Film Review: Milk

I struggled to find my voice as I sat down to write this review…
Reviewed by Lesley Carter

“You can’t live on hope alone, but without hope, life is not worth living.”

T

hirty years after Harvey Milk was gunned down in office, his story has made it to the big screen, and at a time when the main cause driving Milk’s political career once again finds itself publicly embattled. Directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn, Milk provides a sensitive, discerning portrait of Harvey Milk’s life and work.

To those unfamiliar with the history, Harvey Milk (Penn) was the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. A half-closeted investment banker in Manhattan, Milk moved in the early 1970’s to San Francisco, where he opened a camera shop. Moved to action by the city’s hostility toward its gay community, Milk decided to run for public office. After three failed campaigns, he was elected City Supervisor in 1977.

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Tags: homosexuality

Film review: Song of a slumdog

The surprising revelations of Slumdog Millionaire
Reviewed by Lesley Carter

J

amal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees. How did he do it?

A. He cheated.
B. He’s lucky.
C. He’s a genius.
D. It is written.

What chain reactions can put you in the right place at the right time? And how do you come to know what you need to know once you get there?

Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Dev Patel, sets about exploring that question via one boy’s meandering life story.

As Slumdog opens, Jamal (Patel) has reached the final question on India’s version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? A slum kid with hardly any formal education, he has nevertheless managed to answer every question correctly. Not convinced that a “slumdog” could possibly reach that level without cheating, the police haul him in for interrogation - because, as the inspector says, “What could a slumdog possibly know?”

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Music review: Mark Kozelek | The Finally LP

On his latest album The Finally LP, Mark Kozelek compiles a collection of material written by other artists, bookended by two previously unreleased instrumentals. Included here are delicate renditions of songs by bands like AC/DC, Low, Husker Du and Dom Leone, among others. Kozelek’s relaxed finger picking interspersed throughout, he offers stripped down acoustic-folk meanderings as foundations for his haunting baritone - a drawl of a voice that cuts delicately across the intimate settings provided in this, and each of his other albums as the frontman for Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon.

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Send in the clowns - a track from The Finally LP

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Throughout these particular tracks, it is easy to detect their raw production - creaking chairs and unpolished vocal tunings dot the diverse, intentionally sparse landscape. Many of the songs end abruptly, as though part of a mix-tape put together by Kozelek himself. And in a sense, this album quickly reveals itself as a novelty compilation for those fans who would be willing to listen to Mark Kozelek sing nearly anything.

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Tags: music, Reviews

Joyful Noise

Book review | The New Testament Revisited

In a generation where anything goes, where universals have become rare in the name of permissive tolerance, what do people really think of the Bible? For many, the view of cosmic law enforcement holds, simply because: “When liberals avoid a debate, they cede the terms… to more conservative voices“, and frequently these voices show up as rigidly fundamentalist - “long on the oppressive, the intolerant and the punitive“.

When the text in question is part of the Bible - written over thousands of years by dozens of authors; and when even today its rightful contents continue to be debated, can its true interpretation really be so static?

Joyful Noise, as edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke is a collection of essays on the New Testament submitted by 21 published authors - “Jews and Buddhists and African Americans and Hispanic Americans and gay people, even a few mainline white Christians“. The main focus was not to be on doctrine; but it was suggested that each writer deal in some way with the text of the New Testament - whether directly or intuitively.

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Film review: Blindness is eye-opening

by Lesley Carter

I bought a ticket for Fernando Meirelles’ film Blindness with jumbled expectations.  Not having read the book (by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago) that the film was based on, I expected at the least a decent suspense-thriller and at the most a sort of commentary on collective ignorance.

What I found instead was a bleak, jarring allegory about how the “able-bodied” world treats the truly helpless.  I don’t know how much the film resembled the author’s original idea, but I think the end product offers worthy discussion points, particularly for today’s church.

The plot, in short, is this:  unexplained blindness begins to spread through the population like a virus.  As more and more inexplicably lose their sight, one woman (Julianne Moore) remains strangely unaffected.

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Serve God, Save the Planet

 Book review | a Christian Call to Action

The content mind is one of the greatest obstacles to a

rich spiritual life…

I

f you’ve ever wondered how much your faith is affected by your culture, this book is worth taking a good look at. The author is J. Matthew Sleeth, MD - a former emergency room director and chief of medical staff - who has written of his own personal experiences in the ER, and his family’s responses to local environmental issues with worldwide repercussions.

Serve God, Save the Planet is a well written, thought provoking work that will undoubtedly leave readers unsettled. It covers such varied topics as possessions, media, energy consumption, Christmas, stewardship and health care - not as insurmountable problems; but as areas in which Christian individuals and families can, and should make a difference.

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