Everybody and their mother seems to be talking about The Shack lately. I’ve not read it myself, but my good friend Corey Reynolds just reviewed it, and he’s got major concerns. And by the way, before any supporters of the book chalk this one up to just another reformed guy hating on the emergent crowd, Corey was a fan of the much-maligned Blue Like Jazz.
New movies are usually released to theaters every Friday, but who’s got 10 bucks these days to drop on a movie that may well be a load of crap? Given those odds, each Friday I offer an alternative on DVD that you can rent at your local video store (or in some cases, avoid at all costs). Some will be new releases, others you may have to hunt for, but all of them are available to light up your small screen should it be a lazy Friday night.
The movie follows computer programmer James Clayton (Colin Farrell) as he is approached by CIA recruiter Walter Burke (Al Pacino). Burke tells him that his father, who disappeared years earlier, was in fact a CIA operative, and that James’ skills could be of great use to the agency. He enrolls in a training program for new recruits, where he quickly befriends a co-recruit named Layla (Bridget Moynahan) and finds himself in over his head in a strange and dangerous world.
The Recruit was released at the height of Farrell’s popularity from a few years ago. He seems difficult to find onscreen anymore (I’m interested in seeing his appearance in last year’s indie success In Bruges), and I can’t figure out why. He was one of my favorite up-and-coming actors, and he does well playing the lead in this tense thriller. Pacino is Pacino, so your opinion of his performance will be driven by your opinion of him. I love him. Moynahan completes the lead triangle well, and I maintain that she’s one of the more underrated actresses around today. This is more an intrigue thriller than an action thriller for the most part, so the strength of the three leads is vital, and it pays off. Director Roger Donaldson (who previously helmed the excellent political thriller Thirteen Days and returned to top form with last year’s The Bank Job) brings a restraint to the film that steers it away from the action-happy madness of many spy flicks and weaves a tense and entertaining story. There are enough twists and turns along the way to satisfy most thriller fans, and even if a couple are a tad predictable, the film proves deft enough to never make them feel cheap and contrived. There’s nothing ground-breaking here, but the movie does what it does with near flawless execution, and it’s a great ride. 2002’s The Bourne Identity gets all the praise, but I found this a far more intelligent and entertaining movie (I didn’t care for the first Bourne at all, and I haven’t seen the much-lauded two sequels). If that type of film is up your alley, give this one a look. – **** (out of 4)
The Recruit is rated PG-13 for violence, sexuality, and language.
This would normally be the place for the Sola5 Wednesday Recap, and in a way this is it. However, the lesson that God taught me last night has been far more impactful than the one I taught my students, so I pass it along.
Every Wednesday, I head over to the church about an our before our youth meeting to finalize copies of my materials for the week – my sermon notes, outlines for my students, lyrics to the songs we’ll be singing and so on. Yesterday, I was in the process of finalizing my files when I got a call on my cell phone. I got up and talked to a friend of mine for a few minutes, pacing around the room (as is my norm when I’m on the phone, for whatever reason). In doing so, I apparently picked up a considerable amount of static charge, because when I sat back down at my computer and touched the mouse, I got a pretty good zap. Therein started the strangeness. When I went to continue my work, my computer had froze. At first I thought it was just the mouse, but the keyboard was unresponsive as well. I powered the computer down and turned it back on. The fan started up and the power light came on, but there was no BIOS beep, no clicking of the hard drive, and nothing on the screen. The monitor was in standby, which meant it wasn’t getting any sort of signal from the computer. In short, my static jolt had fried my motherboard.
The loss of the computer wasn’t the biggest deal in the world. I was pretty sure the hard drive was OK (it is), and I actually had a comparable machine that a friend of mine gave me a few months ago that I was planning to use for parts. No, the more pressing matter was that 15 minutes before our youth meeting, my plan for the night was completely unraveled. I had no notes, none of the study questions I planned to give my students, no lyrics for the songs that were going to perfectly bookend our study, nothing. Hopeful that plugging the hard drive into the new machine would allow me to quickly get the files I needed, I had one of our adults lead the first hour with our group, which is our game and fellowship time. Surely that hour would buy me the time to get the new Frankencomputer up and running.
Nope. At 7:00, I walked downstairs and stood in front of our group (which included a couple visitors) with my plan for the study shattered and none of my notes. I was going to just wing it, frantically trying to recall all the references I had written down. That’s when it hit me. Our passage last night was Ecclesiastes 5:1-7, which talks of the importance of coming before God in silence and awe and not being hasty to offer up countless words. I was about to stand before a room of teenagers and talk to them about the importance of tuning out the constant distractions our lives present and humbly and quietly seeking God in his word, both personally and corporately. I was going to tell them that so often, we approach God and his word with a million other things distracting us, not allowing us to hear with clarity and receptiveness what he has to say. Yet, here I was, rattled and nervous because my master plan for the evening had fallen through.
My confidence was in all the bells and whistles I’d added to my message for the evening. I was more focused on the peripherals than on God’s Word. I was allowing myself to be distracted by the same sorts of things that I was going to tell my students they should work to not be distracted by. Humbled, and now rattled in a whole different way, I started the study, and was honest about the lesson that God had just taught me through a burst of static electricity and some overloaded circuits. At the end of the night, I wondered whether anything productive had come from my lesson. I felt unprepared, incoherent, unsure. Then today, I got an email from one of my students talking about the impact of the lesson last night.
God fried my computer for a reason. I needed a dose of silence before God, a dose of realizing that my own ideas and plans and abilities were serving in a way to impede my dependence on God’s Word. I had thought about all the things that distract us from hearing God’s voice – our culture, our hobbies, our other loves – but I hadn’t thought about my biggest distraction: myself. It was a lesson I’m incredibly thankful for, and a motherboard was a small price to pay for it.
And yes, the pun is intended. As my little girl gets bigger every day (8 months now!), I’m thinking more and more about how to begin to teach her, and other kids I pray God blesses us with, about Christ. Zach Nielsen has posted some practical advice from Mark Driscoll on family Bible study that I found very appealing and interesting, so I pass it along to you.
Step 1. Eat dinner with your entire family regularly.
Step 2. Mom and Dad sit next to one another to lead the family discussion.
Step 3. Open the meal by asking if there is anyone or anything to pray for.
Step 4. Someone opens in prayer and covers any requests. This task should be rotated among family members so that different people take turns learning to pray aloud.
Step 5. Start eating and discuss how everyone’s day went.
Step 6. Have a Bible in front of the parents in a translation that is age-appropriate for the kids’ reading level. Have someone (parent or child) open the Bible, and assign a portion to read aloud while everyone is eating and listening.
Step 7. Parents should note key words and themes in the passage and explain them to the kids on an age-appropriate level.
Step 8. Ask questions about the passage. You may want to begin with having your children summarize what was read—retelling the story or passage outline. Then, ask the following questions: What does this passage teach us about God? What does it say about us or about how God sees us? What does it teach us about our relationships with others?
Step 9. Let the conversation happen naturally, listen carefully to the kids, let them answer the questions, and fill in whatever they miss or lovingly and gently correct whatever they get wrong so as to help them.
Step 10. If the Scriptures convict you of sin, repent as you need to your family, and share appropriately honest parts of your life story so the kids can see Jesus’ work in your life and your need for him too. This demonstrates gospel humility to them.
Step 11. At the end of dinner, ask the kids if they have any questions for you.
Step 12. If you miss a night, or if conversation gets off track, or if your family occasionally just wants to talk about something else, don’t stress—it’s inevitable.
CNN.com reports that a $273 million NASA satellite crashed minutes after takeoff. Says program manager John Brunschwyler, “Certainly for the science community, it’s a huge disappointment.”
Well, I can’t speak for the science community, but “huge disappointment” doesn’t really do justice to the feelings of the taxpayer community. All we hear about is how grave the economy is right now, and we just blew up a quarter of a billion dollars. I’m sure they’ll spend the $1.2 trillion they just authorized really well, too.
I blogged a while back about my great love for BioWare’s sci-fi RPG epic Mass Effect. The gaming community has long known that the game was the first in a planned trilogy, but over the weekend the first official glimpse of Mass Effect 2 was revealed with a teaser trailer. The video is certainly a teaser, and it has Mass Effect fans like me in a tizzy over the fate of the Commander Shepherd we created and shaped in the first game. The developers at BioWare are telling Xbox 360 owners to hang onto their saved games from the original Mass Effect for use with the sequel, so perhaps the trailer isn’t quite what it seems. Anyway, have a look – and if you haven’t played the first Mass Effect, really, what are you waiting for?
New movies are usually released to theaters every Friday, but who’s got 10 bucks these days to drop on a movie that may well be a load of crap? Given those odds, each Friday I offer an alternative on DVD that you can rent at your local video store (or in some cases, avoid at all costs). Some will be new releases, others you may have to hunt for, but all of them are available to light up your small screen should it be a lazy Friday night.
Roberto Benigni directs and stars as Guido, a funny and charismatic guy in 1930’s Italy who arrives in a new town and sets out to win the heart of Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s real-life wife) and open up a bookstore. The first half of the movie follows the two’s courtship and eventual marriage, and plays more like a slapstick comedy than anything else. However, as the shadow of World War II begins to fall over Europe, Guido’s Jewish heritage comes to the forefront, and a movie that began as a light and funny look at love is transformed into an incredibly touching story of family and survival.
I really don’t want to give much more than that away. This is one of the most impossible-to-define films I’ve ever seen. It can be clever and hilarious at one moment and pull on your heartstrings the next. It really is a film that must be experienced, and it’s one of that rare pantheon of movie experiences where I sit in absolute silence as the credits roll. It’s a profoundly moving story, and it was recognized as such at the 1998 Oscars, in which Benigni won a well-earned Best Actor Oscar, the movie won 3 others (including Best Foriegn Film) and was nominated for Best Picture. If you’ve already seen The Dark Knight four times and the rest of the Oscar ballot just doesn’t sound that appealing, head out to your local video store and hunt for this one. You’ll be glad you did.
Life is Beautiful is rated PG-13 for holocaust-related thematic elements.
Tim Challies takes up a thoughtful examination of that question. I think he hits on a lot of good points here, and examines things fairly. My conclusion is pretty similar to his – no, smoking is not necessarily sinful, though an addiction to it could be. The Bible has nothing to say about the subject whatsoever, so I would have major concerns with someone who would say that it unequivocally is sinful – that is the territory of legalism. Can good arguments be made against smoking? Sure – though Challies shows that these reasons aren’t as airtight as they might seem when viewed with consistency across the spectrum of the Christian life. In any regard, it’s a good article to get you thinking about how we define sin. Check it out, and if you’ve got thoughts on the issue, let me know in the comments.
As I begin to compile my mental list of books I’d like to pick up at this year’s Basics Conference (with its awesome 20% bookstore discount), Philip Ryken’s Art for God’s Sake sounds like an interesting read. Anybody already read it?
D.J. Williams
Louisville, KY
