Four Films for Veterans Day

These documentaries look interesting from PBS.

A Short Documentary on C.S. Lewis

Interesting video here.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

(HT: Mark Wolter)

Bully - A New Documentary

Bully - Trailer No. 1

A statement from the director:

I made BULLY for kids to see – the bullies as well as the bullied. We have to change hearts and minds in order to stop this epidemic, which has scarred countless lives and driven many children to suicide. To capture the stark reality of bullying, we had to capture the way kids act and speak in their everyday lives – and the fact is that kids use profanity. It is heartbreaking that the MPAA, in adhering to a strict limit on certain words, would end up keeping this film from those who need to see it most.

(HT:  JT)

Foo Fighters - Back and Forth

Saw one of the best "rockumentaries" last night. It's the Foo Fighters' Back and Forth.  It just tells the story of the band from the beginning and it a truly engaging story with amazing real life characters.  If you like rock and roll and the transcendent nature of music in general you will appreciate this film.  It is very well put together as it tells a marvelous story.

Here is a description:

A true chronicling of the triumphs and tragedies of the band s 16 year history, BACK AND FORTH chronicles FOO FIGHTERS entire existence: from Dave Grohl s cassette demos to the band forming to play those songs to their ascent to becoming one of the biggest rock bands on the planet--and every Grammy® win and sold out show along the way. FOO FIGHTERS BACK AND FORTH features Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear recalling every stage of the band s existence more candidly and intimately than ever before culminating in a behind the scenes look at the direct-to-analog tape sessions in Grohl s garage that produced the new album, WASTING LIGHT.

You can find it on Netflix.

(Warning:  Many f-bombs.)

Senna - A Review

Adrian Warnock writes:

I more moving film I cannot remember. Senna’s personality is powerfully portrayed. You see a young man infused with a sense of purpose and destiny. He was convinced God had given him this journey. He speaks often in the footage of his relationship with God. As my son pointed out he was far from perfect, for example swearing with relief after one particularly challenging victory. But his determination to achieve the best he could with the talents he had been given is very clear in the movie, and hence inspirational. Every young man needs someone to be inspired by like that. How easy it is to drift through life. How easy to allow others to excel while you are mediocre. We also learned of Senna’s efforts to improve the life of his fellow Brazilians.

Read the rest.

Waiting For Superman - A Review

Waiting For Superman is a truly a remarkable film. Shot with careful narraration, interesting and dynamic cinematography, engaging real-life personalities, and beautiful music, it is no wonder it has won many awards.  Here is a brief description:

Every morning, in big cities, suburbs and small towns across America, parents send their children off to school with the highest of hopes. But a shocking number of students in the United States attend schools where they have virtually no chance of learning--failure factories likelier to produce drop-outs than college graduates. And despite decades of well-intended reforms and huge sums of money spent on the problem, our public schools haven't improved markedly since the 1970s. Why? There is an answer. And it's not what you think. From "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim comes "Waiting for 'Superman'", a provocative and cogent examination of the crisis of public education in the United States told through multiple interlocking stories--from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system. Tackling such politically radioactive topics as the power of teachers' unions and the entrenchment of school bureaucracies, Guggenheim reveals the invisible forces that have held true education reform back for decades.

Some reflections after watching:

I am humbled and grateful that I was raised in an educational system that was, by and large, very healthy.  I have two parents who love me, a school system with teachers who cared about me, and enough resources to enable a wide variety of educational experiences.  This is certainly not the norm.  It's easy for me to sit back and think, "Come on, you just have to work hard and you'll overcome!"  But that is easy to say from the vantage point of a stacked deck.

Having no aspirations is a huge problem.  That is one of the dominant themes in this movie.  There are thousands of high schools in our nation that are simply dropout factories.  These kids just don't care and they don't have the emotional or mental development to see beyond the immediate.  Why?  The answer to that question is far too complex for a movie or blog post to answer but in some ways has to come down to lack of support.  Kids need support.  They are kids.  You leave them alone and they'll just default to stupidity.  Believe me, I know.  I have four of them.  They needs parents.  They need teachers.  More than anything, they just need people to love them and attempt to point them in the right direction.  I had this my whole life and millions of kids in our nation don't.

But kids also need vision.  If all you have ever had modeled for you is single parent families, jobs that do nothing more than kill your soul, and have had very few people shepherd you towards anything different, why would you have aspirations?

Any institution that enables dysfunction needs to be eradicated.  The movie does not paint a very pretty picture of teacher's unions.  As I type this there are thousands of people marching on the capital of Wisconsin for the right to maintain power as a teacher's union.  I'm not sure if there is a one to one connection between the issues with unions in the movie and the issues we are dealing with here in WI, but it is clear that one of the major factors contributing to the decimation of the school system in places like Detroit and Washington D.C. is due to zero accountability for teachers.  The unions hold the trump card over anyone getting fired.  It's called tenure and in most places if you work for two years and are breathing you can get it.

Unions were a great idea when it was a means to protect women from being abused with very low pay.  It is clearly not a good idea when a union serves to protect thousands of teachers who are completely incompetent and ties the hands of anyone seeking educational reform.  Don't tell me "it's all about the kids".  Bull.  It's all about being lazy and getting paid.  There are many poignant scenes in this movie that demonstrate this.  These scenes will break your heart and infuriate you.  The way that the unions are structured right now needs to go.  That is clear.

There is little discussion surrounding the epidemic of fatherlessness in our culture.  This certainly has to be a major contributing factor to the success or lack thereof in any educational system.  It seems to be a bit of a no-brainer that two adults supporting a child is better then one adult supporting a child.   I was disappointed that this theme was not drawn out more in the movie.

A great teacher can change the life of a kid but there are very few that are gifted in this way.  But there are many teachers who are pretty good or above average and couple them with a stable home structure and most kids will thrive.  But place a kid from a single parent family into a system that in many places is designed to protect incompetent teachers and it's not hard to figure out why our kids can't read beyond a 3rd grade level.  The theme of fatherlessness seemed to be missing in the movie and certainly needs to be addressed as a primary factor in the deterioration of our educational system in America.

The Ivey Family

Many of you will have heard of Aaron Ivey because of his music leadership at Austin Stone church and his recording, Between The Beauty & Chaos.  We used the opening cut, "Found", quite a bit at my old church in Albuquerque.  Great song.

What many of you probably don't know is that Aaron and his family recently had a really great short film made about their adoption of an orphan in Haiti.  The film is the story of Aaron & Jamie Ivey trying to get their son home from Haiti following the earthquake.

Here's a link to Aaron talking about the film and adoption.

Here's a link to the director talking about the film.

Click over and watch the film.  It will be more than worth the five minutes of your time.  

Tyson - A Review

A guy at work recently recommended the docummentary on Mike Tyson, approiately called, "Tyson".  He said it was really good and so my wife and I watched it last night via our Netflix subscription.

It was good.  Really good.

The movie is mostly Mike reflecting on his life.   Sounds boring but it is framed in such a way that is rather engaging as he speaks with a refreshing candor and honesty.  You really feel like you can get inside his head and understand what made him tick.

I was too young to really marvel at the level of athlete that he was in his prime but going back and watching the footage that they provided in this documentary gave me a fresh appreciation for how dominate he was in his early career.

The most moving part of the film was his recalling of his relationship with his first manager/trainer/father figure, Cus D'Amato.  Mike would probably be dead or in prison for life had not this man taken Mike under his wing and "discipled" him in boxing.  Christians, who love the theme of redemption, will find this account quite powerful.

I would recommend this documentary as a great work of film-making.  Be warned, Mike's descriptions of his life are quite raw but it gives you a glimpse into the depth of his fear, pain, and struggle that most people deal with and can relate to.

Waiting for Superman

This looks like a very interesting documentary.  Read the review here.

Some New Documentaries

I love to watch documentaries.  My friend Michael Kelley does too.  Today he highlights some new ones that you might want to check out if you are into this type of film making.

"This Is It" - Some Reflections

My wife and I watched this documentary a couple nights ago.  It was very entertaining.  For those of you who don't know, before he died, Michael was planning a huge concert that would play in London for 50 straight nights.  It was going to be the most amazing live show that was ever produced.  After he died they memorialize him through showing the rehearsal footage for the show.  That is what this documentary entails.  He said he wanted to do this final show, with all the classic songs, because his kids were old enough now to appreciate it and he was still young enough to be able to perform at a high level.   This was going to be his curtain call.  His final go around and he wanted to go out with a bang.
Some thoughts:

1.  Michael truly is one of a kind.  What a unique and amazing creation of God.  He truly was a culture defining force and you feel the weight of his power to do this as you watch him in recent form and then recall how he accomplished this in the 80's and 90's.  There have been few people that have walked the face of this earth that were as talented as Michael Jackson.

2.  Based on the footage from the movie you really get the sense that this show was truly going to be the most amazing concert that anyone would have ever been to.  I was sad for all those countless people who put so much work into this spectacle.  I can’t imagine the letdown for them.

3.  The band was freakishly good.  Usually in a huge production like this the band will be using tracks generated from a computer that helps enhance the sound and keep everything together.  Not with this band.  The whole thing was actually live because Michael would improvise certain aspects of the show in the moment as he felt it and band would simply have to watch him for cues and respond.  It was like Michael was the director of this huge orchestra and everyone was looking to him.  As an aside, I enjoyed seeing a female lead guitar play who could absolutely shred.  You don’t see that very often.  In fact, she is the first one I had ever seen.

4.  The opening scene of the movie has many of his dancers talking about what Michael means to them.  These reflections give evidence to serious idolatry but we probably shouldn’t expect any less.  For me, this shone a light on the devastation of the death of Jesus in the lives of his disciples.  For these dancers, Michael was their life and their participation in this show was the pinnacle of their artistic careers.  They would have done whatever he asked is unquestioning obedience.  They worked tirelessly for him and were on the edge of achieving something the world had never seen before.  When he died they would have been rightly crushed.   He was their Messiah and as you watch the movie you can relate to this sense of utter despair that they must have felt.

But Michael Jackson never walked on water.  Michael Jackson never raised the dead.  Michael Jackson never calmed a storm with a word.

Can you imagine who those disciples would have felt as they saw Jesus being murdered?  In a weird way, this movie really helped me get inside the world of the Bible and appreciate my Savior even more. Michael Jackson is going to stay dead and Jesus is alive.

I would highly recommend this movie. Definitely check it out.

Oh My God

His Peace Upon Us Blog:

I’ve only seen the trailer, but I hope I will be able to see the movie. The premise of the movie is simply someone going to 23 different countries asking the question, “What is God?”

Hugh Jackman is in the video and states that if you put a bunch of religious leaders (Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, etc.) at a table he “can’t see them having an argument.” This sentiment sounds great as people try to build bridges between people of different religions, but it is empty and won’t work. They would have arguments (read the New Testament and see how Jesus argued against the religious leaders of his day). My point is that arguments don’t negate peace. In fact, I believe that true peaceful dialogue between people of different faiths depends on having people who will be honest enough to tell someone else that he or she is wrong, but to do it in a respectful, honorable, and loving way.

I’m not offended when someone tells me wrong if he has first listened to me and sought to understand me. I welcome such honesty. It gives me freedom to say what I was already thinking, “You’re wrong!”

Another thing that looks interesting is that the filmmaker doesn’t just ask religious experts. I like the idea of asking regular people about their concept of God.

Mac Documentary

(HT: Los)

I Will Be Watching This Movie

Bigger, Stronger, Faster

This looks like an interesting movie. I love documentaries.

"Bigger, Stronger, Faster" - Watch the trailer here.