Afro Ninja

Don’t ask me how I stumbled across this.

Freaks & Geeks Finale

Kristin and I are mourning the end of a season. Last night we watched the final episode of “Freaks & Geeks.” The series lasted one glorious season. Sadly, it was cancelled just when things were getting really good.

Here’s Netflix’s synopsis (because I’m too lazy to write my own):

Set in a suburban Detroit high school in the early 1980s, this Emmy-nominated drama focuses on the lives of two groups of teens who don’t live in the fabricated, glossy world that most TV shows depict as “normal.” No, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) and her brother Sam (John Francis Daly) live in the reality of being less-than-popular that most Americans remember — or try to forget — about their high school years.

What I appreciate most about the show is the casting. Even the popular kids aren’t all that good looking. I mean – for the most part, they’re all teenagers in real life. This isn’t a bunch of 20 somethings playing kids. I think this contributed a lot to the integrity of the story.

My favorite episode is the one when Sam Weir gets locked out of the boys locker room wearing only a towel. The other boys fianlly open the door. Instead of letting him in, they steal his towel. Maybe one of the funniest streaking scenes ever filmed. Yes – my sense of humor is that base.

Turn Back for Bread

I was telling a friend this morning that, for whatever reason, my grief over our recent miscarriage has illuminated the splendor of Christ in more areas of my life than ever. I have been experiencing what I usually describe as a “brief period of spiritual dryness” for the past 4 years. Lately, my sorrow over my sin has been increasing together with my hunger for more intimacy with Jesus. This word form Spurgeon was like music to me this morning:

“Tell me where you lost the company of Christ, and I will tell you the most likely place to find him. Have you lost Christ in the closet by restraining prayer? Then it is there you must seek and find him. Did you lose Christ by sin? You will find Christ in no other way but by the giving up of the sin, and seeking by the Holy Spirit to mortify the member in which the lust doth dwell. Did you lose Christ by neglecting the Scriptures? You must find Christ in the Scriptures. It is a true proverb, ‘Look for a thing where you dropped it, it is there.’ So look for Christ where you lost him, for he has not gone away. But it is hard work to go back for Christ. Bunyan tells us, the pilgrim found the piece of the road back to the Arbour of Ease, where he lost his roll, the hardest he had ever travelled. Twenty miles onward is easier than to go one mile back for the lost evidence.”

If anyone knows of a song that illustrates this (probably a hymn – but contemporary may be ok), I’d love to host it here (if that’s even possible).

“Shit, fuck, goddamn.”

There’s this scene in the movie Saved that always makes me cry. I was just struck with why for the first time. Upon learning her boyfriend is a homosexual, Mary (Jenna Malone) tries to “heal his sickness” by losing her virginity with him. The intimate encounter yeilds more confusion for the boyfriend and a bun in the oven for Mary. The scene that always gets me is when she gets off the bus after visiting the pregnancy crisis center. Walking past a church, she stops and looks up at the cross on the steeple. The camera looks down on her from the towering height of the cross. Looking up at us, with anger and brokeness, she begins, “Shit. …” The camera begins a slow descent. Mary continues – a little more desperate now, “Fuck. …” Smoothly, gracefully and seemingly intentionally, we continue down toward her until we are face to face. With quiet desperation she closes the scene with a resolute “God-damn.”
The reason this moves me is because the camera movement communicates Christ’s movement in the scene. Mary is hurting tremendously. She’s mad at God, but his compassion is unwavering. “The Cross” in this scene descends toward her despite her tongue. As an on-looker, the camera movement forces me to set aside judgement and honestly engage in this dialogue. I don’t know why I’m posting about this. It’s just something that suddenly struck me and made me cry. I felt like sharing that.

Netflix, The Office, & Huffing Gasoline

While I appreciate both the culture and mission of independant movie renters like Vulcan Video, my enthusiasm over netflix is unwavering. They’ve taken the customer service and selection offered by the mom & pop’s video store of days gone by, pumped it with steroids and speed and posted it online. Even though most people watch a lot of movies, few people have much variety in their rental hsitory. Since signing up for my 3-at-a-time account, my DVD player has seen more documentaries, foreign films, independant productions, and TV series than my blockbuster/hollwyood video excursions have ever yielded. For the uninitiated, “3 at a time” means that, though I am allotted unlimited rentals for my $19.73 per month, I’m able to rent as many as three DVDs at a time.

While not every rental experience is a good one, the diamonds are worth the rough. On her brother’s recommendation, Kristin added the British mockumentary series The Office to our queue. For some reason we recieved the christmas special first. It was hysterical.

“If you’re leading your troops into certain death, you can’t lead them with jokes – can you. They’re not going to say ‘oi – this bloke’s funny, let’s follow him to our certain death.’ No, you tell them ‘Follow me. Why? Because I said so.’ They’ll look at you and say to one another, ‘look at this fella – he’s got good leadership skills – let’s follow him to our certain death.’”

I’ve probably overlooked these discs a thousand times at the store in favor of a new realease or a “sure to entertain” box office hit.

Ok, Ok The Office won two golden globes in 2004 – Best Television series and Best Actor in a leading role. So it’s not some obscure little unknown sitcom. But had we never put it on our queue, we never would have rented it. When I’m renting DVDs at $4 a pop, I want there to be little to no chance of it being a bad experience.

Take Love Liza for instance. We rented it from Blockbuster last night. I know, I know – why rent if we have netflix? We were waiting on two movies and the one at home was some Baby Einstein thing for Jaimes. Yes – we’re that compulsive. We couldn’t wait a day.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favorite actors. I marvel at his ability as an actor, but his characters are very often desperate, broken, losers destined to fail (e.g. Boogie Nights, Happiness, Owning Mahowney). Love Liza is no different. Watch the trailer and tell me it doesn’t look like a light-hearted story about a mentally handicapped man who has lost his wife. Well, I’ll tell you right now – Wilson Joel (Hoffman) isn’t mentally handicapped. But he does huff gasoline and he does lose everything. I went to bed depressed. It was a scary look at a really ugly addiction and a severly hopeless man. The difficult thing about this story is that we’re only told half of it. We don’t know who Wilson was before his wife killed herself. Why she did it, though intriguing, is not necessary information. Not knowing from whence came his downward spiral makes it really difficult to identify with him.

I’d be interested to hear other’s takes on this film.