The Sisters Brothers invites us to stare into its funhouse mirror, if we are brave enough.

The full review is featured at RELEVANT Magazine.

Click HERE to read the full review now!

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Table of contents for Best Picture 2012

1. The Help
2. The Descendants
3. Midnight in Paris
4. Why I was Shocked to Enjoy "The Artist"
5. Moneyball
6. Hugo
7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
8. "Tree of Life" is Too Big for One Film
9. Which Film Deserves Best Picture This Year

1. Warhorse
2. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
3. Hugo
4. The Help
5. Moneyball
6. Midnight in Paris
7. Tree of Life
8. The Artist
9. The Descendants

What didn't deserve the nomination

Warhorse

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Hugo

Hugo

The Serious Second Tier

The Help

Midnight in Paris

Moneyball

The Front-Runners

The Artist

Tree of Life

The Descendants

Why The Descendants deserves the win

YOUR TURN: Which film do you think deserves the win? Which films should've been on the list? Which movies do you still have to see?

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Table of contents for Best Picture 2012

1. The Help
2. The Descendants
3. Midnight in Paris
4. Why I was Shocked to Enjoy "The Artist"
5. Moneyball
6. Hugo
7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
8. "Tree of Life" is Too Big for One Film
9. Which Film Deserves Best Picture This Year

Before we get started, let's note that Tree of Life is too big a film to fit inside a review. Writer/director Terrence Malick has crafted a sprawling epic that is at once as intimate as a small-town American family and as large as the whole history of the universe. There's a story, but it's too small for the film - the themes spill over the bounds of the narrative, so watching the film feels closer to walking through an art gallery than reading a book.

Grounded firmly in the Biblical story, Tree of Life explores the ancient question: Why do bad things happen?

The film opens with a quote from the book of Job:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
-- Job 38:4, 7

Here, God is responding to Job, who has spent the first 37 chapters of the book trying to figure out why he suffers, even though he serves God. When God finally shows up, rather than offer Job any concrete, helpful answers, God responds by taking Job on a whirlwind tour of creation history.

So too in Tree of Life. The film opens on Mrs. O'Brien, who receives a telegram letting her know that her second son, R.L. has died (in Vietnam?).  We then meet the oldest O'Brien son, Jack: a business man estranged from his parents (Sean Penn).

Jack's life is consumed by asking why R. L. died, and by extension why Life doesn't happen the way it should.

Malick answers Jack's question the same way God answered Job's: he takes Jack the viewers back to the creation of the world, and we see scene after beautiful, awe-inspiring scene of Life moving forward. We finally land in the Garden of Eden - 1950s Small Town America. Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) as Adam and Eve live the paradise of the American Dream, have three boys and faithfully attend Church.

All the components of our original mythology are there - Adam working the land, Cain and Abel, the Fall from innocence. Expulsion from the Garden. But Malick never lets Tree of Life become a crude allegory. He handles themes without forcing them into the scenes, leaving us always grasping at the meaning, always feeling that the story watching is bigger than the story we're seeing.

We resonate with Mr. O'Brien's agony at the failure of his legalism. We understand Jack's rage at his mother's unwillingness (or inability?) to rescue him from his father's strong hand. We've all experienced loss. These themes make Tree of Life a quintessentially human film.

Our life journeys are always both unique and common. Individual and human.

Jack's journey is the heart of the film. It's his grief, his questioning. We hear his mother's voice early on:

There are two ways through life: they way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.

For Jack, these two Ways are embodied in his mother:

Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.

And his father:

Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way.

Throughout the film we watch Jack struggle between these two poles, these two modes of living, of grasping the world. And we are Jack, children of the first Father and Mother, living with the consequences of their choices. We are Cain, our basically unfair lives unfolding around us. And we are Job, questioning the basic Goodness of the universe. We cry out with Jack:

Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.

In the end, Jack's answer is as ambiguous as was Job's.

But unlike Job, Jack glimpses not just creation history but creation future. Jack sees a Resurrection with his family and all those who comprised his life.

Jack emerges from his vision to a cityscape under a bright blue sky. And his answer is our answer: bad things happen, but the God who is too big for our stories is bringing all things to Resurrection. As Jack's mom promises:

No one who loves the way of Grace ever comes to a bad end.

Bottom Line: Absolutely beautiful and haunting. Worth repeated viewings.

YOUR TURN: What did you think of Tree of Life? What themes stuck out to you?

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This year, Lent runs from Wednesday, February 22-Sunday, April 8.

Who observes Lent?

Christians all over the world participate in Lent, and we have records of Christians observing Lent going back very early in Church history. Lent is a practice that can unite Christians across denominational lines, reminding us that we are all rescued from Death by one God and one Resurrection.

Why observe Lent?

Easter has a tendency to sneak up on us. But we want our celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus to be intentional, to last longer than an hour one Sunday morning a year.

Lent helps us take Jesus' death more seriously, and celebrate his resurrection more fully.

By taking 40 days to examine ourselves, to take seriously the sin in our lives, we become more aware of our need for rescue. Of our inability to save ourselves. So when we come to celebrate the Resurrection, we have a renewed appreciation for our salvation and what it means to live in the freedom Jesus brought us.

This year at our Church

We are exploring the so-called Seven Deadly Sins during Lent. The list of Seven was created by monks to serve as a guide to personal confession. As we work through the Sins, we'll be better able to identify the Sin in our lives. These Seven are the most basic categories of Sin:

Pride, Gluttony, Envy, Greed, Sloth, Wrath and Lust.

The Church Fathers use a tree metaphor. Pride, the original sin, is the root out of which all sin grows. But each of these other sins is a branch from which any number of sins grows. So Envy can give rise to hate, Lust to adultery, Greed to oppression, and so on.

By taking the Seven seriously, we can confront the deep-seated habits of Sin we've developed and overcome them through the power of the Holy Spirit working to renew us.

How do we observe Lent?

Lent begins with a worship gathering on Ash Wednesday. Christians take communion together and receive ashes on our foreheads as a mark of repentance and humility. We begin our season of serious reflection on our sin and its consequences: Death.

Click Here for 40 ideas for practices to do during Lent.

The most common central Lenten practice is the Lenten Fast. There are 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Resurrection Sunday, not counting the Sundays. Christians fast during those 40 days in imitation of Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11).

The fast reminds us that we cannot rescue ourselves, that our salvation comes only from Jesus.

Traditionally, Christians have given up meat, or meat and dairy for the six weeks of Lent. Along with the fast, many Christians follow a daily time of prayer and Scripture reading. Sundays are not part of the fast; we call them mini-Easters, and they are a feast day!

Today, Christians fast from any number of things from the more traditional meat and dairy to desserts or social media. The purpose of the fast is to give up something dear to you, so that its absence reminds you of your total dependence on God.

YOUR TURN: Have you observed Lent before? How are you observing Lent this year? What practices do you find most meaningful?

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Table of contents for Time to Weigh In

1. A Balanced Diet
2. Spaghetti on the First Date
3. Eat Your Veggis!

Download a full manuscript of the talk here.
Download the Discussion Guide here.

What about That Guy?

Whatever it is, it's enough to kill a lot of small groups. So what do you do if you're in a group with That Guy?

Because believe it or not, you need That Guy. You NEED him to thrive.

For the rest of the talk, join us on Sunday, download the manuscript or check out the podcast!

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Click here to read it there!

There's a term in the Academy to describe the space that exists between identities. It refers to that place we find ourselves when the structures, institutions and traditions we've always put our faith in, built our identities upon, fall or are stripped away and we are left… in transition. If you've ever lived that doubt on the other side of faith, you know what I'm talking about.

Academics call it "liminal space". In her new book Still, Lauren Winner simply calls it "the Middle".

Largely thanks to her own writings, Lauren's entire Christian experience has been well-chronicled. Both a well-loved author and a professor at Duke Divinity school, Lauren describes herself among other things as a "professional Christian" (yes, with the appropriate amount of self-awareness).

Recently, Lauren's mother died and shortly after, she and her husband of five years divorced. Both events shook Lauren to her core and she found herself in a liminal space, a Middle, she was not prepared to face. Surrounded by doubts, beset by a sense of failure, Lauren's faith shifted beneath her. In her own words, the Middle is a place where:

The assumptions and habits that sustained you in your faith life in earlier years no longer seem to hold you… This book is about the time when the things you thought you knew about the spiritual life turn out not to suffice for the life you are actually living.

With this, Lauren invites us into her own spiritual journey.

We walk through her Middle with her, experiencing both her disillusionment with her faith and the salvation she finds in the Church.

If that sounds peculiar, it's probably because many of our Church traditions don't focus

too heavily on what happens after we choose to follow Jesus. 

In the American church, we have a long tradition of telling spiritual stories that culminate in conversion, in the narrator’s joining the church, getting dunked in the waters of baptism, getting saved. But… the baptism, the conversion, is just the beginning, and what follows is a middle, and the middle may be long, and it may have little to do with whatever it was that got you to the font.

Lauren's Middle is a terrifying place, if only because there's no rhyme or reason to it. None of the practices she'd found comfort in - prayer, reading the Scriptures, liturgy - offer her any succor. The God she knew and loved seemed silent and absent. Instead of all the joy and contentment we so often associate with the faith-filled life, Lauren faces loneliness and worry as often as not.

Still grasps for faith in a Middle space and discovers a stranger, bigger and more faithful God than we expected.

Lauren finds solace in the larger Christian community, in the brothers and sisters who have walked this journey before her, who have navigated their own Middles. When Lauren confesses her fear of loneliness to her friend Ruth, for instance:

What Ruth says is: Maybe I should try to stay in the loneliness, just for five minutes, just for ten minutes. Maybe the loneliness has something for me. Maybe I should see what that something is.

As Lauren has grown and changed, so too must her faith. She needs a faith that actually applies to the life she's living, to her here-and-now world. Rather than flee from her life, she must embrace it:

You cannot fast if you have not first noticed that you are hungry… It seems to me that Ruth is saying much the same thing when she tells me to sit with the loneliness.

Less a narrative story of her Middle than a collection of thoughts, insights and questions, the book is made to pour over again and again. You'll fill the pages with underlines, the margins with notes. Each short chapter is loaded with insights that don't so much build on one another as weave a rich tapestry of possibilities in the midst of a spiritual desert.

In Still, Lauren invites us into that place beyond Conversion we don't like to talk about: the Middle where the Faith that got us started doesn't sustain us. The practices we once found so meaningful seem empty. The God once so close seems distant, if not absent.

The Middle becomes the End for many, who give up their Faith here. But Lauren dares us to hope that our Faith hasn't fallen away, but rather opened up.

Our Middles are the places we grow up. Where we take responsibility for our own faith. The space in which we take off the training wheels and figure out our faith for ourselves. The Middle is rife with opportunity. The desert holds a surprising variety of life. To borrow Laruen's chess metaphor:

There is a standard repertoire of openings in chess, only so many plausible ways to start a game—the Queen’s Gambit, the Ruy Lopez. But in the middle game, very little is scripted. The middle game is where creativity begins, where tactical daring and subtlety take over. In the middle game, everything is open.

Honest and authentic, Lauren's story isn't exactly a guide for those lost in the desert, but it is a wonderful oasis. Whether you're in a liminal space or you know someone living a Middle of their own, Still makes an excellent traveling companion.

Bottom Line: Still inspires us to make the most of each moment of our spiritual journey, and challenges us to take responsibility for our own faith.

YOUR TURN: Have you experienced a Middle? Where did you find meaning?

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Table of contents for Best Picture 2012

1. The Help
2. The Descendants
3. Midnight in Paris
4. Why I was Shocked to Enjoy "The Artist"
5. Moneyball
6. Hugo
7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
8. "Tree of Life" is Too Big for One Film
9. Which Film Deserves Best Picture This Year

Nine-year-old Oskar Shell lost his father Thomas (Tom Hanks) in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Oskar has Asperger's and in an effort to socialize him, Thomas concocted elaborate quests for Oskar. Unbeknownst to Oskar, the quests had no actual prize - their purpose was solely to force Oskar to interact with the rest of humanity.

In the wake of Thomas' death, Oskar tries to find some meaning or purpose.

Oskar discovers a key - which belongs to someone named Black - among his father's possessions. Oskar's convinced that his father planned one more Quest for him. So he sets out to visit every Black listed in the New York City phone book until he finds the key's owner.

Of course, Oskar can't succeed in his Quest. The goal - a sixth borough of New York City - never existed, and Thomas didn't leave the key for him. That they key was in Thomas' closet at all was a mistake, a fluke, as Oskar finally learns near the end of the film.

The Quest imposes order on the chaos of death. It helps Oskar to make sense out of a tragedy too big to comprehend.

Early in the film, Oskar and his mother clash over Oskar's comings and goings. Oskar's rage demonstrates how desperately he needs his Quest to shield him from his grief. The Quest provides certainty in the face of Death's randomness. His mom (Sandra Bullock) tries fruitlessly to break through Oskar's defenses, to help him to face his grief:

I don't know why a man flew a plane into a building… No matter how hard you try, it's not going to make sense because it doesn't.
It. Doesn't. Make. Sense.

When he learns the key was never meant for him, Oskar's anger and sadness overcome the denial that's been powering his search through the city. Weeping, Oskar destroys everything that's been propping up his illusion - the tools of his quest.

Confronted by the senselessness of his Quest, Oskar finally comes face-to-face with the pain he's been avoiding.

Not until Oskar embraces the hopelessness of his grief that he can heal. He realizes his father isn't coming back. That no matter how much he wishes it did, life doesn't always make sense. That the only way forward is to make the best with what we have.

Oskar finally embraces his mother, rides on the subway and swings - all the things he couldn't do while his father was alive. He marvels to his mom that nearly ever person he encountered had also lost someone or something. Ironically, Thomas' final non-Quest did what the other quests hadn't. Oskar comes out of his shell, overcomes his fears and faces the future less afraid.

It's no secret our culture doesn't face death well. We don't know how to grieve.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close would tell us that we can never make sense out of much of the pain and suffering in our world. Maybe our time would be better spent embracing those still living. Death is the one universal human experience, and at least on this side of the grave, our common grief can unite us as little else can.

Bottom Line: The core themes are solid, but the film as a whole is overly sentimental and exploits rather than builds on the tragedy of 9/11.

YOUR TURN: How well do you think we handle grief? Where have you seen us cling to illusions of stability in the face of uncertainty? Oh, and did you like the film?

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Table of contents for Best Picture 2012

1. The Help
2. The Descendants
3. Midnight in Paris
4. Why I was Shocked to Enjoy "The Artist"
5. Moneyball
6. Hugo
7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
8. "Tree of Life" is Too Big for One Film
9. Which Film Deserves Best Picture This Year

Hugo is Martin Scorsese's first foray into animated, family-friendly fare. An orphan who lives in a train station in 1930s Paris discovers that an old toy-maker who works in the station is actually the famous filmmaker Georges Melies (Sir Ben Kingsley). In his quest to restore a broken automaton he and his father were repairing before his father died, Hugo restores hope to Melies.

Hugo is a love letter to Film. The movie praises cinema's enduring power to bring us together.

We first meet Melies as the nameless toymaker from whom Hugo steals toys so he can repair his automaton. When Melies captures Hugo and obtains the notebook filled with Hugo's father's drawings of the automaton, we have no idea why the notebook reduces Melies to tears. We only know that Melies is a sad, bitter old man.

Meanwhile, we explore Hugo's universe - the train station - with him. Hugo winds all the clocks, acting as a sort of an unseen hormone regulating the station, keeping everything working. Hugo has obviously inherited his father's aptitude for machines, as evidenced when he restores the automaton to fully working order. It draws the scene from Melies' most famous film of the bullet-shaped space ship hitting the man in the moon right in the eye, then signs Melies' name.

Hugo and his new friend Isabelle - Melies' ward - quickly learn the truth of who Melies really is: a famous pioneer in the art of film.

Scorsese's metaphor is fairly transparent: Melies is as broken as the automaton he created so long ago. And Hugo embodies the childlike optimism and idealism that heals the older generations when the wheels of time grind them down. Hugo's affinity for machines is not a love of mechanics. It springs from the same creative impulse Melies once possessed.

In Hugo, Melies sees a much younger version of himself, and this vision becomes his salvation. Though Melies felt the world of film had passed him by, leaving him an old, broken-down, outdated and irrelevant artist. But in adopting Hugo and nurturing his fresh talent, Melies discovers a new meaning for his life he'd long lost.

Melies' fate awaits all of us: no matter how gifted, we'll all eventually be surpassed. Our hope lies in raising up the next generation.

Turning 70 this year, Scorsese is no spring-chicken himself. Hugo masterfully demonstrates his love for the medium to which he's dedicated his life. It's a beautiful, well-paced film, and the two child stars do well enough to support the film. As the Baby Boomers begin to retire, Hugo is a good reminder that if you're not dead, you still have something to offer those coming behind you.

Bottom Line: A solid film that manages to be more than just a love letter to Film, Hugo paints a beautiful picture of what can happen when the generation gap is bridged.

YOUR TURN: Did you enjoy Hugo? Whom are you mentoring? Who is mentoring you?

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Table of contents for Time to Weigh In

1. A Balanced Diet
2. Spaghetti on the First Date
3. Eat Your Veggis!

Download a full manuscript of the talk here.
Download the Discussion Guide here.

Everyone knows not to go out for Italian on a first date - why? Because it's messy! And you want to make a great first impression!

Our culture loves our facades.

For the rest of the talk, join us on Sunday, download the manuscript or check out the podcast!

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Table of contents for Best Picture 2012

1. The Help
2. The Descendants
3. Midnight in Paris
4. Why I was Shocked to Enjoy "The Artist"
5. Moneyball
6. Hugo
7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
8. "Tree of Life" is Too Big for One Film
9. Which Film Deserves Best Picture This Year

Don't let the trailers or posters fool you. Moneyball isn't a baseball movie. Sure, there's some baseball in it, but the film is really about thinking outside the box and daring to risk.

Based on a book about a true story, Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the General Manager for the Oakland A's. After losing in the playoffs to the Yankees in 2001, the A's lose their three key players to teams that can pay them more. Beane realizes that the A's simply can't afford to play the same kind of baseball everyone else played. That system essentially bought players the scouting system deemed best.

Moneyball demonstrates that old scouting system is highly subjective - one scout rejected a player because his girlfriend was ugly, which indicates a lack of confidence! The A's couldn't afford to compete in this system: they had a $38 million payroll compared to the Yankees $114 million. If he wanted to win, Beane needed a different game.

The subjective scouting system - and by extension the whole game - had changed little since the 1800s.

Change comes in the form of young, Yale-educated economist Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Brand has developed a much more complex, scientific way to analyze players. Treating the baseball season much like the stock-market, Brand recommends investing in more underrated (thus cheaper) but consistent players over a roster with a few all-stars. According to Brand, Baseball needs a new bottom line: getting on base.

Bean puts his reputation and career on the line to embrace Brand's new system.

Beane models bold leadership. Everyone hates his decision to adopt Brand's method: his scouts, his manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the fans. But Beane never wavers. He resolutely demands the A's try it his way, and succeeds seemingly on force of will alone.

But Beane had no other choice. His team had been gutted and he couldn't afford new players. His organization can't imagine any other way to run a baseball club. When the scouts refuse to see that they must change, Bean berates them:

If we think like the Yankees in here, we lose to the Yankees out there.

Beane knew that everything either changes or dies. And the game of baseball had become a stagnant, dying sport in which the few very rich teams always won, while everyone else languished in the basement. He hated the system that had turned baseball into such an unfair institution.

Beane's love for the game itself drives him to change it at a basic level.

Before the A's started winning, everyone was afraid Beane had killed the A's. After they started winning - going on to set a new MLB record for longest winning streak, everyone feared Beane had killed Baseball.

Beane didn't kill Baseball. He changed it. What he killed was the established Way baseball had always been managed.*

To those like Beane who were ready for change, "Moneyball" was good news. To those invested in the Established Way, "Moneyball" was a threat. But after the A's 2002 season, no one could pretend that the game hadn't changed.

Moneyball tells the story of how baseball changed. But it's a universal story. Every organization, every institution eventually stagnates. Good leaders learn to think outside the box, to break rules everyone thought were sacred. And like Beane, the change initiators bear the scars of their sacrifices.

For those who love the essence of what they do more than their institutions, the scars are worth it.

Bottom Line: Moneyball is a great film about the high cost - and the inevitability - of change. Oh yeah, and baseball.

YOUR TURN: What did you think of Moneyball? Do you agree that everything either changes or dies? What change have you participated in?

*The film subtly critiques Beane as well. The A's fail even to make it to the World Series, which Beane takes as a failure of his method. But the Red Sox owner John Henry points out that Beane won as many games as the Yankees, but for a fraction of the cost. He sees this as success, but Beane wants nothing less than a Championship. If that is just another form of superstardom, then Beane has not embraced the Moneyball methodology as thoroughly as Henry and Brand have.

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