Breaking Dawn, Part 2 (2012)

Breaking Dawn, Part 2 (2012)  Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence (apparently vampires have the same neck structure as little Lego men.  Who knew?) including disturbing images (I consider CGI babies disturbing), some sensuality and partial nudity (Don’t worry… mostly what you see is their wedding rings.)

I am not performing a review of all of the Twilight movies at this time.  I promised that I would review this one, because it came out after the launch of the Facebook page, so I am reviewing this one. 

I will tell you truthfully, and my friends know this about me, that I have a lot of bias against the Twilight stories.  I know I’m not alone, but I also want it made clear that I keep giving them a chance to be great, and I keep feeling like they came close and then fell short.  So my dislike of the Twilight stories is not for lack of trying.

So I went into watching this movie with a very loud “LOOK FOR THE MESSAGE!” in my head.  A lot of pressure.  I kept watching the story meander towards something brilliant and then meander back away from it.  I should, I suppose, have just watched it for the fun of it and then let the message come to me, which it did several days later.

Quick Synopsis

In this chapter of the Bella/Edward/Jacob saga, Bella has come back to life a vampire after a terminal childbirth.  Bella is a newborn vampire, so she spends a while getting her vampirey adjustment out of the way. The baby Renesmee is fine, except for a serious case of being computer generated. Jacob has imprinted on Renesmee, so she has a dedicated wolf guardian (and by extension, the rest of the wolf pack) for the rest of what could be an eternal life.

            “Nessie? You nicknamed my daughter after the Loch Ness Monster?!”

Unfortunately, the governing body of the vampires, the Volturi, get wind of Renesme’s existence and mistakenly believe her to be an immortal child (a vampire who was turned as a child) which is apparently incredibly dangerous, and set out to destroy the Cullen family.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The Cullen family finds itself in need of friends and allies in order to save Renesmee and combs the world for people who will understand. Carlisle has friends in countries all over the place.  Vampire friends with superpowers.  (How are the Volturi still in charge here? Is it really  just the black capes?) They try to convince their friends to join them, promising that while they intend to amass in force with the help of werewolves, they are not, in fact, intending to fight the Volturi.  And oh, by the way, Renesmee is not an immortal child as she would appear, but something completely new and different in fact. 

Everywhere they go, their friends react with fear and disbelief.  Then little girl Renesmee uses some kind of psychic truth touch to make vampires see clearly how not a threat she is and win them over to their cause.  When Renesmee touches the cheek of her … um… not victim… potential ally, they see something that makes it all come clear. The only time we see what it is, she is doing it to her mother, showing her the first memory she has of her.  I imagine that particular memory wouldn’t be enough for most of the SuperVamps, so she must be imparting the truth to them some other way. Whatever that is, they are sure that Renesmee is what Bella says she is, and that defending her is the right thing to do.

So that by the time they get to the showdown, they have an X-Men-like cadre of gifted vampires and an ever-increasing pack of wolves at their backs. 

                        “Lot of red eyes around here...”

Meanwhile, the head of the Volturi sees this ‘immortal child’ crime as the loophole he has always needed to break the Cullen family apart. With the Vampire Code of Conduct on their side, the Volturi buys out every black cape store in Europe and shows up in force as well.  Duhn Duhn DUUUUUUUUHN.

Renesmee is given the chance to impart her special knowledge to the head of the Volturi, who knows instantly that she is not an immortal child. With that leg kicked out from under him, he has to inspire his people with fear of the unknown instead. 

            Maintaining our secret has never been more imperative.

Their response seems largely to be “Yeah, okay, sure. Grr” so I don’t know that he had to wax quite as eloquent as he did.  But it shakes his foundation enough to allow Psychic Future-Seer Alice to show him a lego-head popping vision of the next few hours of his life if he goes forward with his attack of the Cullens.

And having seen that grim future, he waxes eloquent again and his people retreat forthwith.

(Btw… what did that look like to his people? SPEECH ABOUT KILLING THE UNKNOWN… quick vision from Alice… SPEECH ABOUT EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN. Why didn’t they think he’d been brainwashed?)

Setting that parenthetical aside…  

Fear and Lies often come to us in giant armored cars. Truth often comes to us in the form of something small and fragile. It’s not really about which one has the most big guns behind it, although that is the way history tells its stories.  The reason Lies have to be surrounded by strength and power is because there is an inherent weakness in their structure that cannot be defended.  Lies fall apart.  Truth survives.  However the epic (largely ignored by the authorities) battle on the white rock had ended, the truth that Renesmee was not an immortal child could not have been destroyed. No matter what the Volturi did to the Cullens, they would never have become right.

            “A truthful witness saves lives, but one who utters lies is a betrayer.” Proverbs 14:25

If he had proceeded, in the few minutes of the battle, Aro’s whole empire would have fallen apart due to the indestructibility of the truth, and the utter fragility of his eloquent lies. And even if it didn’t fall apart then, it would have fallen apart eventually. The trouble with leading with fear is that you have to keep making people afraid. And people grow numb, over and over again.

And as for our SuperVamp/Wolfpack team of Freedom Fighters?  Smaller in number and led by their own motivations, they had amassed behind the weakest kind of creature.  A child.  And yet the strongest kind of banner, the truth.

            “and a little child shall lead them.”  Isaiah 11:6

I will NOT draw Christ parallels to the Breaking Dawn story.  I will not.  Because it doesn’t work anyway. I tried. They walk too far away from the self-sacrifice and just go into epic battle before that can happen, which derails the Christ parallel.   (SEE? So close to brilliance and then *poof* suddenly gone)

But I will say this.

We will follow with fear a leader who inspires us with fear.  But we have it in us to stand fearlessly against an unbeatable foe if we know that truth is on our side.  Because the distance between “We are strong enough to win, right or wrong” and  “Regardless of the outcome of this day, we will still know that we were right” is… well… infinite.

Maybe that is why when it came to all of our salvation, the truth came to us in the form of a soft, warm, terribly fragile and yet somehow unbreakable infant.

Sinister (2012)

“Sinister” (2012)  Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance

Rated R for disturbing violent images (Lots of them. Snuff films and stuff. Geuagh.)

            My friends love me. They really do.  Moments like this one are not an indication that they dislike me in any fashion. When I say “challenge me,” they love me enough to actually challenge me. 

            So it was two days after I moved “Crosses In the Window Panes” onto Facebook and started sharing my reviews that my best friends brought over this movie and said “Okay, Mindy… find the message in this one.”  We watched it together, my two best friends and my husband, wracking our brains for the spiritual lesson to be learned.

Quick plot synopsis:

            Ellison Oswalt is a true crime author with a few books under his belt, one of which, quite a while ago, was a success.  He purposefully moves his wife, son and daughter into a house where an entire family was horribly killed and a child has gone missing to inspire what he hopes will be his next big hit true crime novel. Perhaps he’ll even discover the whereabouts of the missing child and get to be a hero on national television again. Unfortunately, he discovers through the course of his investigation that there is something more than murder to the crimes that happened in his new home. The deeper his digs, the more disturbing and supernatural the story becomes until he and his family are hopelessly entangled in it.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

            We can all see the problem right from the beginning.  This is a man who protests to be searching for a missing child, trying to uncover what the police overlooked in their investigation to solve an unsolved crime. To do his part for justice and right. But every night before he goes to bed, he pours a whiskey, pulls out one of several VHS tapes of interviews about his bestseller and watches himself boast about his exploits to an invisible interviewer.  He ignores his wife’s pleas for stability and threats of separation, his son’s increasingly troubling night terrors, and the ever-more intricate and graphic wall paintings in his daughter’s room because he needs to focus on the investigation. But he makes time for those interviews.

            "I'm going to write the best book that anybody's ever read."

            Early in the move, Ellison finds a box in the attic containing film strips and a projector. His defining character illustration happens when he realizes that he has first person film evidence of not only the murder that took place at the house, but also several other more graphic murders, spanning back over the decades.  He dials the number of the Sherriff’s office on his phone to report the find, but his eyes fall on several copies of his bestselling novel, and he hangs up.

“Do you understand what you've done this time? The kind of jeopardy you've put your children in? Your marriage? Is there anything you won't do for your [bleeping] book?!” Ellison’s Wife

            Later in the movie, after Mr. Oswalt has already mired himself and his family in the supernatural murders, the family moves back to their previous unsold residence, and we get a peek at the life that Ellison was trying to recapture as we see his beautiful sprawling mansion.

“I have always supported you doing what you love, Ellison. But writing isn't  the meaning of your life. You and me, right here, this marriage: that's the meaning of your life. And your legacy? That's Ashley and Trevor. Your kids are your legacy.”

            So the message comes to us from something that all four Gospels agree that Jesus said.  “He that tries to save his life will lose it.”  Sometimes it says “He who tries to secure his life,” or “he who tries to preserve his life.”  The wording only changes the meaning a little bit. The point, in context, is clear. Because the next thing that Jesus says is “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” 

            So the warning is very simple. When we focus on holding on to what we have, we lose everything.

            Now, in watching this movie, one might suspect that the moment that Mr. Oswalt lost everything was when his daughter hacked him to pieces with an axe.  

            "Don't worry Daddy... I'll make you famous again."

But actually, the moment came much sooner. Actually, it happened before the movie started.  In a confrontation only a few minutes into the movie, the Sherriff tries to tell Ellison that he liked the first book, written years before. But in the books that followed, the author had gotten too many things wrong and guilty parties had been allowed to go free as a result.  Our Mr. Oswalt lost the life he was trying to get back long before he started this leg of the story. 

I don’t think very many of us are in the position of having to worry that if we spend too much time reliving the glory days, we will be brutally murdered by our youngest children.  (At least I hope not, but I am eyeing my 8-year old suspiciously as I am composing this review.) 

But if you take that scene in a metaphoric light, if we don’t let those days go, and focus on the ones that we are living right now, our children (or any of the things that we have created) will, in some way shape or form, force us to refocus.  Even if they have to tear us apart to do so. 

Our lives are a gift. They do not belong to us, so we cannot hold on to them by any act of desperation or bargaining. And the more we tighten our grip, the more star systems will slip through our fingers.

Les Miserables (2012) Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway

Les Miserables (2012) Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe

Rated PG-13 for suggestive and sexual material, violence and thematic elements

The message of the story of Les Miserables is not hidden, and it has really been talked about over the decades. Les Miserables is a story of redemption, of misguidance and redirection, of God’s hand moving us. It’s all been said. 

So in reviewing the movie of Les Miserables released this year, what I really wanted to do is to focus on the one aspect that makes the movie different from the Broadway productions.   If you want to know “Does the movie do justice to the Broadway Musical?” or “Could the movie have been made better if the singers had been better?” or “Why did they cut this part of the story? That was my favorite part!” you may have to find another reviewer.   I have opinions about these things, but I’m not going to talk about them here.

My Crosses in the Window Panes opinion about the 2013 musical movie Les Miserables focuses on only one aspect of the movie that could not have been done on a Broadway stage.  

Jean Valjean has just realized that his freedom could be ensured for the rest of his life. Javert has found someone to arrest for Valjean’s crimes. Javert himself is convinced that the man he has in custody is, in fact, Valjean. He has apologized to the man he knows as The Mayor for even thinking that he might have been Jean Valjean. 

                                  Why should I save his hide? Why should I right this wrong? 

                                 When I have come so far? And struggled for so long?

Hugh Jackman, unlike all of the other Valjeans that have ever sung the song “Who am I?” goes into a quiet room, looks in a mirror, and whispers the lyrics that have been belted across stages all over the world. 

                                  “Who am I? Can I condemn this man to slavery? 

                                   Pretend I do not see his agony?”

It’s a beautiful piece of music. It is one of several times that Valjean sings his questions about his life to God and, through the course of a song, comes to a conclusion about the answers. He is almost always alone on stage, facing a packed audience who jumps to their feet and cheer when the song concludes.

But in this film release, it is just Hugh Jackman and his mirror.

                                  “How can I ever face my fellow men?  

                                    How can I ever face myself again?”

The truth about these moments is that they happen to us out here, in the real world. Moments when we realize, “the decision I am about to make, the line I am thinking of crossing, will utterly define me.”  We justify. We explain. We toss and turn. We go back and forth.  But for the most part, we do it privately.   

We want to have an audience when we decide to do the right thing, even when it is the hard thing. Especially when it is the hard thing.  We want to have an audience stand up and cheer for us when we refuse to cross a line… when we step forward and take responsibility for something we could have gotten away with… when we stand up for someone, and take ourselves down in the process.  We want to have an audience jump and give us a standing ovation. Because that, at least, would make us feel rewarded for choosing to do right.

But Valjean’s character did not have that.  He fought that battle in private. Just him and God.  Just like we do.   In the book, and in the movie, there was no audience.  He was not rewarded with a standing ovation for admitting that he was a fraud, a criminal who had duped the whole town into respecting him.  He was run out of town, fighting for his life, by a man who was finally justified in hating him. And other than that, people went on with their lives.

                                       “My soul belongs to God, I know. 

                                          I made that bargain long ago. 

                                        He gave me hope when hope was gone. 

                                        He gave me strength to journey on...”

Don’t get me wrong.  I have been listening to Colm Wilkinson as Valjean sing out those five glorious numbers since my sophomore year in high school.  I thought Alfie Boe was going to shatter windows. I let John Owen Jones break my heart over and over again on Youtube.  And when I sing along, I don’t whisper.

But when I fight my battles with myself, make choices that will determine my place in the plan, plead with God to be understanding until I am sure that He and I both know I’m doing the wrong thing and change my mind (or sometimes don’t), when I do that, I do it alone, just myself, my mirror and my God.  If I choose to do the right thing, I step forward into that decision with no fanfare, no overture, no audience, no ovation. 

I appreciate that the director chose to let us see that, sacrificing the musicality of that moment for its true soulfulness. 

Now… here’s the other side of that story, the truth that we often forget.  We don’t do anything alone. We don’t do anything without an audience. 

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Hebrews 12:1

When we are facing those battles, us and our mirrors, and we win, I think it is not a bad thing to imagine the standing ovation from our cloud of witnesses.

Warm Bodies (2013)

Warm Bodies  (2013)  Starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich.

Rated PG-13 for some language and zombie violence.

Let me say from the beginning that the message for this movie was never very hard to grasp. It’s in the previews!  So I know that I am cheating just a little bit by choosing such an easy mark.

Quick Plot Synopsis:  The Zombie apocalypse has happened.  We don’t know how or why, because our protagonist, R, doesn’t know how or why.  He just knows that it has happened and it has left him feeling a little directionless.

“What am I doing with my life? I'm so pale. I should get out more. I should eat better. My posture's horrible. I should stand up straighter. People would respect me more if I stood up straighter. What's wrong with me? I just want to connect. Why can't I connect with people? Oh, right, it's cause I'm dead.”  R.

He meets still-living human being Julie, and through his growing affection for her, gradually restarts his own heart, which changes everything.  It is supposed to be a comedy, and in fact I did laugh quite a lot. But like all really good comedies, I spent as much time being moved as I did being amused. 

It’s a Romeo and Juliet story, complete with the unfortunate casualty “Perry” (read Paris) and the best friend “M” (who would have had a lot of trouble saying Mercutio).  And with a few minor exceptions, it follows the Shakespearean plot pretty closely for a long time.  What delighted me most were the departures from that story.  And the story does completely depart from it’s Romeo and Juliet roots.

You see… it’s about what makes us dead.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

In this story, (as, I guess, in real life) there are several kinds of dead.  There is the death that comes from having your brain destroyed. Whether you are zombie or human, if your brain is destroyed, you stay dead.  

Then there is the death that comes from becoming a zombie (bitten, infected, however that happens). Once bitten, you become walking corpses with very little language, no direction, no real purpose except to feed their hunger. Classic zombies.

Then there is a way for zombies to die even more, and that is to become “Bonies.” They’ve left most of their skin and all of their communication behind and are completely consumed by their hunger.

“They don't bother us much but they'll eat anything with a heartbeat. I mean, I will too but at least I'm conflicted about it.”

Finally, there is one more kind of death articulated in the movie. The living who have no purpose but to survive a little longer inside their walled-in encampment.  Julie’s father, General Grigio’s whole focus is on keeping his small group of humans alive until they die of old age. There is no discernible plan for the future, other than to continue to survive.  This is also death.

The moment I realized that this movie was going to attempt to truly address this issue was much later in the story. M has just helped Julie and R to escape from over-curious Corpses and ravenous Bonies and is now staring at a picture on the wall of two people holding hands.  He has probably shuffled past this picture every day for a long time without stopping to look at it.  But the sight of R and Julie holding hands and then the sight of this picture has awakened something in him.  He is amazed. Other corpses join him, also amazed.  What is happening inside of them is something they have forgotten. They are remembering that they are supposed to be doing something here! It’s not enough just to shuffle and feed and not die. They are not just supposed to not be dying. They are supposed to be living.

There are lots of things in this world that can make us feel like we are dead. Loss, tragedy, depression, disappointment, bitterness, resentment, anything that cuts us off from love threatens to take us down into cold, deep spiritual rigor mortis.   

What wakes us back up, what brings us back to life, is love.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about romance. The movie trailer would have you believe that it is romance that brings this poor corpse back to life. But it is the moment when the possibility for romance is gone, when R has returned Julie to her own people and walked away from her, that he truly becomes alive and awake. He feels cold…  zombies don’t feel cold. It is when M and all of his followers decide that they are going to stand between the Bonies and the Humans that they are joined by dozens and then hundreds of others.  The love that spreads is the sacrificial kind.

The viral, infectious change that comes over him and every corpse he meets, that makes all of the hearts start slowly beating again, that change is sacrificial love. 

We are told that we have a very important job here to do on earth.  Love one another.  There are no addenda that allow us to exclude those who have detached themselves from life, those who do not or can not return our affection, those who are disagreeable or distasteful to us, (oh, no, did I just use the word ‘distasteful’ in a zombie movie review?) or those who will cause us great pain for loving them. 

The great thing about love is that it also never fails us. It exists in our hearts even when our hearts feel cold and dried out and dead.  It is the piece of eternity that lives in each of us, and it can always be reawakened.