Category Archives: Movies

The wife and I just got home from a free pre-screening of Evan Almighty, the follow up to the Jim Carrey-starring Bruce Almighty. Our new favorite actor (and has been ever since The Office began running in the States), Steve Carell, stars as Evan Baxter, a secondary character from Bruce, but also one that stole scenes.

He’s now a Congressman. God visits him and tells him to build an ark. See the movie for the rest of the story. Or read your Bible.

As for our experience, I received an email directing me to a website to sign up for a free pre-screening. Free movie? Sure. That it’s a movie we actually wanted to see made it all the better. This review is my small way of paying for the ticket, since the only benefit I can think of for the studio providing a free screening is word of mouth publicity. There were multiple cities with free screenings. Our theater easily filled up.

We arrived 30 minutes early and saw the line…outside of the theater. We joined the line, met up with a coworker from my church, had our hands stamped, our bags checked for cameras, then found our seats. The air was sticky, damp, and hot. Although we were given word that the A/C would come on, it never did. Oh how we suffered.

But the movie made the trickling beads of sweat disappear into a fairly engaging story with ultimately thrilling visuals. If you know your Bible, and this particular crowd did, then you’ll be in on all the jokes. I wonder how more secularly oriented people will take the movie – if they’ll get the jokes.

The morals of the story were well presented and went beyond repeating biblical platitudes into actual, heartfelt words of biblical wisdom. The touching moments are small, but memorable.

The effects, especially the climactic scene (guess what kind of cataclysmic event occurs?), are breathtaking. I felt like I was on the boat…er…ark. It’s worth seeing this movie on many accounts, but make sure you see the last scene on a big screen.

My last thought was this: if an event happened in real life anything like the final event depicted in the movie, it would change a lot more than what the movie shows it changes. At least, I hope it would.

Final words: Go see it.

It’s become de rigueur for television shows, movies, and books to feature unreliable protagonists or narrators, the people who tell you the story, but for whatever reason you know you can’t quite trust their interpretation of the events. One of the earliest and most blatant cinematic portrayals of this is the classic film Rashomon, where the same story is told from three very different perspectives. The stories are not the same, but they’re all true. In the end, the viewer is left to decide what actually happened. This was groundbreaking for its time (1950), but the latter half of the 20th Century exploited this plot device so much, in my opinion, that viewers seldom believe what they see. We’ve lost trust in the narrator. With more than half of the movies or shows I watch, I have to suspend my disbelief every time a new character is introduced (LOST, anyone?), anytime a good guy turns bad or vice-versa (Jericho), or anytime I’m told one thing and shown another (I am Jack’s smirking revenge).

Is this indicative of the culture at large? Of course it is. Television either tells us what to believe or shows us what we already believe about ourselves. Either way, it’s a mobius strip. Our culture has lost trust in its own narrative. Cynical is the word. Are we being told the truth or just what we want to hear? Can we decipher reality for ourselves or does a talking box or a talking head need to do it for us? Where are the people that say what they mean without false pretense?

I’m tired of disbelieving.

[Ironically enough, this has been brought to you by rosaries, beads on a string that help some to believe in a Reliable Narrator.]