Daniel, My Brother

For seven years, my teaching partner Daniel Garcia gave our students chiaroscuro splashes of light, lyrical camera movement, languid story structures. From me, they got disk management strategies, the rule of thirds, equipment calibration procedures. And students benefitted. Our stylistic divergence prepared them for multiple workplaces, modeled for them distinct creative styles.

Daniel’s departure this month leaves me looking for a partner. Not merely someone who will cover the classes Daniel once taught, but another mule to share my yoke. Enough like me to pull in basically the same direction, different enough from me to teach students what I cannot.

One of my fondest memories of Daniel is an argument we had in Chicago. Eating dinner in the city’s theater district, we had a knock-down-drag-out brawl over the potential for creativity in independent and Hollywood cinema. For maybe an hour, we slammed each other with escalating arguments of emotion and logic, anecdote and hyperbole. And it was wonderful. We laughed as hard as we fought. Never once in that whole wrestling match was our friendship threatened. We were undoubtedly impassioned but ultimately safe in our brotherhood.

Neither of us was tenured. One had no power over the other. I was not currying his favorable recommendation. He did not fear my damning vote in some administrative Star Chamber. We were truly peers. Thus the mix of poet and mechanic was more or less equal as we fashioned the Media Production major.

But I hope to be awarded tenure this year. Can Daniel’s replacement possibly tell me the same [sometimes brutal] truth that Daniel was able to?

Size Matters, Punk (B+)

These days, anything short of a Baz Luhrmann seizure constitutes a slow editing pace. I thought that’s why Dirty Harry (1971) seemed so sluggish when I watched it a couple of years ago with the kids on the 9’ screen in our basement. Clint Eastwood was, of course, imposing and iconic, but the film as a whole felt like an overwrought Quinn Martin production. The dated Lalo Schifrin score didn’t help.

Sunday the kids took me to a revival house screening of Harry. It played on a 40’ screen (as surely God intended). It was a completely different experience. More screen real estate translated into more places for the Scorpio killer to hide. The audience spent long seconds between cuts tensely searching for bad guys in the blackness made possible by the seventies’ faster film stocks.

Once again I learn what I should already know: size matters. iPhones, laptops, and cinema screens each have their own dynamics of composition and pacing. Those dynamics aren’t interchangeable.

Did I mention the kids chose Dirty Harry tickets as a Father’s Day present? It seems that more than once during their childhood, as one or the other of them teetered on the brink of mischief, they each remembered looking my way, daredevil eyes glinting. They recalled (as I did not) the threat of discipline in my standard response: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well… do ya, punk?”

Clash of the Titans (C-)

In its initial theatrical release, Clash of the Titans took a deserved drubbing from critics, who often pointed to it as an object lesson in post-production 3D conversion. The 2010 iteration was also swimming upstream against reviewers’ nostalgia for Ray Harryhausen’s quaint, 1980s-era stop-motion.

Does director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) deserve a 28% Rotten Tomatoes rating? The answer is probably a function of ticket price. I bought a used DVD for $5, saw it in 2D on a 9’ screen with my 14-year-old son, and didn’t regret its 106-minute running time.

Some viewers were troubled by what they considered inaccuracies or continuity gaffes. Their complaint was often that scriptwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi strayed too far from Edith Hamilton. Considering these are among mankind’s oldest characters and narratives, I think perhaps we’ll have to relax our grip on 11th-grade classroom memories. Surely no one invested in this film hoped for Bullfinch’s Mythology.

I have an opposing conviction: that this script hews too closely to the source material – at least in structure. Tales of Perseus and the Argonaut Jason are linear quests. Adventurers wallop a beastie in the forest, then survive a magical firefight on the beach, then behead a stony serpentine seductress in her lair -- connecting the dots from A to B to C. But modern audiences prefer to juggle multiple threats (even multiple timelines) simultaneously. Without more “meanwhile-back-at-Argos” cutaways one frequently forgets that the clock is ticking on the noble, would-be sacrifice Andromeda. Even when she does get screen time, she really doesn’t seem all that upset about her impending death. The stakes of Perseus’s failure thus seem pretty low.

X-Men: First Class (B+)

The film is strongest when it confines itself to moments of discovery between only two or three characters. By contrast, it's weakened by overblown CGI spectacle (as in the finale). Its hip production design (indebted to Connery's Bond era) and a setting during the Cuban Missile Crisis suggest a faux-gravitas that will be lost on many of this summer's popcorn munchers.

Many will remember the adoption of X-Men: The Last Stand as a metaphor for the gay community. That film asked "Is mutation illness or identity, sickness or signature?" Should the franchise continue on course as 1960s historical fiction, I'd expect future installments to similarly address themes of the Civil Rights Movement.

Thor (B--)

Fans of the Marvel comic reckoned Shakespeare vet Kenneth Branagh a natural fit for a King James-era script. And true to his Hamlet, scenes of royal intrigue were among the film’s most intense. More tepid was the chemistry between Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman. Were these lovers truly destined to bridge the gulf of taboo between heaven and earth? Probably not. At least they managed to [barely] avoid some obvious fish-out-of-water yucks when the thunder god was banished to earth.

Back on Asgard, director Branagh was – as filmmakers have been for years – on the brink (not the bull’s eye) of telling tales believably set in other worlds. Some might argue that George Lucas told audiences such stories two decades ago. But, in general terms, our own laws of physics and weather hold on Tattooine and Naboo. Asgard (and Oa in the forthcoming Green Lantern flick) grasp at more, however. While Thor was admittedly a little better than good, man’s reach still exceeds his grasp.

False Chastity

During a talk last week, I asked Christian college students which was more morally troublesome: a movie, a car, a light bulb, or an apple. True to their upbringing they said with one voice "a movie." They said the things you'd perhaps expect them to say about language, nudity, violence, the erosion of social values, the absence of religion, the treatment of women. They told stories about the ways their parents had protected them from film's negative influence. "For a moment, let's set aside the film," I said. "Let's instead, consider the apple.

"We go to the grocery store and -- believing our bodies to be temples -- we stand in the produce section choosing which fresh fruits to buy. We see apples in broad variety; we buy half a dozen Honey Crisps. Because Honey Crisp apples are not in season in our part of the world in March, carbon monoxide has been pumped into the air on our behalf to ship them from elsewhere on the planet. We have thus weighed the benefits of personal health against creation care and chosen the former.

"We may also have made a decision between stewardship and shalom. We don't just want things that taste good; we also want them for a good price. And cheap apples are cheap because migrant workers seldom get health insurance. Indeed, the cinder block buildings in which they live sometimes don't have heat... or even floors for that matter. Given the Bible's preoccupation with the fate of widows, orphans, and aliens, our apple-purchasing habits are pretty disturbing.

"We're not ignorant. In the back of our minds, we are probably aware of the path our apples take from orchard to table. But we repress this knowledge.

"Now back to the hyper-violent film. Neo, Ahh-nold, or John Wayne (take your pick) spectacularly mows down an army of bad guys. And the director yells 'cut.' And all the extras dust themselves off and stand up. And they collect their paychecks and go home to spouses and children and sweethearts.

"We do understand, don't we, that the film's violence is fantasy? Not even animals were harmed in the making of this film. But our actions in the produce aisle result in real violence, done on our behalf to the planet and to our fellow humans. And yet, we say film is the more morally troublesome consumption."

"And consumption is precisely the problem. Jesus said it's not what goes into a person that makes her nasty; it is rather, what comes out of her. It is what she says, more than what she hears. It is the canvases she paints, more than the galleries she visits. It is what she cooks, more than what she eats. It is the movies she makes, more than the movies she pays to see.

"But because we have accepted that our relationship with the world is largely that of consumer, the church -- especially the Protestant church -- has virtually ignored its mandate to create. Instead, we practice suspicious ingestion (sometimes called "discernment") masquerading as the virtue of Chastity."

We are not chaste. We are fearful.

Everything

The title of last week's address, "Everything You Need to Know About Filmmaking," was chosen on my behalf by members of the Covenant College Film Club. Saying everything that can be said about filmmaking in one hour (to the extent it's even possible) would be like filling a thimble with a fire hose. Panicked by the aimless hopelessness of the task, I thought of a time when folks said to Jesus "Tell us everything." He said, "Okay, here's everything you need to know about the law, everything you need to take home from the prophets: love God. Hard. Hard like 'throwing-yourself-full-speed-against-the-wall hard.' And here's another thing that's kinda like it: Love even the folks you're inclined to hate as if they were your neighbors."

If those two great commandments constitute everything you need to know about life, then maybe everything you need to know about filmmaking is how to love God and neighbor with camera, microphone, and editing software. Easier said than done, of course.

Consider a not-too-recent shoot of a variety show episode. Our musical guest had, the night before her television appearance, suffered an acne outbreak of biblical proportions -- this in our studio's first semester after an $800,000 upgrade to High Definition. Now acne in standard def and acne in high def are two totally different things. My students sensed this and immediately huddled in the control room, asking "how do we use lighting, lenses, and shot size to love our neighbor and tell the truth?"

Many definitions of godly filmmaking are oversimplified contrasts of virtue and vice as regards a movie's content. "A godly movie doesn't have gratuitous sex, violence, or crude language," some might say. But choosing virtue over vice is milk. The acne incident represents a deeper, smarter, meatier faith-walk on the tight rope between one virtue and another.

Such walks are legs on the lifetime journey to "Everything."