Once – A Movie/Musical Review

Being a sucker for large web marketing campaigns and catchy movie trailers, I stumbled upon a little Irish movie called "Once" this past week. What an amazing revelation it has been. Maybe you remember what it was like the first time you watched "Garden State" or saw "Rent". The music took you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go, but once you were there, it felt like home and like you could never leave.

That’s what "Once" has done to me.

Set up as a story of a street musician (busker) on the streets of Dublin, it’s hard to really put into words how the simplicity of the story really works, but it just does. It’s not a crazy, plot-twisting, heart-wrenching drama. It’s just real. The plot is really just a vehicle for the music. This is a musical in the best sense of the word. As the characters move through their days, they write songs together, share ideas, share their stories, through music. From learning a new song in a music shop ("Falling Slowly"), to writing lyrics over an established instrumental track ("If You Want Me"), to the process of recording a demo in the studio ("When Your Mind’s Made Up"), these amazing songs shape and weave the story together.

The great thing is that neither Glen Hansard or Marketa Irglova are actors. They’re musicians whose friend John Carney asked them to help create music for the soundtrack. As the project developed, they found themselves in front of the camera and while they don’t have acting experience, they play their parts so naturally because the songs and the stories are their songs and their stories. It works so brilliantly.

It’s a movie like this, in its simplicity and with its heart that inspires me. I have been rekindling my love for just listening to music, really stopping and listening. It’s music like this that makes it worthwhile. It makes me want to start writing my own music, to start singing along loudly, to pick up my guitar and just play. That’s good music.

Check this movie out. Maybe you won’t respond so excitedly as I have. Maybe the coarse Irish language will turn you off. Shame if it does. I hope we can share in appreciating this brilliance and the heart in these songs. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing more about this movie over the next couple months (hopefully longer), as the DVD begins to circulate. I really wish I’d seen it at the Pickford Cinema this summer, but alas, the time was right this week.

More info at Wikipedia, of course.

An Inconvenient Truth

A world where sea levels raise 20 feet. A world where school the science curriculum does not include a unit on glaciers. A world where we dry up every summer and flood out every winter. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

We just finished watching Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" and these seem to be the profound consequences we could all be facing in the very near future due to the progress of global warming. It seems that this phenomenon actually does exist and it might actually do us and our children a whole lot of harm. What do we do about it? When the ice begins to melt faster and the hurricanes more frequent, when our winter weather becomes increasingly drastic (sound like the present at all), we are going to have to face up to the fact that this is happening around us.

It seems some people feel this is a non-issue for them. Don’t tell me how to live me life, what I can consume, how I choose to get around town or where I buy my electricity from. Or let’s think about groups of Christians who feel that their world is only a waiting room, where they will depart from soon enough and therefore have no reason to feel any stewardship towards it. This issue, this very real issue, is economic, environment, and most importantly — moral.

We have a moral responsibility to take care of the earth. We have a moral responsibility to protect our children and their children from all the issues that increase CO2 emissions will bring upon us. We live on a rock that is not our own — it’s God’s. We have a moral responsibility to take good care of the land he has given us and care for the people he loves, all people.

It’s hard to summarize all of these big ideas in such a way that argues out our moral responsibility to the earth and to it’s people and living creations in such a short statement. But really, it shouldn’t be so hard to see that the God who created this beautiful earth would be/is distressed by what is happening to our world and he would ask people who love him to do something about.

I’ve got a couple ideas. First, please rent this DVD, "The Inconvenient Truth" and watch it with eyes and heart seeking to understand how God would ask us deal with the issue. Second, do something. Change how you commute to work. Pay the extra couple of dollars a month to get green energy. And lastly, tell someone about the problem. If you’re interested, click the link in the right side bar and pledge to watch this DVD and do something about global warming.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we (our generation) could actually do something about some of these issues? It’s not like the environment is the only thing we’re worried about. Can we change it all? Can we do something about global warming, Darfur, AIDS, the war, and everything my selfish mind forgets? Seems like each one would only require small moves by each of us. Dare you to move.

Lady in the Water

I’ll do my best not to spoil to much of the plot in this post. Stacy and I just saw M. Night Shyamalan’s newest film, Lady in the Water. In my opinion, this is his best since the Sixth Sense (I haven’t seen The Village but I haven’t heard too many good things about it.)

Not to say too much about the story, but I have to give you this: everything you see in the trailer is pretty much in the first 15 minutes of the film. Unfortunately, I began to doubt the movie at that point, wondering where it was going to go from there. Luckily, with all of the stuff I already knew out of the way, the story opens up into a challenging look at the purpose of every being. As with his other movies, Shyamalan doesn’t skimp on the spirituality and fills the movie with religious/spiritual symbolism that will take a while to work out as I reflect on the movie.

Starring Paul Giamatti as a somewhat hopeless live-in maintenance guy at an apartment complex, the film revolves around the discovery of a woman from another world, the Blue World, who has come with a message to humanity. Shyamalan has a significant role in the movie as well and I was impressed with his acting ability. Giamatti is good as always, struggling to be a hero under the weight of personal doubt and a lack of confidence in his ability to lead and protect the woman, Story.

I’m glad I saw it. And maybe now I won’t get so annoyed at the Lady in the Water banner ads on every movie website I go to. This film has quite the marketing campaign behind it. Maybe the studio realized that Shyamalan had "done good" on this one. It’s definitely worth seeing, so if anybody wants to go, I’ll see it again with you.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane…

A couple movie trailers I thought might be worth sharing.

First watch this one….

Then watch this one!!

Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music?

It’s another review. My co-worker/friend Justin and I watched "Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music", a documentary on the Cornerstone Music Festival and the Christian music industry in general last night. It is an honest, candid look at the lives of Christian rock musicians. It posed some pretty interesting arguments and also was just cool to see into the lives of some of the bands.

The premise of the documentary was to show what the Christian music industry is like, to make it clear that these artists are for the most part musicians by trade and Christians by faith. It’s easy to forget that they are making their music as a job, something to pay the bills. Many of them spoke of feeling pressure to sing about something more godly or preachy, and feeling stifled by this. One guy posed this sort of question: "Do I come to your workplace and ask you to talk more about God in your board meetings? Should you be bringing up Jesus at the water cooler in the same way you’re asking me to preach on stage?" Fascinating.

I specifically liked hearing the interviews with Five Iron Frenzy, David Bazan of Pedro the Lion, and MxPx. Maybe because they are the ones I’ve listened to the most (I’m not a huge Living Sacrifice fan), but their words really stuck out to me. So many people ask if bands like MxPx or Pedro the Lion are still "Christian" because they (attempt to) depart from the industry, into the mainstream. From the way the Christian music industry seems, I’d want to get out of there as fast as possible, for the sake of my faith.

While this movie didn’t get into the deeper issues of corporate greed and the pimping of Jesus that we see a lot of in Christian culture, it did start to address some of the real problems with commercial Christianity, which was very interesting.

Overall, a decent movie. Low budget, nothing fancy, but it exposes some interesting issues.

Paradise Now

We watched "Paradise Now" tonight, a great movie about two Palestinian men who have been chosen as suicide bombers in an operation in Tel Aviv. The men have to decide whether they go through with the whole operation, knowing what the cost will be (death) and dealing with what it will do to their families after they are gone.

Much of the film focuses on the internal struggle that one of the men faces as he is confronted with the reality of going through with the bombing. Questions of "will this change anything", "will my family be safe when I’m gone", and "what will happen to me once I’ve died" all run through his head.

It’s fascinating to see how the whole operation is organized and executed (I’ll try not to give too much away). The thing that really stuck out to me and Stacy as we talked about the film was the structure surrounding these bombers that set up their operation. It’s not like they were just a couple of guys with some C-4 just laying around, looking for something to blow up for God (Allah). It was more about a nationalist movement, at least it seemed the film was portraying it as such. The Palestinians felt that death was their only option in a world where they consider themselves dead already due to the occupation. Living peacefully, making slow non-violent changes, seems to have lost its appeal. When hope is lost, these last resort efforts become more enticing and easier to justify.

The part of it that was for religious purpose was present, mostly in the ideas of reward as they would become martyrs. I think I’m naive enough to believe that there are just these fundamentalists out there who are religious wackos and are only acting on their skewed religious agenda. This film brought the whole life of the Palestinians into perspective. The religious devotion is there, but as we all know, our religious life is interconnected with our cultural and social life and the ways we serve our God are often played out in how we are choosing to serve our culture for His good. For example, people are out on mission trips this time of year, helping people who society often overlooks (hurricane victims, the elderly) because they are the ones in our society that need aid and God calls us to help those who are in need.

Tying this all together, I think "Paradise Now" helps me see the freedom fighter’s perspective, their need to act out against the oppression as both a religious and cultural response. Cultural in that their actions confront the needs of the people (freedom from oppression). Religious in that ultimately this service is traced back to sacrificing for their God and their sense of duty to that faith. Maybe here is where I begin to see some of the clear differences between the Christian and Islamic gods. (I had a discussion with some friends last night on the possibility of the same God by different name, but this makes me think otherwise. Or at least the way each religion views God is very different because the way we respond to him is so contrasting.) But I have to ask myself whether I say that my God would not condone such violence because I’m not in a situation where I am confronted with violent action as the only answer to ending my suffering.

Religious. Cultural. Historical. All forces which pull on us and drive our decisions. Our desires. Our beliefs. Let our pursuit of God’s truth be above all three.

Rent "Paradise Now", uhh….now.