Lord.  So shouldn't we dance too?  The town council sits in silence, destroyed by the word of God.

Of course, it ain't that easy.  While I no longer think that dancing is the epitomy of evil, and fully expect my kids to want to go to dances when they get older (my son especially already has rhythm), in a Christian sense  how dancing is today is very problematic.  I don't go clubbing...but what I see of it shows me that there ain't a lot of 'dancing before the Lord' in much of modern dancing.  Maybe in high school dances or evangelical Christian university dances, it's a much more tame thing.  Nobody looks like they are simulating sex in such places, I would bet...but in much of the rest of the world godliness is nowhere in sight.  Drunkenness, promiscuity, and the like are all encouraged in much dancing today.

But like most things, we can't make the distinction between these things.  Like the reactionary town council in the movie, it's all or nothing.  Either you can't even choreograph, or you have to bump and grind like a couple of dogs in heat.  Why can't Christians make the determination about what is good and what is evil?  Because for years we have held to slippery slope arguments or have been obsessed with extreme positions that have no basis in reality.  Only when we will start to understand degrees, and see things through eyes of the Spirit, will it really start to make sense what is acceptable and what is not.