bridge on the river kwai

I don't know why, but this film totally seized my imagination during my high school days.

Everyone else was mezmerized by Jaws or under the spell of Star Wars.

But I was drawing this bridge.

Colonel Nicholson and his bridge.

I still have all kinds of drawings and sketches dating back to the mid-seventies stashed away somewhere.

I even remember drawing it on my desk during math.

I honestly don't know why.

I was in absolute heaven when Birmingham High started lunch hour showings of classic films during tenth grade. Bridge on the River Kwai was the first they showed. I had really only seen it on our small color tv at home, with vague memories of it from the theater in the mid-sixties.

I really don't understand my fascination with it (no doubt a good counselor could help here - but then people have been saying that for years).

Watching it now, I see much more than an anti-war film with the message that war is madness; I see something parabolic and even prophetic in my own life. And I find its ironies (ironies that border on absolute absurdity) delectable. The whole film for me is truly a feast each time I view it.

Bridge on the River Kwai is based on the novel by Pierre Boulle (Bridge Over the River Kwai). I've read the rather compact and fast-paced novel several times over the years - it's ending is actually much more satisfying to me, but it would simply have never worked on the big screen.

Released in 1957, Bridge was the top-grossing film of 1958. It pulled in seven Oscars (including best picture, best director, best actor) - a record that was to stand until 1959 when Ben Hur received 11 -- a total equalled by Titanic but still unsurpassed. Another interesting tidbit: the film was first telecast as a three-hour special movie by ABC on September 25, 1966, which was rare for a network to do at the time (maybe this is when I vaguely remember first seeing it) and drew huge ratings.

I'd love you to pull up a chair and join me next Saturday, October 9th in the VineArts Studio and take in a bit of cinematic history. See a classic film and ponder some of the deeper layers and ironies of life.

Here is a bit of a peak - the one scene that I've found posted on YouTube -- one of my favorites, actually. A poignant moment of transparency between captive and captor (and just which is which anyway?)
Hope to see you at the movies on Saturday...

doubt

There are no simple truths.

At Cinegogue on Saturday, we sat together in the VineArts studio like a very large family, and watched Doubt.


Wow.

Our family watched it last year sometime. Rented it along with Faith Like Potatoes and watched them the same Saturday afternoon (the titles felt like a nice complementing fit!). I remembered being stirred by it the first time, with some discussion amongst ourselves following.

This time I was deeply impressed that every believer, every church needs to watch this film.

What an amazing film for a day like 9/11.

What a needed film for every church and family and believer – for our entire culture.

“I don’t have any facts, but I have my certainty. I know about people,” says Sister Aloysius.

As our poignant discussion following the film explored, how easy it is for us to render our snap judgments about one another. How sly, how subtle, how nearly undetectable our lenses are through which we see each other, friend and foe. How easy to be so sure, so very sure that that’s what he is about. It was interesting to hear the perspective of those who saw Sister Aloysius truly in black, and Father Flynn in white, only then to see it totally flipped through the eyes of others – which is the point and brilliance of the play and movie.

The fact is there wasn’t anyone with a white hat or a black one (in fact, everyone pretty much wore black!). And through our discussion, I realized how much both characters, each antagonist, saw only the mask they perceived on each other’s face. Sister Aloysius saw a dangerous and liberal priest, a predator borne on harmful winds of change, and that tilted everything for her. Father Flynn saw a tight-bonneted, stick-in-the-mud sister whose only purpose in life was to halt the progress of the helpful winds of change in the church and in society – and that tilted everything for him. No trust, no communication. But ultimately plenty of confrontation. The scene with Sister Aloysius clutching the crucifix like a knife – wow! How easily we go there, all of us! Politically, socially, religiously, relationally. How readily we will declare holy war, or, more likely, carry on silent vendettas. Submarine warfare seems more to our liking than the direct assault on the gates, as in dealing with wrongdoing “we take a step away from God.”

And so, who is right? Who is wrong?

The film leaves it in our lap with Sister Aloysius’ final confession becoming our own.

I was left with Paul’s words ringing in my ears:

With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you – or by any man’s judgment. In fact, I don’t even judge myself! For I know nothing against myself, yet that’s not what makes me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.


Therefore, judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes – who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and make manifest the counsel of men’s hearts. And then each one will have his praise from God.

No doubt.

dreams, projections and Inception

Okay, I admit it.


I’m an Inception junkie.

Seen it five times so far. I’m sure they’ll be more.

It has layers.

Beautifully arranged layers.

I won’t presume to analyze it. I’ve read some very smart analysis by some very smart people in reviews and magazine articles and blogs. I feel like I’m trying to run with horses just to enter the discussion.

But I know it strikes some chords deep within me. Hard to articulate. Almost don’t want to. Perhaps I fear it would spoil it – like trying to explain why a painting or sunset or a particular piece of music can deeply stir me and bring me to tears or why a joke is so deliciously funny. It’s just a lovely piece of work – visually, audibly, and “soul-ly” for me.

But here I am thinking out loud (or at least “on page”) about it, so some analysis and risk of spoilage is inevitable.

Being taken to the realm of reality and dreams and memories – perhaps that it. The complexity of life, the complexity of us. How deeply buried our wounds can be; how deep the resulting catharsis; how very simple the means can be of unleashing it (a pinwheel! a speck of leaven). How much like a freight train are these wounds and memories that we cannot change; wounds that we so often only “heal slightly” by applying religious remedies (someone else’s dream, a poorly attempted inception?). How easily indeed we can find ourselves caught up in someone else’s dream – and how easy to miss the kick (or to be unwilling to take the fall) when we realize that’s just where we are. How seemingly narrow a line is there between dreams and imagination and reality. Makes me think of the question a very young Christian Bale asked his mother in Empire of the Son, “Mum, is God our dream, or are we his?” And how much is real prayer potentially like Ariadne practicing “pure creation” as she starts “messing with the physics of things.” Just how much does God wish we would do just that on this layer of his “dream”…

And then there’s the projections.

I was struck by the first and each succeeding viewing with the absence of blood in the considerable carnage. The real characters (Saito, Arthur and Fischer) along with Mal (who is nearly real in Cobb’s mind) bleed. But none of the projections in the gunfights and zero gravity wrestling bleed. It’s just “bam” and they’re down. Ariadne’s question to Cobb, “Are those parts of his mind that you are destroying?” Cobb: “No, they’re just projections.”

Just got me to thinking as a believer, as a pastor, as a human being. On this layer of reality, how often are the people I encounter on the road, in the neighborhood, in the check-out line, on the job, at church – how often are they no more than projections to me? How often do I work around people, seeking to get them out of my way so I can move more quickly from point A to point B, forgetting that these people do, in fact, bleed? That they are not mere projections to be exploited or used or resisted, but hearts and souls and minds and dreams and imaginations all fashioned and shaped in the image of God? How readily do I treat people as projections from whom I can learn or get or extract something that will contribute to my obsessive agendas – and in the process treat them as no more than “a fast-food meal over which I am too busy to pray”?

And how ready am I to face the basement of my own darkest memories and fears?

Am I willing to let my own Ariadne into that maze?

saving alice

Some thoughts upon viewing Alice in Wonderland again this evening…


Alice is essentially a film about finding yourself.

It’s about waking up to the reality of who you are and refusing to live within the confines of another’s dream or expectations. Underland/Wonderland serves as a catalyst for a young woman’s transformation, the characters and events in Underland ultimately finding correspondance in the reality of her life – and of her realization of who she really is as she journeys from the “wrong Alice” to “hardly Alice” to “almost Alice” to “Alice at last.” And she’s the one who has to take that forged identity from Underland into the world gathered and awaiting her answer.

And Underland was right there within her the whole time.

And so in this walk with God we are not pursuing or constructing a holiness that is exterior or foreign and alien to us, but it is Christ being formed in us, being “fleshed out” (as it were) in us. It is the inner life of God surfacing in increasing measure. Or as James puts it, it is “humbly accepting the Word already planted in you, which can save you.” “Word” here is not isolated Scripture references which we have mastered and memorized, but (joining together James and John) the expansive reality of the “Word” which was with God and was God and through which all things were made. It is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

And just as in Underland, we need a company of “mad” and subversive friends to help us discover and rediscover and unpack that identity. We each need our own Hatter calling forth our muchness; our own Absalem blowing smoke in our face and asking who we are; our own Mallymkun happily stabbing us in the foot; our own Cheshire with unique evaporating skills appearing at just the right moments; our own Bayard bearing us forward on our journey; our own Bandersnatch helping to lick our wounds.

Seeing these characters gathered around Alice near the end of the film I suddenly realized that I was seeing Alice’s own small group – a group about as diverse and seemingly random (and mad) as one can imagine. But they were essential to saving Alice – to taking her on that journey from the “wrong Alice” to “Alice at last.”

They also did their job and then let her go. Every impacting friendship in our life will be like that. The measure of good friendship is not how long lasting or how many others it includes (notice it’s the Knave that is obsessed with largeness), but rather how effectively that friendship challenges us to step into and be who we really are.

Real friends relentlessly poke each other with the question, “Who are you?” rather than merely echoing our own bloated image (like the “falsifiers” surrounding the Red Queen).

And what personally blesses me so is that I have just such an eclectic assortment of friends in my own Underland asking me that question and calling forth my own muchness…don’t be afraid to tumble down a rabbit hole to find yours.

invention of lying

We rented this last Friday.

I remember Brandon saying he didn't know whether he liked it or not...

I liked it.

Off color, yes. Irreverent and even blasphemous, for religious folks, absolutely.

But it made me realize just how much we rely on lying day in and day out...I mean really! (Sure, it's just me.)

And what a refreshing rendition of the delivery of the ten commandments (aka the ten things that the big man in the sky wants you to know). It made me laugh til I cried. Think it made Papa smile too (and cry) as he sees all the silly images we carry around of him.

More delicious commentary on how "anti-living" being "pro-heaven" can be (sad).

I want to see advertising like the commercials in the movie...

And I'm wondering what, truthfully, we would see on the signage on the various buildings and institutions around town.

Invention of Lying didn't just give me a laugh or even just make me think...it was an unexpected treat.

The Road

This is probably not a film we’ll watch at Cinegogue, but reading through a discussion on Facebook about it makes me pause to capture some thoughts.


Of course, read no further if you don’t want it spoiled but wish to experience it firsthand unsullied by anything I say here…

I was loaned a copy of The Road with the comment that it was depressing…and not just depressing, but that it was unrelenting in the weight of isolation and depression to the point where my friend said she was wondering with each successive scene, “Why am I watching this?” Which naturally begs the question, “Then why would I want to watch it?” But my friend knows me well, and my natural affinity for darker hues.

The Road is another journey into the land of post-apocalyptic wonder – minus the wonder.

Let’s face it – it’s bleak, oppressive, burdening, and numbing. Our eyes strain for something of life, of redemption, of grace. In the special features, the most frequently mentioned summation was that it is the story of a father and son’s love for one another. Someone quoted a line from the book, “They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."

It actually sounds a lot like the Old Testament.

Six months into a two year reading of the Bible, that line summarizes much of the land I’m walking through. I know people say, “Look for Jesus everywhere – he’s everywhere!” And with that hindsight reflection from my easy chair of grace, that’s a wonderful luxury indeed. But to read the Old Testament on it’s terms as they wrote and read and breathed and experienced it, there was no Jesus – only an often seemingly forlorn hope held to under a lifelong inversion with little or no sun – and few patches of bright green vegetation or variegated flowers.

And yet there is a hope there - pre-Jesus - that isn’t buried under the ash. There is something of a dance to this shuffling through ash that is the Old Testament – and that, more often than we’d care to admit, that is our life. Even Lamentations has some brilliant rays of hope unseen and yet believed.

And perhaps that’s what’s missing from The Road. Father and son alone, surrounded by death and dying, stumbling upon corpses or near-corpses, walking in fear, ready to take their own life at any moment, and when other souls are encountered, there is avoidance and suspicion. Perhaps the thought that they were “each the other’s world entire” rather than a warming notion is actually fingering the pit to avoid – and pointing out the difference between it and the Old Testament narrative. They did live as if they were “each the other’s world entire” when there was still much humanity all around them. I’m not going to watch it again to confirm this, but the indication I picked up was the family that ultimately took in the boy after the father’s death had been following them, and were perhaps the ones right over their heads when they were hiding out in the food cellar. But in fear the father continued to choose isolation, to stay on the run rather than risk connection.

Of the four film categories I shared in a previous post, I would put this in the fourth – for there is parable here. Not a pleasant one – it’s more like the parable told about Abimelech in Judges 9 about the trees wanting to anoint a king. It’s a dead end story told as a warning (the author and filmmaker may not have intended it so, but that’s how I heard it at any rate). I believe a large percentage of us who walk “under the sun” spend many days “shuffling through the ashes” of life. Fear and despair engulfs us, enshrouds us; we turn inward, we trust no one. It’s learning to dance in the ashes, to have our eyes open enough, our heads lifted enough to even see some beauty in the midst of the ashes, beauty in the soot-covered face of a stranger others would fear and strip and leave naked beside the road. It was in just such a desolate first-century landscape that Jesus went about “doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil.” Jesus didn’t come to a garden, and he didn’t leave a garden behind. He came to a people in a land of darkness, the land of the shadow of death. And his very presence was light. Light danced through their ashes, brought glimpses of beauty, shared garments of praise. And ultimately was lifted up on a bloody gallows because rather than withdraw in fear he loved to the uttermost.

And laid down his life for his friends.

Review: Iron Man 2 @ Parma MotorVu (did I just make a rhyme?)

Tonight was the first time back at a drive-in theater for me in about 35 years (at least).

Growing up, I remember going to drive-ins fairly frequently.
I remember us making an evening of it, going down early, playing in an onsite playground until dusk, waiting for the first image to be shot up on the screen. I remember large metal speakers hooked onto our car window and watching from inside the car.

Which was one of the pointed differences between tonight’s experience and what I remember. Tonight was like one big tailgate party. Hatches open, lawn chairs set out, boom boxes for sound systems, kids spread out on the roof of their family cars. There wasn’t even any need to silence your cell phone. And then there’s the huge screen with the backdrop of a starlit sky. Half the time I found myself gazing at the stars, at the deep, darkening blue/black of the night sky with that fading tinge of reddish orange on the horizon.

Iron Man 2 is a throwaway film that reveals the kingdom of God by contrast (humility versus narcissim and braggadocio, organic simplicity versus high-tech gadgetry, one-another community versus the one man show – with a timely assist), but the show God put on behind the show filled me. What a way to watch a movie!

Add in the community aspect of the tailgate party happening down the row, and there was much more of the kingdom in evidence behind the screen and before it than on it.

Not a bad way to spend an evening…makes me think of one creative use for that big athletic field behind the church. Can you imagine it – the Vineyard Motor Vu right in our own backyard…

Dreaming, dreaming…