Elf

At the end of Elf, we tried to think of something of redeeming value but couldn’t.  It’s sort of like the food choices made by Elf’s main character, Buddy Wells, a human raised by Santa Claus’ elves.  Because he was weaned on a diet of candy, Wells pours maple syrup over his spaghetti.  Think about eating a plate of syrup-covered spaghetti.  That’s exactly what watching this movie, and so many others similar to it, is like.

Elf, to its credit, opens really well.  But then a few subtle potty jokes slip in here and there, and before you know it we’re in a formulaic Christmas movie in which immoral people will be converted to a state of Christmas jolly because Santa Claus exists.  Elf has the standard plot of an innocent dope going to a big city.  These days, you know exactly what will happen at exactly what point.  At the 20 or 30-minute mark, the main character will meet a love interest.  At the 50-minute mark, that love interest will fall for him and he’ll be at high point.  At the 70-minute mark, something will happen to bring that main character to the lowest emotional point of the movie.  From the 70-minute mark to the end (given a 100-minute movie), the main character will rise from his state of despair and triumph.  In the suites of Hollywood, studio executives have this narrative formula plastered on their wall in big letters.  Happens in almost every big-budget movie.  Watch your DVD player’s counter next time and see.

We admit, there are parts of Elf that are charming and delightful.  This movie was directed by Jon Favreau, who shocked us with the likeable Zathura. Elf has, at times, a similar sense of wonder as Zathura does, but it doesn’t sustain that level throughout.  Instead it dumps maple syrup on itself at about the 70-minute mark, just in time for Santa Claus to have a problem so that the main character can redeem himself and get out of his low point.  So yes, maple syrup on spaghetti is as saccharine and icky as it sounds.

Entertainment: starts at 8, drops to 3

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 1 (Unnecessary potty jokes, an brief unnecessary shower scene, and all Christmas but no Christ; in other words, we wouldn’t ever put our kids in front of this movie)   

Gunga Din

Gunga Din is a relic now, something that could never be made without completely reversing its underlying messages.  Here you’ve got three British officers, having a good time in the exotic parts of the British empire, yucking it up and turning themselves into heroes at the same time.  And then you have your Thug worshippers of the lovegoddess Kali, who yell “Kill, kill, kill!!!!” so that you know they aren’t headed off to Sunday School.  The Thugs are political rebels as well as idol worshippers, so the whole point of the movie is how the three British officers tame the thugs and steal their gold, all while having a grand old time in the spirit of a 1930s swashbuckling adventure movie.  This kind of thing was remade by Spielberg as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but the difference is that Jones is an American individualist, while Gunga Din reinforces the joys and jollies of rule by the British empire.

Now that we’re on this side of WWII and colonialism, they can’t make this movie.  Consider the difference between it and The Man Who Would Be King, another movie based on something written by Rudyard Kipling.  In that movie, two guys go into Afghanistan for gold and military glory.  This is no different than some of the basics of Gunga Din’s plot.  But whereas Gunga Din is about how you could whoop it up while dominating the colonials (just look at the movie poster to the right), The Man Who Would Be King is about how those exotic colonials will get you killed.  In other words, empire can work grandly on that side of WWII.  It’s a total failure on this side of WWII.  This latter point is used and reinforced, of course, by that still-dominant movie vision of empire, Star Wars.

The Bible has a lot to say about empire, but always the chosen people are on the side that the Thugs are in Gunga Din.  Either the smallish Israel, or the church in the New Testament, finds itself squeezed or persecuted by a dominate, idolatrous military and cultural powerhouse.  Two of the major points of Bible stories about empire is that God saves a remnant of the chosen and that those powerhouses aren’t powerhouses for long — they go kaputt, with a bang or a whimper.

Does that mean, at its core, that The Man Who Would Be King is more Biblical than Gunga Din?  Maybe, maybe not.  Politically speaking, maybe.  Religiously speaking, probably not.  In the first movie, it’s the native religious superstition that undoes the phony rule by the two British officers.  That religious superstition, then, triumphs in the end.  Not so in Gunga Din, in which the main point is the British destruction of the bloodthirsty worshippers of the goddess Kali.  Like many Old Testament stories, Gunga Din is a morality play about the destruction of wicked idolatry.  In other words, it seems to us that you’ve got your goods and your bads with both the pro-empire movies and the anti-empire movies.  Watch them with a careful eye.

It’s up to you whether you have a taste for Gunga Din.  People who’ve consumed blockbusters for the last thirty years are apt to be put off by 1930s special effects and overacting.  They probably won’t get the movie language of Gunga Din’s long battle sequence followed right away by a long, semi-comedic dinner scene.  You wouldn’t ever get those two scenes separated but juxtaposed these days.  This is all to say, know your preferences and take the entertainment rating as you need to.

Entertainment:8

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 6

The Spiderwick Chronicles

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a Costco version of Harry Potter, right down to the magic spell that lets the main characters ride on the back of a griffin.  You’d think that movie audiences would get tired of fantasy spinoffs like Spiderwick, but the key marketing demographic for this movie is 8-13 year olds.  Admittedly, if we were eight years old, we’d want to watch this movie twenty-five times.  We also would want to watch movies like it twenty-five times.  That’s why they make this kind of movie again and again and again.

Spiderwick has some things going for it.  The whole plot is about a family uniting as foreign invaders try to invade their land and steal and destroy their property.  You can’t get more red-state America than that.  This family, dysfunctional and fatherless, has just moved into a big old house in the woods.  Soon after, they find out that the surrounding area is filled with magical creatures, none of whom are inherently good (though several are friendly), and some of them want to destroy the house.  These family-destroying house invaders are led by the ogre, Mulgarath, and his goblin army.  Mulgarath wants a book of secrets located inside the house, but he and the goblins can’t barge into the house because of a protective magic circle surrounding it.  And of course we all know that Mulgarath is going to find some way in.

The adults who see this as a Costco Harry Potter will spot some problems.  One of those is typical of movies like this.  The main character — in this case, a young boy named Jared Grace — does several stupid things, and the only point of him doing them is to propel the plot forward.  Another issue is the lack of geography.  We’re all familiar with Narnia and Middle-earth, but all Spiderwick has is the house and its surrounding backyard.  With one exception (the non-location of which reinforces our point), there’s never a sense that the fairyland world of these mythical creatures extends beyond the family’s few acres, as the Spiderwick Chronicles book says it does.  All that said, it’s still a pretty good movie, even for adults who’ve seen this kind of thing ten times before.

Finally, there’s a test for purists.  There’s one uttered “spell,” if you can call it that.  But still, if you’re blackballing Harry Potter for its positive depictions of spellcraft, you have to blackball this one too, just as you’re blackballing Lord of the Rings.  Meanwhile, we’re waiting on the mass evangelical protest against kids movies that promote blasphemy and child rebellion.   The silence has deafening been since the early 1960s.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 6

Hellboy

Surfing the TV, we stumbled across an episode of BibleMan.  If you don’t know who BibleMan is, he’s a evangelical superhero ripoff of other way cooler and more popular superheros.  He’s supposed to be a “holier” substitute for parents who think that Batman is the devil.  For example, Bibleman wears the breastplate of righteousness instead of Batman’s chestplate, and a helmet of salvation instead of a bat mask.  (What’s the difference again?)

Anyway, this episode featured Luxor Spawndroth, Bibleman’s arch enemy.  Spawndroth looks like a guy wearing one of those cheesy plastic masks you see in teenage goth stores at Halloween.  So he proceeds to parade around onscreen, performing some kind of unfunny comedy schtick, singing Frank Sinatra songs and acting like a teenager at a youth group party.  Later in the episode, BibleMan — played by a guy who couldn’t give a decent performance in a high school drama club skit — quotes Scripture at Spawndroth and thus defeats him.  Now, despite the disgusting mask, who has been portrayed as being cool?  Undoubtedly, Spawndroth.

We mention this because we think some of our evangelical readers might object, “Why did we watch something evil with the word ‘hell’ in it?”  In terms of presentation and visual spectacle, we don’t see any difference between BibleMan and Hellboy.  Hellboy, in fact, is a superhero who fights against ultimate darkness.  He doesn’t quote Scripture — actually, he’s got an attitude problem, but the movie looks down upon him for this — but he does grind down his horns to fit in better with other people.  And he likes kittens.  So, actually, we felt like Hellboy presented the good v. evil battle in much clearer terms than the episode of BibleMan we saw.  The bad guys in Hellboy are Rasputin and a couple of freakish Nazis, and they didn’t parade around the set singing Frank Sinatra.  They were genuinely bad.  They didn’t have a problem with killing people and bringing about the end of the world, and for Hellboy, those are pretty terrible things.

Now this is not a praise in Hellboy’s favor. Let us explain.  What was good about Hellboy, like other Guillermo Del Toro movies, is that it’s visually outstanding.  Del Toro is like Spielberg on steroids.  In fact, Spielberg hasn’t been able to figure out how to make CGI look really good, while Del Toro is a master.  (This means that Del Toro’s version of The Hobbit, unlike the recent, watered-down Narnia movies, could be very good.)

But Del Toro is too much like Spielberg in that he’s given over to hokeyness about spiritual matters while pretending to be serious.  There’s lots of humor in Hellboy, but it’s directed at the superhero and his relationships, and not at the inherent structure of the comical plot, which is taken entirely seriously.  Nazis opening dimensional portals that pull in giant slimy monsters from space?  A devil character and his fish-faced sidekick trying to defeat the Ograd Jahad from the seventh dimension?  This is the kind of stuff that needs to be satirized, not used as if it contains a teeny-tiny possibility of being true.

Like Spielberg, Del Toro is quick to exploit religion for the sake of spectacle.  Religious iconography dominates a movie that pits sacred icons against occult practices.  In the real world, this would be serious business.  In a Hollywood flick, it’s an action-packed two hours of fun.   For example, one character wears a relic from the Vatican to ward off hellhounds.  Also, what defeats the Ograd Jahad is a rosary.  Ready to give himself up to Rasputin, Hellboy accidentally touches a cross, which brands him and restores his “goodness.”

We don’t know, is this really any different than BibleMan quoting Scripture at his archenemies?  To us, this stuff is fundamentally all about being entertained by what’s on-screen.  The credits roll afterward, reality kicks back into gear, and for most folks, the spectacle has done its job to degrade matters that shouldn’t be taken so lightly in the real world.

Entertainment: 6.5

Intelligence: 5 (for everything but the plot)

Morality: 4

The Bucket List

We can’t describe The Bucket List any better than this. 

Moreover, Morgan Freeman’s character is some kind of New Age guru who represents the 92% of all viewers who believe in the afterlife.  Consequently, Freeman is a believer in “God.”  In one scene, his family prays to this God, In the rest of the movie, Freeman is content to recite Hindu and Buddhist platitudes.  So we weren’t sure whether the family was praying to Vishnu or the River God.

The movie does have one puzzle.  Is Freeman’s voiceover narrationdelivered from some kind of heavenly realm, or has he been reincarnated?  This is deliberately ambiguous, because no one in the audience is to be offended.   It’s also anathema, but the millions of Christians who have spent time and money on this flick probably took away “spiritual truths” that have long been staples of mushy sermons, rather than ignoring it for giving the old heave-ho to the First Commandment.  Look for scenes from this movie to be shown in worship service in a megachurch near you.

Entertainment: 4

Intelligence: 0

Morality: 0

Dan in Real Life

Dan in Real Life is an okay movie up until the ten-minute mark.  It doesn’t try to nail you with the fact that the main character, Dan, still grieves over the death of his late wife.  It’s also content to portray Dan’s rich Yankee family as warm and tightknit — a rarity in contemporary film.  The subdued melancholy combined with the joy of family persists throughout the movie.  It’s a shame, therefore, that the movie takes a terrible turn so early, embracing one of those contrived “she’s the girlfriend of my brother!” situations that is the hallmark of every stupid situation comedy ever made.

Reading the critical reactions will show you that people are evenly split on liking or disliking this movie.  So it was in our household.  One of us picked up the laptop and surfed the web midway through, while the other watched contentedly, though without being charmed.  If you want a picture of a decent family life (we’re talking brothers, sisters, their children, and grandparents — no less than 15 people gathered together at once), Dan in Real Life might satisfy your hankering for that.  It’s not going to do anything else for you, so we don’t see any reason to pay more than 2 cents to see it.  (You are already paying two hours of your life to do so.)

There’s always that one scene.  In the case of this movie, Dan decides he needs to talk to his potential girlfriend — who is dating Dan’s brother — in the bathroom.  Dan’s daughter knocks on the door.  Quickly, Dan hides in the shower, while the girlfriend tells the daughter that she’s taking a shower.  No problem, says the daughter, I can talk to you in the bathroom while you’re in the shower.  Thus begins a scene in which the girlfriend has to pretend to take a shower while Dan hides in it.  Yuckety yuck yuck.

I think there’s a reason why Dan’s nice, big family enjoyed one another’s company.  Instead of sitting around and watching movies like Dan in Real Life, they didn’t have a TV in sight.  They interacted, and it looked like a lot of fun.

Entertainment: 3 or 7, whichever

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 4

Escape from Alcatraz

Escape from Alcatraz has been made twice.  The second time they called it The Shawshank Redemption, which everybody went gaga over, but nobody realized that it’s the same plot plus Morgan Freeman.  Maybe adding a guy who’s played the President and God twice is all you have to do to make people love your movie. Heck, if we were making one, we’d get Morgan to do voiceover narration.  Wouldn’t matter if it were superfluous or not. Had he narrated Dude, Where’s My Car? or Jackass 2, those might’ve had a chance at Oscars.

Escape from Alcatraz is exactly what you’d guess it is.  Some inmate wants to break out of jail, so the story is about how he smuggles contraband into his cell past the guards and then hightails it in one night of triumph (while swelling orchestra music plays and, maybe, Morgan Freeman narrates the escape).  If we have to watch a movie about this, we’ll take Clint Eastwood over that hippie numbskull Tim Robbins.  So that’s another point in favor of Escape from Alcatraz over Escape from a kind of Alcatraz (aka Shawshank Redemption).

It’s also straightforward that the warden in prison movies is going to be a jerk.  He represents the cruel institution that keeps these jailed welfare recipients in their cages.  Eastwood, feeling the repression, needs to break free of this harsh institution.  It doesn’t take much to see that the moral of these movies is the power of the individual will that overcomes the repressive aspects of social institutions.  The Shawshank Redemption is all about escaping from religion, mainly Christianity.  Tim Robbins carves out his Bible to hide his tools of escape, keeping it from the hypocritical warden who mouths a lot of Scripture.  In Escape from Alcatraz, Eastwood and his pals escape from a warden who apparently hates paintings and flowers.  In other words, he can shut down free expression and creativity whenever he wants.  The only difference between this movie and Shawshank is that one of them is completely ambiguous about who triumphs in the end (the warden or the escaped con), while the other celebrates the victory of the escaped con.

If a Christian were going to write an escape-from-jail story, he might try a new angle.  Instead of championing the idea that the prisoner is a hero because he used his own ingenuity and willpower to escape, let some outsider graciously free the convict by taking his place.  Well, that one’s already been done too, with Barabbas as the convict.  But it obviously conveys theological reality far better than the two prison movies mentioned above do.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 5

Morality: 3 (watchable, except for a couple of taboo words and shots of prisoners’ naked backsides; in other words, it’s not PG by today’s standards even though it says it is)

Say Anything

One reason we watch movies is to analyze their moral statements, to discover what they say about human values and ethical priorities, especially as they relate to a Christian ethical system. By watching in this way, we arm ourselves. Either we get recommendations for movies with worthwhile viewpoints (very few and far between) or we can provide others with reasons for avoiding popular movies with warped morals.

Say Anything is a classic example of a movie that’s founded on a certain moral principles. Or, really, many moral principles. It’s chiefly about love — that is, about how men and women get together, and how in the process they break away from their parents. Like Jane Austen stories, Say Anything aims to get a guy and a girl together. When we see this kind of plot, we immediately ask ourselves a few key questions. How does it think they should get together? When and why should they get together? These point us toward the moral.

Now, we admit that we liked the guy’s relentless pursuit of the girl in this movie. That’s about all we can say that’s good, but it’s something. He’s courageous, determined, and zealous, but not so much that he alienates everyone else in his life.

But then there’s the rest of the movie. The male and female characters are freshly out of high school. She’s the brightest student in the country, headed to England on a full-ride scholarship. He’s a Seattle slacker — the kind made famous in moronic early ’90s movies about recent college grads — who likes martial arts and has no direction. Not that he has to have direction, but if he’s going after this girl, he probably should. Anyway, he makes her laugh, she begins to like him, and the rest of the movie plays out towards the ultimate goals of modern guys and girls: pre-marital sex and then a “committed” relationship. Nevermind that that commitment can be broken off in a heartbeat by either party. As long as they are together, it’s all great. That’s where the movie ends, and we’re all supposed to feel happy. It’s not like your typical Victorian English novel, where you know it’ll all pan out when the characters get married and are happy. No, in Say Anything, the guy and girl just need to be “more than friends” after having sex.  Then the credits roll.

In order for the guy and girl to get together, the girl’s father has to get out of the way. The movie at first presents the girl and her father as a closely-bonded pair who have surprisingly great communication. But — and you probably knew there was a ‘but’ coming — there’s one big problem: the dad is cheating old people out of their inheritances. He’s covered this fact up from everybody, including his daughter, who is so offended when she finds out that she might not speak to him again. Now the father is a much more complicated character than we’re presenting here (the movie generates a lot of sympathy towards him), but the fact is that he ends up looking more fraudulent than the IRS agents who are after him. And any movie that makes the IRS look somewhat respectable, in our humble opinion, has its priorities backwards.

So, in the end, the older parental generation is fraudulent or non-existent, while the younger generation is peppy, hopeful, and decent. And the main characters, the two lovebirds, fly away to England together to pursue the female’s career. Make no mistake, these are moral statements. If you attend a church that champions them, you’d better leave that church.

What makes the movie seductive is that these moral statements are sort of hidden under its presentation, which is fresh and realistic. The dialogue resembles real people talking, and the sequence of scenes keeps pushing the story to where it should go, not to where it will become like every other date movie (i.e., it’s doesn’t feel cliched, even though it basically is). For those reasons, we wanted to like this movie. Maybe some Christian director can study this one and separate the good from the bad, in order to learn something about movie-making and storytelling.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 7

Morality: 1

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Curse those relentless advertising blitzes! If only we hadn’t seen sidebar ads, movie trailers, and pre-release promo articles. If only we hadn’t seen Harrison Ford go on The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and all the shows in between. If only Indiana Jones hadn’t been a part of our entire lives — as a movie icon, as video games, as action figures. But it all worked well as a form of external motivation (or mind-control?) — we were compelled to go to the theater and pony up our $15 for two hours of escape. So did everyone else, judging by the crowd size. In our midwestern locale, the factory workers and farmers crowded into a plush theater to soak in another cultural production from Hollywood. No one blinked at the horror movie previews, and many laughed at the part in the Get Smart preview where a man gets smashed by a bus traveling at 60 mph. (In fact, the people behind us cackled at every punch and crotch shot, leaving us to wonder what kind of jollies Grand Theft Auto gives them.) It reminded us of the bit in 1984, when Winston Smith attends a movie.

But to this movie. The narrative formula is the same as the other three movies, but here, Steven Spielberg unexpectedly combines his two favorite topics: the dysfunctional nuclear family and aliens. Aliens here take the place of God, whose “power” was channeled in the other Indiana Jones movies to destroy curious Nazis. So now, thankfully, aliens get to play the part of the goofy higher power.  They look ridiculous doing so.

Meanwhile, the bad guys that Dr. Jones confronts are Russians. They not only anti-family, disrupting the Jones family’s unexpected reunion, but they also invade the United States. The movie, weirdly enough, subtly derides what popular culture now imagines as the right-wing politics of the 1950s, while fully embracing the possibilities of the Red Scare in order to make the plot move forward. But who can blame Spielberg and Lucas for cashing in on the fear of terrorists while at the same time pandering to their liberal buddies?  Just as with previous Indiana Jones movies’ dumb depiction of supernatural power, this movie has a rather dumb depiction of politics and the 1950s.  Thankfully, as usual, Jones himself stays out of it all.

But this Jones movie, like the others, is really about style and action. You get what you pay for: extended action sequences and Jones’ cool hat. Our one problem with this is that the movie has plenty of CGI effects, which look unreal and give the movie a video game feel. We still like sets, makeup, props, puppets, and stuntmen. Give us not a computer drawing; give us instead something concrete and real.

But — and this may be the movie series’ only redeeming quality — Jones is a laconic hero, who loves both the pursuit of truth and a good, necessary fistfight. No manicures for him. Just his brains, his fists, and a whip.  He is a modern-day rarity: a grown-up Boy Scout.

Entertainment: 10

Intelligence:1

Morality: 7 (for two grotesque deaths and unnecessary taboo words sprinkled in to up the rating to PG-13)

The Illusionist

(SPOILER ALERT here: but we don’t think it matters much if you read before you watch.)

There is much of the Gospels in The Illusionist. That is what makes it all the worse. Consider the “hero,” Eisenheim the Illusionist. He’s a great, mysterious man who can amaze crowds with supernatural tricks. He could be a demagogue if he wanted to; he’s clearly a man with the power to woo the masses. His problem is that the government is after him. That is, a German prince gets jealous of Eisenheim’s crowd-control abilities, something that any government would like to have more of. So the prince sends his pack of bureaucrats, the police, to hound and investigate Eisenheim. Yet Eisenheim evades them, while coming up with a new trick: bringing people back from the dead.

Our miracle worker, Eisenheim, is an illusionist. How does he really summon forth ghosts? The movie never tells us, unfortunately. This was one of our problems with it. While the audience in the movie is amazed at Eisenheim’s magic, we (the real movie audience) can see that every trick is a CGI effect, a fake “trick” integrated into the movie in its post-production phase. We were never awed at all by Eisenheim. The movie is not about tricks — certainly not about tricking us — and since we saw the plot twist coming an hour before it happened, there were no surprises here.

Eisenheim is no Christ, though. He merely succeeds in getting his girl and moving to the country — the American frontier dream. Actually he beds the German prince’s fiancee — an acceptable move because Hollywood is our Moral Authority (”Blessed be thy name!”) and “True Love” must conquer all. We don’t mind “True Love” tales — they can symbolize Christ and His elected church — but we get sickened when they okay cheating and fornicating. The end of this movie considers those actions acceptable.

For all of its high-class actors, period sets and costumes, and gold-tinted frames,The Illusionist is just a cheap combination of Shakespeare’s MacBeth and The Tempest. Looked at another way, this movie is a cheap fairytale. A poor boy loves an aristocrat’s daughter. They grow up. The boy, a magician now, reunites with his love. She happens to be engaged to a prince, who is jealous of the magician. The magician tricks the prince, the prince dies, and the hero and his lover live happily ever after. And that’s all we really learned.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 0