I still love Juliette Lewis

Cast member Juliette Lewis signs autographs at the premiere of The Switch at the Arclight theatre in Hollywood, California August 16, 2010. The movie opens in the U.S. on September 2. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni (UNITED STATES)Content © 2010 Reuters All rights reserved.

And there's always Jennifer...

Sadie, 3, explains death by sword

We were watching the end of "The Count of Monte Cristo" on the ABC Family channel as we waited for "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" to begin.

I had forgotten how violent "Count" is. At the end, Jim Caviezel's character thrusts a sword through Guy Pearce's character, who then falls to the ground, impaled.

Sadie, 3, saw this, but she had a rather enlightened response.

"That's not good," she said. "God said we can't do that."

Relativism, theism as my daughters watch 'Star Wars' for the first time

Maggie, 8, watched most of Star Wars for the first time last night, but she was too tired to finish the movie, so she went to bed.

As I type this, she is watching the movie, again, from the beginning, with her sisters, Audrey, 6, and Sadie, almost 3 — although in fairness to this father, my wife and I believe the latter will fall asleep shortly.

I read the opening to Audrey — the scroll of words across the stars — so she could follow the basic story line. And I watched the beginning with them. I was explaining that the Storm Troopers were not androids or robots, but people in armor, and that they were bad guys.

Maggie, 8: “They’re not bad guys, they just believe different things.”

Audrey, 6: “The good guys believe in God.”

Wow! We’ll talk through this later.

-Colin Foote Burch
Check out:

Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters

I liked 'Shooter'

I didn’t know until the opening credits that director Antoine Fuqua’s movie Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg, Danny Glover and Kate Mara, was based on Stephen Hunter’s novel Point of Impact. Hunter is the Pulitzer-winning movie critic at The Washington Post, formerly of The Baltimore Sun.

I had read Point of Impact several years ago, and subsequent books based on the central character, Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger, played by Wahlberg. I knew the basic plot, including the surprise at the end, so I immediately was thrown off-balance with the inevitable question: Is this movie going to work for me?

I loved it. It’s an entertaining, gut-level movie about survival and justice, and it basically does right by its source – a good indication being that Hunter showed up at the premier.

Wahlberg’s Swagger holds together and never slacks within a fairly tight pace, except the character, approached through the film, is missing some dimensionality, some echo of internal vibe. In the novel, Swagger was haunted and bitter. In the film, Swagger experiences tragedy and has an immediate need for survival, but he doesn’t have the haunted, bitter inner world. In Three Kings, one of my favorite films, Wahlberg’s character wanted to get gold, and wanted to get back to his wife and infant daughter, so he came off as a convincing character. Even in The Departed, Wahlberg’s character seemed to have more layers, and he was only a supporting actor. In Shooter, as much as Wahlberg’s Swagger liked his dog, even the pooch didn’t appear to be a motivating factor. He’s just executing the plot line, not totally two-dimensional, not quite three-dimensional.

A slightly chubby Michael Pena understood the novel’s character Nick Memphis, the FBI failure whose chance meeting with Swagger changes the lives of both characters.

If I say too much about Danny Glover’s role, it might be a give-away. I’ve never seen him play this type of role.

You know the constructed world of the film has a moral compass when bad guy Ned Beatty, playing a senator, says, “Truth is what I say it is!” Then again, as Swagger’s actions imply, when the powerful put themselves above the law, vigilante justice works just fine.

The political undertone of the movie has taken a hit in some conservative circles. They have some points, but maybe I don’t care because I don’t go to Hollywood movies for political or historical accuracy.

I tagged some glitches in the film:

1. As Swagger shops in a general store in Lynchburg, Virginia, highly attractive, fashionably dressed women pass through in the background, and they just don’t seem like they would be the norm in a Lynchburg general store.

2. A steel-mesh hanging basket in a kitchen scene with Mara holds fruit that looks way too fake.

Cool parts:

1. The first scene with Sarah Fenn (Mara); ga-ga.

2. What Swagger did with a bottle of water, salt, sugar, and some kind of culinary implement apparently used for injecting turkeys.

3. A ghastly contraption the bad guys attached to Memphis.

4. Big-ass explosions.

I saw this movie in the best cinema around, at Colonial Mall between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach. The old cinema at the mall was terrible. Then someone came along, tore the old place to the ground, and rebuilt with stadium seating, top-notch digital projectors, and a thunderous sound system. Better still, it’s about a half-mile from my house.

Apocalypto now

Mel Gibson directed social and anthropological layers into his presentation of the Mayan city in Apocalypto, a film unlike anything I have seen before.

I won't give away much here; let me just tell you what Gibson has accomplished from the standpoint of his craft. Socio-economic classes and religious perspectives vary among the people in the scenes set in a Mayan city. The equivalents of present-day Pentecostals and Episcopalians, as well as the lower and middle and upper classes, and the public manipulators and the true believers, are all readily discernable, even with the subtitles on the screen and the busyness and grotesqueness of the city scenes. Volumes are communicated with subtle gestures between socially important characters during a scene in which a solar eclipse frightens many within the city. Some were thinking about angry gods; others clearly knew something of the solar system's calendar. A complicated society is made easy to grasp, while never simplistic.

With all this depth of vision throughout the film, it almost seems too normal to see action sequences that fall back on common conventions, even if those sequences are flawlessly portrayed. I mean, how many times have we seen some variation of the good guy sliding across the ground to snatch a much-needed weapon in perfect choreography with the bad guy? Yet the scenes tighten with primal fear.

It's too bad Gibson brought the spotlight onto his alcohol problems and his feelings about Jews just months before this film was released. Of course, he said he was sorry, and I believe he's sincere (how could he have worked among the diversity of Hollywood and made it so far if he was a full-blown bigot?). Still, many will hold those incidents against him and choose to skip Apocalypto, which is an undeniable work of cinematic art, a display of profound artistic vision.

I'm in awe of the guy.