Black and Roiled Waters

At Soccer Camp the other night my buddy Shawn drove his car around the back of the school as the kids were gathered for the Devotional time of Soccer Camp.  He parked his car and said, Hey I need some gas.  Immediately my friend Phil ran up to Shawn's car with a two litre bottle of Coke and proceeded to "fill up" Shawn's car with Coke.  The kids broke forth into uproarious laughter as Shawn, of course, rebuked Phil for being so silly as to fill his car with Coke and said, Hey I said I needed gas!  Phil stopped, shook his head, and ran over to a Gas Can that was sitting beside the school steps and put gas in Shawn's car. 

This was supposed to help the kids see that we just don't work without Jesus.  Cars aren't meant to run on Coke.   Humans only operate properly on God.  I love the way The Amplified Bible words Jeremiah's rebuke to Israel for filling up on Coke. 

¹³ For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the Fountain of living waters, and they have hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns which cannot hold water.

¹⁴ Why have we become captives and prey for evil? ¹⁷ Have you not brought this upon yourself by forsaking the Lord your God when He led you in the way?  ¹⁸ What have you to gain by allying yourself with Egypt and going her way, to drink the [black and roiled] waters of the Nile? Or what have you to gain in going the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the Euphrates? 

¹⁹ Your own wickedness shall chasten and correct you, and your backslidings and desertion of faith shall reprove you. Know therefore and recognize that this is an evil and bitter thing: [first,] you have forsaken the Lord your God; [second,] you are indifferent to Me and the fear of Me is not in you, says the Lord of hosts.

I saw a reporter on TV the other day who asked the question, Why has our country become so broken that deranged madmen shoot up innocent victims in a movie theatre?  This is the answer.  We have forsaken the living water of Jesus Christ and have drank the black and roiled waters of sin for so long that our kidneys and brain are shutting down.  We are dying spiritually as a continent.  We need to return to the Fountain of Living Water so that we work properly and live life that Jesus said He came to bring us.  He is the Water our thirsty souls seek.

Nuff Said.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises

So here's the thing; Chris Nolan is a genius.  His treatment of Batman in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and now The Dark Knight Rises is brilliant.  He delivers twists and turns, knows how to throw in social commentary and how to take you to the edge of despair and then yank you out with a lifeline of hope and triumph.  Good stuff to say the least. 

Christian Bale did another swell job playing a tortured Bruce Wayne and tired Batman, Michael Caine was great, again, as Alfred and Anne Hathaway made a  brilliant Catwoman.  Tom Hardy as Bane portrayed a brilliant, brutal bad boss, although my Canadian ears had a hard time deciphering that modulated and accented Bane dialogue at times.

Hans Zimmer's score, which he and James Newton Howard pioneered as a new sound for movies in Batman Begins is driving, familiar and fresh in many ways.  Zimmer knows how to take one note and somehow build a symphony of tension and triumph in your skin cells as you watch the movie.    

The way that Nolan and his team weave together this complex story with so many characters, threads from the first two films, and the comics make this movie one crazy quilt of complexity that almost demand a second viewing.

This film is intensely good and should be saluted in many ways.  I hope that it does well despite the dark cloud of the Aurora shootings.  Nolan understands humanity and takes the Batman movies into a tremendous mythology that is all their own.  It is nice to see that Nolan has beat the curse of the "third-movie-sucks" (as in Spider-Man 3, Superman III and Batman Forever).

I give The Dark Knight Rises a 9 out of 10.  

'Nuff Said.

The Amazing Spider-Man

All of Sam Raimi's Spidey movies were number one in their years of release.  The first Spidey flick came out ten years ago (!)  How did that happen?  Well, here we are in 2012 and The Amazing Spider-Man has been released sans Tobey Macguire and the entire cast of the first three Spider-Man flicks.

I am amazed at how the special effects have evolved over the last ten years.  My daughters and I watched the original the night before we went to this new one and the special effects in the 2002 version look cartoony by comparison.  This Spidey looks more weighty and affected by gravity rather than the lilting big screen Spidey of days gone by.  I also like the way that this Spider-Man has a harder time finding surfaces to swing from, even in New York City.  Spidey even needs some help from good, old fashioned, gravity bound humans to save the day.  This movie felt like a cross between a Christopher Nolan Batman movie and a Spider-Man movie.  It has a darker and more melancholy feel.  The music was also a bit of a surprise as James Horner's usage of more of the orchestra and his recognizable style isn't heard a lot in movies as of late.  I recognized the music as his part way through the film.  Some of his music works and some doesn't seem to suit some of the scenes.

I liked the cast.  Garfield makes a great Peter Parker and gives life to the classic comic character's bookish, quiet, geeky scientific personality.  I love that he invented the web shooters like the comics instead of the organic webbing of the first three films.  The whole thing was that Parker was a genius who could invent web shooters.  Gwen Stacey, played by Emma Stone, is a strong and sweet lead female and the way that the writers developed the romance between Peter and Gwen was solid and not sappy.  I liked Sally Field as Aunt May and the way that she was strong, and smart.  Martin Sheen was good as Uncle Ben and I really didn't want him to die in this one-but it was necessary. Rhys Ifans made a good conflicted villain.  I am looking forward to seeing this series' incarnation of J.Jonah Jameson.  I think this is the best cameo of Stan Lee in any Marvel Super-Hero film. 

I like that the film didn't resolve everything and definitely had a first-chapter feel to it.  Spider-Man shows he is human and uses that transparency to save people.  He can be bruised and battered and gets a little more realistically beat up than the average super-hero.

If people that like the first three (or at least the first two) can manage to not compare The Amazing Spider-Man to them then I think that they will like this movie.  Sam Raimi caught the buoyant nature of Spidey and Peter Parker's problems but Marc Webb has brought Spidey into the Dark Knight era of Super Hero films.  I liked it. 

8.4 out of 10.