The trailer for the new movie, Little Boy, worries me. I can’t tell if it’s setting up a story that cautions an audience willing to believe that faith can be measured in specific acts and feelings or panders to such an audience. This review doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it does imply that the faith of the boy relates to the dropping of the bomb by the same name. Maybe if they had released the film on August 6 for the 75th anniversary of the leveling of Hiroshima, we would have all gotten the connection.
Heh.
I gather the movie is heavy-handed enough to need more explanation–still some people need things spelled out, you know.
Tony Woodlief, author of the concept “Dreadfully Wholesome,” linked to an old article of his, in which he describes common sins of the Christian writer: neat resolutions, one-dimentional characters, sentamentality, and cleanness. On this last point, he says, “In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.”
The point, of course, is not to mix a little filth into our current shallow stories. Little Boy is PG-13, I believe, because it shows some of the horrors of war and uses some contextual bigotry. It may even have smoking! That’s a letter grade drop all on its own. The point, though, is to think honestly and depict reality appropriately.
A strong example of this is the recent movie, Something, Anything. I saw it on Netflix Instant a few weeks ago at a friend’s recommendation. Justin Chang summaries it nicely as having a “dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, between the pleasures of a comfortably middle-class existence and the rewards of an introspective, examined one.” This is not a heavy-handed movie at all. In fact, there’s a touching scene in the middle that clearly shows the disconnect between two main characters. Viewers might overlook that scene because one says anything, but that appears to be the tension point between them. The husband picks up his wife’s journal, exposing him to her struggling cry to God, but he just puts it back down and walks out of the room. He doesn’t know how to talk about that.
If you watch Something, Anything, let’s talk about it here. It’s beautiful, quiet film without common sins listed above.
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