Brief review on this one – 

Either as a newbie or an old friend, you’ll find the film adaptation a good one.  Les Miserables has one of the strongest stories of any musical out there.  Let it touch your heart this week. 

If you know the story of Les Mis and already love the music, you’ll like the film. The actors aren’t tied to a grand orchestra driving the tempo and tone, so they can truly act while performing the songs. I like the cast’s voices during the film, though I don’t plan to buy the soundtrack to listen on my iPod or anything. (To me, the Broadway or original London recordings just soar musically, especially on showpiece songs like “Bring Him Home.” The film cast communicates the story better.) Anyway, the film gives such a sense of time & place & plot structure to what can feel befuddled on the stage.

If you don’t really know Les Mis, the film offers a perfect opportunity to fall in love with a story that’s drenched in both Grace and themes of social justice which are just as relevant today as they were in Victor Hugo’s poverty-ridden France. “Look down, look down” at the poverty and suffering of the  masses, and be moved by the incredible mercy of God to do something about it.  Love the people in front of you — “to love another person is to touch the face of God.” 

Also, Les Mis noobs will really appreciate a much clearer plotline thanks to the visual storytelling possible with film. The musical can be absolutely confusing if you don’t already know the story. There are multiple gaps in the chronology otherwise — twice, the story skips forward by at least a decade. And it’s hard to understand the barricade business. So if you’ve never seen Les Mis, this is a great way to start. 

 

Favorite moments: [Spoiler Alert] Where our hero lets Javert go, telling him “the debt is paid, there are no conditions” on his offer of mercy to the guilt-ridden, Law-enslaved police inspector. It really doesn’t have anything to do with the movie….I just love that moment. 

#2 favorite moment: Eponine’s solo, “On My Own.” Nearly every recording (except the 25th anniversary one) casts Eponine with “the most annoying nasal voice in the cast,” as if her character cannot be communicated otherwise. So thankful the film avoided that terrible pit and chose an actress who nailed it. 

I use the weather app Swackett on my phone to keep up with forecasts and all– I like it because it presents the weather in visual form, as an avatar wearing appropriate clothing.

Sometimes the pictures are really cute. Sometimes they just make me laugh.

This morning, the “college edition” avatar made me say “ouch”– is this the future of the college-educated? Lets hope not….

I like books.  I like films that are based on books. So perhaps my best review of The Hobbit lies in this comparison: The Hobbit is a trilogy based on a single book. The Lord of The Rings, on the other hand, tantalized us with three books smashed into three movies, a sweeping story of epic proportions.

Therein lies the fundamental difference between these two trilogies. While the new Hobbit movie is excellent and fans of Middle Earth will revel in returning to the world once more in its splendor and detail, the truth is Peter Jackson is willing to sacrifice the truth of a children’s tale to get the epic feel of LOTR.

First the good: this Hobbit film is beautiful. The acting, of course, is great. Moments of humor are sprinkled throughout just as one would expect. We even get to see more of the flying helicopter scenes, the shots soaring above heroes running across an open plain.

But there in lies the rub: We’ve seen this before. We’ve heard this soundtrack before. We’ve seen these shots before. We feel like we’ve heard these jokes before.

In 2002 when LOTR:Fellowship opened, everyone was stunned by its complexity and beauty. Anticipation for the movie had risen to a fevered pitch. Fans were in love with this man who brought Tolkien’s story to life in truth and love (except for that stupid insertion about Aragorn falling off the cliff in Two Towers). 

In 2012, the novelty is gone. We enjoy The Hobbit like we enjoy visiting a beloved cousin. It’s not like seeing a celebrity, but it’s still a great visit.

Again I’m not trying to be too negative. Tolkien fans will love the film. They’ll enjoy the songs and the scenery and the battle scenes and the jokes and just sitting in a theater again watching something from this world.

But at three hours, the film just runs….long. (To be fair, Tolkien feels “long” to a modern reader used to the cotton-candy pacing of young-adult literature.) Sometimes good filmmakers fall in love with the story so much that they can’t bear to cut anything. But the essence of good art lies in the editing. What isn’t present is as important as what is. 

Now, on the upside, the Hobbit film delves into the nooks and crannies of Tolkien lore, expounding on moments which enrich the subsequent LOTR storyline. You’ll understand so much more of the Hobbit story from the film than you got from the book (unless you’ve memorized The Silmarillion or can go toe-to-toe with Stephen Colbert as a Tolkien nerd).

But I must warn you, make sure you’ve drunk some coffee before you go. (Don’t worry about having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the film, there are plenty of moments when you can get out without missing the action.) And you had better choose a theater with very comfortable seats because you will be in them for three hours.

Bottom line The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is lovely and interesting. I like being back in Tolkien’s world. But I hope Jackson exercises a little more editing-room self-control for the later films. 

Best scene “Riddles in the Dark”–it’s absolutely incredible.

Our water bills here in Anderson CO are totally screwed up. The sewer charge is ridiculous; has to do with county politics. So the sewer charge on the bill is about 3x the charge for water.

On a $20 water bill, paying $55 for the sewer charge is galling but still manageable. We grit our teeth and move on.

Well, one of the few conditions Coart asked of the Kueblers when they moved in was for them to cover the water bill, since it would be the main area where their presence in our house would really affect our finances. Jane agreed. The first couple rounds weren’t too bad. (In fact, I wondered if there was a mix-up somewhere….)

When I opened December’s bill last week, I nearly died — it was $520!  Jane and Coart had their own personal heart attacks….

and then we just laid it on the table and said, “OK. This one is bigger than us. So God’s gonna have to pay it….because we sure can’t.”

 

So on Wednesday Coart was opening mail and found that someone anonymously sent us $100. Cool.

I said to Jane, “Hey, this is awesome! Because yesterday, I got a Christmas bonus from Erskine — totally wasn’t expecting that!”

Bonus was $300. “We’re 4/5 of the way through the water bill!”

Jane jumped up, strange look on her face, and rustled through her wallet.

She emerged with $100 — “A college friend said his mom was up to visit last weekend, and he had told her about our situation, and she told him to give us this money.”  A hundred dollars.

 

And that is how God paid the water bill.  

If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, please go back there before reading on, or this won’t really make much sense.

 

I guess the Holy Spirit decided I needed a trail of frikkin bread crumbs to this idea so I wouldn’t miss it, so my weekend journey through Love continued….

*****
Weirdest thing happened on Saturday. We attended the wedding of people we totally didn’t know.

Rest easy, we haven’t taken up wedding crashing.  Greg Skipper, the director of Calvary Home, was officiating at the quickly-planned wedding of a couple he knows …. I still haven’t gotten all the story yet, but I gather that a couple who have been together for several years decided to get married. Greg said in his email inviting people to please come attend the wedding and celebrate this couple, that they had recently come back to the Lord. 

Cool. Weddings should be celebrations, and anybody who wants to make a go of it the right way (which is the harder way, but the better way) deserves to be supported. So we put on our nice clothes, found a card, and headed over (despite Coart’s cold).   

Part of the wedding included the usual reading of 1 Corinthians 13. It is a passage I love. Normally I tune out the reader somewhat and try to remember the passage as I memorized it in the King James, because the language is so beautiful. But my linguistic archaeology was interrupted this time by these arresting words:

⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

I had spent much of this past week being irritated and resentful. 

Oh, hell. 

 

*****

If you know us in person here in SC, you’ve probably heard that things are a little crowded at the house these days. A family in our church lost their house (rental) back in August and nothing opened up. It’s a big family. We all kept expecting something to open up for them, like it always had.  

But it didn’t. So that’s why on a Monday in mid-August I found myself trying to haul everything out of two or three rooms of our house to make room for 5 people to move in. *gulp*  Within a month, we had three more, and I have officially declared our house FULL. If I could find one of those lighted No Vacancy signs for the front window, I’d put it up for chuckles. 

Sometimes people want to be impressed. They say things like, “I could never do that. You guys are awesome people. You’re living the Gospel.” And while I appreciate the attempt to stroke my spiritual ego or tempt me toward self-righteousness and arrogance, the truth is — the past 4 months have mostly served as a big fat billboard pointing to just how selfish and irritable and resentful I am. 

I think it’s easy to grit teeth and “do the right thing” because you feel obligated. 

If loving people, if living like Christ lived, if showing Grace to others because I myself have been forgiven for so much — if that were easy, we’d all be doing it. Poor people would be taken care of, orphans would be adopted, the foster system would have enough caregivers, hungry folks would eat.  The solutions to social problems like poverty will be through relationship — not through shifting the burden of the cost of care from the church to the government, or from the state back to individuals. The “cost” in terms of dollars isn’t the point at all.

The “cost” is personal. 

Grace costs the giver.  

The truth of myself that I must face when I grumble inwardly that there are small socks on the floor, when one of the visiting cats races across the end table and knocks everything off, when the microwave looks like someone exploded a burrito inside — the truth is, I love my house more than I love people. And that’s wrong.  People are more important than things (another one of my mantras).   

I love my own comfort, my sense of peace, my desire for organization, a quiet house, no fingerprints on the glass doors, an open guest bathroom more than people. 

And it’s wrong. 

I can’t tell you why God hasn’t given the Kueblers a house yet. I don’t wish it for our sakes; they’re the ones who are trying to cram 7 people into two small bedrooms.  Have you ever been homeless? Probably not.  Have you ever had to hang on God’s very provision just to eat? Yeah, me either.  I want the K’s to get a house and stock it with tons of food so the teenagers can eat as much as they want without fear of running out of food before the month ends. I want for them to feel the warmth of stability, so the kids grow up without the fear of people walking out on them or abandoning them.  I want Jane to have the space to be as hospitable as she would like to be, all the time, without the physical contraints of our house. 

But *I* need them.  

Rich blessings come from God’s hand when we walk in His ways and surrender to the brick-to-the-head moments of sanctification. Having the Kuebler clan join us for these past 4 months has been rewarding, gracious, and enlightening. I find myself praying one of my most-used prayers from the Gospels, “Lord, I believe. Please help my unbelief.” 

It is in these moments when we die to self and choose to love others truly and with open hands, as God loved us — not demanding a reward or a return on the investment — that we grow to understand more of our Father’s heart.  We love only because He first loved us.  God proves that He loves us because, when we were total failures — when we ARE total failures — Christ died for us.  

 

Back to Mass Effect mom from yesterday — I think she “gets it.”

Sometimes Grace shines out from the most unexpected places 

 

PS. By the way – The Kueblers still need a house. This is bigger than what they could ever attain on their own, so we’d all appreciate it if you’d pray for God to kick someone in the butt who has the means to provide them a real place to live to get on that and do it.  

In my former life as a teacher participating in an experiment — to see Grace-based education incarnated in a real classroom setting– at my school, we had many little sayings that tried to encapsulate the truths about Grace-in-education. One of my favorites, borrowed from the words of the ever-wise Cheryl Martin (aka RivenDella) is this: Grace always costs the giver.

My life-journey these past few days has tossed several opportunities to reflect on that truth. I’ll muse for a bit….

*****

The first was an article posted to me on FB from a friend. Daniel Starkey wrote a column called “My Mother, Commander Shepherd.” He describes his experience with the trilogy Mass Effect, one of the best video game stories I’ve ever experienced. The series also offers one of the few truly-rounded female main characters in recent video game history — maybe ever, I don’t know. (There were some awesome stories told by the early games, which don’t get any attention now because their graphics aren’t up to snuff.)  

After explaining why he chose to model his main (female) Shepherd character on his mom, a woman who loomed large in his consciousness for the way she selflessly cared for many other people in their lives, Starkey found his passage through the games becoming more and more poignant as his mom began to battle arthritis and other problems.

Starkey writes about his attempt to walk in his mother’s footsteps of altruism:

I lost myself. I learned that when you spend all of your time living for others, when you dedicate everything you have to those around you, when you fill yourself with the selfless, agapic love of an altruist, some element of your being has to suffer.

My mom tried to never show weakness. She tried to suppress her own humanity so that she could be an unflinching symbol of perfection. I didn’t figure this out until I was past 20. I didn’t understand how little of herself she still had until I tried to live that life—however briefly – and burned myself out in a matter of months.

[My game character] Shepard was burning out too. She’d been resolute and she’d been unyielding, but you can only wear that mask for so long. The game was drawing to a close, and I knew how it was going to end. I knew what was going to happen. 

Picking up the thread of Starkey’s column — and there are spoilers in here, so stop reading now if you plan to play the Mass Effect series – 

[At the climax,] the child gives Shepard a choice; one choice and one chance to try and end the conflict.

Tired and weakened, [Shepherd] chooses to create a new kind of life. A new beginning for the people and the artificial intelligences that are left. In so doing, she had to sacrifice herself.

It was here that I think the potential implications of the manner in which I’d been playing affected me the most. In a sense, I’d just watched my mom, the most important person in the world to me, die to achieve her goal. That reality is disturbingly poignant now.

A few weeks ago, I called one of her best friends and asked if there was anything my mom had been doing that would fall within the realm of “self-destructive behavior”. 

“Yeah. She has. She’s been running herself ragged.”

Somehow I thought that’d be the case. She’s been taking care of several people and helping them out when and where she can. A few members of our family have been in out of hospitals recently, and she, as she does, has taken it upon herself to make sure that everyone has the care and the support they need. She makes one hell of a mother, but she’s awful at being a person.

 

And THAT all got me thinking. … “Grace always costs the giver,” to quote the eminent Cheryl Martin. 

Jesus said, if we want to save our life, we must take up the Cross and follow Him.  The person who tries to save (preserve) his life will lose it instead. (Matthew 9)

Is Starkey right that there must be a demarcation between life-sucking altruism and life-affirming altruism?  Or is this what we are called to — “Unless the seed falls into the ground and dies, it cannot bring forth any fruit.”  

Sounds like his mom is a very fruitful lady.

 

*****

Later, Mark Wells posted an amazing article on my FB called “Going to Hell with Ted Haggard.”  Honestly, I hadn’t even heard of this whole deal …. I guess Haggard cheated on his wife or whatever, bought drugs, dinked around with homosexual sex, who knows.  Whatever. Lost his pulpit, lost his ministry….

…and then repented. Asked for forgiveness. Began ministering to people around him.  And the church as a whole has thrown a fit. People won’t talk to him; people won’t talk to people who talk to him. He’s not fit for ministry now or for eternity, it seems. The author Michael Cheshire starts asking questions about why Christians wanted Ted to repent when he was sinning, but now they won’t have anything to do with him. Cheshire writes,

I had a hard time understanding why we as Christians really needed Ted to crawl on the altar of church discipline and die. We needed a clean break. He needed to do the noble thing and walk away from the church. He needed to protect our image. When Ted crawled off that altar and into the arms of a forgiving God, we chose to kill him with our disdain.

I wrestled with my part in this until I got an epiphany. In a quiet time of prayer, Christ revealed to me a brutal truth: it was my fault. We are called to leave the 99 to go after the one. We are supposed to be numbered with the outcasts. After all, we are the ones that believe in resurrection. In many ways I have not been aggressive enough with the application of the gospel. My concept of grace needed to mature, to grow muscles, teeth, and bad breath. It needed to carry a shield, and most of all, it needed to find its voice.

 

Incredible.

Flannery O’Connor said somewhere,  more or less, that her stories illustrate the way Grace has a backbone.

Real Grace is tough. It has teeth and claws. Sometimes Grace is a swift kick in the nuts rather than a nice pat on the head, and in Flannery’s stories, it’s always the self-righteous ones who get it in the nuts. 

 

….more tomorrow….. I know you internet people have short attention spans.

 

^That quote comes into my head at least once a week. It comes from one of the Anne of Green Gables books, perhaps the first one, and I believe it’s Marilla who comforts Anne with these words at some point after Anne screws things up (all with the best of intentions, of course).

When I was younger, I thought that adulthood meant getting smart about how things work and ceasing to screw up. Having lived as an adult for quite a while now, it seems that was a misconception on the part of my younger self. In fact, my ability to invent new mistakes never ceases to amaze me.

Earlier this week I had a classic smh moment (“smack my head,” in case you need a translation) at work. I made one of THE stupidest graphic design mistakes ever.  Total n00b.  The Advancement office needed cards printed for scholarship recipients to use when writing thank-you notes to the donors of those funds. The students stop by the Advancement office to jot a note, then the secretary includes a photo of the student and gets them in the mail. 

We paid an amazing photo editor (look her up: “Command Zee” is the name of her business here in the Upstate) take a photo of Belk Hall in the snow (from last year, maybe?) and make it look 10x cooler. We were going to print 5×7 cards. I laid all the plans with a local printing house (one of the owners has a daughter at Erskine) who enthusiastically tackled our print job with days to spare.  It was a rushed week with a lot of details flying about, so I dashed off the card design late in a day and kept rolling. 

Normally you get to see a proof of a project before it’s printed, but that didn’t happen this time. Instead, the Erskine dad/printer stopped by my office to hand-deliver our cards–a nice gesture. Or maybe he was around to visit his kid and swung by. Whatever. He handed me a stack of neatly cut and scored cards…. 5″ wide and 3.5″ tall (it’s a horizontal design).

…Oh damn.

If you want a 5×7 card, you need to design a 10×7 card (so it folds to 5×7.  

*sigh*

Laugh or cry…..  I appreciate the fact that Cliff laughed.

Dena, from Advancement, sweetly stopped by with a card and tactfully opened with, “I fear there’s been a misunderstanding….”  No, Dena. I just screwed that one up. lol

 

I also had a very negative encounter with a VERY dark set of outside stairs on Tuesday evening. Not really on par with the Great Fall of Christmas 2009 in the Raleigh airport or the Nearly-Gangrened Knee in the Dominican Republic in 2008. But still painful. Limped around a lot today on my way to the 3rd floor, but I refuse to use the elevator. 

 

But the real jewel of Tuesday was my realization at 8:30pm, after spending several hours working on the magazine that we’re trying so hard to get finished, which came after several hours of doing a photoshoot (for the above-mentioned scholarship thank-you cards) that I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be at the GAMAC rehearsal at 7:45. Due West is 30min from Anderson, plus I hadn’t had supper yet…..so THAT was a wash.  

Is it possible to write a sheepish email? I certainly tried. 

 

Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it. (Yet.)  

Let’s see if I make it to GAMAC at 7.  

 

PS. Shout-out to the Anne of Green Gables series for being a lot better than a lot of people are willing to give credit for. I learned more about the home front during WW1 from that series than anything else I encountered in my teen reading years.  The characters are good, and Montgomery takes the stories well past Anne’s childhood into the lives of her children. It’s a neat example of regional fiction, though I’ve found a lof of kids today don’t have the patience for that series.

We turned our “evening-out” attention last night to the new Brad Pitt film Killing Them Softly, which is garnering great reviews from critics (according to Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregator). And as a bottom line, I have to say I was disappointed. 

I like artistic films. Last weekend we saw Life of Pi, which was engaging and fascinating and beautifully filmed. Even though Pi was a long feature, I enjoyed it; and although I don’t know how I feel about the cloud of ambiguity + religious tones that serve to wrap up the experience, I’m really glad I saw it. 

Killing Them Softly, however, always seemed to tip its hand that it was trying to be “artsy.”  The film uses a thin plot about a robbery in the seedy underworld of a Northeastern city (maybe Philly?) to stitch together several very impressive scenes. The acting is superb and nuanced. But the film is dull.

I think Coart summed it up best when afterward he said, “I feel like that was a master’s thesis for acting technique.” You can stand back and be impressed by the excellent performances by all of the principal cast — Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, and several others — but you don’t like any of those characters, and you aren’t really drawn into what they’re trying to do. 

Even worse, the film offers a totally-not-veiled-at-all attempt at social commentary. The background audio track constantly streams news clips about the financial downturn of 2008, with the voice of Bush or McCain or Obama or some financial pundit serving in place of a soundtrack. The real BOOM moment of the film, thematically, happens in the very last line … and then you get the credits.  I guess the director wants me to feel like America is a business and even the mob is hurt by the downturn, even criminal “contractors” have to put up with the tyranny of the rich and the unfairness of the current system. 

*yawn*

Any movie that gets “preachy” loses its status as art, IMHO. And even a pretty film has to still succeed as a story piece. 

 

Bottom line: Pass this one up in theaters. If you really appreciate outstanding acting technique, watch it on DVD/Netflix in a few months.