“…You see this in Christian movies, too. If you look across the bulk of the movies made, they are shallow, filled with superficial “tragedy” that in every case resolves perfectly, helping the protagonist to more exciting faith.
This is why so many believers who are artists choose to do art outside of the community of faith — or on the outskirts of it. You can communicate harder things, deeper things, if you’re not constrained by an industry that doesn’t want depth, preferring an easy sell. So, you get a movie like Primer, made by a Believer, that explores hard questions about man’s nature and does it interestingly (time travel and the relationship dynamic between best friends). This movie would be a hard sale into the Christian art buying community (Christian bookstores, web stores, etc). But, ironically, it found an audience with thinking people in the general industry. And it was better done than any Christian movie I’ve ever seen.
So, one thing that Christian art must have is depth.”
It will be interesting to see how central the titular poem is to the story. The poem, while admirable in several ways, is pretty fundamentally at odds with a biblical worldview.
But one understands what angle the filmmaker’s are pursuing with it.
Oh you very stupid film. If what you revealed were true, what kind of despair ought to follow? Heaping pails full of baneful woe. And an ugly dog trotting along beside.
Oh mind behind these lies, so far from Eden you can barely reflect a spark’s worth of light. You smother the blazing torch with a titanic effort of suppression. You lay on the trunk of love to be sure nothing beautiful escapes. You are an ungrateful son, a pitiless assassin, a plague of misdirection.
The True story is so comprehensive, a broad and brilliant view. And you have chased the peripheries into a canyon off the map. And all the crafty stories about it were lies. Misled and misleading. “Follow me to freedom,” you say. “Escape from conformity with me.” But you outfit your travelers with complex chains and tell them it is the uniform of self-actualization and they say “More chains please. Damned be our oppressors.”
Folly is your banner. Your suppositions are answerable, your incoherence decipherable as the language of lies.
No.
Autonomy is not ecstasy. Rebellion is not liberty. Order is not enemy. Truth’s not in idolatry. Treason is not fealty.
In other words: I award you zero stars. Two thumbs way down.
“…What a privilege it is to have the trust of your audience. Such is Pixar’s legacy that people who would otherwise turn up their nose at a mere ‘cartoon’ came in droves to fill the house based on the trust of a studio’s name alone. It’s a precious and delicate thing and with each successive film I fear the spell will finally shatter.
But UP isn’t a flop. The integrity of the Pixar name is well intact and may it be so for years to come. There’s nothing I can write here that can say more eloquently what has already been said in theaters across the country. UP’s reviews are written in a communal grammar built of gasps, and happy tears, a language filled with the sighs of the long-lived, the breathless wonder of cynics like me, and best of all the laughter and joyous exclamation not only of children but of those who dare to come and sit in the darkness and hear the storyteller’s whisper and remember how to be child-like once more.”
Right. On.
This was an amazing film. Take your family and go see it. We took our whole family to the movies for the first time (kids aged 6, 3, and 3 months) and it was a wonderful family memory. We’re keeping the stubs.
