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22.2.11

Guest Posting!

Sometime between me finding out that I was stuck in Atlanta for two days and me actually checking in for my new flight to Omaha (hopefully finally making my way home), my guest post over at Jesus Needs New PR was posted. It's an off-the-cuff personal examination of the violent rhetoric that we find in Jesus' cleansing of the Temple, and my discomfort with this somewhat violent image of Jesus.

I'll be participating in the comments section shortly, so head on over, give it a read, and see if you can add to the discussion!

10.2.11

It's that time of year again!

It almost goes without saying: I'm a big time movie buff. I love watching movies, I love going to movies, and I love talking about movies. Or, if I wanted to be pretentious: Films. I love films. If I could have done film study in college, I would have (among many other interests). So every so often, I take advantage of my blogspace and deviate from discussing social justice and issues in the church to discuss something frivolous and fancy free: movies.

As the Oscars are just over two weeks away, I thought it may be time to announce my picks for this year's Oscars, for what it's worth. While I haven't seen all ten best picture nominees, I've seen the big names, and feel pretty confident in my picks. I'll save Best Picture for last, to drum up anticipation (I'm sure you're just dying to hear my selections!).

Here we are, most of the major categories, excluding those I'm not particularly qualified to comment on.

Best Visual Effects: Inception will win this hands down. Though this is a great selection of choices, ranging from Tim Burton's insane Alice in Wonderland to the fun romp that was Iron Man 2, Christopher Nolan's blockbuster piece has enough pull and respect within the Academy to pull an easy win.

Best Cinematography: The Coen brothers' cinematographer Roger Deakins has been nominated for the cinematography category nine times, but something tells me he's still not going to get it. I think Black Swan will eke out a win here, as it is a truly beautiful film, though I wouldn't be surprised if this is Deakins' year. It's a toss up.

Best Editing: I think David Fincher's The Social Network is going to clean up in a lot of "smaller" categories here, and film editing will be one of them.

Best Documentary: Banksy could pull out a win for Exit Through the Gift Shop here, but I highly doubt the Academy will go with the "controversial" pick, especially if the winner can't show his face on TV. The Academy tends to be a bit, shall we say, "fuddy-duddy" when it comes to novelty things unless there's a large undeniable popular movement behind them (see Eminem winning an Oscar), and I don't think Banksy has quite enough pull to reach the more easily offended parts of the Academy. I'm going to go with Restrepo on this one - a doc about one year with a platoon in the deadliest valley in Afghanistan. As "liberal" as Hollywood can be, they like depictions of war (see Saving Private Ryan, The Hurt Locker, Band of Brothers, etc).

Best Original Score: Trent Reznor's score for The Social Network will pull out a well deserved win here - there is not a moviegoer on the planet who doesn't hear this and know IMMEDIATELY what it's from.

Best Original Song: This one's a toss up. I honestly didn't like Tangled all that much, but since it's Disney and people have been raving about it, it might have a chance to win. I doubt Gwenyth Paltrow's Crazy Heart-lite will be able to win in this category, and Toy Story already won a ton of song awards back when the first one came out. I'm going to go ahead and say Toy Story 3 on this one, just for nostalgia's sake.

Best Costume Design: The King's Speech has some brilliant and amazingly well done costumes. The same could easily be said for True Grit, but since the former seems to have more pull this year, I'm going to go with that.

Best Art Direction: Inception. Hands down.

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Here we're getting into the larger categories that will take up most of the column inches in newspapers the Monday after. This one's a tough one considering there are a number of fantastic contenders for the little gold man. In my opinion, though, nothing beats Aaron Sorkin's adaptation that was The Social Network, though the Coens' True Grit comes close.

Best Original Screenplay: The King's Speech, no question. David Siedler started it something like 40 years ago, and basically had to wait for the Queen Mother to die until he could finish it, and that's the type of story the Academy salivates over. Not that it doesn't deserve it, but in this case, the odds are clearly weighted in its favor simply because of the obstacles in bringing the film to the screen.

Best Foreign Film: I was amazed to see Tilda Swinton's I Am Love shafted in this category, and as that's the only foreign film I've seen this year, I don't really feel qualified to pick one in this category. I'm thinking, though, with Javier Bardem getting a best actor nod for Biutiful, that it may have more pull with the Academy.

Best Animated Feature: Come on, do I even have to say it? Toy Story 3 will win.

Best Supporting Actress: This is the one acting category I'm most unsure about. Young newcomer Haliee Steinfeld really deserves to be in the best actress category, but apparently the Academy wouldn't know what a leading female role would look like if it stood in front of them with a shotgun - which it did in True Grit. There's a lot of talk surrounding Amy Adams and Melissa Leo from The Fighter, but I, along with Roger Ebert, think this will result in a split in the vote, allowing Steinfeld to take home a statue, albeit one that reads the wrong category name.

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale has been shafted by the Academy a number of times, and this will finally be his year. The one that could beat him is Australian Geoffrey Rush for The King's Speech. Jeremy Renner is really fantastic in The Town (and he is that movie's only nomination) but it would be a miracle for him to pull out a win. As much affection as I have for Jeremy Renner, I think Bale will win.

Best Actress: Natalie Portman. No. Question. This role had Oscar written all over it, and she lived up to the hype. And it's well-deserved. Despite having this scene on her acting resume, Portman has proved herself to be a brilliant young actress, and Black Swan is a masterpiece performance from her.

Best Actor: It's his year. And if you have to ask who "he" is, you must be living under a rock. I'm talking about the man who can really wear a sweater, the man who is finally breaking out of the typecast romantic comedy roles he's had for ages, the man who should have won last year for A Single Man, the man whose British accent makes women melt even when he's talking about the most banal of things. Yes, Colin Firth. As much as I love and adore Jesse Eisenberg's performance in The Social Network, as much as Jeff Bridge's was enjoyable as The Dude Redux in True Grit, as much as I like looking at James Franco, I believe Colin Firth rightfully deserves this Oscar. If you haven't seen The King's Speech yet, you must do so just to watch how he puts every little bit of his facial muscle together into accurately portraying a man struggling with a stutter. The gulps and the twitches and the terrified look in his eyes are so believable that when you hear him speak normally, you have to remind yourself that he doesn't actually have a stammer and is a very fluid speaker. I can't praise his performance enough, really.

Best Director: This award could easily go one of two ways. Tom Hooper won the Director's Guild Award for The King's Speech, and 90% of the time, the winner of the DGA goes on to win Best Director. But, Darren Afronosky or David Fincher could slide in for an upset, but the possibility of that is highly unlikely. I want Fincher to win for The Social Network, just as I want Afronosky to win for Black Swan. But realistically, Hooper will take it home for managing to churn out a film that fits everything the Academy adores.

And finally! Best Picture: This one's a hard one. I want Black Swan to win, but I don't think it'll happen. It is, truly, a masterpiece of film and one of those that you think about for weeks after you leave the theater. The same thing goes for The Social Network - as soon as I finished watching it, I wanted to go back to the beginning and watch it again - I've seen it multiple times since, and Sorkin's writing combined with Fincher's direction and the performances of everyone on the cast makes it like West Wing on steroids with college students. It's profoundly engaging, exciting and interesting, and does a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of this generation.

But, that's not what the Academy's always about doing. So while I think The Social Network has a chance to pull out an upset, and while I would love for Black Swan to take home the gold, I have to, begrudgingly, hand this one to The King's Speech. I say begrudgingly because while I loved the film, it was also very much Oscar bait, and very typical safe fare for the Academy. It's brilliant and moving and engaging, but at the end, I want to say it's just a film. It's a good film, but it's like Titanic 14 years ago: It's good, sure, but I don't feel like I learned anything from it that I couldn't have predicted learning just from seeing a trailer. It's missing that extra oomph that I believe both Black Swan and The Social Network have. That said, the climate is against me, and it'll be The King's Speech that takes home the win.

So there you have it: My official predictions and ideas about The 2011 Academy Awards. They air at 7:30PM (CST) on ABC, so be sure to tune it. And feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

8.2.11

Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Sometimes I feel like a broken record on this blog. I get going on the ideas of not mis-imagining people, and remember that your neighbor is fundamentally and completely human, just like you and just like me. Often, I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over in different ways because that is what my fundamental philosophy comes down to: recognizing that when Jesus said to "love your neighbor as yourself," he meant that your neighbor was not just the person whose dwelling was next to you, but that your neighbor is every single person you meet on every single day, and loving them means remembering that they are human beings. But I've slowly been realizing that this means, even so, much much more.

The "as yourself" has always been a little confusing, because "loving oneself" is usually interpreted as a narcissistic "me me me" sentiment. We don't want to say that we "love ourselves" because that gets interpreted in weird and twisted ways - the picture I get is a tan jock in a sport coat with perfectly white straight teeth and perfect hair smiling as he puts on sunglasses and says to himself in the mirror: "Hello, you sexy beast." Or, y'know, Jack Donaghy.

And I think, to some extent, that's the picture Western culture has ingrained in my generation - loving yourself means indulging. It means looking your best at every moment. It means getting Starbuck's, watching Snooki on TV, and basically being a self-indulgent jerk because "If you don't love yourself, who will?"

And I think that's infected our rhetoric in the church. It's all about what you can do to draw closer to Christ, how you can go to that poor country and help the brown people, how you can improve yourself by reading the Bible everyday, how you can grow in understanding.

And those are, in some respect, good things, in moderation. It is important to make selfish decisions once in awhile.

But I think we've also inserted a few words between the "as yourself" in Jesus' statement. He is not, contrary to popular reading, saying "as you love yourself." No, he's saying "as yourself."

Here's how I like to read it: "Love others as though they are a part of you."

We focus too much on parsing the statement into the two separate bits, which I think is a failed interpretation. Separating the sentence into "Love your neighbor" and "as yourself" makes it far too easy to focus on one instead of the other - how can I love my neighbor if I don't love myself first? And then we end up back at square one, concentrating on our own lives and improving our own lot, and putting loving our neighbor in the secondary position because if we don't know how to love ourselves, then how can we love our neighbor in any meaningful way?

But if we're putting ourselves first, we're not loving our neighbor. We're loving ourselves, and our neighbors are an afterthought. They are still this "other" being that is worthy to receive our love once we have our stuff figured out.

But let's put it a different way: Our neighbors are us - by loving them, we love ourselves.

I never feel as alive as I do when I forget who I am.

Everyone knows those moments - when something totally earth shattering happens that causes you to redefine how you see the world around you. It could be something as simple as realizing that you like a food you previously thought inedible. It could be as big as your brother and his wife having a baby. It could be sitting down on the train in India and realizing that "they" are just as concerned about the things you're concerned about - that "they" like to play cards, or "they" enjoy reading Sherlock Holmes as much as you do.

And then you realize, slowly but surely, that the divide between us and them is being chipped away. We can never, really, live life as another person. I am the sum of my experiences to a great extent - South Dakotan, highly educated, unable to remember a time when I couldn't read and write, a world traveler, someone who gets an incredible, inexplicable joy out of being able to put words together in a meaningful manner - and therefore can never be another person than what I am.

The same goes for every single person we encounter in life - they are the sum of everything they've experienced and lived.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes in his famous poem about Homer's Ulysses: "I am a part of all I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / for ever and for ever when I move."

I am a part of all I have met.

In this poem, Ulysses is an old man reflecting on his life, his past, and deciding to go out for one last big adventure - leaving his young son in charge of his kingdom, and basically abandoning his wife and family. It's at the same time inspiring and disheartening, but every time I read it, I find myself more inspired than saddened. It seems that Ulysses knows exactly what's up when it comes to The Other - when it comes to realizing who you are in relation to others.

Who I am and who you are is a fluid, ever changing, vastly diverse complexity that defies simple explanation. When we say to people "you are the poor and I am the rich, and I will help you out of your situation," we deny their complexity, and subsequently, shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to loving our neighbor.

We are not separated into neat little boxes of us and them. There is not "the poor" and there is not "the rich," though these categories may make political discourse easier to digest in soundbyte mode (unless you're Rand Paul - then the idea just gets confusing).

There is only us. There is only a vast community of people, intertwined and working together to somehow become better, as a community. As a people. As an "us."

I've never been much for individualism and independence, at least not in the sense that it means I put myself and my career above other people. My niece may only be a few months old, but she is already a part of me, and even more so a part of her parents. And I would be doing her a disservice if I chose to see the world as little separate units of people grouped into particular areas - here we have the poorest of the poor, here we have the somewhat developed world, here we have developed nations who have major problems, here we have the Europeans, the Americans, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Indians.

Forget who you are as an individual, and love your neighbor as you should - as though she is a part of you. Because she is a part of you, just as you, if you drop the pretense of "helping" and begin being a friend, will be a part of her.
"That which we are, we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."