ACTION MOVIE SNORE

By Robert L. Capehert

Last week, Beilstein sent me to the Regel Theaters in Oviedo, Fla., to see A Good Day To Die Hard.  I confess not liking an inch of the cinematic frame, finding myself asleep at the wheel. It could not be helped. Worse action movies have been made, of course, but few as boring.

Mediocrity occupies large portions of American entertainment in these years. Some, sharing my political views, are angered by this turn of events.

Not me. I simply do not take our culture serious enough to be so bothered. Life offers plenty of beauty and mystic romances, elsewhere.  One has to have the gumption and the patience to look.

A Good Day To Die Hard, a sequel -- starring Bruce Willis and Jai Courtney -- was an atrocious bit of storytelling. With A Good Day, Bruce Willis, 58, is on his fifth Die Hard outing, addicted to excreta now, it seems, following 1988’s impressive actioner. Willis is a fine performer, stirring actor with talent in reserve. But such elements do not overcome prosaic story telling.

In 1988, the Die Hard flick was a tonic of large entertainment -- brimming with character, humor, and skillfully choreographed action pieces, set afire. Die Hard was an exciting action tale, chalked full of hyperbole, for sure, but a quality piece of commercial filmmaking. It took place in a City of Angel’s skyscraper, but never lost sight of its modest ambitions.

It was not unlike good fast food. Never to be confused with prime rib -- but cinematically, piquant. Fresh off television’s Moonlighting,  Willis’ charm and charisma was palpable. With good looks, a good role, the young Willis used the 1988 blockbuster film to enter the majors, just in time as Stallone, and others action figures, began a penultimate fade to black of the campy and overblown.

Differing quite a bit from previous action movies, all high-octane motion pictures packed with beefy knight-errant’s -- Willis, as John McClane, was the common man thrown into intimately uncommon trouble with thief’s masquerading as foreign terrorists.

Based on Roderick Thorpe’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever, the original Die Hard flick became an epitome of the new action movie. It had imitators of course -- Speed, Under Siege, come to mind -- but nothing matched Die Hard’s human characteristics.

Next up, Renny Harlin contributed to Hollywood’s obsession with mediocrity with 1990’s Die Hard 2: Die Harder -- wow, original title, one could cringe; but it made big juju money and by 1995, Die Hard with A Vengeance, better by a country mile, but not great, was released to commercial success.

It would take more than a decade to throw the public another John McClane adventure. In 2007, Live Free And Die Hard produced enough ridicule to choke a horse -- a PG-13 Die Hard  movie? -- fans protested. Hindsight being 20/20, it appears to have been a mistake -- but not as much as 2013’s A Good Day To Die Hard.

Sequels are a Hollywood custom. Like drugs and fast woman, overblown egos. But unlike so many movie snobs, and I consider myself a purebred capitalist when it comes to American movies, I’ve never minded sequels.

I look forward to them on baited breath. Sequels are, of course, always a gamble -- most of the time being inferior cinematic endeavors. But they also are analogous to Christmas presents: one never knows what one might receive.

I never minded Hollywood admitting, quite frankly, it was fresh out of something new to do. Likewise,

I understand, more than some, Hollywood is a business -- the doors have to stay open -- art-house movies are unable keep studio’s doors open. Nothing new.

Art films never kept the lights on in Hollywood -- they never sold a lot of popcorn, either.

Exeunt A Good Day To Die Hard. I could not keep my mind from drifting. Whenever Jai Courtney brooded across the screen, I found myself thinking the 26-year-old Australian actor would make an excellent Mitch Rapp  -- throw him a black dye rug-job -- in the upcoming American Assassin movie, based on Vince Flynn’s thriller novel of the same name.

Typically, when a movie ends I’m still stocked on popcorn. I usually end up taking it home, munching on it later. But less than halfway through Willis and Courtney’s prosaic adventure, father and son killing dozens of Russian sons of bitches, I found my hand scraping the bottom of an empty bag.

Slurping my Coke Classic, freshly out of popcorn, I contented myself -- or tried too -- with this abominable cinema drought. When a movie is good, I’m too busy watching the flick to eat my popcorn. Once the movie is done, therefore, plenty of corn remains.

But with A Good Day To Die Hard, God knows I have never been more bored -- so I finished my popcorn way before the conclusion of the movie.

The original Die Hard flick took place in three major locations, give or take. But it mostly confined itself to a skyscraper high about Los Angeles. Conversely, A Good Day To Die Hard takes place in several locations -- a rustic warehouse, jam-packed Moscow streets -- and Chernobyl, badly rendered with bargain basement CGI (20^th Century Fox must have spent too much money on the truck chase).

Some things were done right. The gunshots. They sounded pitch-perfect. Sound effects editing has come a thousand miles since I was a born in 1983. It brings tears to the eyes. Those gunshots, mind you, sounded real -- ominous even, with the explosive pounding, and flat automatic rifle clattering, puncturing the dirty Moscow air.

Still, the original Die Hard never bored me.

A Good Day put me to sleep -- almost. One will find no cinema snob in me -- but there is some sorrowful contempt at the edge of my mood -- dampened by pizza and dark beer -- that would like a better class of action movie. Lots.

Something akin to the original Die Hard. Something with less explosions, more character -- something alive, and God forbid, something exciting. 

REGARDING REACHER

By David Beilstein

LITERARY figures come and go.

One figure, specifically, has caught my attention of late. He is British born, transplanted into America author, Lee Child, and his delightful Jack Reacher character—a former military investigator, stealth-like in timing and comedic turn—a knight-errant and hard-boiled fisticuffs scrapper.

Having read several Jack Reacher books—“The Killing Floor”, “One Shot”, “The Hard way”, “61 Hours”, “Bad Luck and Trouble”, “Worth Dying For”, “Tripwire”—and most recently “Nothing To Lose”—I say with confidence (a whipping thrill-up-the leg of jovial abandon), Mr Child’s impact with the Reacher books’  is based upon a whole-lot-of high-brow ingredients.

Chief amongst those ingredients is the man with no name  refracted through a Knight-errant  mythologically rich literary milieu. Worse steals have been made.

And worse fictional simulacrum occurs in popular bestselling authors. An unattractive reality to be sure, but unintentional nonetheless—void of personality and lacking intelligence. Like something approximating gravitational laws.

Thankfully, the Reacher books share none of these banal subtractions. Strident voice, terse prose, and an up-to-date “ice-berg” approach enable the Reacher books an imaginative reach beyond the average run of the mill bestselling fiction.

There has been blind spots. In Mr Child’s “Nothing To lose” novel, I came across the first low-grade effort of proletarian disappointment, resulting in an ersatz political thriller and an implausible villain of leftist fantasy. Given my confessional Presbyterian convictions, I have laid truckloads of criticism at the door of Dispensionalist, rapture-orientated evangelicalism—since it is unbiblical and unsound,hermeneutically—but as homemade terrorist-in-conspiracy exploitation, the premise of “Nothing To Lose” stretches believability too far.

Nobody needs Jack Reacher to leave fundamentalist Bible thumpers  alone to legitimize his literary purposes, but fiction does need to imitate the real world in some manner. The idea a evangelical rapture televangelist-esque clone is the threatening villain at the center of “Nothing To Lose” was beneath Mr Child’s efforts. I can buy such a character embracing pleasures and excitement with a woman not his wife; I can even see such a character wafting of used car salesmen sheen, embezzling funds from bamboozled do-gooders. But a menacing terrorist at the center of a terrorist conspiracy, such a character is not. It’s laughable. “Nothing To Lose” takes place in an arid landscape between two towns: Hope and Despair. A working class environ, where in Despair everyone is dour and uptight. In Charles Murray’s latest book, it should be noted, it is actually working class folks whom are far more likely to be irreligious. Yet, in “Nothing To Lose” an evangelical Bible thumper  has a cabal of working glass men and women dipped in the incantations of rapture panegyrics. Certainly, Timothy McVeigh fits the part of a working class homemade terrorist, but a rapture orientated evangelical, McVeigh was not.

Indeed, the late Mr McVeigh was an agnostic at best, atheistic more probably. Sometimes, one misses. “Nothing To Lose” was Mr Child’s miss.

I suppose one could simply say populist evangelicalism rooted (and dictated) by the passing earthly kingdom is an easy target. Still, what makes great fiction great—and Mr Child’ writes great fiction—is its abandonment of easy target acquisition.

Perusing reader comments on amazon.com for “Nothing To Lose”, I would safely say the Reacher novels have quite a few conservative fans, illustrated by how many readers were pissed off by “Nothing To Lose” seeming anti-Iraq War thrust—since Jack Reacher argues, subtly, that the last good war America fought was World War II. Everything else, Reacher intimates—Vietnam, Korea, Iraq—has been a molder of foreign policy gymnastics.

Such conservative umbrage, assumes, of course, that progressive Wilsonian  ideas about foreign policy, encompassing the purposes of the sovereign state in terms of military expression—are themselves, conservative. President Woodrow Wilson was anathema to classical liberal ideas concerning war and peace. Likewise, President Wilson warred against Constitutional parameters—hailing individual autonomy as purely illusionary —an obvious backwards leap and attenuation to a liberal society.

As such, the premise anti-war convictions held by Jack Reacher are simply authorial leftist bootleg, are surface level argumentation at best. Such an anti-war premise is easy to claim, but harder to defend ideologically from a conservative point of view. All freethinking conservatives, i.e., classical liberals, however, should challenge that premise.

What seems to grip conservatives in the Jack Reacher novels is probably the imperfect nature of men and women depicted, and Reacher’s own question of authority. Reacher is a knight-errant wonderer; one ringing of pure individualism, something conservatives tend to venerate.

“Nothing To Lose”, therefore, investigates some of the natural consequences of such a character. And so, Reacher’s ideas about war are far more realistic to tenets held by men and women who have known war, than not.

Typically, this is a universal conviction of experience with violence. It is the skilled fighter, not the spurious hot-air amateur, who is most often the first person in a bar to avoid, or talk, him self out of a fight. For the skilled practitian of violence knows she [violence] is a promiscuous companion—much like fire and water.

In actuality, it is consistent conservatives whose nerves went to jelly when American foreign policy dictated more and more involvement in other nation’s affairs. In the media, popularly, the left got the credit as the anti-war crowd, thus convincing far too many uninformed conservatives, anti-war convictions arose only out of the caldron of the American left, not the American right.

This despite such well reasoned anti-Iraq War arguments made by Pat Buchanan and William F Buckley, Jr. Neither man—was  in the case of the late Buckley, Jr.,—a progressive leftist.

In literary environs, Reacher’s maturation into fictional existence could not have come at a more apt time—in America and elsewhere around the Western universe. Jack Reacher, mercurial figure that he is, happens to be an isolated man of an isolated age—latitudinally related to the perils facing the formerly great nation of America. She is heavy with child of late—nobody knows the father— and who knows how worse it will get. It could be admitted America is on a road of to serfdom, philosophically, economically, and culturally; therefore, it would make sense such cultural context was the soil in which Jack Reacher germinated.

Jack Reacher matters for all the right reasons. Holding to America’s highways and byways by foot, sated by the pragmatics of the cloverleaf hitch-hike, Reacher is a former U.S. Army MP investigator slogging into new territory every book—slipping, jabbing, breaking and investigating—a rugged individual with his own code of ethics, handing out death and judgment from above with vicious entheos.

There is much Hemingway in Mr Child’s prose. Terse. Exacting. And sparse. White space, dialogue-drive narrative abounds. Like good dessert, turning the page is addictive. One has to keep reading.

With the Reacher books, a two-way street construction is erected: one where the writer builds the architectural edifice; the furnishings, the world, while the reader—and their imagination—occupy the newly adopted space. Rob Bass once had a hit Hip-Hop ditty called, “It Takes Two [To make a Thing Go Right]” and Mr Child’s Reacher books accomplish that marriage wonderfully.

British author, creator of Middle-earth, the late J.R.R Tolkien was famous for saying it is not the writers job to dominate the reader, but to unleash the reader’s imagination. Give and take. In Jazz parlance, it is called trading twelve’s.

So it is with the Jack Reacher series.

Mr Child’s is on record as disparaging genre. In his world, he sees two types of books: ones that keep one’s nose pressed in a book, enabling a novel reader to miss a subway stop, and ones that do not. And it would appear Mr Child’s opinion here is shared, more or less, with people like American writer Stephen King.

Or crime writing genius Elmore Leonard. There is more “Dutch” Leonard too, in Mr Child’s writing than horror/fantasy maestro King, but either way the results are equally addictive and engaging.

And that’s the point.

Turning the page, like gut-wrenching laughter for a stand-up comic, is the ball game. It’s the measure of success. The measuring rod as it were; the trophy wife, the Bentley sedan—the posh Park Avenue townhouse, for the Wall Street master-of-the-universe.

Many people lament how easy this sounds to unpack. But it’s damn hard work and requires prestigious literary skills. Storytelling skill-sets are of the genes, not the will.

Gifts, not purchases.

Mr Child’s process can be documented, simply. No outlining, no planning. When he begins, he is meeting the life of the characters (and the story) as people occasion upon life. They don’t know. People don’t know what happens next; it is unknown to them what happens in twenty minutes, in a week, in forthcoming months.

Could be anything. The good, the bad, or the ugly.

Next up, is a question—in the macro of the overall book, and the micro within chapters. Sounds easy, but execution is altogether a different thing. Unless researching, reading should be fun. It should be interesting. This is another successful pull-off of Lee Child’s craft. The Reacher books, all things considered, are fun reads. More than fun, there is something majestic going on with the sights and sounds of America without the sodden tourist bulletin-prose.

Virtuoso jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote,

“All first-rate literary criticism first defines what we are confronting.”

I suggest, besides being an imitation of the human experience within a dramatic framework—shaped and welded by narrative—literature must confront our penultimate circumstances. It must confront the cultural context of the character’s time and place, revealing something true and concrete.

Whilst the starring role belongs to Reacher, quite deservedly so, the second tier position is the American landscape. This was Mr Child’s best premise. Reacher would not be confined to rural pilgrim status, or locked into a cultural metropolis (New York, Los Angeles), but would traverse the American frontier wide and far. The other large conceit of the series, Reacher has no ties. None. And personal details of Jack Reacher are conserved, sprinkled lightly over all the books. Suffice to say, readers learn about Reacher sporadically, fostering the foundations for an engaging courtship between character and reader.

I have not been as excited about a series of books since discovering Elmore Leonard back in the late 90s. Lee Child, therefore, is a comforting new thing. And I’m blasting through these books too.

One could do worse in popular fiction.

Much worse.

GENERALLY, SPEAKING

By David Beilstein

When it comes to Christian evangelistic centered cinema, we must periscope into questions concerning audiences. 

Whom are movies for? 

The question is subtle, but important. 

Along with categories of means and aesthetics in films and the otherworldliness central to the Christian religion - the audience, in which movies are glimpsed by, becomes wholly crucial to understanding the purpose and parameters of cinema.

The first short films made sometime at the beginning of the 20th Century focused on common (general) behaviour (action) audiences could relate to. A man spraying family members as they walk by with a water hose while watering his garden; a train pulling into a station with passengers preparing to board. The movement of horses’ galloping. These scenes related to audiences of all ages and beliefs because they are general actions familiar to those particular audiences’ life experience.

It is action that is dramatic.

Action is character in movies, generally speaking. And while actions spring from individual and collective beliefs - the camera describes the action and the consequence dramatically. Movies cannot apologetically sightsee into epistemic areas of consistency and inconsistency. The audience for movies is an audience in general terms that has lost, loved, hated, suffered, gained pleasure; of an audience that has felt all common experiences of this present age. It does not matter the religious views of the audience -or their philosophical views. The audience cannot escape what the world is and as such this is movies central panorama of dramatic context.

Cinema is a descriptive context, not a prescriptive one.

And this is why movies are filled with characters that generally contain the beliefs and struggles the audience with which they are contemporaries therein have. If we go into the past, movies contained ideas, religious affections, religious skepticism - ideas about sex and love - that imitated those categorical beliefs audiences held to at that time.

It is no different today. For instance, large swaths of modern Americans are unchurched. It is not that this is good - it is what the American people have been becoming for generations. Not surprisingly, then, we find in movies characters that are not members of communions of faith or other religious organisations. Since organised religion is no longer en vogue for a variety of low and highbrow philosophical and cultural minutia - individual ideas about spirituality have increased. As such, we find ideas about individual spirituality, unanchored from organised religious pillars, to become more central in the experience of movie characters.

The Christian evangelical’s default position has been movies create culture. This serious error partly explains the fundamentalist Christians’ triumphal need to replace Hollywood with a “Christian” version, as part and parcel to redeeming American culture.

But the problem is, the reverse is actually true. What is generally prevalent in culture creates movies - is the source for stories in movies. For instance, movies did not widely show a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed together until men and women living together unmarried became commonplace. Movies, as it were, were behind the cultural eight ball. In essence, movies are not trendsetters, but instead follow the trends in society generally speaking.

Movies are not a moral statement, but a cultural and individual description of general cultural and individual patterns of living. This is obvious because cinema can only imitate cultural and individual experience.

Cinema is no more than poetic and metaphoric imitation of common life experience in a dramatic confine. The problem with Hollywood is not that they do not make “Christian” movies - as if the Christ, The Son of God reconciles institutions to Himself rather than people. The problem with Hollywood is a serious lack of verity when it comes to recognising general experience in all its vagaries.

When was the last time an espionage movie focused on Islamic-Fascism? Where the enemies are Arab Islamic-Fascists and not European bankers trying to manipulate currency or oil futures? Besides the recent release of Zero Dark Thirty, the espionage genre has focused on cloak and dagger issues of internal significance where a civilly righteous hero
(Jason Bourne & James Bond, 007) must bring down their own corrupt entity. In the case of Bond, an Mi6 Agent - an organisation deeply involved in rooting out Islamic-Fascism - Bond seeks out European dressed villains, not bent on immanentizing the world-to-come, but of profiteering on global arms races. 

When Hollywood made Tom Clancy’s excellent novel, The Sum of All Fears, into a movie starring back-in-the-saddle actor and now director, Ben Affleck, Islamic-Fascist baddies were transformed into neo-Nazi European bankers with swastikas on the back of their palatial watches. In other words, Hollywood balked about accurately rendering the verity of our current cultural and global experience, bowing to the golden calf of political correctness. This is propaganda by omission. And just as much as Christian “evangelistic” movies are unnatural to the storytelling media, propaganda by omission is also something to be avoided.

Since movies are a powerful visual medium, there will always be some truths requiring caution before imitating them on film. School shootings is one of them. Hollywood has been wise to avoid the pain and angst such graphic images would bare on the public at large. There is no need to go there.

Truths exist in life cinema does not need to imitate.

But caution does not change what movies inherently are. And the over-realised eschatological vision of proponents of “Christian” films does not change the parameters by which cinematic stories work.

COMMON, UNCOMMON GROUND

By David Beilstein

I have written previously about the problematic idea of “Christian” movies. I have maintained cinema and literature are uniquely secular focused - both descriptive media forms, and unable to do the prescriptive work Christian evangelism requires. Christian evangelism is unnatural in storytelling because of what Christian evangelism is, and also, what storytelling is as a media form. Such issues create room to unpack the proper line to draw the antithesis, and prayerfully determine where that antithesis lies between what is Sacred and what is secular.

In determining the proper grounds upon which the Christian exile lives in the temporal age - taking part in culture and cultic activities in a dual citizenship - we must first inquire the differences between believing saints and non-believers.

In Gen. 3, the pre-figuring of the Kingdom of God through the Messiah comes. In Gen. 4, the prefiguring of the city of man begins. Gen 4, in an ironic foreshadowing manner, lays the foundation for cultural work and the secular activities of men through Cain. But the covenant of the common kingdom breaks into history fully with Noah in Gen. 9. This covenant was made by God with all peoples, non-believing and believing.

It involves all cultural activities.

The covenant made with Abraham is a cultic covenant. It is made with Abraham and his future offspring - the people of God’s choosing through the Covenant of Grace. Abraham was culturally similar from non-believers around him. But he was cultically dissimilar. It is upon this firm foundation in Sacred Scripture an antithesis between believer and non-believer begins. But it is an antithesis based upon ultimate concerns, things pertaining to the Kingdom of God, of eternal salvation as the reword of the heavenly Kingdom.

There is common ground, objectively speaking, with non-believers, in the profane, or common kingdom of man pre-figured with the city Cain built in Gen. 4 and officially established with the covenant of Noah in Gen. 9. The New Testament Scriptures, particularly the book of Hebrews, treats NT saints as sojourners and exiles glimpsing back, as it were, to Abraham and the patriarchs - including the Babylonian exiles, Daniel, et cetera.

New Testament saints, therefore, have commonality with non-believers culturally, but stark dissimilarity when it comes to cultic things - or things Sacred. The Christian living post the ascension of Christ The Lord, therefore, is a citizen of two distinct realms - or kingdoms. One, encompassing civil, cultural affairs, the other, Sacred affairs, meaning those cultic distinctions represented in Christ’s Church.

Christ is Lord of both realms. But Christ The Lord rules (or mediates) them differently.

Christ’s Kingdom is ruled through the Covenant of Grace. It is a spiritual kingdom, mediated by Christ through the historical manifestation of the Church. It is spiritually discerned by faith in Christ alone. The civil kingdom is ruled by Christ, but differently; through God’s divine eternal decree.

The foundation for Christ’s Kingdom, pre-figured in the Garden of Eden in Gen. 3, is unpacked in St Matthew’s Gospel in The Great Commission. The foundation for the civil kingdom is also pre-figured in Gen. 3 with Cain’s city, but periscopes back to the cultural mandate of Gen. 1:28, refracted (post-fall) in the Noahic covenant of Gen. 9.

It is through this premise, I contend that movies are a common cultural task. Objectively, the Christian is using the natural design of storytelling to do the same kind of dramatic “work” non-believers peruse of storytelling. There need not be any objective difference between the storytelling of the non-believer and believer.

There will, however, be subjective differences.

First, Christians do everything subjectively to the glory of God according to St Paul. But this does not mean the objective task (movies, plumbing, engineering, et cetera) will be objectively different for the Christian and non-believer.

To use the adjective “Christian” to describe subjective differences within common kingdom activity - in light of what storytelling is - seems to buttress all kinds of improper categories. The desire to use those subjective differences to categorize the storytelling of Christians verses that of non-believers as distinctly “Christian” misconstrues the true cultic differences the believer and non-believer have. Worship can be Christian, because worship can be uniquely Christian. The Lord’s Day and the Lord’s Supper are distinctly Christian.

But cinema and storytelling in general is different. Storytelling perceives and investigates in descriptive dramatic context the penultimate realities of human experience. Storytelling corresponds and describes things as they are in the common kingdom. Storytelling is uniquely festooned to the ways and manners (and ontology) of the common kingdom. It does not discern things spiritual.

It does not reckon with ultimate things - things pertaining to Christ and His salvation.

Storytelling can certainly involve characters who believe things about Christ and His salvation. But as I have indicated before, the beliefs of characters wrongly or rightly understood are for the unfolding narrative of the story-in-question and do not hold prescriptive intentions for the audience. Movie characters believe what they must believe in order to act - and they act in order to push the narrative forward within a dramatic framework.

Thus, movies imitate in dramatic metaphor things temporal. Storytelling is a post-Fall, pre-World To Come media narrative. Storytelling presumes the secular world - where conflict and men’s imperfections create vagaries of imperfect (and dramatic) experience. This narrative framework whether visual or prose, is descriptive, not prescriptive… prescription being the necessary confine of Christian apologia and evangelism.

Likewise, movies show in dramatic, visual metaphor man’s place in the temporal order of things and his anthropological character in dramatic contextual design. If there is a distinctly “Christian” charter upon the Christian who writes secular movies, literature, - it is a duty to capture and render the world and the creature man truthfully, descriptively and dramatically. The more verity here - since movies’ soil is based upon penultimate concerns - the more the Christian says something true both temporally and eternally about God’s world the creature man as imago dei lives in. The non-believer will acknowledge the penultimate concerns of the dramatic piece in question, but only if the natural order of things (general revelation) - the light of nature - is rendered truthfully.

Cinema and literature are not unlike other temporal creations of God. Designed for distinct, but temporal purposes. Science being one of them. Science cannot determine the truth of the Holy Gospel. It cannot discern the Holy Gospel. Science cannot prove or disprove the Holy Gospel. Science can perceive evidences that God has designed and brought into existence an ordered universe. If science is done properly it will correspond (where it can) with the truth of God’s creation of the world ex nilo, but it cannot prove it by itself without the lense of special revelation (Holy Scripture) to interpret science. Since Holy Scripture is not written to be a science book, and science is science, interpretive issues will arise. 

The point is, just because science, alone, cannot prove the Holy Gospel does not mean science is useless. 

It means science has its God-given parameters. It’s limits. All things temporal have limits. They will not be eternal. Science, then, has its purposes - it’s design for a penultimate age unable to discern the things of the age to come. Those drawing near to God - an ethic of the age-to-come, ironically, breaking into the temporal age in a spiritual manner, taste the Holy Gospel, and its attendant realities, in the Christ’s Church.

A blood test can determine whether a person’s kidney function is optimal. But it cannot establish if a person is a citizen of Heaven. Blood tests are not useless, but they are penultimate. It would be a mistake to say unless blood tests can be made to evaluate things pertaining to Christ and His Salvation, Christian’s have no use of them.

Christians have use of blood tests in this age - the secular age. Blood tests are good, but non-Holy.

The conflation of the cultic and the cultural is disharmonious with the Sacred Scriptures. From this conflation, theological movements assume such unbiblical isms such as pietism and asceticism. And it is these paradigmatic “systems” a product of Christian pilgrims needing unmediated life and liveliness of faith - instead of reckoning the truth of faith - as found in Word and sacrament in Christ’s Church.

The evangelical mission to Christianize movies (amongst other secular activities) is one that does not comprehend the natural world God has ordained and brought into existence with the covenant with Noah. Whilst Christianity is the necessary premise to account for the intelligibility of things secular - the paradoxical, but distinct relationship between cult and culture does not cease to exist. 

WHEN IT GOES BAD?

By David Beilstein

Writing is hard.

But if one loves it - appreciating its beauty and sweep - one will make time to for it. Part of the point of Dominium was to periscope at movie aesthetics - and part of it was to sightsee some of the writing projects I am working on while I slip and parry through film school.

What is key to remember: never make writing harder than it is and enjoy yourself.

Sometimes you throw an oft-timed punch. And sometimes what you thought was a good punch isn’t. I must conclude my screenplay entitled Interloper, is one of those. Good title, but the story is so implausible it becomes painful to think of it. There is some great stuff in Interloper - but its wedded to a plot that I cannot justify in any sense, whatsoever.

Interloper was dedicated to a friend who passed away in 2012. Someone not so close at the moment he passed - but close in other ways. I will miss his conversations and his taste in movies and cinema. We had some wonderful, appreciative moments of pop culture, which included tons and tons of stuff about movies.

Nevertheless, Interloper is damn awful. Too many things don’t work.

The story concerns a former NYPD first grade detective who relocates to New Smyrna Beach to mend fences and take care of his rich father’s estate. His father was a womaniser but generous in death. He has left his former detective son a multi-million dollar estate. The main character is a former NYPD detective because of a bad shooting he was involved with. No fault of his own, but the higher-ups at One Police Plaza in Manhattan did not see it that way.

Then a land dispute erupts. Squatters are living in the old man’s estate. The former NYPD detective wants them out. And he is tough enough to move them out. But the squatters are a mean batch of Florida red necks involved in a shady enterprises. One that is worth a fortune. And the head of that shady enterprise is worse than the NYPD detective and the squatters put together. 

Or is he?

Interloper involved a classic Charles Bronson land dispute theme. I was riffing on several movies and books using that texture. Elmore Leonard’s Mr Majestyk comes to mind. Charles Bronson could not be better than in that movie. Another such story (one Bruce Willis supposedly bought the rights too) was Mr Leonard’s 2002 novella, Tenkiller.

But Mr Leonard’s story somehow achieves what Interloper misses: plausibility and simplicity. Mr Leonard has been honing his craft longer than me. As I have said, there are excuses and than reasons. They are not the same. Mr Leonard is north of 85 years old. I’m 36. Be it said, Mr Leonard is much better than I and somehow he is able to make something implausible, plausible. Mr Leonard’s stories get human nature and action so right the implausible becomes naturally plausible. The stories, thus, never raise eyebrows.

But it rose like hell in Interloper - so much so I could not bare to read it anymore.
So there it is.

Another screenplay aborted. It’s frustrating as hell. It always is when it goes bad and the work has felt for not. But I have a plan to rework the material into something better, something fun, and something with more plausibility.

If God permits, light at the end of the tunnel.

CINEMATIC AESTHETICS DON'T CHANGE THE ART FORM

By David Beilstein

We have seen why movies cannot be objectively “Christian” if what storytelling is as a media form is held to by the storyteller in a dramatic context accurately. But I wanted to look at the objection to this paradigm by those who object to the content of many films and movies.

Often when I make the case I have made on this blog I am roundly critised that my ideas are impossible because of the offensive material in movies.

But the world is offensive - people are sinful and broken. To portray a world removed from such truth is to abandon the vocational duties of the storyteller. If a Christian working as a storyteller fails to describe the reality of the world all people at all times have lived in he betrays truth (not a Christian virtue) and fails the duty of storytelling.

There is ways to demonstrate these fallen human realities without being either exploitative or grotesque. There is a way to do a rated R coming of age story and a G way of doing the same story. Non-believers as much as Christians understand this. The desire to call such differences in content and material as “Christian” seems rather unattached to anything particularly unique to the cultic distinctions (theology, piety, and practice) of Christians.

It is an unhelpful and unnecessary category.

Whilst the Christian saint rightly criticizes much of what comes out of Hollywood, the leap from objection to content or the manner in which human brokenness is displayed is not an argument for “Christian” movies. 

If the point of movies is a dramatic art form glimpsed by people and not a confessional art form told to people, than propaganda - good and bad - is to be avoided because of what movies naturally are.  

St Paul is utterly clear in the Epistle to the Galatians. To restrict the Christian saint in areas where Holy Scripture is silent or indifferent is to build an illegitimate yoke.That a Christian is only proper in storytelling when telling “Christian” stories by good intentioned transformational evangelicals is to shackle the Christian saint - freed mercifully by Christ’s blood - in the law. Of course, there will be a need depending on genre and audience for a filmmaker of confessional Christian faith to graphically show the realities of the world.

The problems with labeling movies “Christian” by what is not in a film in terms of content is that non-believing filmmakers can realise these aesthetics too. There are non-believing filmmakers who do not feel comfortable shooting graphic and exploitative scenes. Whether a filmmaker decides to show a graphic sex scene - or a Christian who is a filmmaker abandons such a scene - the movie does not become “Christian.” It’s still just a movie - a secular art form. It is either a well-crafted film (written, directed, performed, edited) or mildly well realised.

Or it could be horrible. But it is not Christian, objectively.

The content and style of a film is related to film aesthetics. And aesthetics do not change the overall form of dramatic storytelling; the “work” movies properly dramatize to the viewer.

The larger problem with evangelistic movies is they are - in effect - not movies, but commentaries. The evangelistic filmmaker is not externalizing a dramatic conflict outside of his or herself, but is trying to put the universe of the film together to “preach” the Holy Gospel. In essence, this evangelistic filmmaker has imprisoned themselves, by trying to show how life should be - how people should behave - not in order to tell a dramatic story, but for evangelism - meaning conversion to Christ.

But historically movies are of an entirely different form and form dictates motivation. Cinema dramatizes how things are - who people are, in dramatic complexity. They describe an external, yet dramatic story in visual imagery. Aesthetically, this can be realised in stark entertainment ways - [think Indiana Jones] - or more seriously, like Chariots of Fire.

But movies are not an altar call - nor can they be.