The Face I Can't Forget

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Cool guys don't look at explosions....

      

SPOILER ALERT!!

I am sitting at my in laws house watching the above movie. 

Now I have always been a keen action movie fan. Despite the crap scripts and easy to guess plot lines, and despite the fact that the main characters always have more muscles than acting talent,watching stuff explode followed by the inevitable witty one liner has always appealed.

So let me say I am more shocked than anyone else to find that this has changed!!

I mean Bruce Willis!? Who can say no to a good Bruce Willis flick??

And yet something is sitting ill at ease with me as I watch cars flipping and the chandeliers falling and the gratuitous use of swear words and the name of Jesus used as a profanity. And not for the reasons you are thinking.

There seems to me to be someone fundamentally wrong with a world that pays millions of dollars to watch a movie that cost millions of dollars to make because it blew up millions of dollars worth of stuff.

Does any one else wince when hundreds of cars are destroyed simply to make a good 30 second shot? Does anyone else consider it an injustice to a country to go into the poorest parts in order to cheaply destroy and rebuild people's houses in order for entertainment? Does anyone think that it is bad form to pick at the worst parts of a country's history in order to create a plot line or a believable villain?

Does anyone else think that the movie industry earns its money by playing of the real world horrors of war, murder, death and destruction? Not to mention the twisted use of sex.

Now maybe I am getting old, or maybe my study has warped my brain, but when I watch people purposely smash into cars I tend to think of innocents who in real life may have had their lives destroyed by uncaring drivers. I watch people get their brains blown out and think of the families that never get to see their loved ones after they have died overseas in war.

Movies like these hold no joy for me anymore. The more real they get the more I am disgusted. The more the cool guys pay no attention to the havoc they wreak, the more angry I become with the industry as a whole.

Movies are our new day colosseum games. We watch the gladiators kill each other in ways that put us right in the ring with them. The reality of what we watch in a movie means we may as well be watching the real thing. The blood splatter, the life like choking of people, the use of people as pawns in a game. 

Why do we need this? What drives our blood lust? What makes us want to watch body bits blown off people? What makes us cheer when the good guy walks away without looking back at the explosion?

I am coming more and more to think that it is our fallenness humans that fuels the movie industry. Our desire for bigger, better, faster. Our drive for sex and violence. Our altruistic tendencies that turn people into objects to be watched. We know it is acting and no one is really getting hurt so we excuse the fact that we are turning war into entertainment, that we revel in true death of the baddy, that we want revenge and not forgiveness to win out in the end. As long as the good guy gets to walk away in one piece we will quite happily forget what he did to the hundreds of people he left in tatters behind him. We want a hero, not a saint, and heroes make things messy sometimes.

There are too many movies out there that sell on sex and death. There are so few stories of real redemption, forgiveness and healing. There are so few stories that show the best of humanity rather than the worst. And as I write this I am watching a man be thrown into the blades of a helicopter instead of being arrested and taken to trial. His daughter is killed too, instead of getting counseling for having a psychotic maniac as a father. Makes my point quite well I think.

*sigh* theology has destroyed my ability to mindlessly watch anything anymore.

I guess I will stick with Despicable Me.

Alex Cross kicks some ass

I am an avid book reader. I can read through an average size 300 page book in a day, stopping for meals, if I am in the zone. And I am in the zone fairly often. These Christmas holidays alone I have read ten novels and a bunch of books and articles for my thesis study. I love love love books.

One of my fav authors at the moment is James Patterson, especially the Alex Cross series. If you don't know them then let me give you the run down (SPOILER ALERT):

Alex Cross is a big black dude. He is over 6 feet tall and built like a mac truck; all muscles. He is a detective who lost his wife to a mindless killer and has got a bit of a saviour complex out of trying to deal with that one. A workaholic, he goes through relationships like they are going out of fashion and seems to be so blinded by pretty woman that, in one case, he doesn't notice that they are a serial killer. 

He loves his kids and his Nana Mama (his grandmother who raised him after his parents were killed), is a Dr of behavioural psychology and attracts psychos like bees to honey. 

He is bad ass.

I love it!

The thing is, my thesis is on morality and ethics in video gaming and the biblical viewpoint on violence in these games. I am being convicted about the glorification of violence and death in media.

So the last time I read an Alex cross novel (about a week ago) I spent most of the time wondering what God thinks of it. I have to admit it, it kinda ruined the experience a tad for me.

Only a tad.

Because when I think about it, Alex Cross hates violence but works with people who are violent and so ends up in situations where violence happens. The great thing about the novels though is it shows the emotional impact that this violence has on him.

Instead of him being the hero who walks calmly away from the destruction all around him, he weeps when his friends die, he goes into shock when he has to kill people, he panics in moments of craziness and protects his family out of desperation more the heroism.

He acts, in short, like a real person would.

And something about this really appeals to me. The violence isn't glorified in the books, even though it is there in bucketfuls, it is more seen as part of a messed up world that people have to do something about.

And when it gets a bit nasty, I just switch off my imagination, or skim read the descriptions.

I am not gonna go to the film.

Firstly, movies ruin books (except maybe in the case of LTR).

9 times out of 10 what the producer imagines from the book is not what I imagined and I come away disappointed. And then I can't read the book again without imagining the producers characters. It annoys me, coz I like to re-read books until the pages fall out!

Secondly, movies glorify  violence in a way that books don't. In a book you can 'hear' what the character is thinking about a situation, 'see' the emotional impact, and grieve with them.

The movie for Alex Cross is going to be a Hollywood extravaganza focusing on the badges getting taken down, the gunfights, and Cross's huge biceps. The books are action filled, the movies will use that.

In the gruesome bits it will show it in detail. My mind is still innocent enough that it can't imagine the scenes that are described in the book, or it does so in a way that it doesn't see it happening to real people. On screen the reality of the violence is that much more real. It isn't imagination anymore, it could have happened to your next door neighbour. And as my husband can testify, I get upset and cry for the families of the extra's  in films let alone the main characters.

And once those images are in my head there will be no getting rid of them. The emotional Alex Cross, who tells his bff Sampson that he loves him, will be lost to me forever.

I am just not prepared to let that happen.