X-Men: The Last Stand

I didn’t exactly go into this movie with high hopes. The team that brought us the first two entries of the X-Men franchise are bringing us Superman Returns. Now instead of waiting that extra time to let that team deliver the third entry into the franchise, the powers that be decide to rush the vehicle in the hands of director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, Red Dragon). Ladies and gentlemen, I give you X-Men: The Last Stand.

Way to gut a franchise.

(And I apologize in advance for any insider geek language.)

Even in the comic, there came a point when the allegory for what the “mutant dilemma� stood for had been worn out. For the longest time it stood for racial tensions and it was extended with the backdrop of homosexual civil rights as its relevant social backdrop. However, the storylines became exhausted to the point of having te feel of treading the same ground and in need of an infusion of a fresh plot and fresh villains.

On the plus side, this movie finally gave Halle Berry, as Ororo/Storm, something to do. It seemed a waste to have such a high caliber actress reduced to the sidelines and not given enough screen time. The down side is how they reduced the cast of characters in order to make room for her. Maybe it was just me, but the art seemed especially bleak, as if the filmmakers went out of their way to drain the color, the joy, out of the franchise. To say that some of the characters, Kitty (Ellen Page) and Peter/Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), were under-developed implies they were developed at all. Even the latest addition, Angel (Ben Foster), was more symbol than character.

The movie has several nods to X-Men geeks (read: my people). They do a tribute to the Days of Future Past comic book storyline in the Danger Room, where the team practices how to use their powers in combat. They give us flashes of Sentinels, a tease of a story that could have been. They throw in new characters such as Dr. Hank McCoy/The Beast (brilliantly performed by Kelsey Grammar), Callisto (Dania Ramirez), and Cain Marko/the Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones, who delivers a line familiar to those who have seen his internet video clip). The movie crams a lot of new mutants into it, but doesn’t take the time to tell any of their stories and allow us to connect to them. In fact, the movie is full of cool moments that don’t quite come together as a compelling story.

“Who will you stand with?� –Magneto

The story is set off by the revelation that a pharmaceutical company has developed a cure for being a mutant. This sets off a debate within the mutant community. Mutants were considered the next stage of evolution. The inherent problem of finding your identity in what you claim is strictly biological is that the natural progression of thought becomes if it is biological, it can be seen as against the natural order, an illness. If it’s a disease, it can be cured. That is, if it’s how they’re born, then it can be tested for, possibly “corrected.� So if mutants had found their identity within their mutation, then the idea of being cured was unthinkable. So for a teenagers, Anna Paquin's Rogue for example, already struggling with issues of identity and coming to terms with who they are and wanting to fit in, there is a choice they have to make.

Some mutants decide to follow Magneto (Ian McKellen) who adopts a lot of racially militant language, essentially seeing their dilemma as a purity war. Some of the mutants even refer to their birth names as slave names and the president opts to solve the problem “By any means necessary.�

“You know, sometimes when you cage the beast, the beast gets angry.� –Wolverine (Hugh Jackman)

The other half of X-Men: The Last Stand revolves around death and resurrection. Their journey begins with a resurrection. Dr. Jean Grey/Phoenix (Famke Janssen) returns with her alternate personality, The Phoenix - a being of all desire, joy, and rage, battling for control of her. Her return leads to the death of several characters. Again, this points to a problem with this movie. If you are going to do the Dark Phoenix story, commit to that story. Allow Famke to display the emotional range this story would require. Don’t reduce it to a subplot.

This fanboy take on the classic Dark Phoenix storyline represents that internal battle we face as we wrestle with that part of ourselves we believe to be unchecked, our sense of freedom, individuality, and self-sufficiency taken to extreme. Like Jean Grey, it is our other self, the product of fallen creation, living contrary to what we were created to be. The path of The Phoenix, with its subtle Jean Grey possessed by Phoenix imagery, leaves only entropy and death in its wake.

“Don’t let it control you.� –Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart)

We’re all born with this inner beast, this out of control aspect to ourselves. The struggle is one that Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) especially identifies with. We all have a choice to make, to choose to be what you are. The choice of how to live, of what to be about, is represented in deciding between the way of Professor Xavier (the path of control/help, ultimately leading to peace and reconciliation) and that of and Magneto (unbridled freedom ultimately leading to chaos and death).

“Be what you are, what nature intended.� –Magneto

We are looking for a story to define us, a community to belong to, be it punk (the anarchist story), militia (the story of �patriotism�), gang (the story of street families), or being a mutant (the story of how they were born). When institutions fail to do what the were created to do, be what they were supposed to be about, other places–not often looking like one expects–will spring up to do their job. Professor Xavier preaches a gospel message of peace and reconciliation. He believes that the best way to spread this message is by providing a safe place for people to work out their questions all the while teaching them ways to discipline themselves so that they can control themselves. Such safe havens involve first being a community, allowing people to have a sense of belonging before believing. People need to find a place to call home, a place to belong, and people to call family. As Storm put it, “we work as a team.�

Phoenix: You would die for them.
Wolverine: Not for them. For you.

Freedom to live as you were meant to live comes at a cost. “If you want freedom, you have to fight for it,� Magneto says. To be formed into the people we were meant to be requires discipline. A choice, community, formation, the path of discipleship is a long and difficult one. As Robert Webber put it “discipleship is a long obedience in the same direction,� but it is a journey worth taking in order to fulfill the vision of a world united.

X-Men: The Last Stand is sadly predictable with an inescapable sense of forced pathos. There is no emotional development to any of the characters. During the course of the movie we lose a lot of beloved characters (no matter what the clip after the credits hints at), the heart of the franchise; but the movie doesn’t move us with their loss, it only plays out the expected cues and tells us we’re to feel moved now. The movie raises a lot of questions and issues, but chooses to not engage or meditate on them. What we are left with is this bleak vehicle-by-numbers that distracts us with cool scenes and action (that can’t even keep the time of day straight). File this in the cabinet with third installments to a franchise that didn’t quite live up to the first two (Alien 3, Blade: Trinity). We can hold out hope for the rumored Wolverine movie.

Big Fish

—Overview
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film
—Spiritual Connections
—Forum

Tim Burton has always been a hit and miss film-maker. When he’s on, he’s on (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice), but when he’s off, he’s ... Planet of the Apes. Too often he’s a theme without a coherent plot (Batman Returns). However, with Big Fish, some of his favorite themes, alienation and the power of stories, combine with his strengths as a film-maker to craft a wonderful fable about fables.

Big Fish is about a father, Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor/Albert Finney), and a son, Will Bloom (Billy Crudrup), and their inability to see anything of themselves in the other. Ed Bloom is a larger than life figure who tells tales and myths about his life, spinning so many stories that his son has never been able to tell where reality ends and fictional license begins. As the father is dying, Will–who grew up to become a journalist–decides to tell the story of his father and in so doing, learn about his father, and learn about himself by finding himself in his father’s story.

“A dangerous path is made that much harder by darkness.� –Edward Bloom

Like The Odyssey, Big Fish is a series of adventures with Ed Bloom on the hero’s journey. Finding it hard to leave the perfect small town Specter is like the temptation of “heaven� or, rather, finding yourself at your intended destination too soon and becoming complacent in your journey. Next comes the circus, echoing the Biblical story of Jacob working seven years to marry Rachel. Then there's the wooing of his true love, Sandra (Alison Lohman/Jessica Lange), his girl in the river (to put it in Arthurian terms), his “lady of the lake.� Along the way, he collects the tales and characters that make up his life. Finally, for the hero’s journey to come full circle, like Arthur off to Avalon, the hero dies. But his stories live on after him and in that way, he becomes immortal.

The central conflict in the movie revolves around the idea of the “truth� vs. the power of story. Ed Bloom blurs the line between fiction and reality so much that the son feels he doesn’t know his own father. His frustration grows out of trying to discern the truth of the events, only to find out confusing new information that makes him give up on the prospect entirely.

On one level, it reminds me of how my wife and I tell stories. We both convey the essence of truth, but she sticks more to the facts while I pursue the entertainment of the story (which means leaving out some facts and exaggerating others). On another level, this debate reminds me of how we often argue over the Bible. Sometimes it’s a matter of accepting the story, the metanarrative of God wooing man back to him, not dissecting it. Not reducing it to its parts to see how every theme or fact fits together. Not having it try to do things it wasn’t meant to do: be a faith proof text, be scientific doctrine, be political treatise, be historical document. It is a collection of stories within an over-arching story - a story we’ve chosen to let shape and form us. Will Bloom tried to explain it to his father this way:

“The thing about icebergs is you only see 10 percent of them. The other 90 percent is below the water where you can’t see it. And that’s what it is with you Dad. I’m only seeing this little bit that sticks above the water ... You tell lies, Dad. You tell amusing lies. Stories are what you tell a five year old at bedtime. They’re not elaborate mythologies you maintain when your son is ten and fifteen and twenty and thirty. And the thing is, I believed you. I believed your stories so much longer than I should have. And then when I realized that everything you said was impossible -- everything! - - I felt like such a fool to have trusted you. You were like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny combined. Just as charming and just as fake.�

Faith is like that iceberg.

The thing about questions is that people want answers and we aren’t comfortable with the mysteries of unsatisfying answers. And when we think about it, how much do facts convey about us? The facts of me don’t sum me up, not the way the story of me would. Truth is communicated best in stories, which is probably why Jesus told so many parables.

“Do you love your father?� –Josephine Bloom (Marion Cotillard)

People are stories; we are all interconnected stories. One of the great things I have appreciated about working for Hollywood Jesus is how it has trained me to look at movies as stories and then connect those stories to Jesus. It’s a good exercise in how to approach people, too. Accepting people for who they are, where they are, and how they connect to the world, then finding a way to help them see how their story connects to Jesus.

“You become what you always were.� –Will Bloom

Our own story-telling culture isn’t dying. What was once a rich, oral tradition has just slowly been replaced by television and movies. We are the sum of our stories. Stories have a way of coming full circle. The power of story is in how it shapes and defines us. We all have stories that we’ve chosen to live by. Sometimes it's only a matter of choosing the one best able to form you into who you were meant to be.

Big Fish is visually stunning, the flashback sequences having their own sense of vibrancy, with special effects used exquisitely to layer a canvas of dreams. Some movies exude charm and magic in their tale-telling, like Chocolat and Amelie. Big Fish is surely one of those type of movies, sure to enchant audiences.

Inside Man

With the most mainstream movie of his career, Spike Lee pays homage to the great crime caper movies with Inside Man. It's more puzzle than typical heist movie: even a simple bank robbery, like each of the characters in it, is more than it seems. Like Scorcese repeatedly working with DeNiro, Lee teams up once again with Denzel Washington (Mo Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game) who plays the complicated Detective Keith Frazier. Waffling on whether to propose to his girlfriend and facing corruption charges, he’s a man “too smart to be a cop.� Good thing, because a lot of the movie goes unexplained.

The movie is filled with wonderful performances. Frazier’s half sleuth/half street cop is pitted against Clive Owen’s mostly masked “villain,� Dalton Russell - bank robber-cum-father confessor - in a cat and mouse game of wits. Jodie Foster has a ball playing Madeline White, a mysterious power broker in need of having her own movie. A bit of a red herring, she is never sufficiently explained, despite the viewer wanting to see more of her intriguing character (think “The Cleaner� from Pulp Fiction).

It’s the little things about Spike Lee movies that provide me such joy. The music that is almost a character unto itself: though slightly intrusive this time around, the Terrance Blanchard score–the John Williams to Lee’s Spielberg–adds a flourish of film noir. The costumes: Lee seems to take pains to dress his leads, paying as much attention to Denzel’s wardrobe as his performance. And the movie feels very New York-y: from the bank customers, to the international feel, to the shout outs to Brooklyn.

Spike Lee is still prone to his quirks: he interrupts the rhythm of the film with interrogation sequences, so you have an idea of who lives right away. He manages to squeeze in one of his infamous “standing still on a moving track� shots. As always, he leaves room for social commentary in his film, from the racial profiling of “Arabs� to how video games (Lee’s subtle jab named “Kill Dat Nigga�) and hip hop mentalities impact our view of things.

“There’s a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being imprisoned.� –Dalton

Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are already in a prison, no matter how gilded the bars. We have built these complicated structures in our lives, often trying to fill the voids in us with the trappings of wealth. Inside Man is largely about what we value: whether it's the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ ethic of money and success or the power of secrets, those things left unconfessed.

“I sold my soul and I’ve been trying to buy it back ever since.�

Unconfessed sin is the true corruption at the heart of the movie. “All lies all evil deeds, they all stink. You can cover them up but they will come out,� Dalton Russell says. Someone in the movie has sinned. The sin has been long buried, but not forgotten - and though it has been mostly covered up, sins have a way of finding you out. No matter our self-salvation scheme, be it becoming successful at what we do or turning to social service with the idea of making up for it, that is not where true salvation lies. True salvation begins with confession, be it voluntary or your hand being forced. Only then can true redemption be found.

Inside Man, though a taut crime thriller, is a morality tale along the lines of Phone Booth. I will have to find a place in my Top Five Spike Lee Joints for this one. Ya dig. Sho nuff.


*********

My Top Five Spike Lee Joints (Recommendations)

Let me put this as plainly as I can: Spike Lee is not a great black film-maker. Nor is he the black Woody Allen. He’s a great film-maker. Period. Some of his movies are more controversial than others, and some get lost in the mix because they aren’t controversial at all. Here are some of my faves:

1. Do the Right Thing - seventeen years later, the movie still packs a powerful emotional wallop
2. Malcolm X - features Denzel’s tour-de-force performance, though he was robbed of the Oscar. Yes, they they made up to him by giving him one for Training Day, but we all know they were rewarding his performance in Malcolm X.
3. 4 Little Girls - a fabulous documentary that is heart-rending to watch.
4. Clockers - Spike Lee enters the hood movie genre (Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society) with this strong entry.
5. 25th Hour - starring Ed Norton, this one features one of the best “End of Self� moments put to screen.

Honorable Mentions:
Jungle Fever - two movies for the price of one. The main story, starring Wesley Snipes, explores the idea of interracial relationships, but the thesis gets somewhat muddied by being entangled with the issue of adultery. The sub-plot, featuring a strong performance by Samuel L. Jackson, is so good that it threatens to overtake the movie.
Bamboozled - if you can get past the voice that Damon Wayons chooses to employ, this is some of Spike Lee’s finest satire of television and racial stereotypes.

His under-rated character studies:
He Got Game, Summer of Sam, Mo Better Blues, Get on the Bus, Crooklyn

MI:3

—1. Overview
—2. Cast and Crew
—3. Photo Pages
—4. Trailers, Clips, DVDs, Books, Soundtrack
—5. Posters (Tom Cruise)
—6. Production Notes (pdf)
—7. Spiritual Connections
—8. Presentation Downloads

The official summer blockbuster movie season has begun. While it’s been a long time since MI:2, it’s only a short time for our intrepid hero, Ethan Hunt (the bad-press belabored Tom Cruise) and the stakes of the spy game movie have been raised in this post-24, post-Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and post-Bourne Identity/Supremacy world. This director’s franchise was in need of reinventing itself after the convoluted plot of the first (Brian DePalma) and the too reminiscent of a James Bond feel of the second (John Woo) - so in the rare Hollywood brilliant move, Cruise tapped J.J. Abrams (Lost) to helm the reinvention.

Abrams, who directed and co-wrote MI:3, has his fingerprints all over this movie. As the creator of Alias, he can stage exciting spy sequences with the best of them. For good or for ill, MI:3 has many of Alias’ rhythms, from the use of the J.J. Abrams' favorite players [Keri Russell (Felicity), Greg Grunberg (Alias)] to poaching a character from the show and stopping short of naming him Marshall. However, a trait of his work is that Abrams’ stories have always been about relationships as much as anything else.

Ving Rhames (playing Luther) gets a little more screen time, once again making the most from a small role and the only strand of consistency in the Mission Impossible franchise besides Cruise. Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix Trilogy, King of New York) is a welcome addition as the man in charge of IMF. By the way, let me squeeze in a word on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian. It is easy for a good actor to be handed the uber-villain role and give a hammy performance that would make William Shatner oink. Yet he plays his no-nonsense villain with a cool aplomb that makes him all the more terrifying. On the surface, the movie is little more than an excuse to set up non-stop action scenes, yet there is another story that lays within this movie.

“What I see in Julia is life before all of this. And it is good.� –Ethan Hunt

This is a story as old as creation itself. What the spy genre does so cleverly is remind us is that we all lead double lives. On the surface, we lead relatively normal lives, going through the day to day mundane motions of whatever job we have, even ordinary ones like Ethan Hunt’s faux day job of being a highway traffic control engineer. However, life has a way of bringing about a crisis that forces us to reflect on the fact that we aren’t who we think we are and we aren’t what we were meant to be.

“A dishonesty that poisons everything.� –Luther

This fundamental lie to our existence reveals itself in several ways. It can disrupt relationships, as Ethan’s wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), has her life hanging in the balance due to his secret life. Without giving away any of the (tired) twists and turns that we’ve come to expect from this franchise, his colleagues suffer due to betrayals stemming from an “ends justify the means� expediency that serves to remind us of the reality that when you collaborate with corruption, you get corrupted.

The impossible mission this time around focuses on securing the “Rabbit’s Foot,� a MacGuffin if ever there was one. In this case, the Rabbit’s Foot is supposed to represent a type of anti-God: technology capable of anti-creation, real “end of the world stuff.� (Sadly, also reminiscent of the Rimbaldi mythology that permeates the show Alias). So, once again, Ethan Hunt finds himself in the unenviable position of pursuing objects he doesn’t quite understand, unable to trust anyone.

“But you’ve got to do what’s right. What you know to be right.� –Ethan Hunt

“A normal relationship is enviable for people like us.� says Luther. Just as we can often sense that things aren’t as they were meant to be, we also sense that there is a way to make things right, to make things whole again. That there is a better way for us to live. As Julia’s sister points out “this is about starting a new family.� MI:3 is billed and centers around Tom Cruise’s character, yet the premise is about a team, sometimes that team learning how to be a team. In the end, they are Ethan Hunt’s family every bit as much as Julia is - sometimes, it’s a matter of finding the right family to be adopted into.

“Just a prayer I say to bring it home.� –Zheng (Maggie Q)

In the end, no matter how impossible the mission, the goal is to come home. To reclaim a semblance of normalcy in one’s day-to-day living. Ethan Hunt can’t be a spy 24/7 and MI:3 explores what that life, or the desire for that “normal� life, might look like for him. The plot for MI:3 is serviceable, with a certain amount of heart and light romance holding it together. Still, if all you want is mindless, non-stop action, you'll be well served. There is a ballet-like movement to the choreographed mayhem. If The Sentinel was like a bad episode of 24, then MI:3 is like a good episode of Alias. Have fun.

— Overview

Criminal Minds

'The literalness is nowhere near as horrifying as the empty space where the body was, where the ground is stained with blood. That allows me to [imagine] every tortured victim throughout history in this empty arena. This piece is a metaphor for hate, insensitivity, torture. When this show operates at its highest plane, it's as a window into man's inhumanity to man. And the question is — why?'' –Mandy Patinkin

The era of the police procedural on television grinds forward. A network already dominated by three brands of C.S.I. (not to mention the other procedurals Without A Trace and Cold Case), which invariably clashes with NBC’s 3 brands of Law & Order (or Conviction or ... you get the picture), cashes in on the popularity of movies like Seven, Saw, and Hannibal Lector (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) with the new series Criminal Minds. Airing opposite cultural phenomenon Lost, the show, which has carved out its own niche among the procedurals by focusing on serial killers, has managed to become a breakout hit in its own right.

Criminal Minds centers on a crack team of profilers: burn out-cum-mentor, Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin); his ever-brooding number one, Special Agent Aaron Hotchner (Thomas Gibson from Dharma & Greg); the resident genius and socially clueless Dr. Spencer Reid (Marrhew Gray Gubler, The Life Aquatic); requisite hot chick Elle Greenaway (Lola Glaudini, The Handler); requisite hot guy, Agent Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore of The Young and the Restless); and computer oracle Garcia (Kirsten Vangsnees). Executive-produced by Ed Bernero (co-creator of Third Watch), the show doesn’t stray far from the C.S.I. mold in terms of quick cuts and gruesome close ups. However, Criminal Minds focuses on the “why?� instead of the “how?� of a criminal. The psychological motivations of the unsubs aberrant behavior. By the end of each episode, you understand exactly how the evil was nurtured and formed before it was unleashed.

Our culture has a fascination with serial killers. Even pre-romanticization with the character Hannibal Lector, the serial killer has been long mythologized. Caught up by the charming face evil often wears or a simple fascination with the brutality we are capable of inflicting upon one another. Call it sin or our nature, it’s like we realize that there is something fundamentally broken about us. Sometimes this brokenness evidences itself in ways both sick and criminal. Evil has many guises, yet there are those who have to figure out the pattern of brokenness.

Horror deals with the total depravity of man. Sometimes this comes out as wrestling with the theme of man having a darker nature to resist, restrain, or kill (with such archetype monster tropes such as the werewolf or Mr. Hyde). In fact, the modern day serial killer has become the natural incarnation of man’s capacity for evil.

“In my experience, evil is not a cultural phenomena. It’s a human one.� –Jason Gideon

A trope that depicts the dark side to our nature, serial killers specifically remind us that evil death is all around us in the form of each other, lurking in the ordinary. The horror at the core of the show is about fear, an attempt to get a cathartic release from dealing with what scares us - be it the unknown or ultimately, our fear of death. Criminal Minds is about real, undeniable evil. The commonplace evil that we do to one another. It delves into the terror that only a thin line separates a normal housewife from being a serial killer, the fact that any of us could be pushed over that edge. That we are all capable of evil. Once we are confronted with this evil, someone has to face it, track it down, and stop it.

We, the viewing audience, can’t seem to get enough of how good pursues evil. We want to know why. The “whys" of life haunt our lives: Why do bad things happen? Why this person? Why this victim? Why do unsubs (investigator jargon for "Unknown Subject Of An Investigation") do the things they do? Each episode is part morality tale, whether dealing with serial killers on death row, a chemist who poisons employees, a serial arsonist, or a cannibalistic killer who drinks blood to get closer to God. An evil comes to light, a pattern is detected, the circumstances that shaped the evil are studied, and the evil is confronted.

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others we become disguised to ourselves.� –Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Criminal Minds is a show about those trained to stare into the abyss of evil for a living. One wonders what the toll of that will be. Mandy Patinkin’s temperamental gravitas carries the show, though we aren’t sure whether his Method acting style will lead to a personal breakdown or him suddenly leaving the show (Chicago Hope anyone?). Its taut, suspense thriller plots keep viewers coming back for more.