Friday Five: Movies that should have gotten Best Picture nominations over the last five years

1. (2006) Children of Men – The screenplay has flaws, mainly in its need for the characters to explain things to the audience they would never actually say in real life (the same problem that cursed Inception), but the acting, cinematography, art design and direction are near flawless. The scene in the elementary school is devastating, and I reference the war-zone-goes-quiet-because-of-the-baby scene in conversation as a metaphor for something else at least 4 times a year.  Alfonso Cuaron might never make a better film, but he’s made at least one great one here. You’re a fascist pig. Alternate: Pan’s Labyrinth. Apparently it was a banner year for Mexican directors.

2. (2007) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Andrew Dominik made a nearly perfect film here, and it got almost completely ignored by the Academy. I expect that for great foreign films (like my alternate for the same year), or for quirky but brilliant indies (like my second alternate for the same year), but a movie starring Brad Pitt in the best performance of his life with an ensemble of fantastic actors around him should have had the Oscar voters tripping over their own feet to nominate this one. Nope. I even would have taken it for Best Cinematography over There Will Be Blood, which is saying something. But no. Nothing. Alternate: The Lives of Others. It hurts me to make this one an alternate, as it makes my top ten list of the last ten years. I’m scheduling a compare/contrast between this and Francis Ford Coppola’s forgotten 1974 masterpiece The Conversation sometime soon if anyone wants to join. Second alternate: Once.

3. (2008) Synecdoche, New York - It kills me not to take my first alternate on this one, as In Bruges in one of my favorite films of the last ten years, but Synecdoche was ultimately a more deserving film. It is grandiose and yet specific, expansive yet claustophobic. It speaks to the need in each of us for an audience, for witnesses to our existence, for kind but honest critics to our performance, for a record of our days, a chronicle of our thoughts, a work of art that will ensure our immortality when our small, forgettable lives are done. I get why it wasn’t nominated – it’s impenetrable to most movie goers – but if you’re a creative type in any way, you owe it to yourself to watch this one. Alternate: In Bruges. We’ve already done this once. Second alternate: Let the Right One In. The vampire movie for film snobs who don’t even have to love vampire movies. Poignant, beautiful, restrained, nearly perfect.

4. (2009) Sin Nombre - I was a bit disappointed with 2011′s Jane Eyre, but Cary Fukunaga did it right with his debut film about Central American refugees trying to make their way illegaly but desperately to the United States. A simple script and an unknown but deeply talented and empathetic cast made this heart-wrenching film a hard one to watch, but a harder one to look away from. It punched me in the chest. The next time someone says something asinine about illegal immigration, direct them to this film. Or just punch them in the chest. I’m really fine with either one. Alternate: Bright Star. The most beautifully shot film of the year.

5. (2010) Blue Valentine -  Oh, this one hurt to watch. If you’re married and you say it didn’t, you’re either lying about the movie or you’re lying about marriage. Michelle Williams (be still my heart) and Ryan Gosling (be still m-wait, what?) were positively brilliant as a young married couple who are falling apart for all the hardest reasons. There is no cheating, no death of a child, no major catalyst at all – just two people falling out of love and trying to hold on by their fingernails. Marriage is hard. Watching this made Lyndie and I hold each other’s arms just a little bit closer as we walked down 5th street in Dayton away from the theater. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. Hang on. Also, this film finally exposed the MPAA as the sexist bastards they are, and they got called out on it. Score one for the female orgasm, America!  Alternate: Another Year.

Bonus – (2011) – Beginners. Go see it. Now.

Recent Reading

Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne (2009) – This is one of the best scientific books I’ve read in a while. Coyne avoids attacking creationists but directly refutes creationism by providing a mountain of evidence for the fact of evolution. His explanations stretch the reader but are never more than a lay person can understand, and his prose is professional but engaging. If you have open questions about evolutionary theory, want to better understand why basically all top scientists accept it as fact, hold to evolution and want to better defend your convictions in conversation, or are still in the creationism/intelligent design camp but want a better understanding of why so many of us in the church are accepting scientific explanations of human origins, pick up this book. It’s fantastic. Then tell me about it and we’ll get coffee.

Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know by Jennifer Van Sijll (2005) – I’m a film snob. Nerd. Whatever. I love books that help me understand the artform and history of film better, and Van Sijll’s book, while simple and short, provides some excellent information. So much is happening in a film frame that the majority of viewers are completely oblivious to. Understanding basic visual film theory goes a long way toward better understanding the story and emotions the filmmaker is trying to convey.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (1831) – I really started to enjoy Hugo’s classic (and very long) novel after about 300 pages when something finally happened. I read Herodotus unabridged a few years ago and I think it had fewer tedious details than the first third of Hunchback. Still, once the plot took off and the characters starting rounding out, the book became riveting. In Claude Frollo, Quasimodo, Esmerelda, Pierre Gringoire and Sister Gudule Hugo gives us stunning and vividly realized characters that speak to us of human isolation and longing from across the nearly two centuries since their creation.

The Sacred Way by Tony Jones (2005) – In this book Emergent guru Jones walks through a number of spiritual disciplines and prayer practices and provides the historical origin and tradition for each and also guidance for living them out in the modern world. I found several chapters of the book to be very helpful and enlightening, particularly those that dealt with physical prayer practices such as icons, walking labyrinths, and the stations of the cross. The parts of the book that dealt with more internal practices like the Jesus Prayer felt repetitive and stretched for length at points. Overall I enjoyed the book but found it to be less than what I hoped it would be. Still, it’s a good resource for someone looking to learn more about some of the older spiritual practices being revived in the modern church.

L’abri by Edith Schaeffer (1969) – I never threw it across the room, which is something. I didn’t count on being so incredibly frustrated with this book. I have always held L’abri in my mind to be a semi-magical place of free dialogue rooted in the ancient spiritual tradition of Christianity. Several things I’ve read recently, this book included, have changed that impression for me. The book gives one too many simple answers, and one too many accounts of Francis launching into lecture mode every time someone comes to him with a simple question. Francis Schaeffer was a brilliant man, and contributed a great deal to the depth of the Christian conversation during a time of social and cultural change. But whatever his impact was for that era of the church, so many of his words now seem to fall flat for me. I barely finished this one.

Sink the Bismarck! by C.S. Forester (1958) – I’m kind of a sucker for military history, especially anything related to naval or air conflicts. It’s a geeky interest I indulge periodically with a book like this one, which was short enough to be read in a weekend. I had no idea just how close to disaster the Atlantic naval situation was for the Allies prior to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck on its maiden voyage. Basically, if they hadn’t sunk it when they did, the entire European war would have swung in favor of the Axis, with supply convoys across the Atlantic in constant jeopardy.

What have you been reading recently?

Embrace the crazy

What would it take to get you out of Chicago? I asked for at least the tenth time in the last two months. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon this past October. My wife sat on the couch, and I sat in our cheap garage sale armchair, and our friend Melinda sat in my grandmother’s giant chair that could have fit three of her, her tattered notebook open on her lap. I had been joking with her most of the summer about moving to Ohio to help us start a church or intentional community but hadn’t held out hope for it to actually become a reality. An hour later we had an answer to my question and a tentative plan to make it happen.

We left our church last summer. We haven’t replaced it yet. We’ve visited some good ones, and we still hope to find one we can attend on a regular basis for worship and to connect to this ancient tradition we can’t seem to shake even when it makes no sense. But we haven’t yet found a community of Jesus followers with whom we feel we can fully live the Christian life in the freedom, honesty, doubt and beauty in which we believe it can and should be lived. For the last four months we’ve been working on a plan to start just such a community.

In October, Melinda will be leaving Chicago and moving into our home here in little old Greenville, Ohio. For a while we will just work on doing life together and adjusting to the new living arrangement before moving forward with anything more involved. For all our book and blog reading, all our planning and list-making, all our scheduled interviews with church leaders and authors from around the country, all our praying, our idea still doesn’t have a definite long-term shape, and that’s not an accident. We want to be flexible and allow for this to develop organically.

If you're wondering why I'm making that face, it's because I hadn't slept in a long time and only marginally knew where I was. I have no idea why Yosi was holding her nose. And yes, that is our 44th president dangling from our friend's ears.

Our basic idea is to bring in a few more core members and start an intentional community. We would have meals together and meet weekly for discussion and prayer. Eventually (and again, we are are making no deadlines or inflexible plans), we would like to create a community that would be a safe place for religious outcasts to come and know acceptance and grace and love and freedom, a spiritual triage center for the ecclesiastically disillusioned, the doubters, the questioning, the cynical, the fearful, the sarcastically-defensive-but-can’t-stop-believing, the gay, the straight, the humbly fervent, the sincerely agnostic, the apologetically or unapologetically unbelieving. But for now, it’s just my wife, my daughter, my best friend and I turning off the smooth path we’ve been walking and taking a few simple steps to walk a new one in the name of truth and love and beauty and grace.

In an email a couple months ago Melinda was discussing this project and asked me to regularly remind her we are embracing the crazy. That we aren’t apologizing for doing something unusual, and we aren’t living in fear. We are looking at a crazy means of living the way of Jesus and choosing to embrace it rather than make it safe and normal. You’re weird Lyndie’s sister said when we told her the plan. Yes, yes we are. And we plan to stay that way. And as Embrace is my word for 2012, Embracing the Crazy has become an unofficial mantra as we look ahead.

Over the coming months you will hear plenty about our plans and preparations for October and after. Melinda will be here on the blog a whole bunch to discuss this with me, and I’m pretty sure I can convince Lyndie to join in and share her wisdom and perspective also. I’m about as excited for this plan as I’ve ever been about anything, and I want to share that with you.

As I plan for how to arrange the coming posts and what to be sure to discuss, I would love to hear your specific questions and thoughts on all this. I’d also love to hear your recommendations on favorite books, blogs and sites on intentional community or anything related. And of course, we’d love your prayers. Thanks for reading.

Common Prayer

Yesterday morning I sat down in the enormous chair I inherited from my grandmother, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. My daughter’s cartoon played in the other room. I was tired from staying up too late the night before, and in another hour a couple would be over to discuss some concerns they had about our coming plans. My mind and heart needed recentered badly. I had heard it in my lack of patience with Yosi, and I could feel it in the fuzzy static in my head that was keeping me from feeling peace. So when I opened my eyes, I opened my Book of Common Prayer and read the collect for the day:

O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I prayed it over and over, and then read the Psalms for the day, which spoke of a God who commands both fire and snow, and before whom both young and old may dance. I prayed the collect again, and committed it to memory to return to during the week. I took a deep breath, and when I got back up from my chair, I felt at peace, rejuvenated, ready to face the coming hours.

Every Sunday I read the collect for the week, and I try to meditate on it, but some weeks the words just don’t seem to reach me. Some weeks the words are so powerful, I write them into my notebook and return to them for months.

When you find yourself in this place of needing to recenter your spirit, to quiet all the voices (and I say that in the least crazy way possible) and allow your soul to hear God, are there specific prayers you have come to rely upon to speak truth and peace to your heart? Is there a prayer book or liturgy you try to use on a regular basis?

A wrap-up to my unplanned week of posts on diversity and transracial adoption

In case you missed any of them, below are all five posts I wrote this week on the topic of race, diversity, and transracial adoption. Feel free to share these with anyone you think might benefit from them. Thanks!

Different, like everyone else – In which I introduce the topic of dealing with comments from strangers about Yosi’s race.

Different, like everyone else (continued) – In which I explain why I don’t always feel generous towards strangers who are trying to be nice but say something stupid.

Brown child, white town – In which I explain what it’s like to raise a Latino child in a small town with little racial diversity.

Questions and a book – In which I recommend the best book I’m aware of on this topic and offer to answer any questions you have.

Friday Five: confessions of a transracially adoptive parent – In which I call myself on my own shit.

Friday Five: Confessions of a transracially adoptive parent

1. Yes, sometimes I think we’re better than you because we adopted. Hey, as long as I confess it, you can’t get mad at me, right? Listen: I know it’s not true, and I almost always remember that. Really. Yes, I think more couples (and Jesus-followers, I’m looking right at you) need to be adopting. Yes, I think if you’re outspokenly pro-life but haven’t at least considered adoption, you need to stop talking now. But there is nothing special or superior about us because we adopted. There are lots of ways to build families, and lots of ways to love the orphans of this world. Adoption is one of them, but far from the only one. And I really do know that.

2. There have been times when I’ve carried my brown child as a badge of my cultural awareness. I did this a lot early on. It wasn’t on purpose, but I was definitely aware of it. It was validating to be seen with my Latino child. Having her on my hip told any room I walked into I am all kinds of cultured and progressive, in the same way that wearing Toms projects the image you give a shit about poor people (the image, mind you). It was understandable, but not okay. She wasn’t a badge of anything besides my parenthood.

3. I have my own set of stereotypes. On any given day I can be guilty of assuming one or more of the following things: people who fit the description of white trash are less intelligent than I am; very politically conservative people are uncaring; religious conservatives are closeminded; men in authority are assholes; kids with giant racing spoilers on the backs of their Honda Civics are idiots. Okay, that last one is actually true, so it’s a bad example. But you get the point. I assume things about people I’ve never actually met, and it affects my perceptions of them, and I think that’s called prejudice. I need to work on it.

4. I don’t know nearly enough about my daughter’s birth culture. Oh, I know a fair bit, don’t get me wrong. I’m nothing if not a reader, and I’ve read a lot on Guatemalan politics and twentieth century history and ancient mayan history and culture. I’ve read the Popol Vuh and I, Rigoberta Menchu, and with a little brush-up I can limp my way through survival Spanish. But I don’t know enough to help my daughter understand what it means to be born into that culture. We’re trying, but we have room to improve.

5. I say boneheaded things sometimes too. When I was a teen and young adult, retarded was an all-purpose junk word among my group of friends for use in a wide variety of circumstances. A computer that locked up was being retarded, a friend throwing wads of paper at me needed to stop being retarded, and I wished I didn’t have to fill out the retarded tax forms. I was not in any intentional way being derogatory toward people with mental handicaps. It was just a word. Until I said it in front of a mom I care about who has a handicapped child I also care about. I instantly felt about 2 inches tall. It went from being harmless slang to harmful slur in the space of 10 seconds. Lyndie and I set to work cutting it out of our vocabulary immediately. The point is, as progressive and sensitive as I might like to think of myself, I still have blindspots of stupidity. We all do. Let’s show each other grace while we learn, yeah?

Questions and a book

I really hadn’t planned on making this Diversity Week here on the blog, but I’m glad it’s worked out that way. We’ve had some great discussions (here’s part 1, part 2, and part 3), and I really appreciate the thoughtful comments I’ve received on these posts. Today I want to make a book recommendation and then open up for questions you might have.

I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race Conscious World by Marguerite A. Wright – This is without question the best book I’ve read on helping children understand race and diversity. As the title suggests it specifically addresses families with black or biracial children, but the information and advice Wright provides is applicable to families representing any race. Even if every child and adult in your family is white, this is still a wonderfully helpful and encouraging book for helping your children understand diversity and race.

We’ve covered a lot of ground this week on the issues of race, prejudice, and transracial adoption, and yet it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface. I would love to give you an opportunity now to ask anything you want to in relation to these topics. Don’t be embarrassed or feel like you’re going to end up in some future post as an example of what not to say: you have permission to ask whatever is on your mind. Want to know how to phrase certain questions or comments to adoptive parents? Have specific questions about international adoption and/or our adoption specifically? Curious about how we handle explaining adoption and ethnicity with Yosi now? Are there things I’ve expresssed as important in these posts that you don’t understand? Anything at all, I’ll do my best to answer (some questions might require more time and thought, so be patient). And of course, if any of my wonderful readers would like to step in and help answer with me, that would be awesome.

Ask away!