Richard's Blog

Black Gold

Read a review of a film that's opening soon in the UK (8th June) that looks like an important one for justice-minded and coffee-drinking (I take that to be 80%+ of All Souls?) Christians to get a glimpse of. I'll reproduce Rich Cline's review in full below...

His website, Shadows on the Wall - and weekly email (free to sign up for) - is one of the very best for film lovers: non-glitzy, down-to-earth, informative and generally spot-on in his opinions (in my 'umble opinion!)... Rich also happens to be the editor of the Evangelical Alliance magazine, but the site is straightforwardly mainstream rather than aiming to cater for a specifically faith-defined audience.

Here's the review (emphasis mine) - you can compare is with the collection of (almost universally positive) reviews on film site rottentomatoes.com...

Filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis travel explore the global coffee trade in this pure, observational documentary. It never preaches at all, yet it's unforgettably strong stuff.

After oil, coffee is the world's largest trading commodity, but the people who actually grow the crops remain locked in a cycle of poverty. While Western corporations post record profits, coffee growers are being asked to sell their beans for less and less. The film centres on Ethiopia, birthplace of coffee, and the trader Tadesse Meskela, who's bypassing the system to provide fair wages for his co-operative of coffee farmers and apply profits into community projects like schools and health care. We also follow him to London and Seattle, where he markets his products to the world, stopping to glimpse the New York market where global prices are set and Italy's Illy coffee empire, which only buys coffee off the commodities exchange.

All of this is filmed in a completely unobtrusive manner that merely lets us see what's happening as savvy editing contrasts the luxuriant indifference of Starbucks café culture with the grim realities of the coffee producing communities. If we feel any guilt, it's because we recognise that we're to blame for this disparity, that the entire global marketplace is designed to keep the developing world in its place while we enjoy the proceeds.

The raw fact is that Africa, in particular, is getting poorer by the day due to colonial greed. Western aid is actually keeping these people dependent and subservient, and the irony is that as they switch to more lucrative crops, usually illicit drugs, not only will the coffee supply dry up, but our cultures will be increasingly undermined by addiction and crime. And we can't say we didn't bring this on ourselves.

The filmmakers never spell this out; they don't have to. What they do tell us is that if Western corporations allow African traders to keep just 1 percent more of the profits, they'll earn more than five times what's given in aid each year. And of course this isn't only happening in Africa. And it's not just about coffee. This is subtle, insightful cinema that demands an audience that's willing to engage their brains. And their hands.

[(c) 2007 Rich Cline - from Shadows on the Wall]

If you get to see it - add your own review here! :o)

Reminds me, by the way of a posting a while back to which I gave the title Complicated Ethics?

Borat - cultural learnings...

Not a film I'm likely to see - too many good films and not enough evenings to enjoy them! - but it's making such a splash at the moment that this thoughtful review from Nick Spencer at the LICC is worth posting:

Altogether, Borat is 90 minutes of toe-curling embarrassment. It’s funny and it’s silly. But it’s also clever, and asks some uncomfortable questions.

First, there is the question of civilisation. Borat is an obviously primitive caricature – yet the film’s most shocking lines come not from him but from the Americans from whom he is supposedly learning. There are the students whose attitude to women makes Borat look like Germaine Greer; an ageing cowboy who talks enthusiastically about hanging homosexuals; a pastor who walks out of a dinner party when a prostitute walks in. Who is civilised here? Who is in a position to offer ‘cultural learnings’?

...the rest is online at the LICC site.

More on the film...

As a quick follow up to my post earlier today (see below) about the film An Inconvenient Truth, Tearfund have put out a press release along the same lines (read the news report of it here):

As Christians, we can no longer ignore the implications of human-induced climate change. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a powerful and challenging film which highlights the climate chaos that is increasingly undermining the livelihoods and security of the poor people Tearfund works with.

The damage that the West’s rabid consumerism is doing to the developing world is a justice issue that Christians must stand up and be counted on. Whether or not your political views are aligned with Al Gore’s, he presents the science in an engaging way that everyone can understand.

This is a vital issue that is going to affect us all. I would encourage everyone to watch the film, then join with Tearfund as we lobby the UK government and take action to cut down on our carbon emissions.
[Andy Atkins, Tearfund’s Advocacy Director]

An Inconvenient Truth

I rarely (ever?) recommend films here - tastes vary so widely it's a pretty risky business!

This time, though, I think I'm justified in saying that there's a film opening that every thinking adult ought to go and see - An Inconvenient Truth.

I've blogged about it before and it's finally arrived after a remarkably successful (for a documentary that is) season in the States. The reviews online are even more dazzling than back then (believe me, a score of 92% on that website is unheard of!), including this one from The Chicago Sunday Times:

In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

The film's website, climatecrisis.net makes for sobering, but helpful reading - the real disappointment is just how few screens the film is opening in this weekend. The Odeon website, for example, lists just a handful nationwide, but that thankfully includes one not that far away from us at the Kensington Odeon from this Friday...

If anyone out there fancies taking on the project of seeing if we can hire a local screen for a showing in Richmond or Twickenham - let me know!

United 93

I don't often just 'cut and paste' stuff from other people at such length, but Brian Draper's latest LICC Connecting with Culture email is too good to edit. I'm not sure whether I'm feeling in the right frame of mind to see the film at the mo', but the critics rave about it...

United 93, the fourth flight to be hijacked on September 11th 2001, seems as iconic as Titanic when you see it captured in Philip Greengrass’s moving feature film.

You want to shout “Don’t get on!” to the poor man who’s running late and just sneaks through check-in with seconds to go. You want to cry “There’s a better way of solving this!” to the hijackers as they sit there in first class, clearly in trepidation, awaiting the time to strike. And you desperately want the brave passengers to subdue their captors and bring the aircraft soaring out of its nosedive towards the safety of a Hollywood ending.

Yet, every time the film plays, of course, the man running late catches his plane with the same few seconds to spare; the hijackers carry through their plan and the passengers fail to re-gain control (though they do, of course, stop the plane reaching its target).

United 93 was delayed in taking off that fateful morning, so by the time it was hijacked, the passengers were receiving reports that the Twin Towers had been struck. Theirs was the first, urgent decision to make in the new, ‘post 9/11’ world – do they sit back and do nothing, or try to intervene? Greengrass believes we’ve been wrestling with this question in the West ever since.

The most moving scenes in this ‘real time’ film come when the passengers, realising the extent of their awful predicament, start to phone their families to say goodbye. In the face of such unexpected trauma, the simplest of phrases takes on the greatest urgency and clarity: ‘I love you.’

We should never take those words for granted, as we remind ourselves, even within the luxurious tranquillity of everyday banality, that love transcends everything, and never fails, as Paul says.

Yet it’s one thing to love your loved ones. It’s another thing entirely to love your enemies too, as Jesus commanded, and to pray for those who still mean us harm.

As we enter the run-up to the anniversary of the London bombings, this beautiful, shocking film celebrates the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people; but it reminds us, too, that the hijackers in the cockpit, and by implication the young men on the tube with the rucksack, are also people – people who God loves, and who we must somehow seek to love as well as our own.

Give me strength.

Brian Draper

REVIEW: DaVinci Film

Actually "Review" is a rather over-the-top term - there's loads of reviews out there (see previous posts on the Code for links), but here are a few personal thoughts, comments, responses having seen it on Sunday night...

• It's not as bad as many of the reviews say... but it isn't great. Actually, it's a bit dull in places and any director who manages to get a "so-so" performance out of Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou must be doing something wrong!
• The 'theory' behind the plot actually comes across even more laughably in the film than in the book - which is no bad thing, clearly.
• Unfortunately, the general stench of church cover-up, power-plays and the sense of 'you can't know who's telling the truth - especially with the Bible' pervades the film so completely that it's hard to shake, even when the central ideas of the chase and discoveries are ludicrous. That's my key concern with non-Christians seeing it, that it just hammers again the reliability of the Gospels, without any good reason to do so!
• The self-mutilation of the monk (played rather well by Paul Bettany) is gruesome and unpleasant - think twice before taking youngsters to see it.
• Ian McKellan is great, but (a) rather hams it up [light relief, so that's good] and (b) has a few portentous lines that make him sound like Gandalf again... ;o)
• It's too long - losing 20 minutes would have helped, but then I reckon newcomers to the story (are there any?) would have had even less idea what's going on.
• The assertion that "nobody knows who started the atrocities" between the Romans and the Christians during the persecutions of the first few centuries is utterly silly (to say the least)...

Anyway, I wouldn't rush out to see it, but it could have been worse!

More on DaVinci...

I'm going to be one of the sheep this weekend... (thanks to the cartoonchurch blog for the image - click it to see a bigger version on that site) I'll post here next week on my 'take' on it, but the film reviews are beginning - and it has to be said they're generally not very positive. Not sure if this is because (a) it's just not a very good film , (b) it wasn't a particularly brilliant book or (c) it's backlash against the success of the book...

I suspect it's a combination of all three, but for what it's worth, rottentomatoes.com is the best place to go for an overview of (mostly American) critical opinion on the film - and their 'freshness rating' on the movie (of 19%) is one of the lowest I've ever seen!

Still interested in people's personal reactions to the book - you can add them to my post earlier this week.

In the meantime, Ben Witherington (yet again!) has given one of the most helpful overviews/reviews of the film from a Christian perspective. Please do go and read it in full if you've any thought either of seeing it yourself or of having to answer the questions of others about it... He's actually a little more positive about the cinematic experience itself than many (I live in hope that our tickets aren't a waste of money!!):

Audrey Tatou's portrayal of Sophie Nouveau is well done. She does indeed come across as a woman with secrets and a troubling upbringing which she has tried to repress and overcome. And Tom Hanks though be starts off in rather Stoic or wooden fashion is believable as a professorial type not apt to willingly become the hero of a conspiracy or murder investigation. Paul Bettany as the mad monk Silas is positively demonic in some scenes and repulsive in his self-flagellating mode as well. Ian McKellen (aka Gandalf) is marvelous as the mad hatter Teabing, and the supporting cast is good as well. Han's Zimmer's score is well done (cf. the Gladiator score) which preserves an air of forboding and brooding darkness throughout the film. It adds to the ambiance of the film.

The film's 'tag line' (the con of man)...

...is not one perpetrated by the church about Jesus and his real nature, but rather one foisted on a Biblically illiterate public large numbers of which seem naive enough to believe the hysterical fiction in Brown's novel. It is a good thing that various critics, and to his credit Tom Hanks as well, have seen through this ruse. Hanks plays his role with one eyebrow raised most of the time--- good for him. ... It is my hope that this will lead to candid discussion about the real Jesus, and the real story about what the early church believed about his humanity and divinity, long before Constantine was ever born.... This is not your typical fun summer thriller. It is too dark for that, but it may at least raise some interesting questions for those really trying to puzzle out the religious mysteries involved.

The last part of Witherington's post is a guide for Christian viewers - both whether to see it and how to prepare... I think you'll find his writing on this useful.

The Church of England website also has some good links about the film. And if you want one more moderately positive review, try Rich Cline's view at Shadows on the Wall...

The Da Vinci Code

With the release this week of The Da Vinci Code - based on Dan Brown's staggeringly successful and  usefully controversial book - it's worth getting ourselves ready for questions and debate likely to flow our way.

Over the next few days I'll post some links to useful sites that will help sift through the theories and accusations against the church that litter the book and make some comments on how we can respond in a way that is Jesus-like to those who are attracted by the flap.

Make a date in your diary for June 25th - where we're giving over our morning service to considering The Code - a morning for Christians and also for any friends you've got that have read the book or will see the film. More details to follow soon.

In the meantime, a first collection of links that are worth a follow-up:

• A useful starting point is David Couchman's brief review and comments - especially if you're thinking of taking children to see the film.
• Their companion site which focuses on the Da Vinci Code alone is a mine of useful information if you follow the menus at the top.
• Ben Witherington - whose blog we often visit from here - has a good overview of why this film represents such an important milestone for the Christian Church and some key pointers for how to respond. He follows it up with a more recent post about Dan Brown's recent interview.

More to follow soon - especially once I've seen the film myself this weekend.

If you've read the book yourself - what did you make of it?

TV with eyes open

We swim in a sea of multimedia entertainment - from news-headlines, goals and more on my 3G phone, to broadband video over the internet and plain-old TV.

Paul's famous injunction:

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is— his good, pleasing and perfect will. [Rom 12:2]

...gives us the image of being squeezed into a mould by 'this world' - we need to push back.

Watching an episode of The West Wing the other day, I was struck by how the entire storyline arc (strecthing across several series, let alone episodes) was leading me as the viewer to be willing these two characters (Donna and Josh, in case you're a fellow-sufferer), not just into "a relationship", but into bed. Here I was - believing that God has given us the gift of sexual intimacy to be expressed in the context of lifelong marriage - cheering on the characters on the screen as they headed for the hotel room!

I love West Wing - intelligent scripting, strong characters, great storylines - so I'm not suggesting a "don't watch" solution. I am suggesting that anything we can do to engage our brains and faith when we watch has got to be a good thing.

One of the ways of getting switched on mentally when we watch is to use some of the many online resources about TV to help us think from a Jesus-perspective about what we're watching. It's not all about "what should or shouldn't I watch?", but about spotting the mould-squeezing effects of the culture in which we swim.

Here's a few that would be worth a read - mostly from a partnership between the UCCF apologetics website (bethinking.org) and Damaris Trust (whose specialism is helping Christians interact with the culture) - if you watch the programmes:

• Desperate Housewives
  An article from Tony Watkins of the Damaris team about this hit series - a short piece, but an interesting insight into the genesis of the series.
• Family Man
  Also from Tony Watkins is this longer article about the current BBCOne series starring Trevor Eve. Some very useful links at the bottom of the piece about some of the issues raised in the programmes.
• Doctor Who
  A sample chapter from a Damaris Publishing Book - Back In Time : A Thinking Fan's Guide to Doctor Who - which looks good if you're a Time Lord fan...
• Lost
  Again from Damaris (direct on their site this time) - this time a study guide with good introduction with questions for personal reflection or group conversation.
• West Wing
  An interesting (American) take on West Wing written a couple of years' ago before the Bartlett administration began to head into its final year.

In fact, the CultureWatch site from Damaris is a rare thing on the internet - a site that genuinely demands the description "goldmine". They have an entire section devoted to TV (and one to films, books etc etc).

Discernment, cotton wool and safe places

Ali's comment on yesterday's post concerning Harry Potter set me thinking more about the whole area of what we are happy to read/watch/listen to as Christians and what we feel is appropriate for children/young people to experience too.

At stake, in this particular case, was the assertion by one 'blogger' that Harry Potter - as a series of books - was a bad influence, not so much because of the magic, but because Harry is a flawed hero who succeeds because (it's claimed), rather in spite, of his imperfect behaviour.

We needn't here rehearse the specific arguments over Harry Potter - although I happen to agree with Ali! - but it did set me thinking more generally about the way we decide what's acceptable to read/watch and (even more fundamentally), how we approach those things we do come into contact with.

I think the best thing about Conrad Gempf's post is that it serves as a reminder that Christians can be guilty of "straining gnats and swallowing camels" when it comes to our consumption of stories (in whatever form). In the case of Harry Potter, Gempf makes the case that Christians are focusing on the "magic" (which you can argue is, in this case, devoid of any real occultish overtones) and ignoring core issues of morality and ethics. He might come to rather extreme conclusions (in my opinion), but I think he's hit a rather important nail squarely on the head.

For example, we can end up with a focus on campaigning against the negatives of the worst 'horror films' (perhaps a right and proper concern in many cases), but swallow enthusiastically the gross materialism, soppy sentamentalism or "happy ending = ending up in bed with each other at the end of the movie" worldviews of more lightweight films. Or some might complain at the explicit violence of a Saving Private Ryan and be happier to take on board the unthinking xenophobic nationalism of some of the crowd-pleasing (and seemingly harmless) war/action-hero films that clutter our Summers.

So, is it a case of 'anything goes' - or of 'nothing goes'? Hardly.

From a biblical perspective, I think two key principles apply:

• Be discerning - i.e. engage our minds as well as our emotions in those things we watch, hear and read (Romans 12:1-2) so that we aren't just unwittingly shaped by them, but allow a God-shaped perspective on the world shape our attitude to them.
• Know our own limits. Paul says:
  "Everything is permissible— but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible— but not everything is constructive." (1 Cor 10:23).
  We have to know what things (images, scenarios etc) will have a negative effect on us and be ruthless enough to avoid them (I, for example, just can't get enough 'distance' from a film to deal well with horror/violence in the cinema - but I know that my decisions to not watch such films isn't an 'absolute' for all people, but a personal "what is beneficial" one).

Both principles can/need to be applied to children too. My biggest aim for our children in this area is not that we somehow wrap them in cotton wool and protect them from all that is 'out there', but that we (a) teach them discernment when they read or watch (Ali makes the same point) so that they don't just soak things up like a sponge and (b) protect them from images, scenarios etc. for which they are too young and therefore would be damaged by.

Both aims require a fairly high degree of parental involvement - actually sitting and watching (at least some of the time) with children and actively engaging them in talking through what they are experiencing. Unfortunately, unless we're practising the same disciplines on our own consumption of media (be that video games, film, books, internet etc), we're unlikely to do it for any children we have responsibility for.

A couple of questions to finish with:

1. Think of the last film you watched, TV programme you enjoyed, novel you read or computer game you played... What was its worldview - where did it affirm a Jesus shaped perspective and where did it clash? Were there ways in which it shaped you and your attitudes to people, to God, to yourself? Could you see ways in which it expressed longings/needs which we know are only truly met in Jesus?
2. If you are a parent, do you know what  your child(ren)'s answers to (1) would be? Are they experiencing anything that is inappropriate to their age? When was the last time you sat down with them to watch/read/play so that you could be part of their learning to discern? How can we help them to be shaped more by their growing love for Jesus than by the culture in which they have to swim?

That's a big challenge to me - what do you think?