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Master and protégé - Gustave and Zero in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

There's a moment in "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which I watched last night, that struck me as particularly poignant social commentary. For the sake of not spoiling any of the plot, I'll speak as generally as I can...

The political eschatology of Les Misérables

Eschatology at the barricade; Photo by Laurie Sparham/Telegraph.co.uk

Here in the little town of Toledo, we have a local treasure: The Wieting Theater. It's been in town for ages, but had started to fall on hard times and was threatened to close until a few years ago when local citizens and the theater guild - who didn't want to see this public gathering place die at the hands of a 60" HDTV in every home - got organized. Because of their efforts, today we have a beautifully restored classic small-town theater with a state-of-the-art digital audio and projection system, and a great stage for the periodic live performances that run. The movies are usually a few months behind, but for someone like me who couldn't care less about seeing most movies right when they come out (except "The Hobbit"), this is fine.

Well this past weekend, the recent movie production of Les Misérables was at the Wieting. My wife went on Friday night with a few other gals, came home and said "I'm going again tomorrow night." So Saturday night, my wife, daughter, and I caught it together.

It is stunning. It is incredible. Wow. There are a hundred directions this could go for me, but I want to focus on something peculiar I noticed at the end of the movie, having to do with eschatology or "kingdom(s) coming, on earth as in heaven." But first a bit of set-up...

Cap or Katniss? Violence in The Avengers and Hunger Games

It's strange business, being an Anabaptist-Christian pacifist who grew up loving comic books and videogames, both practices that are largely predicated on the myth of redemptive violence. Recently this has been brought to mind by two movies: "The Hunger Games" and "The Avengers." In this post I'll be focusing solely on the movies and not the prior art from which they're being adapted, and this is largely a "viewer response" commentary. Caveat: I'm currently near the end of the entire Hunger Games book trilogy and have a few thoughts that seem relevant from a theopolitical view, so some of what I say toward the end borrows from my having read the fuller story.

[Spoiler notice: I'm not going to give any major plot spoilers here, but I will discuss particulars of scenes and snippets of plot. So if even that counts as a "spoiler" and you have yet to see these movies and plan to, perhaps you shouldn't read on...]

First off, these two movies certainly share the view that violence is a necessary means. Neither espouse any pacifist ethic in any substantive way. What struck me, rather, is how violence functions in each movie and the response it elicited from the theater audiences that I was a part of in each instance.

Deus ex Matrix: Embodied Knowing and Love

(or: Toward a "Balls to Bones" Christian witness.)

When I first saw The Matrix just over a decade ago, it seemed like a movie that was made especially with my interests in mind. I was (still am) a life-long techno-nerd: The first kid in my class with a computer at home (Commordore64!), the first kid to get online, an avid reader of sci-fi novels and comic books of all sorts. When the movie was released in 1999, I was 20 years old and just finishing up an associate's degree in computer information systems. I worked for a software company. My buddy and I hung out until all hours playing video games and writing computer code, dreaming of becoming game developers. I had a problem with authority. So as I watched in early scenes of the movie, as Thomas Anderson/Neo slept with his head on his computer keyboard, or got chewed out by his boss for being late to work the next morning, I felt a deep sense of connection to his character. And when the final credits rolled before my eyes for the first time, as Rage Against the Machine's “Wake Up/Rock is Dead” blared, I could only echo Neo's words upon seeing Morpheus jump a chasmic gap between two skyscrapers (I realize this is cheesy): “Whoa.” This movie stuck a chord, the same year that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace struck out in the eyes of this (and many another) life-long Star Wars fan.

Four years passed before the final two installments of The Matrix trilogy were released. Like the Star Wars prequels, I was nonplussed. A brooding, cerebral story seemed to have been replaced by a fetish for over-the-top CGI action, horrendous “love scenes,” ridiculous philosophical conversations, and an overly complicated storyline with too many characters. The first movie was tight, sparse, and full of breathing mystery. The final two shot everything they had all over every scene, nothing left to subtlety. Disappointed, my DVD copy of the original has sat in my dwindling collection for the better part of a decade, collecting dust. Until out of necessity, this project gave it another lease on life to me.

In this post, I will offer reflections on what I'll call “The Doctrine of the Matrix” and then will put the movie into dialogue with Christian theology. After re-engaging with this movie, I've discovered that 1) I still love it, and 2) it has some very interesting biblical imagery/references alongside what I observe as a philosophical tension between knowing and being, or epistemology and ontology. With this latter tension, there may be some surprising parallels to Anabaptist or post-Christendom ways of knowing/being in the Christian faith. So read on for more Deus ex Matrix...

God at War in "Gabriel"

While poking around Netflix the other night, a movie I had never heard anything about was suggested to me, and it caught my attention: Gabriel, released in 2007. I watched the trailer online and it looked like your run-of-the-mill low-budget action good-guy/bad-guy movie, this time pitting angels and demons against each other in a city-based depiction of purgatory that looked like a prototypical dark, gothic city in the tradition Frank Miller (Sin City), or perhaps The Crow.

Normally, I would steer clear of these kinds of movies, because they strike me as formulaic and unimaginative. However, the namesake of this movie, the archangel, Gabriel, is a being that I have an affinity for. You see, I've assumed the role of the angel Gabriel for two film projects done last year for a seminary class (see Millennium Update episodes One & Two). I also steer clear of these kinds of movies because my wife can't stand them. But, as luck or fate or predestination would have it, my wife was gone this particular evening, and the movie was available for instant streaming, so I pulled it up and gave it a watch.

Read on for my review of the movie, Gabriel, with some theological reflections interspersed throughout...