By Jody Bennett
I don’t watch horror movies but I do find the concept of the 2019 horror flick Us very intriguing.
In the movie, a family encounters their evil doppelgängers and spends the entire film trying to escape their deadly grasp. These are not just lookalikes but their own evil incarnations.
The movie highlights the little-acknowledged fact that our greatest enemy and the most confronting thing we can encounter is our own worst selves. Continue reading
Tag: movies
The purpose of the Passion
by Andrew Lansdown
Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ opens with Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is here, the historical records agree, that Jesus suffered unspeakable anguish as He contemplated His imminent death.
In Mel’s version of events, Satan comes to taunt and test Jesus in the garden. Like many other scenes in the film, this scene has no historical basis. Such a thing could perhaps have happened, but the eyewitnesses make no mention of it. (From this scene onwards, viewers should be alert to the fact that they are watching not an historian’s account of the Passion, but a filmmaker’s account. While much of the film “is as it was”, much of it is as Mel imagines.)
Learning from the samurai
by Andrew Lansdown
Anyone who has seen The Last Samurai can easily understand why it has been nominated for four Academy Awards (best art direction, best costume design, best sound and best supporting actor). It is an outstanding film about a disillusioned American soldier, Captain Algren (played by Tom Cruise), who goes to Japan in 1876 to help modernise and train an army for the Emperor. He knows nothing of the samurai, the enemy he is about to face. Then in his first battle against them he is taken captive. Thus begins his (and our) discovery of the samurai and their way of life.
And what a discovery it is! I doubt that anyone could watch the film without feeling a sense of admiration for those warriors of ancient Japan.
That which connects us all
Recently I watched the movie Collateral Beauty, starring Will Smith as a man dealing with the death of his young daughter. Two years have elapsed and Smith’s character Howard Inlet is still not coping very well, his marriage is over and he is reduced to writing hate mail to Time, Death and Love.
As Howard explains right at the beginning of the movie, “Now these three things connect every single human being on earth. We long for love. We wish we had more time. And we fear death.”Continue reading