A long year...

Well, it's been almost a year since my last post, and a lot has happened. Now that it's the summer again, I'm planning on getting some serious writing done. When I say "writing," I primarily mean fiction; I'm hoping to finish a story I started last summer, and I have a few ideas for some new stuff. Chance are pretty good that none of it will get finished, but a guy can dream, eh?

Speaking of dreams, broken ones in particular, my girlfriend and I broke up last night. I still don't really understand what's going on inside her head, though I wish I did. I think it would be easier that way. At least I'd know why I ended up without a chair when the music stopped. Suffice it to say that she's a wonderful woman, that I love her deeply, and I'm torn up to see her go.

I think the hardest part of life for me, in general, is dealing with the unknown. I live my life day-to-day to the best of my abilities, and lots of things go well. Things like my job, my schoolwork, my ability to make friends, and be honest and straightforward about my faith; these things aren't too hard. Sure, I regularly screw things up and make messes for myself and everyone around me, but, as my friends, they have to forgive me and live with me, because (I hope) they know that I would do the same. My life has worked pretty smoothly over the year since my last post, and I really have no grounds for complaint. And yet, I am about to do so.

The problem is that the things that go well tend to be the things I don't really care about, in my heart. Sure, I need a job, the school is interesting, and who doesn't appreciate having friends? But then I have trouble convincing people to actually care about me in ways more serious than just "Oh yeah, he's good at math and fun at parties." I like knowing people, understanding them, looking at how they think and act, and finding the soul God put inside them. With non-Christians, this can be a heart-wrenching affair; I wish I could make them understand God and His ways. I want them to see how all of their problems would still be there with God (probably even more would crop up), but that there would be hope in the midst of the darkness, one ray shining through the rolling clouds. Of course this is impossible; I can't make anyone do anything, frequently not even myself.

Coupled with this desire to know others is a desire to be known. I have thoughts and feeling in my head that no one knows about, and I'm dying to find someone who will actually ask. Sometimes it seems like I do, and things are good for a while. Not just good, they're intense, vibrant. The rainy days are beautiful and the sunny days break my heart. I get this feeling sometimes on my way to work, where I want to climb a mountain or learn a new instrument, or read an impossible book. There was a day while ago where I literally skipped around the office (before anyone else showed up ;), even though I had 7.x long hours of pointless labor in front of me. I was happy, really happy. I knew a girl who liked to hear my stupid, pointless thoughts, who liked to spend time with me, who liked to go trudging through a swamp, looking for turtles and hoping not to find snakes. My spiritual sails were full, and God gave me a companion here on Earth as well. It was a good time.

But, as always seems to happen just when I begin to get used to the idea of something going the way I wanted it to, the cracks appeared. On a Saturday we went to a wedding, we danced, and we kissed. On a Tuesday we broke up and she cried into my shoulder for a while. The next Monday we talked and breathed some life back into things. Now, a month later, the axe seems to have finally fallen.

Or maybe not; I don't know for sure. One thing that frustrates me about this girl is that she rarely seems sure about anything. I don't mean that she doubts God, or anything big like that. It's the smaller things: where to go next, who to be with, etc. It seems to me that we broke up because she's not sure one way or the other about me (though is leaning toward "no,"), and she doesn't want to get into something she can't get out of unless she's sure about it. Does this make sense to me? Absolutely! I used to worry extensively about the state of my teeth, because when they fall out, you're sunk. You can fill a cavity, but the tooth will never be as strong as it was beforehand. Teeth are permanent, as is the damage done them, and that scares me.

However, that doesn't mean I don't eat. I guess it seems to me that there's risk in everything, and so being absolutely sure about anything is kind of an illusion anyway. Furthermore, people can't be sure about other people because those other people aren't even sure of themselves. I said I wanted someone to know me, but in truth, I don't know myself. I certainly know a lot about myself, plenty of which I'm not so proud of, and every day I learn a bit more.

I have a lot to work on, but I'm a hard worker. I can't always communicate the way I want to, and I tend to overthink things, often to the point of absurdity. I do this because I want someone to see me, and love what she sees, blemishes and all. I'm willing to do that for her. I can't offer any more than that. I don't think anyone can.

So where do I go from here? I wish I knew. I'll find out as it happens, I imagine. Is this the bitter end of this relationship? I wish I knew. I'll find out soon enough. Is God using this relationship to help me grow? Yes. I just wish I knew how and why.

I'm tired. Times like these make me want to go Home.

The Lone Hero

So the other night, I was again embroiled in combat with my abdominals, pectorals, and triceps, this time to the tune of Blade: Trinity. Yes, I am, in fact, going to write about Wesley Snipes’ latest offering on a website devoted to a Christian’s take on film. The truth is that I enjoyed this movie, I bought it, I’ve watched it several times, and now I’m going to write about it.

The film is, at its core, a stupid action caper, replete with a central badass hero, a badass woman-hero (with large… tracts of land), a wise-cracking badass hero, and a number of badass villains (again, including a badass woman-villain, albeit with less noticeable assets). The action is over-the-top, with vampires burning and ash-ing left and right while thrumming techno and hardcore rap give rhythm and attitude to the chaos. In short, it’s a Blade movie.

On the whole, I guess the movie is pretty formulaic, but it comes off as good-natured, even self-aware at times. Ryan Reynolds’ opening voice-over is brilliant writing, in my opinion, and Reynolds himself is indicative of the movie’s strongest point: its characters. Blade needs no introduction, though as the traditional badass he ends up lacking the originality of the others. Still, he gets props for being the only good guy cool enough to use a sword. Jessica Biel is cool because she’s a girl, she’s pretty hot, and she trained like crazy to be able to actually do the stuff you see her do on the screen. Rounding out the cast, Ryan Reynolds is hilarious in a stupid, sophomoric way (and MAN, is he ever cut. That’s devotion to a physique). I’m not at all above ad-libbed goofiness, though when I heard he got the part I was initially worried that the humor would end up derailing the whole operation. It doesn’t, and it works.

But at best, this is still a dumb action/martial arts flick. It’s A-quality, but it is what it is, and what it is isn’t Shakespeare.

So why write about it? I guess I’m not really interested in the particulars so much as in the general idea of the lone hero. The Blade movies have always been, in some measure, about the loneliness of the titular character. He loses Whistler in the first one, he loses his vampire love-interest in the second, and re-loses Whistler and everyone else in the third. He doesn’t say much, he just whips out the weapons and turns the bad guys into dust. And most of all, he doesn’t like company. He’s a hero out to save the world on his own; he’ll be better off if you and I stay out of his way.

When I think about these movies, I find myself oddly attracted to this model. There’s something liberating about having nothing to care about; the promised freedom of having nothing to come home to, and thus nothing to lose/worry about, is comforting in a strange way. Similar to the feeling I get from Fight Club, I wonder sometimes if my life would be better if I cut away all the unnecessary, even cancerous possessions I have surrounding me. And when I say “possessions,” I am including, to a large extent, my relationships to people around me (much of which seem to be dying of their own accord anyway). I wonder if being alone is really so horrible, or such a crime against God as we all seem to subconsciously think it is. And when I say “alone,” I mean just that; no friends nearby, no enemies, and family that lives far enough away that I don’t see it everyday.

I had something of a mentor in college who seemed to think that it was good for a person to rely on the people around him, and I’ll admit, I’ve never understood his reasoning. It went something like this: In order for man to rely on God, he first need to rely on others, and since we need to rely on God, we therefore need to rely on others. Now, it’s very possible that I just butchered that, but I can’t really think of a way to correct it. I agree that every Christian needs to rely on God for every ounce of energy and fortune that makes his life possible, but I fail to see the connection to others that this somehow implies. In certain areas, sure. My parents supported me financially for years, and still do, and thus I rely on them in that respect. More than that, my family and certain friends are often sources of comfort and intellectual support that, whether necessary or not, make my life easier and more complete, for sure.

At the same time, I’m at something of a transition period in my life, and as many of my current friends are getting married and moving away and doing grandiose things with their lives, I’m not sure how interested I am in replacing them with new blood. Don’t get me wrong, my friends have been great; I’m just not sure that I shouldn’t spend some time between myself and God. It seems to me that a certain amount of tempering stems from hardship, and so if spending even a few years alone, honing my mind, my body, and my will, ends up leaving me a smarter, harder, and more determined Christian, then I’m not sure why I shouldn’t.

I can hear it now, the chorus of voices telling me about how being “hard” means being cold, or how cutting myself off from others will invariably cut down on my “ability to love,” or some variants thereof. I’m sure there’s some truth in those statements, but at the same time I’m not sure that the alternative is any better. It seems to me that if a man were to spend a year in solitary confinement, at the end he’d be able to go anywhere and endure anything, while the man who spends a year schmoozing with other people ends up popular, but fat and weak.

I wonder if spending some time working toward being self-sufficient, as long as it is done under the recognition that self-sufficiency is actually God-sufficiency, is not categorically better or worse than surrounding one’s self with others, it’s just different. As such, I bristle sometimes at the insinuation that a guy like me, who spends a lot of time alone and does not mind, is somehow backward, weak, or deluded.

In short, I guess I like the idea of the lone hero, at least at this point in my life. I recognize that it has shortcomings, I just wish other people would recognize that the mob of Christian interdependence has its own.

Oh, and girls with muscles are hot. So long as they’re not WWF-muscles; then they’re gross.

Fight Club

The other day I was bumming around my room, doing my self-improvement routine (pushups and situps until my body tells me to stop), and I absentmindedly flipped on David Fincher’s Fight Club, which I had not seen for quite some time. It’s a puzzling movie in some respects, because I have trouble figuring out exactly what it’s pulling for. I love certain aspects of its value system, but abhor others. Since the parts I like are interesting (read: worth writing about), and the parts I don’t like are for the usual Christian “I didn’t need to see that” reasons, I’ll stick to the good parts.

What I absolutely love about this movie is its unabashed hatred for modern materialism and feel-good sentiments. Ed Norton begins his wild journey through insanity as a normal, white-collar guy who’s got all the marks of success: designer clothes, Swedish furniture, and insomnia. I like this last one because it does really seem to go with the territory; it reflects his deep-seated knowledge that he is somehow selling himself short with his lifestyle. As a member of the modern work force, Norton gets up and drives to work, where he sits at a desk and moves around pieces of information, in one form or another, eats some pre-fabricated plastic “gourmet” meals from some chain restaurant, then heads home for the night to lounge around his excruciatingly expensive apartment. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep; he never expends any real energy, so his body has no need to replenish itself. At the same time, he never really tires his mind out either, so it puts on a similar cowl of restlessness, and poor Ed Norton slowly goes nuts in the shuffle.

His first solution begins to get at the problem: his life leaves him completely numb. He never takes anything in, and he never lets anything out. Like a stagnant pool that sits and grows slime until someone shows up and breaks the festering stillness, Norton exists in a state of intellectual and physical limbo until he can find some way to get stirred up. So he goes to the testicular cancer group, and starts crying with the men who are actually in emotional pain. When he cries, he begins to feel something, and that somehow makes him less of a robot and more of a man. Sort of.

This emotional release does the trick for a while, but ultimately the insincerity gets to him (through the guise of Marla and her own insincerity) and he ends up in the same insomnia-ridden state as before. He needs some way to really feel pain, some way to really get out of the complete sterility of his life.

So he starts beating the shit out of himself. Of course, we don’t know that it’s him who’s doing the beating initially, but that’s kind of beside the point. I actually think the movie would almost as well without the whole surprise ending, or at least it would in the capacity I am here discussing. The point is that he’s getting away from the computer and the numbers and all the worthless paperwork that has consumed him for however long, and has replaced it with the utter simplicity of fists and footwork.

What I like is that this interest in fighting is so quickly embraced by all sorts of men in different walks of life. True, most of them are in the service industry and the like (i.e. not CEOs with yachts). We see snatches of the lives the other men lead, and they all seem as sterile and uninteresting as Norton’s, even though the details are variable. When they find Norton’s method succeeds in giving them a renewed sense of life and limb, the club takes on cult-like appeal. I wonder how true this really is. I know that, for myself, the prospect of letting loose some of the male aggression that sits pent-up in my veins is appealing, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to actually get into a fight. I wonder how I’d do. Sure, I’ve sparred before, and I work out as much as the next guy, but I have no real concept of how competent I would be in an actual fight, i.e. one with consequences. I love the part of the film where Tyler is explaining his vision of the future to himself, a future where technology is a thing of the past, where people hunt and farm and wear “leather clothes that will last the rest of their lives.”

There’s something entirely comforting about the simplicity of such a life: when you’re hungry, you kill something and eat it; when you’re cold, you kill something and wear it; and when you’re angry, you settle your differences with knuckles and loose teeth, and not with thousands of pages of rules and laws and codes and procedures, with lawyers sucking their lives out of everybody’s wallets so they can buy a new piece of “flaming shit” that they don’t need and won’t appreciate anyway. There is something truly comforting about owning nothing. It really is freedom in a very basic form.

This brings me to the film’s concept of “hitting bottom” as being a good thing. At first, I kind of dismissed this as an overly romanticized version of freedom, but the other night it occurred to me how similar this is to the Christian worldview. As Christians, we very truly need to hit the bottom before we can get anywhere else, and as long as we fill our lives with “flaming shit” (I like that phrase), we never get to the real issues. Life doesn’t really begin for a man until he realizes what’s truly important, and that doesn’t come until all the unimportant stuff is forcibly removed. You lose a lot of stuff, be it in the form of physical possessions or intangibles, but you end up with a freedom you never had before.

The fighting stuff also fits with Christianity, I think. It seems to me that men are naturally aggressive, and deep down, most of us wish we had some legitimate outlet for that aggression (or if I shouldn’t speak for other men, then I certainly speak for at least myself here). I think it helps, or at least it has helped me, to see life as a war between good and evil that is waged on every level. In some instances it’s fought with fists or guns, in others it’s fought with words on a page and the ideas conveyed therein. We can’t get away from this, though I suppose the uninitiated can kind of ignore it with liberal ideas that allow them to accept everything as long as they don’t think about it with more than ten percent of their brains. We are soldiers in God’s army, and that position has many ramifications in our daily lives.

So Fight Club gets a lot of it right, in my opinion. A good Christian does hit bottom, and then he does have to fight. The difference is that when he fights, he fights with a purpose.

Books!

I guess this one's not actually about a movie. Sue me.

I just read The Screwtape Letters (for the first time), and The Great Divorce (not for the first time), over the past two weeks or so. Both were exceptionally well-written, but both are strangely different.

The Great Divorce is an amazing account of heaven and hell that, while I do not believe it literally, makes an inordinate amount of sense. The idea that people are in hell because they choose to be is fascinating, and I buy it completely. I remember having many a conversation about the almighty predestination issue, with one of my more conversationally-oriented friends of yore, and I think Lewis's solution is probably the correct one. To say that a person has no choice in what he believes is to deny everyone's common experience. To say that a person has control of himself is to deny God's sovereignty. And to say that it's both at the same time is contradiction to a feebly human mind.

But it is both. People go to heaven because they can't imagine living in the emptiness of hell, and people go to hell because they don't like what heaven "stands for." We end up where we want to be, and God knew it all along, and allowed us to make the choices that would take us there. Maybe it's not quite that simple, but maybe it is.

Screwtape Letters, on the other hand, is depressing as hell. It seems like the poor guy they're tempting has a very narrow path to walk, and a million ways to screw it up at every turn. If you're strong, you get aggressive, if you're weak, you cave in, and if you're in the middle, you get proud of your wonderful balance (even as you plummet serenely into error). It seems so hard sometimes to walk the line without deviating in any of the myriad ways that bombard me.

But it's not about chance, and the ultimate choice is simple: believe and follow (even if it seems like you fail more than you succeed), or go your own way and do whatever the hell you want (and I do mean "whatever the hell," since you might as well be there already). We make this choice a thousand times a day, and Christians will always end up on top if they're truly Christians.

I guess that's why I don't really worry too much about losing salvation anymore, though I once did. If I get to the end of my life and I don't "make the cut," then I guess I probably would never have appreciated heaven anyway.

I guess some people just aren't happy, never will be, and don't want to be, strange as that may sound.

Band of Brothers, Part 2

Ok, so it's been quite some time since my last blog. I can chalk that up to general laziness, but also a good bit of busy-ness regarding school reading and, of course, my precept paper. "Justice in the Oresteia;" I imagine it's not a gripping read.

Anyway, I decided to get back into it this weekend, seeing as I'm at home and have a nice, convenient way to write and upload. I really should be reading my Tocqueville, but I'm a bit too rowdy for that.

As promised, I am now returning to Band of Brothers. Last time I wrote about Soble as a guy who tried but didn't really make the cut. This time I think I'll write about Nixon as a guy who makes the cut but doesn't really try.

Note: I realize that most of the character issues I'm going to bring up here actually don't happen until near the end of the series, so if you haven't seen them all, dad , you might not want to read all of this just yet.

Nixon is an interesting character because he's a rich boy in the army, and as such he demonstrates an certain facet of the personal characteristics that go hand-in-hand with being well-off.

One gets the sense that Nixon is of a different sort of man than Winters from the very beginning. Winters seems disciplined and duty-bound; the sort of man who leads from the front for the simple reason that it can't be done effectively from the rear, the first in and the last out. Nixon seems like the kind of guy who would rather shrug off actual combat and lead from a bunker behind friendly lines; he seems like the kind of officer who would rather discuss the merits of any specific strategy than actually implement it. From the first few episodes, perhaps most notably in his reaction toward Soble, Nixon seems to be much more aware of the army systems and their functionality than Winters. Nixon seems to constantly question and complain about his particular situation, with what seems to be a partial attitude of "I could do a better job than whoever's calling the shots," and he's far more likely to bend the rules to suit his own desires. He's the kind of man who follows only the parts of the rule set that he understands; those rules he does not like, or simply thinks are silly, he does not heed.

For example, he's one of the few characters who is ever seen drinking with any amount of regularity. Sure, the enlisted men would never pass up alcohol if they could manage to get some, but Nixon goes out of his way to get it, to the point where he ends up embarrassing himself more than once. He's likely to sleep in late and roll into his meetings unshaven, with a wrinkled uniform, because he's an officer and he can afford to. And later, he gets demoted for his lackluster war-performance, but he doesn't care much because his wife decided to divorce him (Sidenote: any woman who would divorce her husband while he's actually out on the battlefield, defending the lives of innocent people, is an absolute bitch).

This last illustration is the most interesting to me: in the middle of a war, in which he could conceivable be killed at any moment, he's preoccupied with the fact that his wife is leaving him and is taking his dog with her. This seems completely absurd to me, that a man who is daily thrown into numerous life-threatening situations is more worried about being alone than of staying alive.

I wonder how much this sentiment is actually held by people, and specifically by men. One could easily make the case that if Nixon is fighting for his home and his country, then if his home is destroyed by his wife's departure he no longer has any personal reason to fight. I can see how this demoralization would negatively affect his attitude. At the same time, he's fighting a war that needs to be fought and won, regardless of his current personal issues.

I wonder if we as Christians often make the same mistake; we let our desires and performance be regulated by our circumstances. We say "oh, God can't possibly expect me to witness to my friends because my girlfriend just dumped me," or something along those lines. So often, I think that my own personal suffering justifies my actions to make other people's lives worse, and that they should "understand" and not be upset because my foot hurts or my dog died or my car needs a new muffler. And as offensive as this is toward people, I think I end up doing it most often to God, who is the one person who can claim both that He fully understands my pain, and that He will never treat me the way I treat Him in return. It's pretty selfish, when you come right down to it.

The other interesting idea I get from Nixon is the issue of education. As I wrote earlier, Nixon seems to be the type of person who is more interested in the theory of warfare than in the actual practice of it. I think this is a snare of education, and it is especially dangerous to Christians who pursue the intellectual route. People get so caught up in reading and contemplating (and writing, ), that they forget that there's actually a war going on between Good and Evil. I know it is certainly a tendency for me to get caught up in theory to the degree that my practice suffers greatly. Rather than deal with envy or anger or lust, I can spend endless hours devising excellent plans to deal with them, all of which involve "starting tomorrow." There's an air of cowardice in this tendency, that I would rather create the plan than carry it out. At the end of the day, the man who works steadily gets the job done, while the theory jock gets fat and bald but some how manages to still feel superior to the other.

Christian men, like Nixon, need to be willing to get their hands dirty, even if it means getting shot at and bloodied in the process.

I have no idea when my next post will be, but hopefully after school's out my ability (and interest) in writing will pick up again.

Garden State

When I first heard about this movie, I was a bit skeptical. After all, Zach Braff is funny enough on Scrubs, but can he write, direct, and star in a film that's worth the two hours it takes to watch? My past experiences with writer/director combos have been mixed at best (I still don't see what's so great about Donnie Darko), and it seemed especially unlikely that a comedy actor, whose body of work is mostly in TV, would be able to produce a film with any kind of dramatic or thoughtful interest. It turns out, my fears were pretty much unfounded, and the film posits some interesting ideas about the nature of happiness, which I will now attempt to discuss.

In my opinion, the film's main focus is on a sort of tension between happiness and pain, and how different people deal with that tension. Braff plays Andrew Largeman: a twenty-something who has been seriously medicated since he put his mother in a wheelchair when he was a kid. He has a strained relationship with his father, and seems generally as though he does not fit in any particular circumstance he ends up in. He's seen lying in a perfectly-white bed in a perfectly-white room, staring vacantly into space instead of answering his phone. This shot is repeated a bit later when he is seen looking into a mirror, wearing a shirt that matches the wall behind him almost perfectly. In both instances, he is both static and different from his surroundings; in the first shot his skin and hair are the only sources of color in the entire room, and in the second they're the only parts of the frame that aren't textured. The end effect is that Andrew is somehow categorically different from both the extreme clarity and purity of the white room, and the busy-ness and exuberance of the textured wall. Taking these two instances as emotional metaphors, perhaps for happiness and "good" emotions versus sadness and other "bad" emotions, Andrew is non-interactive with both, and thus exists in some kind of limbo between the two.

I don't personally know much about the actual drugs he's supposedly on, but the effects of those drugs are obvious from the way the character is portrayed. Through the first half of the movie, Braff's character spends pretty much all of the time with a blank expression on his face, often staring straight into the camera, or at himself in a mirror. The scene where he's at the party with his supposed friends, and everything shifts into fast-forward around him, while he sits quietly, unresponsive to the glut of movement around him. He seems to be completely sterile, as if he's just a spectator in his own life.

The audience does eventually find out why Andrew has been so heavily medicated for so long: he cost his mother the use of her legs, during a violent outburst when he was a kid. His father, a shrink, then stepped in and, in an attempt to fix the problem, prescribed the drugs for Andrew that seem to have caused much, if not all of Andrew's platitude. When Andrew finally confronts his father about this move, his father explains that he just wanted everybody to be happy again. The obvious truth is that no one has been happy at all since the incident between Andrew and his mother, and while the drugs may have taken away Andrew's pain, or perhaps his "bad" emotions, they've taken away all his "good" emotions as well. The film thus seems to make the point that having no feeling is not really any better than having bad feelings, and by extension, that happiness is more than simply the absence of pain.

I think this sentiment is one that modern American culture would say it believes on paper, but contradicts heavily by its actions. We seem to be a culture of quick-fixes, fad-dieting, and antidepressants, and we try so hard to be "not-sad," that we completely miss the boat on being happy. If someone is unhappy, we give him prozac and send him to an impersonal head-doctor, rather than sit down with him and really listen to his story. If someone's stressed out over work, he just crams more "liesure activities" into his free time, hoping that if he just plays harder, he won't regret working so hard in the first place. Instead of trying to find out how to live well, we try to find out how not to live poorly, and thus we never really solve the problems, we just try to fix the symptoms. I would liken it to a patient who deals with a sinus infection by using ten boxes of tissues per day, instead of taking some antibiotics.

I think the root of this is an inability to give up the things that, as humans, we have decided we can't live without. I've known several guys my age who repeatedly get themselves into destructive relationships, of varying degrees, because they "can't" deal with the idea of solitude. I find most areas of my life which experience recurring sin patterns are difficult to solve because I don't want to actually lose the sin, I'd rather just fix the problem. If people can't give up their own ideas about happiness and embrace God's plan for them (and here I'm speaking to Christians alone, since I don't think this is possible for anyone else), even if it means they never get that thing that seems so all-encompassing right now, they'll never be happy. Speaking as a single man, I need to realize that, while it may mean that I'll never find that "special someone" (whatever the hell that means), I will be happier in the long run if I follow God's plan in solitude, than if I take the matter into my own hands.

So in Garden State, the final solution is to give up this dream of eliminating pain, and replace it with an honest struggle for happiness. As humans, we need to either take both the good and the bad, or neither, but we'll never be able to take just the good. That's not how life works.

The happiest man will be the one who also experiences the worst pains, and in the end this leads to the richest life of all.

Sin City

In an effort to avoid giving away the plot of Band of Brothers, I will address Sin City instead. Dad, get working on those Bands of Brothers. It seems to me they've been in your queue for like a year now, and I will not postpone my comments forever.

First of all, let me put out a disclaimer on this one: this film should not be seen by anyone with a faint heart. The "R" rating is quite deserved, as the violence is second only to Kill Bill Vol. 1, in my opinion (though like Kill Bill, it's stylized in such a way that it looks less realistic, and is therefore not as jarring as it would be otherwise). There's also a decent amount of sexual content, including some nudity, so be warned. I know I said I wouldn't concern myself much with this kind of film assessment, but in this case I want to make sure that people know I'm not recommending the film by reviewing it. Anyone I would recommend this film to has undoubtedly already seen it, so use your judgment.

That said, Sin City is a difficult film to analyze from a Christian perspective. In terms of the film's entertainment value, it's nearly flawless. Robert Rodriguez has done excellent work before (Desperado had some great action sequences), and I put him on par with Tarantino, except without the bizarre and unnecessary sex scene tarantino likes to throw in, though Rodriguez isn't a saint in that area either. However, the world depicted in the film has a bizarre morality, in that it's almost entirely survivalistic. Of the main characters in the film, only Bruce Willis's character is truly a good guy, though the audience gets the sense that Mickey Rourke's character is probably misunderstood. Clive Owen is a badass, but not a particularly moral guy. I think this setup has interesting ramifications, but I'll get to them in a bit.

The first and most obvious selling point of Sin City is the visual presentation. This seemed to be one of the selling points of the film, according to the previews, and it does not disappoint. In a style similar to Sky Captain..., the film was shot mostly in front of a green screen, and then all the scenery was added digitally. For the most part, this method works incredibly well, though at times it seems to me like the characters are cutouts in front of a backdrop. Of course, since this film is a graphic-novel-adaptation, the prospect of characters being cutouts is actually not that different from the source material.

And ultimately, that's what this movie is all about: staying true to the source material. According to an interview with Rodriguez (www.ign.com, it shouldn't be hard to find), no one even wrote a proper screenplay for the film. Instead they worked directly from the books, down to copying the framing of individual cells for the film (IGN also has a side-by-side comparison of the film and the books, and the resemblance is astounding). The reliance on computer effects largely made this adaptation possible, as I understand that even the lighting on the characters was added in post-production.

The film also has an interesting use of color, as bits and pieces of the characters often have a primary color attached to them. I'd have to watch the film again to decide what was the motivation behind the color choices, but, if nothing else, it's great to look at. I don't know if this color scheme is used in the books at all, as I actually thought the books were completely black-and-white, but either way I think it adds rather than detracts.

So the visual aspects of the film are more or less top-notch, but as I said in my introduction, the film is more interesting in terms of its themes. Basin City, as depicted in the film, is almost completely devoid of order. Its political and religious leaders are completely corrupt, and the police force is just another army with its own motivation. Everyone is out for himself, and for the most part nobody seems concerned with what is right or wrong, with the exception of Willis and, to an extent, Rourke and Owen. The city seems to be populated by relentless and selfish violence, and one can't help but wonder how the city manages to continue to exist at all.

While I'm certainly glad that I do not live in such a moral vacuum, I can't help but wonder what kind of a man I would be if I did. I think the most interesting concept that arose in my mind after watching this film is the interplay between complacency and prosperity. Basin City is a place where life is hard for everyone, and in such an environment, I think, a person is forced to be honest. In reading a lot of the literature that I've read this semester, much of which being focused on the nature of man and morality, the concept of supply and demand seems paramount. For example, people are less likely to fight when there's enough food to go around, but the minute things get scarce, people start getting killed. Therefore, in a place like the one depicted in Sin City, it may not be that people are necessarily any more evil than they are here in modern America, it's just that there they are unable to hide behind wealth and luxury. Men use violence to get what they want/need, and women do what they have to to get the same. Sin City may very well be an accurate depiction of the human condition, once the trappings of modern human society have been removed.

It is also that much more impressive when a good man rises from the din in Basin City, since he has to break with soceity to be good, rather than simply conform. In modern America, everyone is all smiles and sunshine to his neighbor's face, but "breathes murderous threats" in his mind. We're all nice to each other because it's the thing to do, and hence our lauded morality is, in some ways, just a fashion statement. It seems telling to me that people often describe violent criminals as "such nice guys" in their private lives. It seems that, in a America, if a man can convince everyone that he's a nice guy, then it doesn't matter what goes on inside his house, as long as it stays there. In Basin City, most people can't afford the farce.

I guess Sin City speaks volumes to me about how little civilization actually does for the souls of men. While the film is brutal in its depiction of man, it's also pretty accurate. It seems to me that, for all our ideas about "higher moral standards" and "personal betterment," a staggering portion of us are still happily trotting down the wide road to destruction. The fact that it's all sunshine and smiles until the end doesn't change the fact that the end is darkness and death.

I'll probably get back to Band of Brothers next, though I'm not quite sure. Again, leave me any comments you might have, and pass this blog on to anyone you think might be interested.