Soul-Sickening Movies 2

Christians ought to be the most discerning people in the world. Every piece of media has a lesson in it, whether positive or negative, and only the most discerning person can exegete it. Never will I claim to be so infallibly discerning, but I must try as far as I can.

Up is the most tragic of Pixar's creations, and thus I find it to be their most important. For whatever reason, I found this the most difficult to evaluate of all these movies, so I must credit my dear friend Joshua for his conceptual input.

All Pixar movies feature loss of one kind or another, but Up presents some very real hurts that most everyone experiences. Couched in incredible fantasy (though I suppose no more incredible than any of their other stories), the story's characters seek with all that they are to find approval. Whether this approval comes from a deceased spouse, a distant father, or an overinflated egocentrism is irrelevant. My point is -and must be- that only the Lord's approval is of any import. Dismiss this as clichéd Christianese if you will, but I challenge the reader to find a more significant auditor of personal worth.

I point to Muntz, who spent his entire life on the pursuit of validating his reputation as an explorer and naturalist. This obsession filled him with a cynicism that took place of his ability to develop relationships with other people. What good is a person without community? Consider also Carl, who spent his entire life seeking to fulfill his promise to his wife. Even after she died, he risked everything he had to honor his promise, even if only to a small picture on the wall. Similar object lessons of fruitless approval abound throughout the movie. Never underestimate animated movies as nugatory nihilarians offhand, for you may thereby miss much of great worth.

Avatar rather intrigued me from the first trailer, so I was eager to see it. I was skeptical from the beginning if for no other reason than its strongly Hindu name. I was surprised to find a social justice piece that was basically a sci-fi retelling of the Native American tragedy. My first impulse was to overreact to the apparent affirmative action propaganda and to defend my innocence in the events that happened centuries before my birth. Then I realized that I had committed to sitting in a movie theater for a while, so I might as well make the best of the situation by seeing what I could learn.

In those two hours, I recognized the universality of prejudice and bias. Since I am partially blinded from my position in life, why shouldn't I pay attention to someone whose blindness is different from mine? In other words, because it is hard for me to see the problems of the Europeans' actions in colonizing the New World, why should I not learn from the natives who may have overreacted to the Europeans' flagrant, genocidic evil?

Avatar predictably portrayed the Omaticaya as "noble savages," but their spiritual leader uttered one of the most beautiful and widely applicable moral assessments that I've heard in recent days: "[It is] hard to fill a cup that is already full." Here lies the root of the problem of prejudice. Nearly everyone, regardless of how humble he may think himself to be, is a cup that is either already full or perceives itself to be such while actually being vacuum-sealed and tightly shut.

Australia has similar themes. It has many topics, but since I watched it on the same day as Avatar, my attention was mainly on the issue of social justice. This story was less skewed (and way less fun to watch) than the other, but it was delightful. I fear that some people may refuse it blindly because of its message against racism. {I wrote the following at nearly 2a.m., and because of this movie's relative unimportance, I'm going to leave it alone. Besides, I wrote this in a bit of a rage, so I think it's kind of funny.} "I'm not a racist, and I'm tired of being told that I am." Well, good news, this movie didn't say that you're a racist, it just said that racist acts were performed on a large scale in a particular setting in a particular time. Even though you weren't there, you can still learn from it.

I'm breaking tradition on this one. I want to hear what my readers think about these movies (and my assessments), so I'm opening this up for comments. Happy critiquing!