Movie Review: 27 Dresses

Okay, so I"m not supposed to like this because it's a girl flick (that's never stopped me) plus it's supposed to be kind of superficial. You know what (now I sound like Simon Cowell), I like this one. Katherine Hegl stars as Jane Nichols. She is the person who never does anything for herself. From the day her mother has died she has taken care of everyone expecially her little sister and she is absolutely horrible at doing anything to get her own needs met. In fact, she works as the assistant to a man whom she has a major emfatuation for and he has absolutely no idea. She carries this role of servant on further by keeping a busy social calendar as the bride's maid at various weddings. She has done something like 27 or so weddings as a matter of fact and the title refers to the many dresses that she has kept as a "reward" for these weddings.

Okay, so the plot's kind of cliche. Another man comes along and she learns for the first time how to say no to this other man and finally she discovers that she CAN say no and that she CAN take care of her own needs and, of course, she falls in love with this other man.

I guess I like this movie for two reasons. First, I can relate to it. I tend to be a giver myself. I also tend to live by the rule "don't sweat the small stuff" (and I really do believe that everyone else should live by that rule too). As a restaurant manager, it's kind of inevitable in this day and age that I'd be a giver but I also play the same role at home without much recognition or thanks.

When I do want for myself, it tends to be too late and I tend to get upset. That makes me look kind of selfish and childish (oooh, bad thing to admit). It thus becomes a never ending cycle. I thus like the movie because I see myself in it.

I also like the movie, however, because it is really not overstated or over dramatic. The message is presented and the issue is resolved without too much drama. When we overdramatize our problems, these problems become mountains rather molehills and they look like they are too high and too difficult to be climbed.

"Nuff said. It's a good watch. There are some delightful visuals in here as well like when Katherine Hegl opens her closet and shows the man that she later falls in love with all of the dresses that she has collected over time.

Movie Review: No Country for Old Men

I thought I was going to get a "bang 'em up, shoot 'em dead" movie and I got exactly that but I also got one of the most meaningful movies I've seen for awhile. As usual, I'm better at identifying the symbols than figuring out what they mean so I depend on some of you. Okay, I’m going to try to figure this thing out. I’ll no doubt fail. If you think I’m all screwed up, please let me know. Does somebody have a Cliffnotes that I can borrow?

No Country for Old Men is about givers and takers and those who no longer want to play the game. It is about fate and about our ability or inability to take control of our own lives by living by our principles no matter what cards the arbitrary gods of fate may deal us.

The killer in this movie, named Sugar ironically, is about as cold and as mean as any killer in any movie including Silence of the Lambs. His way of dealing with fate is to kill before others have the chance to kill him. He does not, however, seem to take lives indiscriminately. As Carson, played by Woody, the bounty hunter who is trying to kill Sugar and ends up as one of Sugar’s inevitable victims says:

Sugar’s “…a peculiar man. You might even say he has principles, principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He’s not like you. He’s not even like me.”

Sugar seems to track down whoever gets in his way, whoever takes from him in one form or another. He seems to take the lives that he needs to take. On the other hand, those lives that he does not need to take, he leaves to fate. If it is not in his plans to take a life, he takes a quarter out of his pocket and asks his potential victim to call it. If the victim calls it right, Sugar spares his life. If not, Sugar kills him. Ultimately Sugar is right, our lives are as certain as the flip of a coin. Sugar does what he can to increase his odds of living by killing.

The lawman, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is chasing Sugar reinforces this perspective when he tells someone the story of a cattle rancher named Charlie who attempted to shoot one of his cattle but the bullet ricocheted and then hit Charlie in the shoulder. As he says, "...the outlook is not certain even between man and steer." At the same time, things are becoming more certain because they now use an air gun that lodges a steel plate right intop the steer’s brain. The steer never knows what hits him. If arbitrary fate doesn’t get us, in other words, the arbitrary decisions of others may do so. That’s why Sugar asks the bounty man who he is about to kill “if the rule that you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

The hero in this movie, Lewellyn seems fated to die. At the beginning of the movie it looks like Lewellyn, played by Josh Brolin, is another lifetaker. He is a kind of a witless ex-Vietnam Vet whose life seems to revolve around beer. While out hunting, he stumbles into 2 million dollars, a whole bunch of dead people and one barely alive person who asks for water. If Lewellyn simply took the money and ran at that point, he would be up 2 mill and the movie would be over. Instead, once he hides the money under his house trailer and banters with his girlfriend Carla Jean a little bit, he tries to fall asleep. Finally after awhile he gets up and says "okay" or something similar. He then grabs a full gallon of water and brings it to the crime scene. He couldn't help himself. He needed to bring him the water. As the movie progresses, it also becomes clear that the money is not so much for him as it is for Carla Jean. It’s not so clear, after all, that Lewellyn is one of the takers. As he leaves Carla Jean, he says that "he's fixing to do something dumber than hell but I'm going to do it anyway. Tell mother I love her." Carla Jean reminds him that his mother is dead and he responds by saying, "Well then I'll tell her myself." An element of inevitability is established throughout the whole movie in this scene. Of course, the irony is that Lewellyn seems as fated to die as Sugar is fated to live. Sugar’s principle of kill or be killed keeps him alive even as Lewellyn’s principles of giving people what they need, whether it's water or money, kill him.

That’s how Sugar looks at it. If it is all about fate, why not just go on a shooting spree, why care who dies and who lives. If it is all about fate, then why not take all that you can and not worry about others. On the other hand, some believe that in a world where God is silent and all of history seems to be ruled by chance, ALL we have to fall back on are our principles. In order to live with yourself, you have to live with integrity.

Ultimately, it is Lewellyn’s wife who teaches us a lesson after Lewellyn has already died. Sugar finds her and prepares to shoot her. He says he has to shoot her because it’s a promise that he made to her boyfriend. She convinces him that he has no reason to shoot her. He gives her the usual option: flip a coin and fate will decide. She refuses. We assume that he shot her. That’s the ultimate act in the midst of fate: refuse fate even if it kills you.

Also,
here’s a notable quote from Tommy Lee’s brother in the movie and I can’t quite fit it into the theme today. His brother’s back was broken when he was a deputy. The person who was in jail for breaking his back is about ready to come out. Tommy Lee asks him whether he is going to exact vengeance and he says these words:

“All the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from ya more is going out the door. After awhile you've got to get a tourniquet on it.”

Also,
the movie is riddled with clothing symbolism: people selling or lending clothes to Sugar and Lewellyn, Lewellyn not having any clothes to wear, clothes that are worn to hide wounds, Lewellyn appearing in a pure white outfit. I"m sure that the clothing fits into the giving and taking motif but I'm quite frankly not in the mood to figure it all out. You do it.

Also,
the final scene. The movie ends without resolution. The lawman has retired from law enforcement and Sugar has apparently never been caught. The movie ends with the lawman recalling a dream from which he just awoke. He is walking along with his deceased father. Suddenly his father starts to walk ahead of him and leaves him behind. The lawman sees his father walk into a forest and eventually he sees smoke in the forest. The movie ends with the lawman explaining that his father had gone up ahead of him to build a fire and set up a campsite so that they could be together at the end of the journey. That is, of course, the great hope: that this struggle of life will lead us all somewhere where we can be together with others whom we love.

Book Review: Diary, A Novel

I have a new friend in my life named Bethany Leigh who I met on a really cool social website entited 43Things (www.43things.com -- check it out when you get a chance). As I read her materials, it became pretty clear to me that we have really similar reading tastes and that we both love to read. Later on, I did the visual personality test on facebook and found out that she and I are 100% intellectually compatible so that verifies the similar reading tastes thing. There was, however, a new author on her list who was not on mine: Chuck Palahniuk. She likes him so much, as a matter of fact, that she wants to come visit him in his native city, Seattle. Pretty cool! All I knew about this author was that he wrote Fight Club and I totally loved the opening scene in Fight Club where he totally disses (how do you spell "disses"?) the Ikea lifestyle. Anyway, I thought it was about time that I read this guy so I started with Diary. I also discovered that Amy Hempel was the one writer P. constantly refers to as his favorite writer so I also picked her main book: The Collective Stories. To my credit, I didn't do what I usually do and buy every possible thing that P. wrote. I started with one book. Ahh, what a display of great restraint!!!



I have to admit that it took awhile for me to get into Diary. The book is written in what is called the minimalist style. Hemingway is probably the best known in this style. It is exactly the opposite of F. Scott Fitzgerald in many ways. F. absolutely drenched everything he did in words. On the other hand, the minimalist attempts to simply words. Great minimalists are capable of saying a great deal while maintaining tremendous economy. They also tend to be very multi-interpretational. It's not always clear exactly where they are coming from but they come along with these absolutely marvelous loaded statements every once in awhile that make you think and think and think. The other thing about P. is that his plotlines are rather outlandish in a manner reminiscent of one of my all time favorites: Tom Robbins.



I'm not going to talk much about plot line. I don't think that I can try to describe this plot without destroying it. I'll leave that to the book. Suffice it to say that Diary is the story of Misty, a waitress at the Waytansea Hotel, and a erstwhile artist who everybody in the town turns back into an artist. You can find out the rest. The book is supposed to be Misty's diary and it is written to her husband who is in a coma.



The first place that the book catches me is on the entry dated June 28 (p. 17). This chapter introduces Misty to the reader. The rhythm to this writing reminds me very much of the movie beginning to The Fight Club:



"This is a day in the life of Misty Marie, queen of the slaves.

"Another longest day of the year. It's a game anybody can play. This is just Misty's own personal coma. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

"Everytime someone asks for table....you need to take a drink...

"Well you should serve tofu instead of vale!" take a drink...

"Misty, how could you? You know I'm always a regular here at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Really, Misty..." then you need to take two drinks.

"When the summer people ask for coffee drinks with foamed milk or chelated silver or carob sprinkles or soy-based anything, take another drink.

If they don't tip, take another."

And it keeps repeating the same mantra over and over--take a drink, have an aspirin, take another--until you know exactly what it feels like to be in the midst of yet another longest day of the year with Misty, queen of the slaves.

In the midst of all this is a line, however, that opens up the whole chapter and really the whole book. In the midst of the repetition, Misty says,

"You can see where this is going.
"This is where Misty Marie Kleinman's whole life has gone.
"You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying."

And in the midst of this rhythm and this repetition, we are slapped in the face with this one liner.

I enter into this one liner in my own life. Today I am halfway through my weekend. I have come to realize that my weekends can make or break my week. You see, I am in the midst of a job that is not anywhere close to my main passion in life and yet I have experienced jobs that are so my main passion in life. If I waste my entire weekend by RESTING, DOING NOTHING, taking a drink, having two aspirin, taking another--whatever my drink may be--then I will return to work unrested and feeling like a nothing. The week will be a horrible experience for me and spend all of my time thinking about the next weekend when I just might completely repeat the process if I'm totally stupid, which I occasionally am. The one saving grace in my life is that I am forced to one of my passions and that is parenting. My children don't let me rest, do nothing, take a pill. I have to father. Because, however, this weekend I have at least chosen to write this blog, and to clean my office by the way, then it is at least a little bit possible that I will break the cycle and truly go back to work rested, refreshed, energetic. Everyday we choose life, as it says in Deuteronomy, or we choose suicide. Misty had reached a point in her life where she no longer believed in herself so there's no way that she could be all that she was supposed to be and every day was the very longest day of her life until the next one.

Now for a few one liners that caught me throughout the book:

July 12 entry (p. 102):

The resort where they live has gone through cycles of being a resort and being nothing. In this chapter, Misty talks about other places like that:

"Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.

"The quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliche. Flower and Christmas lights, it's what we're programmed to love. Some young and lovely..."

I am reminded of a long conversation that I had with someone at Candler School of Theology on the campus of Emory University on the topic of "the aesthetic of pretty". She captured a realization for me that I had never been able to articulate. This above quote names it again. We are all about the pretty in our lives. It's what America wants to capture. If we can just keep things neat and tidy and not ugly. Think of Target. It's a much prettier and more orderly store than K-Mart. And things cost more too. We want to beautify our streets. We want to keep the riff raff out. We want old people in nursing homes. We don't even really like to talk about sex because it's kind of messy, after all.

We prefer our nature to be cultivated instead of wild. It's funny because my children and I went to a little nature refuge not one half mile from out house. We wanted to get to the lake because it was the lake but there was no direct pathway and so we went through the bushes and just made a mess of ourselves. It would have been so much more fun, we thought, if we had just stuck to the nice, neat, well-manicured pathway. But the bushes were such a great adventure!

I could go on with this topic for quite awhile. Certainly we expect our lives to follow orderly patterns and they almost never do. We also expect our God who is an ordering God (from page one of the Bible: the creation of order out of mystery and chaos) to provide us with order. And our churches and other institutions also have to be very orderly. I want to on about this but I think I"ll wait. It is those who would have us order the church that have led me to absence the church. SOMEBODY PROVOKE ME ON THIS SO I CAN CONTINUE. ASK QUESTIONS. ARGUE WITH ME. I truly am an extrovert who needs a response if I am to keep babbling on.

August 2 Entry (p. 172):

This is the section in the book where Misty has been confined to her room and forced to do only one thing: draw. "Just for the record, ever color Misty picks, every mark she makes, is perfect because she's stopped caring."

Haven't you ever reached that point? I know I have. That point is when I do really, really good because I could just care less anymore. It's like our worries, our debts, our fears all ebb away because we just don't care anymore. If I haven't played pool for like two years and then come back to a game, just watch me. I'm friggin' incredible! That is, I'm incredible in game one because it really doesn't matter. Game two sucks. I was always the best practice basketball player on the court but I sucked in game situations except when I was playing for the Mormons and then I didn't really. I didn't really care in that game when I scored 23 points. I just didn't care.

We can just be who we are made to be and if we are truly being who we are made to be then we just don't care who we are and who we are becomes action instead of words. I get so tired of telling my eldest daughter how to do her work in school. I would love to let go so that she can just go through the cycle on her own and yet I keep holding on. If I don't care, then she will be forced to care and she can eventually get to the point where she doesn't care and then she becomes verb and just does who she is instead of doing who she wants to be.

August 12 entry (p. 188):

He talks about right brain-left brain stuff and the fact that suppression of the rational mind is source of inspiration. Congratulations to us weird computer blogger/social network people who spend our time doing nothing purposive or meaninful by spending our time on our computers. Yeah, perhaps we are addicted but perhaps we just want to get the creative side out a little more. The greatest times in my life have been those times when I could get together with other people and plan programs and worships because I would insist that we find ways to use our imaginations, to think the unthinkable, to go way outside the box. And sometimes we even succeeded at presenting that creativity in artform!

The other day I was watching my daughter perform in The Nutcracker. My daughter's lyrical dance coach is particularly creative and she and two other women did this incredibly eclectic dance performance in The Nutcracker. After the show I told her that I knew it was hers because it was so creative. She told me that it was actually quite collaborative. Later on I came back to her and reminded her that the truly creative is TRULY collaborative. What could be more collaborative then a situation where a group of people leave their pretensions behind to create?!? Those moments are truly living for me. Again, caring about nothing...

August 21 entry (p. 207):

I'm beginning to think that the subtext to this novel is about living out the patterns of life versus true creativity. Misty, the artist, believes that she is being truly creative not only with her artwork but also with her life choices. She comes to find out that she is not creative at all. She is repeating a pattern. She is being captured by a pattern. Back to the beginning of the book: Which is worse? It is to consciously live out the same pattern over and over again--take a drink, take two drinks--or is it repeating the same pattern over and over without knowing it. Is it conscious suicide or unconscious suicice?

This aspect of the story reminds me very much of a great book turned movie. The book was A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving and the movie was Simon Birch. The young, ugly hero in that book knew he was born to be a hero and he died the death of a martyr/hero. He stepped into the pattern for his life while others were resisting the patterns for their lives. If it is true that anything taken to its ultimate conclusion is excessive, is idolatrous, then could the same be said for our American worship of freedom? Are we so much into freedom that we deny ourselves who we are called to be? Do we see life as just boring if we step into our fates? What about the life patterns that we don't see? How are we stuck?

Entry August 28 (p. 252):

"According to Plat, we live chained inside a dark cave. We're chained so all we can see is the back wall of the cave. All we can see are the shadows that move there. They could be the shadows of something moving outside the cave. They could be the shadows of people chained next to us.

"Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

"Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Proections. Our associations.

"The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

"The camera obscura.

"Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. Distored by the mirror or the lens it comes through. Our limited personal perception. Our tiny body of experience. Our half-assed education.

"How the viewer controls the view. How the artist is dead. We see what we want. We see how we want. We only see ourselves. All the artist can do is give us something to look at."

Wow. This always amazes me. Is there really a world out there that we can see and touch? Are the external and the internal related or are they almost completely unrelated? I can look at a picture of myself and see who is on the inside because I know the picture to me. I can also look at a picture of myself, however, and see someone that I could never possibly be and wonder how this soul or spirit or geist got stuck inside that person and his world. I realize this as a white male. I remember a friend who was a strong feminist. It took us awhile to become friends because she did not see me for who I was but as a white male. She was right in the sense that white males get treated a certain way (including the way that she was treating me) but she was also wrong to assume that all white males react and respond the same way to the stimuli of being treated this way.

I have a confession to make. It's still true that when I see a beautiful woman, I want to enter into the beautiful world that this beautiful woman must inhabit. I guess my latest is Natasha Bedingfield. She is absolutely gorgeous and about as poetic and creative and artistic as anybody I've ever had a chance to observe. I would love to enter into her world and have her world become mine. It's not so much that I want to possess her, not that at all. I want to be possessed by the imaginery world that I have created for her. What Carl Jung says, and I think it is truly beautiful, is that everything that we see outside of ourselves is really not outside of ourselves but inside of ourselves. It is as though we are all trapped in our own individual phone booths that are completely mirror on all sides (does everybody still remember what a phone booth looks like?). We keep thinking that we are looking outside of ourselves but we keep merely projecting out other parts of ourselves. When I see Natasha Bedingfield I make her into that Natasha Bedinfield that is within me (oh, come on you people...don't go there).

I remember that I used to be envious of anyone who experienced the sixties from the inside. What I was really seeing, according to Jung, was the part of me that was captured by my image of the sixties. By the way, when I saw Across the Universe recently, my image of the sixties began to change. This was a hard, hard time. Not a beautiful time at all. And yet I still see why some are captured by its images.

Final page:

"What she's learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We're all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to.

"Every day of her life, every minutes of her life, if she could just remember that."

I believe that he is saying that living into our patterns makes us a part of the immortal story itself.

Wow, I need to think about this alot more. So often I am troubled by the patterns that I am a part of. My wife wants me to pick something up off the floor or gives me a chore to do or criticizes the way in which I handled some other chore. I respond defensively, crossly. I realize in the midst of this that I feel like a fourth grader again speaking with my mother. The pattern has repeated itself. Aren't we supposed to break these habits? Aren't we supposed to become empowered, to go on to new levels? Are we destined to repeat the same patterns? If so, then is there freedom in accepting the pattern and moving on? Is that, in a sense, a way of breaking the pattern? Is there resolution in acceptance?