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Bob Bixby: Misérable means Miserable

January 7, 2013 in Culture, Entertainment with 0 Comments

Pastor Bob Bixby interacts with Les Mis the movie:

A lot of discussion about Les Misérables has been had.

I’ll join with some scattered thoughts under the following categories:

Musicality
Vulgarity
Spirituality

Musicality

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and everyone has a reason for why their opinion is credible (whether it makes sense or not). I’m no different. I think I know a thing or two about music having had some formal training in music. Thus, I think my opinion about the vocals and musicality has some credibility (with me anyway).

First of all, it’s hard to do a disservice to the music. The literature itself, musically and lyrically, is tested by time and will be sung for years to come. But it was the musical experience that was totally different. Many of us have heard the best singers in the world sing the music on the world’s largest stages. Or we have heard recordings of the same. Or we have seen cinematic musicals that were recorded differently than Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables in which he had the actors sing the music directly as they were acting. No studio recording of the solo and lip syncing here. The singers are singing the take live. It’s been done before, but it’s extremely rare and therefore a mainly novel experience for today’s viewers.

It’s for that reason that some were . . .

Read the rest here.

Looking forward to Christmas 2012

May 31, 2012 in Culture, Entertainment with 1 Comment

The “Princess Bride” Reunion on Good Morning America

October 15, 2011 in Entertainment, Stupid Stuff with 2 Comments

Cast members reflect on a Brauns family favorite.

HT: Denny Burk

A movie recommendation from Cal Thomas

October 6, 2010 in Entertainment with 0 Comments

Cal Thomas frames a suggestion for entertainment by reminding us of the Carter years:

In 1977, things were similarly gloomy. The misery index under President Jimmy Carter reflected the mood of many Americans. The president would come to speak of an America that had seen its best days and he told us we were going to have to cut back on everything, including our vision of a greater America.

Along came a big Broadway musical that year called “Annie.” It touched the country’s unique chord of optimism and promised, “the sun’ll come out tomorrow.” Most who saw it came away believing that the sun would, in fact, come out again and that things would eventually get better.

Now we are in the midst of another national funk and there is a new cultural rescue boat coming just in time to save us from the flood of our current depression. It is a film called . . .

The rest here.

Are “totems” (in the movie Inception) sacraments?

August 9, 2010 in Entertainment, Sacraments with 9 Comments

Is there an analogy between Totems in the movie Inception and the sacraments?

If you have seen Inception, then you know that Totems are an important part of the story line. Per the movie:

A Totem is an object that exists in the real world in order to ground oneself not only in reality, but also in the dream world. A Totem has a specially modified weight, balance, or feel in the real world but in a dream of someone who does not know it well, the characteristics of the totem will very likely be off. In order to protect its integrity, only the totem’s owner should ever handle it. That way, the owner is able to tell if he is in his own dream or someone else’s. In the owner’s own dream world, the totem will feel correct. Any ordinary object which has been in some way modified to affect its balance, weight, or feel will work as a totem (Source).

The importance of Totems to the characters in Inception cannot be overstated. These objects of substance and weight, give concrete assurances of reality. They assure Dom that he is not a projection of someone else’s dream.

Compare and contrast “totems” with Calvin’s thoughts on sacraments.*

It seems to me that a simple and proper definition would be to say that [a sacrament] is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith; and we in turn attest our piety toward him in the presence of the Lord and of his angels and before men. Here is another briefer definition; one may call it a testimony of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him.” Calvin. IV.14.1, page 1277.

Sacraments are “totems” given by God which assure us of the reality of the Gospel. As Sinclair Ferguson wrote (in reference to Calvin):

[God] provides the visible words of baptism and the Lord’s supper where Christ puts his grace on display in order to bring us to a more assured communion with him through the Spirit’s work and our responding faith (p. 205, emphasis mine). (As quoted in this post).

Think of it this way. There are times when we feel that reality is “sloping.” We wonder if anything is real. And, at such moments we run to the table to bite into and taste the Gospel. We remember that Christ’s body was broken, his blood shed. Or, we see the water splashing down over the face of a brother or sister and are reminded of new birth. The sacraments are vital aids that sustain the faithful.

Of course, sacraments do not bestow grace in and of themselves, even as in Inception, totems don’t make reality happen. Rather, the sacraments are a grace which assures the person holding them in his hand of reality.

But, they are more than just memory devices. They bring us into the presence of Christ in a particular way. At this point, the analogy breaks down, as illustrations and analogies always do.

The perfectionist in me wants to refine this even more. But, it is a blog – -not a book. For more on the sacraments, see this post.

What do you think? Do you see the parallel?

*I am comfortable using either the word "sacrament" or "ordinance." For a discussion of the use of these terms, see Grudem’s systematic theology.

Rob Dreher on Avatar

January 12, 2010 in Entertainment with 0 Comments

Rob Dreher is more patient with Avatar than some of the other reviews linked to:

I finally made it to "Avatar" today. Whatever else there is to say about the film, it was well worth seeing for the visual spectacle alone. I saw it in 3D, and it was great fun. It’s also fun, in a way, to see it as a Rohrshach test of one’s political and cultural orientation. "Avatar" has been thoroughly analyzed as a cliched story about white guilt/reverse racism, cheesy noble-savage mythologizing, cheap anti-capitalist fantasizing, pantheism, environmentalism, anti-militarism, and so forth. In its storytelling, "Avatar" is not morally nuanced, or even sophisticated. And yet, I found myself enjoying the film more than I expected to, and I believe that of all the criticism I’ve read of the picture, Conor Friedersdorf’s take seemed the truest to my own experience this afternoon. Here’s a bit of what he had to say:

Ultimately all these critics miss out on a rare chance to reflect on the tragic flaws of earth and humanity in a novel way. Think back to those basic kinds of narrative conflict we learn about in elementary school. Man versus nature stories show us how the hard realities of the human condition impact our lives. Man versus man stories render the fallen nature of our species: since at the Greeks we’ve understood that we’re condemned to be forever hubristic, greedy, violent, jealous, etc. In Avatar, we’re shown a foreign world where creatures and nature are similar enough to our world that we understand them, different enough that they can help us reflect on ourselves and our planet as never before, and rendered so spectacularly that as much as any movie I’ve ever seen, we’re able to conduct this mental exercise by really feeling that the creatures and habitat we’re viewing are authentically there and different. "The audacity of Cameron’s movie is to make believe that the artificial world of computer-generated graphics offers a truer realm of nature than our own." (link)

Sure, I wish the villains would’ve been a bit less one dimensional — Avatar isn’t an inquiry into the characters of individual humans or the nature of evil doers, nor is it a masters class in intricate, delightful plotting — but the characters and the plot serviceably accomplish their main objective: putting us inside an alien society and landscape, awing us with its contours, and threatening its destruction so that we feel how thoroughly we’ve grown to like its best attributes.