More Than One Lesson

“For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”
-Romans 15:4

Quotations are important to me. In my apartment, there are three large stacks of blank notecards and a black permanent marker, so that whenever a new one comes into my life, I can write it down. There are about 50 next to this keyboard right now – quotations from movies, books, songs, interviews, and many from The Bible.

[…]

We at More Than One Lesson are committed to creating a safe and encouraging place on-line to discuss issues of faith and art.  There are plenty of other sites on the internet that seem to want to promote controversy and divisiveness.  We have no such goal.  While we wish to maintain a policy on the website that encourages real conversation, we recognize that it is possible for people to abuse this policy and use the comments section of a given blog post to promote their own agenda, stir up controversy for its own sake, or insult others.

And so we reserve the right to delete any comments that we feel are written with a combative spirit and are not meant to be constructive.  This does not mean that we will immediately delete comments that are critical of More Than One Lesson and its views; simply that we will try as objectively as possible to assess a person’s motivation in posting a given comment.  If it is a negative criticism, but written in a spirit of constructiveness, we will leave it up.

We would also ask that those posting comments try to keep them as pithy as possible.  We understand that, given the nature of the show and its goals, people can respond with very strong opinions and will often have a lot to say.  However, the comment section is not meant to be a back way into writing a rebuttal blog post.  We ask that you try to keep your comments to 400 words or less.

If we feel that people- Christian or otherwise- are abusing the comments section, we reserve the right to delete their comment.  If we do choose to delete a comment, we will do our best to e-mail the commenter with an explanation of why; we feel that this is only fair, since we certainly don’t want to alienate those that have a legitimate complaint or concern with the site.

As stated, we know that opinions about both art and faith can be very personal, so we understand a certain level of passion in the comments and we want to be accommodating to that.  However, we also want to be sensitive to those that are searching for a more civil discussion on-line and desire to explore these deeply personal elements without fear of demagoguery or abuse.

If you have any questions, or would like to report a concern, you can e-mail Tyler at tyler@morethanonelesson.com.

Thanks for your continued support.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009)
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Gambon

I think “delightful” is a good word to describe Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. In a time where the animation world is dominated by CG, it’s fun to see a divergence from the norm. In taking on a well-loved classic, Anderson and his team give it a pleasant, whimsical re-imagining.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on the children’s novel of the same name by Roald Dahl of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” fame. Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a lovable scoundrel trying to steal from three of the meanest farmers around. Things get complicated when the farmers decide to fight back. The cast is mostly woodland creatures; fox, badger, rabbit, weasel, and so on. But we also get some great moments with the evil farmers. The ringleader is voiced by Michael Gambon, who expertly gives us both sinister and hilarious moments. Among the rest of the voice cast we find Wes Anderson regulars such as Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman.

The look of the movie is one of the things that gives it so much charm. The color pallet is full of soothing fall colors, and the landscapes are beautiful in a simple way. That’s the way all the animation is. It goes in the opposite direction from the super-realism attempted in some animation, which gives it a lot more character. It has its own aesthetic as well, coming from relatively unknown animation company MacKinnon and Saunders. And everything in it encourages you to come along for the ride.

The script is simpler than other Anderson films, being based on a children’s book, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. It still has a recognizable crackle of Wes Anderson/Noah Baumbach dialogue. There are a few moments when the film seems to pop out of its kids genre to throw something to the indie-movie lovers, who will undoubtedly be out in droves.

Because it’s simpler (I wouldn’t call it simple, but simpler), the story is not as compelling or moving as Royal Tenenbaums or Rushmore. Also lending to this is the mere fact that it’s animation on animal faces – you’ll never get the same emotion from an animated image that you would from a true human face. But the movie isn’t trying to change your life, it’s trying to tell a good story in a fun way, and it succeeds.

You’ll see here some of the same “father” themes that regularly pop up in the work of both Anderson and Baumbach, but not to the same degree. The story arc between Mr. Fox and his son Ash (Schwartzman) has a heartfelt setup and a tender pay-off. The character interplay is enough that it will have something for all audiences, even if it doesn’t blow your mind. Anderson’s directing style is also still there, for certain. There are lots of straight-on close-ups, long wide shots, and his typical attention to set design. A scene showing the animals in different levels of the sewer will remind savvy audiences of the presentation of the Belafonte in The Life Aquatic. And as always, there’s lot of great classic rock music, from the Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys.

Some might question whether or not this is a movie for kids, considering the big debate over Where the Wild Things Are this October. I think Mr. Fox will be enjoyable for both kids and adults. The animation is fun, the story is basic enough for kids to follow, and hey, it’s got talking animals. It moves quickly enough that it shouldn’t lose children’s attention. At the same time, the themes are pretty universal, so parents can take something from it, and they’ll get more of the jokes.

It belongs in a different category than his other films, but Fantastic Mr. Fox is still a great offering from Wes Anderson. It’s a fun ride, it might pull at your heartstrings a little bit. I’d say…well, I’d say it’s delightful.

In this episode, Tyler discusses Pete Docter’s Up and what we as Christians can learn from it.

The podcast was recently reviewed on the website “The Itinerant Iconoclast.” You can read the review below.

Podcast Review
More Than One Lesson

This is simply the best podcast I’ve run across that reviews film from a Christian perspective. Host Tyler Smith is a film school graduate living in Hollywood, and looks at film equally from those two perspectives of cinema quality and Christian worldview.

What I like about the show is that Smith knows what he is talking about when it comes to examining film, and he knows what he is talking about when it comes to analyzing Biblical themes and concepts in cinema. Smith is not a fundamentalist in his biblical worldview. To my way of thinking, this separates his podcast positively from too many that I have run across.

His podcast successfully manages to intelligently discuss both faith and cinema. And I appreciate that greatly.

// posted by I.I. @ 11:09 AM

No, Roland Emmerich, you may not have 250 million dollars.

This November’s offering of disaster-movie-maker Roland Emmerich’s most recent disaster movie cost $250 million. This, my friends, is ridiculous. That’s $100 million an hour. To break it down further, every second of 2012 cost about $280,000. Can this possibly be worth it? Is there any way that this movie can justify spending so much money?

Let’s look at the campaign leading up to 2012. For months now (especially if you live in LA), you’ve been seeing posters, bench ads, billboards, all sorts of publicity for the movie. All of it has one thing on the poster – the number 2012. That’s it. The marketing campaign is based on the number 2012. Maybe a sleek minimalist concept to make it fit in with late fall’s Oscar contenders, but let’s take a look at the trailers. They contain almost nothing but disaster scenes. We see nothing but giant waves destroying buildings, monuments, and highways, cars being tossed from side to side, and planes crashing into the ground.

Now after you watch the trailer, what would you think the movie’s about? The world ending, yes. But what else? What’s the plot? What is the story, who are the characters, why does it all matter? There is nothing in the advertising campaign of 2012 to give us any idea of the actual movie, besides that it has lots of very, very expensive disaster scenes. And how do these scenes fit into the story? Lets think about it. We see scenes of destruction in Washington DC, LA, Rome, London, Rio de Janeiro, the Himalayas; the list goes on. Are we to believe that every one of these places has people that are important characters in the movie? Are we to believe that the movie has a good, story or theme based reason to show us destruction in these places?

A good movie comes up with a story and uses plot point to move that story along. What 2012 does is take a plot point and throw a story around it. There’s no way that we need to see the destruction in all these exotic locales. It’s just an excuse to throw in ridiculous special effects and mock ironic scenes (Emmerich has a penchant for showing the world’s most famous monuments being destroyed in fantastic ways – the toppling of the Jesus statue over Rio de Janeiro is a particularly stupid one). It’s a huge two-and-a-half hour gimmick. And it’s not even a new idea. Roland Emmerich has done this before with Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. It’s not a new addition to the “disaster movie” genre, it’s just the same movie all over again with a different impetus. Is this fair to viewers? Should we be expected to watch a movie with almost two hours of destruction that we’ve already seen?

Yet the trailer only showcases the destruction, and the posters only tell us the name. They’re not even hyping the actors in the movie. John Cusack is playing second billing to “disaster.” Apparently Woody Harrelson’s in it, but there’s nothing telling us anything about that. There is a reason for all this – the makers of 2012 are holding their cards very close to their chests because they know that the movie is terrible. They know that there is nothing in the story, the character, the idea, the themes; nothing anywhere that makes this a redeeming piece of cinema. But they don’t care. They still want you to see it, because they’ve got to make that money back – that 250 million dollars.

Is this what film has become? Filmmakers like this have taken an art form and turned it into some dilapidated industry where they spend piles of money trying to trick audiences to go see something they will not enjoy. Like the three-card monte tricksters of old, they want you to pay them in hopes of getting something they have no intention of delivering. How much money could it really take to make a good movie? Let’s look no further than Paranormal Activity, still flying high at the box office. That’s a great concept and an enjoyable movie. But Roland Emmerich is allowed to spend Paranormal Activity’s entire budget 20 times every second. Does that make any sense? If a quality movie can easily be made for less that $10 million, why are studios still spending so much?

This is a call to both filmmakers and audiences. We can make great films without spending a king’s ransom. Let’s look for quality instead of proven tactics. The age of the blockbuster has been in a stunted state of growth for nearly 20 years. Producers complain that things are shabby at the box office, but only offer pallid regurgitations of what has worked in the past – more sequels, more remakes, more TV shows gone to the silver screen. Time has come for filmmakers to rise to the occasion and make something new, something great, something that defies convention. The cinema is an industry that is pleading for a few brave souls to give it some new life.

And audiences have a responsibility to stop seeing the same old schlock because they need something to do on a Friday night. If people keep paying for bloated over-budget blockbuster clones, producers will keep making them. Like a toddler with a bad habit, if you encourage him, he’ll never stop. Producers can’t be more discerning unless they believe that their audiences will be. And why can’t we? If you know that 2012 is going to be the same movie that you’ve seen Roland Emmerich make twice already, you should stay home. If you want great cinema to survive, you cannot patronize bad cinema.

To be clear – this isn’t a review. I haven’t seen 2012. I haven’t seen it, and I’m telling everyone I know not to see it. I’m sure that the word will spread eventually that it isn’t worth seeing, but by that time, they might already have the money, and we can’t let that happen. The producers desperately want to make the top of the box office in that opening weekend, and if they don’t get it, that’ll send a message. The advertising campaign is all designed so that you don’t know you’re wasting your money until it’s too late. And then they don’t care. They’ll start taking that money and making a new, terrible, waste of a movie.

The people have the power. If the product is bad, don’t buy it. If Roland Emmerich wants to destroy the world again, he shouldn’t be allowed to have $250 million to do it. If 2012 fails miserably, maybe someone will get the message.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2009)
Written and Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins

I remember first seeing the marketing campaign for Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol and rolling my eyes. The trailers and billboards featured a mugging Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge being put through the computer generated ringer; he gets flung through the air, shrunk down to the size of a mouse, and other supposedly hilarious things. This couldn’t seem less like the Charles Dickens classic; instead, it seemed like Zemeckis was taking things that we all knew about the story and was exploiting them. As such, I had no interest in seeing the film. “A Christmas Carol” has long been one of my favorite stories and I was in no mood to see it ruined by an overly-ambitious director with a limitless budget.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wound up seeing it and thought it was surprisingly okay. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. There is such inherent power in Dickens’ story that all the special effects in Hollywood could never completely outshine it. If you’re going to make a movie of “A Christmas Carol,” all you have to do is remain fairly faithful to the source material and make a serviceable film and, almost by default, you’ve got a very watchable movie. Such is the nature with Dickens; he created such intriguing tales and characters, it’s nearly impossible to totally screw them up.

As expected, the action sequences stick out like a sore thumb, as if accidentally edited in from a different- worse- film. Their inclusion smacks of pandering, as they seem to come right in the middle of extended periods of genuine emotion and reflection. It seems as if Zemeckis was afraid of losing the audience with all this British dialogue and had to do something to keep their attention.

This is most problematic during Scrooge’s encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Future. In what is undeniably the darkest and most foreboding section of the story- as it should be, giving Scrooge’s emotional journey- our protagonist finds himself shrunk down to the size of a mouse and chased through the sewer pipes of London and comically smashed in the face by ice sickles. This makes so little sense dramatically, I wonder how a director as savvy as Robert Zemeckis was able to justify keeping it in. Perhaps he thought that some comic relief was needed. If so, it mystifies me as to why he felt the need to make the Ghost of Christmas Future so frightening in the first place. Don’t get me wrong; the dread is perfectly realized, and I count it as one of the film’s strength, but if the director felt the need to break the tension with some humor, perhaps he could have simply tried to make the section less frightening, rather than try to shoehorn in some broad physical comedy.

As frustrating as moments like these are, there’s no denying that Zemeckis is a master at utilizing cutting edge technology to create a fully realized world, as he did in Beowulf, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and The Polar Express. While some of the character designs are still a bit too creepy for my taste- the impish Bob Cratchit being a prime example- the slightly off-kilter landscapes and grotesquely exaggerated characters seem to fit with the tone that Dickens so often strove to create.

The animation also allows Zemeckis the freedom to pursue his unique interpretation of well-known scenes. For example, as Marley’s Ghost clatters out of Scrooge’s house, we find him joining a veritable army of miserable ghosts haunting the streets of London, pleading for the forgiveness of the living. There are so many of these melancholy apparitions that we find ourselves coming to a harrowing conclusion: the greed and indifference of Scrooge and Marley is not an uncommon thing. Marley is merely one of the thousands- millions- of people that could have done something valuable with their money and time, but chose instead to hoard it and look down on those without it. Perhaps we know a few people like this. Perhaps we are people like this.

As entertaining as Dickens is, his commitment to stimulating social and economic awareness has always fascinated me. “A Christmas Carol” is one of his more straightforward treatises on the subject of the responsibility of those that have to those that don’t. It is dark and lingers on the precipice of condemnation, only to allow Scrooge- and, by extension, the audience- a chance at redemption. And, if we don’t take it, God help us, everyone.

As frustrating as some of Zemeckis’ artistic choices may be for me, I admire him for standing by the central idea of “A Christmas Carol.” He clearly understands the power and appeal of the story and, with a few notable exceptions, allows Dickens to speak for himself. And, as always, he has a lot to say.

Voting has begun for the 2009 Podcast Awards and More Than One Lesson has been nominated in the Religion/Inspiration category. To cast your vote in our favor, just head over to www.podcastawards.com and follow the instructions.
Oddly enough, one person can cast one vote per day until voting is over, which means that you could, if you were so inclined, vote for the show 17 times. It seems like a strange rule, but why not take advantage of it?
So, there you have it. I certainly didn’t expect to get this far with the podcast, but, now that we are, let’s try to win this thing!
As always, thanks to everybody for their continued support and thanks for listening!

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2009)
Directed by: Grant Heslov
Written by: Peter Straughan
Starring: George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor

What do you do when you have a script that isn’t any good but you see want people to come see it? You get some big name actors to be in it. I guess I can’t be that upset about it. I saw the previews for Men Who Stare at Goats and I didn’t what to see it.

However, I ended up seeing it anyway and, I must say, after the movie was over, it was better than I thought it would be. That’s not saying very much. The acting was good but the story left something to be desired. In a move like Men Who Stare at Goats, there have to be jokes that make you laugh so hard that it makes your sides hurt or the movie isn’t going to fly. This move didn’t have anything like that. Sure, it has a couple humorous parts, but that isn’t enough to offset the dumb parts. So in the end you have good acting and a weird story.

If you have the money, I would say pay for good writers and then you will have a good movie. This way you won’t have to rely on the names of your actors to sell tickets.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2009)
Directed by: Grant Heslov
Written by: Peter Straughan
Starring: George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a comedy about people who have (or think they have) Jedi powers. It has an all-star cast, an interesting concept partially based on reality, and potential to be very funny. All the pieces are there, but are the filmmakers able to put them together?

The movie opens with an intertitle reading “More of this is true than you would believe.” And from the trailers and commercials, we kind of had that idea. It’s a fictional story based on a real life army group called the “First Earth Battalion.” Adapted for the film as the “New Earth Army,” they are a team of “warrior monks” who use New Age techniques as simple as yoga and as wild as psychokinesis. Ewan McGregor takes the role of a journalist who follows Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a member of the New Earth Army, into Iraq on a secret mission. Throughout the mission, we flashback to scenes chronicling the way the battalion began and grew through the 70s and 80s.

Clooney and other characters specifically refer to themselves as “Jedi” which adds a clever joke, since audiences will remember that Ewan McGregor played Obi-wan Kenobi in the recent (terrible) Star Wars prequels. And the idea isn’t totally unbelievable. The real-life First Earth Battalion began as an extension of the “human potential movement” in California, closely associated with hippies, free love, and LSD. That someone would take something as popular as the New Age movement and find in it military applications is not a huge surprise. Clearly it isn’t something that would actually ever go through, and in reality they were never actually endorsed by the US military, as they are in the film.

The cast of quirky characters is fun to watch; Clooney is especially entertaining. His performance will remind viewers more of his O Brother Where Art Thou? days. And there are some great one-liners. But despite an interesting concept and some huge names, the movie falls apart in the third act. Up through the first two I found it enjoyable, if not particularly compelling or challenging. It’s fun, it has a goofy concept behind it, and several good laugh moments. But as the third act begins (it’s a pretty clear break), things start to spin completely out of control.

Without giving too much of the story away, I can say that Clooney and McGregor’s characters are suddenly and inexplicably re-united with the old team (Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey in a joyless and utterly wasted performance). The plot points that continue after this are so unlikely and so unbelievable (even in the context of this unbelievable concept) that I was convinced the main characters were dreaming or hallucinating. But they’re not. The pacing is wrong, the characters don’t act like they should, we rely on character development that hasn’t happened – this is the third act of a terrible movie pasted in after the first two acts of a decent movie.

The rest of the movie keeps us invested because there’s a doubt in our minds whether or not these “Jedi powers” are real. Everything attributed to psychic powers could be explained by natural science, even if it’s a far-fetched coincidence. When the movie stays on the fence this way, it makes the warrior monks so much more interesting. But in the third act it’s as if the movie gives up entirely and falls ungracefully to the wrong side of the fence. I haven’t read the book, but I would guess that this is where the divergence between the real story and the fictional account takes place.

For the first two-thirds I was willing to accept some things that were strange or inexplicable because I assumed the movie would lead to a point where it all made sense. Unfortunately, I was giving it too much credit. The strange albeit interesting title, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is actually a pretty good analogy for the movie as a whole. We know, as the audience, that there has to come a scene in the movie where they stare at goats. And when it finally comes, it’s not that interesting, and ultimately doesn’t matter very much. It sets you up for something that, when you get it, turns out it wasn’t worth it in the first place. If you want to see it for pure comedic enjoyment there are some good moments, but overall the movie ends up being a disappointment. Which I found…well, disappointing.