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Having turned in Raven’s Ladder, I’m excited, exhausted, and eager to enjoy what little bit of summer remains. I’ve spent these beautiful months laboring over a hot laptop to finish the third book in The Auralia Thread, and I hope to read some great books and see some great films (not to mention eat great meals and spend time with great people) to re-fuel.

So, here’s an assortment of news, links, and highlights from my re-entry into “the real world.”

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Lo… the Dawn Treader…

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Today’s unexpected notes from the team at Christianity Today have been a tremendous blessing to me at the end of a trying week. I am deeply grateful.

And thanks to those of you who left comments for me there as well. All I ever did was ramble on, ad nauseum, about an art form that I love. That it has come to anything at all is powerful evidence, to me anyway, that there’s a creative, resourceful God in charge of things. I’ve learned as much from my colleagues and readers on this journey as I have from the filmmakers. And I still have so much more to learn.

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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The news of an upcoming director’s cut of Ride With the Devil prompted me to dust off this 1999 review. Reading through it again, I realize how much I want to see this film again, and if I recall correctly, the theatrical version felt like a studio’s abridgment of a promising project.

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Most war films on the big screen amount to little more than a championship sporting event. We are introduced to an oversimplified conflict. We meet the hero, a tall strong and handsome man who will fight for what he believes in, if necessary. He’s a hero because he believes in the same things we believe in. And then, when the bad guys get nasty and force him into battle, we cheer when he scores a point, we weep when the things that he loves are damaged or killed or burned down. And then we hold our breaths, hoping that he wins in the end. If he is required to sacrifice himself, we weep.

This is the stuff of myth, legend, and adventure storytelling for as long as stories have been told. It’s a simple ethic: We like it when the good guys win.

But in real life, it is dangerous, hard-hearted, and foolish to see things in so cut-and-dried a fashion. Human beings are far more complicated. I challenge you to find a war in the real world where everyone fighting for the “wrong” cause is a vicious, evil creature, whose death earns the cheers of the audience. If we are to “love our enemies”, then we should learn that on either side of something so great as a war, there are people motivated by misconceptions of the truth, people doing right and wrong. We must hate the sin and love the sinner, acknowledging that we are probably not seeing the whole picture clearly, but war films are usually fashioned to make us hate the sinner, so we can exult in their defeat and our justificiation. In truth, there is something to mourn, something tragic about every death, in every army. There will be some who kill for sheer hatred … on either side. There will be some who fight because they fear losing those they love…on either side.

This reality makes war something far more serious than Hollywood likes it to be. War is something about which we should never cheer. It should always leave us hollowed out, grieving for those on both sides.

Ride with the Devil is Ang Lee’s perspective on the U.S. Civil War. It is a rare and wonderful film in that it never crosses over to show us the lives of men in the Union, the side for which audiences usually cheer, the side that is “right.” Of course, slavery was a blight to our nation. Of course, the slaves deserved to be free.

But there was much more to life in the South than slavery. And Lee is interested in looking at the lives of the men who fought there, the bushwhackers, those who didn’t join the formal military effort but crept about with rifles shooting down the Unionists who ventured anywhere near their loved ones, their homes. They may have been irresponsible, misguided, lacking in the nobility to strive for a broader sort of freedom. But who doesn’t understand the motivation to defend one’s family?

Tobey Maguire is Jakob Nordell, the young son of a German immigrant who finds himself fighting for his friends and loved ones in the South, while his father serves the North. Nordell rides with Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), his lifelong friend. They team up with a pipe-smoking, well-dressed bushwhacker named George Clyde and his companion, a black man named Daniel Holt. Holt is a former slave who has a secret and strong bond with George that compels him to fight for the South in spite of what it means for others of his skin color. In this company, Nordell finds himself the only man not fighting out of passion, but rather out of a simple and self-interested desire not to be pushed around or told what to do.

Soon, they come to find a sort of headquarters, or at least a home base, at the house of a Southern family where young Sue Lee Shelley (Jewel) has just been widowed. Under the care of her parents, she tends to the wounds of the troubled bushwhackers. Jewel’s performance is a pleasant surprise; she brings a delicate touch to a character with admirable resilience. While Sue Lee’s heart rises to the romance of Jack Bull Chiles, her interaction with Nordell becomes one of the turning points in Nordell’s development of true convictions.

This is not the usual Civil War tale of learning to respect a man regardless of his race; it is more ambitious than that. It’s about how true freedom comes from love, from respect, and from self-sacrifice. Most popular American films champion the individual’s will to do what they want, to follow their heart. War films like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan do show brave men giving themselves for freedom, but don’t explore what freedom truly is. “Freedom” is all too often explained as “my right to pursue happiness and I’ll knock down anybody who gets in my way.” If the character is charismatic, he’s a hero, and we want him to be happy. If he’s nasty, who cares about his right to be happy? Off with his head! In the end, it isn’t freedom in a large sense, but merely “survival of the coolest” that seems to matter in American movies.

Ang Lee’s films consistently present the damage done when we concern ourselves only with our own personal liberties. The hero of Sense and Sensibility was a selfless man with a loving heart, and the trouble began when a naive young woman equated love with infatuation and fantasy. In The Ice Storm, he showed us the disintegration of families as parents pursued their invidual right to happiness in sexual infidelity. In Brokeback Mountain, we watched as one man’s pursuit of a self-centered fantasy brought about destruction in his family. In Ride with the Devil, Nordell needs to learn to fight for something larger than his own dislike of being told what to do.

While this is definitely Nordell’s story, Holt is every bit as much the focus of our sympathies and our attentions. He is a marvelous character, well-played by Wright. He is mysterious, loyal, brave, full of subtle humor, and most importantly not a spokesman for an idea or a side. How refreshing, to find an African American character in a Civil War movie who is more than just a representative for the oppressed. He is a well-rounded individual who has his own complicated thoughts and motivations.

The Southerners are obviously uncomfortable with Holt because he is not exactly a slave. But their respect for Holt’s friend and protector George Clyde gives him the benefit of the doubt, and they leave him be. For a while.

This is an inspiring, rewarding war movie, and timely. In recent years, our government has oversimplified complex conflicts and encouraged support for military efforts by dehumanizing whole cultures and nations. We’re going to be paying the price for that for a long time. Any great war film will prod us to mourn for both sides of the battle, and to hope that someday all of these events will work together for good for all of the people caught in this quagmire.

Mosey on over to Filmwell, pull up a chair, and let me serve you a heaping plate of Caille en Sarcophage.

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You may have read my first impression of Joe Henry’s Blood from Stars, which I typed with trembling hands a while back. This music seized my attention and has refused to let go. I’m reminded of how Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy took over my life when it was released.

Well, now you can listen to the album in its entirety thanks to NPR.

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Note (2009): Looking back at this review, now eight years old, I can remember the excitement I was feeling as I began to discover great Asian filmmakers. Zhang Yimou is one of the filmmakers responsible for expanding my horizons and introducing me to a quality of art that made my life richer. I recently wrote an article for Image about my favorite discoveries in this journey. I remember the giddy enthusiasm I felt writing this review, even though films like this led me to far more thrilling discoveries. I’m still very fond of this film.

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You’ve heard critics, audiences, and me rave on and on about the special effects stirred up this year by Steven Spielberg (A.I.), Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park III), Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) and the folks that made Final Fantasy. Nothing was on the calendar that looked like it could come along to top these films for spectacular visual wizardry.

Well, leave it to the Greatest Set Designer of All to come along and top everything else out there. That’s right. Just call God this year’s Oscar winner for Best Special Effects. With the help of storyteller Zhang Yimou and cinematographer Hou Yong, The Road Home treats us to eyefuls of some of the most dazzling and vivid landscapes, colors, designs, and details that the silver screen has had the privilege to display.

The Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern), is a simple love story set in a rural and remote area of China. The story follows a young woman, Zhao Di, who falls for the town’s new schoolteacher, Luo. Her yearning is so intense that she waits by the road after school just to watch him walk some of the children home. She hopes to impress him and win his heart.

We know that they will be married, because most of the movie is narrated by their son, who promises to share with us the story of their legendary love for each other. The movie opens with the son coming home from his busy life in the city. He comes to bury his father, and finds his mother quite properly heartbroken. She is sitting outside the schoolhouse, mourning him in the midst of a bitter winter wind. We wonder how she can stand it. But then the son takes us back in time, telling us the tale. The movie turns to color.

We are introduced to the storyteller’s mother as a young woman, played perfectly by the increasingly impressive Zhang Ziyi (the young tigress of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Zhang’s marvelously restrained work gives us a unique character without speaking more than a handful of lines. She uses her dark, beautiful eyes to draw us into a very private world of fear, admiration, infatuation, and frightfully deep emotion. Lonely but dutiful, she lives out her days caring for her aging mother and wondering about her future.

There is little explanation about why her heart clasps on to the schoolteacher so powerfully; we are told it is his voice. Perhaps that’s all we need to know. Actor Zheng Hao is certainly charming as the young bachelor, and I would have liked the movie to spend more time with his character. But it is clear, in his brief time onscreen, that he possesses an integrity and a spark that sets Zhao Di’s heart on fire.

True love is difficult to explain. It is so much more than the surface-level swooning of prime time soap opera. My wife often asks me, bewildered, why I love her, and I find myself groping for the same insufficient explanations for the powerful force that draws me to her. Similarly, I can’t fathom what draws her to me. Ziyi portrays Zhao Di’s passion with a quiet power, reminding me of Juliette Binoche in Kieslowski’s Blue, whose face filled the screen silently for most of that incredible film. She is quickly becoming, like Juliette, one of my favorite screen actress; you can’t take your eyes off of her. By the end of the film, we will know just how much this woman endures out of love… how her feelings make her seemingly oblivious to the deadly power of the elements.

There’s not much more to tell, really. It’s such a simple tale that afterwards you can’t quite figure out where 110 minutes went.

If you’ve read this far, then I probably don’t have to persuade you of the value of expanding your horizons to enjoy contemporary Asian cinema. Most readers probably skipped over this review when they realized this movie wasn’t going to have chases, kidnappings, and sensual sex scenes. That’s too bad. The Road Home does have a chase scene as breathtaking as anything in Run Lola Run. And it also has so much of what is lacking in American movies. It possesses a patience that allows the camera to discover moments that are miraculous, things that the rapid-cut editing of Hollywood movies will never notice. It also knows that characters can say as much in silence… in fact, more… than they can when they’re machine-gunning dialogue.

When was the last time you saw a movie that kept you glued to the screen, and told you about the value of honoring your parents? Or when were you last reminded that the elderly are full of the same passions, stories, yearnings, and surprises that the young and the restless possess? When did you last hear a story about a love so strong that it would keep a person standing by the road through a life-threatening blizzard? In comparison, the silly lovers’ games of American comedies and dramas seem frivolous, petty, and not very resilient.

The movie would be just a big sappy valentine if it weren’t for the director’s relentless attention to the small, physical details of these lives. We are so accustomed to things made in factories, things made in vast quantities. We are so accustomed to speed. We are used to throwing things out when they break and buying a new one. The Road Home swims against that stream. We watch a scarf made as a woman works a loom. The red threads are stretched out like taffy, poured like honey, the reddest reds you’ve ever seen. We watch… and this is my favorite scene in the film… a pottery repairman do his work with intricate tools that are primitive and homemade, and yet they are precise and rather miraculous in what they accomplish.

If I have any misgivings about the film, they are due to the strength of the love on display. This woman loves this man fiercely. But is there anything left for her if he is gone? What if Luo hadn’t returned Zhao Di’s love? Would life be meaningless? I am always hoping for a happy ending in such stories, but since I was assured that these two would end up together, I found myself troubled at the idea that their happiness was so dependent on the other person. When we make our own peace dependent on another flawed human being, we’re building our house on shifting sand.

Still, in this age of marriages built on conditional love, I’m moved by Zhao Di’s love, such a powerful demonstration of fidelity and devotion. And when the son carries his father’s body down the long road to his home, it is a beautiful picture of honor and respect. It’s a rare thing, to see such virtues blazing on the big screen, when most movies define love in shallow, frivolous expressions.

The more I explore contemporary Asian cinema, the more grateful I become. It reconnects me with things that matter, and shows me that great art is still possible on the movie screen, no matter how much American movies try to prove otherwise. For the way it gave me room to ponder all that it suggested, for the gift of its colors, and for the sometimes-delicate, sometimes-ferocious performance by Zhang Ziyi… The Road Home is easily one of my favorite films in this great big-screen year.

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Andy Goldsworthy is something of an enigma. He is, above all, an artist. He’s is not focusing on pleasing the audience with a performance; he’s exploring questions by making things, with careful attention to excellence, truth, and beauty. His creativity is an investigation.

For those who take the time to look, there are vast rewards. As we watch him work, we enjoy not only the suspense of “How will it end?”, but the added suspense of knowing that even the person in charge doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time is Thomas Riedelsheimer’s quiet affecting documentary on the life and work of an artist quite worthy of our attention. Goldsworthy is unique in many ways. He works in a unique fashion—piecing fragments of nature together into exhibits that express the mysterious and fragile balance of the environment in which he constructs them. But he’s also a refreshing surprise for audiences who have been taught at the movies that artists are primarily drunkards, promiscuous, spouse abusers, drug-abusers, and half-crazy.

Well, okay, maybe he’s a bit crazy.

He does lie down, motionless, throughout a rainstorm, letting the water run across him until it stops. Then he gets up and, presto, he’s left quite an impression.

He spends day after day trying to assemble impossible stacks of crooked, slippery rocks before the river rises to wash them away.

But that’s the wonder of Goldsworthy’s work: he envisions something that seems to defy the laws of nature, and then he just goes for it. And, more often than not, he proves that it is possible. “I enjoy taking a work to the edge of collapse,” he admits.

That’s where the suspense in Rivers and Tides comes from: We watch the effort involved in putting the pieces together, and we feel that exquisite pain when a nearly-finished work suddenly shatters, breaking under a mere breath of wind. He builds complex, gravity-defying walls by joining the tips of twigs; he builds a precariously balanced column of stone that becomes the submerged secret of a rising river; and he braids leaves into long colorful ribbons that wind their way down rivers into oblivion. Goldsworthy is a living testament to the rewards of patience, ambition, attentiveness to and respect for the natural world.

Rivers and Tides gives us an array of scenes and interviews that challenge us with ideas about the relationship between a Creator and his Creation. Just as I’ve begun to worry that a generation is growing up without any idea of the difference between an artist and a crowdpleaser, here is a film that makes that distinction undeniable. Further, as an amateur novelist myself, I am humbled by Goldsworthy’s long-suffering commitment to his work and attention to detail. Even though it is true in any artistic medium, Goldsworthy’s work makes it painfully clear how one misplaced stone can upset the balance of an entire project.

The film also suggests what a wonderful world it could be if we really looked and listened for the language of creation. After this film, I understood better what Scripture is saying when it claims that the mountains declare the Glory of God. These stones do speak, and Goldsworthy teaches us how to listen to them; with touch, with patience, with feverish attention, with playful curiosity. He poses questions to twigs. He challenges boulders. He tests the abilities of balls of red clay in a pool of slow water.

Goldsworthy does not present himself as a Christian, or even particularly interested in God. In fact, his contemplative monologues about his own thought processes have annoyed some of the critics who have written about the film. (After all, the first rule of art is “Show, don’t tell.”)

But Goldsworthy is not one of the innumerable practitioners of New Age psychobabble. He admits his limitations with the spoken word, and often breaks off in mid-sentence, surrendering his attempt to describe what a work means to him. He would rather let the work speak for itself. If the film has a weakness, it is that Riedelsheimer includes too many of these insufficient speeches, and the film feels about ten or fifteen minutes too long.

But as long as the camera stays focused on the work of this visionary Scot, the stuff that happens under his muddy fingers is riveting cinema. The first glimpses of his achievements often inspire a feeling akin to what Moses must have felt when he first stumbled onto the burning bush. Goldsworthy’s not playing to our appetites. He’s aligning things in a frame to draw attention to things we’ve never noticed, things that surprised him too. You can’t help but want to see more. You’ll want Goldsworthy to come over and show you the hidden wonders of your own backyard. And I’m sure he’ll inspire a large crowd of imitators and disciples who will go running into the woods looking for undiscovered patterns, relationships, and places to try out their own hunches.

His work reminds us of an artist’s true focus: a meditative commitment to play, to discovery, and to the celebration of God’s own inventions. It is also a useful metaphor for our lives. Given the short time we have before the tide submerges us, what are we making of our years? What symmetry, what order, what surprise, what balance, and what light are we allowing to shine through before the inevitable, exquisite collapse? And have we developed a sense of the essence that goes on after that shattering? If life is all about survival, what is the point of (to borrow a phrase) all this useless beauty? Whom was it designed to delight, deep in the woods, under the earth, where no human being will ever notice it?

[I'm posting this again, because I have a better link for you. You can get the book straight from the Image office now.]

Congratulations to Image journal for twenty years of standard-setting work.

In the territory where art and faith intersect, no publication has produced a more profound body of work, nor boasted such an accomplished roster of writers and artists.

Check out Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image, the beautiful, “best-of”, hardbound anniversary volume. I have a copy already, signed by several great contributors. (more…)

Just an FYI:

Due to my present overload of writing responsibilities and other various pressures and stresses, I’ve decided to surrender my participation at CT Movies. My latest Through a Screen Darkly column, “Feasting on Films”, will be my last contribution there for the foreseeable future (although I certainly won’t close the door, as circumstances may change). (more…)

Yes, I am saddened by the news about director John Hughes’ sudden death of a heart attack today. He was only 59, and might have had (more…)