Taken

I just went and actually spent money to go see a moving picture in the place with the really big TV and all the strangers loudly eating popcorn. The movie was Taken, and it was simply magnificent.

First, the disclaimers: the movie deals with girls being sold into the sex trade, and there are a few scenes that pushed the envelope in that arena (two scenes of girls being displayed in skimpy clothing come to mind), but it was done in a way that was the opposite of titillating: it was, to be honest, more reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons than anything else. It was designed and effectively used to build up a very real hatred of the villains.

Also, there is an off-color joke in the beginning of the film, but one that would go over the heads of most younger viewers, kinda like when Holly watched Lady and the Highwayman and thought that "Carnival of pleasures" included a merry-go-round and cotton candy. There is a smattering of language, noticeable at the same time as the joke. This was the most awkward part of the movie, as it develops the lead character in a great rush: ex CIA, trying to reconnect with his daughter, to whom he has been a real jerk of a non-father. This section lacks continuity, but rapidly smooths itself out, and is not that bad anyway: it isn't to the point of distraction, it just doesn't have the same finesse as the rest of the movie.

Finally (on the objection front), is the most serious of the objections, and the only one that I could see actually posing a real problem: the ethical question of some of the violence used. The vast majority of it was necessary, and was done tastefully, not graphically. But there were a few parts where Neeson fudges the line between combat and simple brute violence to get done what needs to be done. The gray areas are absorbed into the white, and it is something that should be taken into consideration.

With that out of the way, let me say that I loved this movie, far more than I thought I would. The characters are developed so that we actually care about them, instead of the usual mild warm and fuzzies that we have toward the victims, we have a real sympathy and connection with the somewhat gangly, emotional and almost awkward daughter wearing lo-top converse with shorts on under her summer dress as she ecstatically tackles her dad in a very sweet scene. We respect and like Neeson, as he rapidly adapts to any situation, and uses his connections to try to give his daughter whatever he can, and we understand his ex-wife (which I had not expected).

Then, the movie takes off. Neeson is shown to be a very calculating beast of a man willing to do anything, to break any rule to recover his daughter. The phone conversation will become infamous, though to be honest, it could have been improved. The action picks up, the crooked cops, the hunting, the fighting, the interrogations, and the all-out war: "You don't remember me. We spoke on the phone two days ago. I told you I'd find you..."

It is brilliantly done, and is a very sweet movie in a very odd way. Neeson's magnificent voice and commanding presence make the movie what it is, as does the daughter's naive sweetness. It was a great, fun movie. It wasn't pretentious, and, incredible for it's genre, managed to (mostly) suspend disbelief through the one-man holocaust that is visited upon the evil sex-traders.

And, topping it off for me, it had some very satisfying scenes: the spotter that "got away," the rather expensive electric bill, the personal touch in an elevator, and the negotiation on a boat were all times when I felt like applauding, and the random guy sitting next to me felt like moving a few seats down.

Very fun, very good, and a very needed break. I highly recommend this movie.

Nice...

"I'm not gonna lie to you. If you want to make an omelette, you gotta kill some people."

Wilson

Taken from: www.dougwils.com

Unless They Don't Need It
Topic: Parable

Once there was woman who would get overwhelmed with her housework from time to time. She was industrious, and not lazy at all, but there were times when it just got away from her. Her husband was considerate and thoughtful, and so he surprised her one day with the news that he had hired someone to come in every Tuesday to clean for her, to help her keep on top of things.

She was very grateful, at least in terms of what she said, but he did not notice the look of reserved and quiet panic in her eyes.

The following Monday when he came home from work, he noticed that the house was sparkling and his wife exhausted. "What happened?" he asked. "Did she come a day early?"

"No," she said. "She will be here at 8 tomorrow morning."

"Why?" he said. "This place is spotless."

His wife looked indignant. "You don’t expect that I would let someone else see the house in the condition it was in, do you?"

"Umm," her husband said.

And so it is with everyone who won’t get help unless they don’t need it.

Confession

I confess: not only did I watch the Super Bowl, but I actually enjoyed myself. But don't worry: I'll wear my hair-shirt for a month as well as increasing the self-flagellation from one hour to two.

More Great Music

I should have more nights where 350 pages of reading is assigned: I get so much more posting done. A magnificent album that is very worth the price I paid for it eight years ago is Don Potter's Facing the Wall. It is instrumental, and possibly not for everyone, but is a display of absolutely magnificent guitar music in various genres. It has crept into almost every playlist that I have, and I've yet to tire of it. Terrific album. Click on my title.

Great Music

The Shoemaker Brothers are a band that is fairly local to our Moscow area, though they will be touring the west coast shortly. Their music is acoustic rock in the best sense: violins (yes, that's plural), guitar, piano and drums or bass. Each of the four brothers plays all of the above instruments, and that quite well. The vocals are in some places iffy, and in others downright distracting, but all in all it is very worthwhile. Click on my title for their link.

Hermeneutics: "Apocalyptic"

Tonight, or early tomorrow as the case may be, I will finish N.T. Wright's tremendous book The New Testament and the People of God. This 400 page magnum opus serves as his introduction to Jesus and the Victory of God, and its magnificence is hard to overemphasize. It reinterprets everything from the Pharisees to the Macabaeans and Hasmoneans, and all done exegetically, soberly, conservatively, and eruditely. Of all the books that I have read in my NSA career, this one has been the most illuminating (save perhaps Capon's eloquence upon the onion) and the most paradigmatically momentous. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Among all of this brilliance, he has a magnificent throw-away paragraph on the exegeting of Apocalyptic literature:

"We do this all the time ourselves. I have often pointed out to students that to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one well might, as an 'earth-shattering' event might perhaps lead some future historian, writing in the Martian Journal of Early European Studies, to hypothesize that an earthquake had caused the collapse of the Wall, leading to both sides realizing they could live together after all. A good many readings of apocalyptic literature in our own century operate on about that level of understanding."

N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, page 282: Part III: First-Century Judaism

Ouch.

"But no matter how many helpful things you say, if you leave the really huge question out, then all you are really displaying is a real loss of proportion. "Well, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

--Doug Wilson
click my title

Intriguing Speech Compilation

This speech compilation is actually really funny: "Shame on you..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wRkzCW5qI
or click on the title.

Enjoy.

Absurd Levels of Design

In his very enjoyable book Blink, Malcom Gladwell comments that there was a group of people in WWII assigned to intercepting messages in morse code. They did not understand them at all, as they were in German and in code that we hadn't broken, but they were able to figure out who was sending them simply from the sound of the tapping. Each of the thousands of different Germans sending messages had a distinctive way of doing so: not a distinctive pattern of speech, but a distinctive pattern of tapping. We assigned people to follow each of the senders, and after several weeks, in a mix of several thousand messages, one person could be picked out. This enabled us to track them all across Europe, and, if we knew who they were traveling with, we would know what groups of infantry, what tank divisions were being moved where.

Lewis Thomas' book The Lives of a Cell, in which he employs his delightful prose on an incredible range of topics, offhandedly mentions that termites have an odd method of communication: tapping: "From time to time, certain termites make a convulsive movement of their mandible to produce a loud, high-pitched clicking sound, audible ten meters off..." Along with this there are the whale-songs, the "strange, solitary and lovely bell-like notes" produced by bats, the prairie rabbits, hens and mice that all drum their feet, "Fish make sounds by clicking their teeth, blowing air, and drumming with special muscles against tuned inflated air bladders... Even earthworms make sounds, faint staccato notes in rhythmic clusters..."

The list is literally endless. And no two of these would have the same exact sound, and not one of these was not planned from before the foundation of the earth. "The more we know, the more we realize we don't know, and we're learning so fast, it won't be long before we know nothing at all." We learn to sing that we might glorify God, but are still being out-done by earthworms. And how do they even make a sound? With what?

Quotes

Some Christians hold, thorugh a misunderstanding of this passage (1 Peter 3:3), that 'it is a sin to wear make-up.' Peter is teaching that it is a sin for a woman to look like she fell face-down into her make-up, or like she puts it on with a trowel" (Her Hand in Marriage, p. 50).

Wilson vs. Hitchens: CBN News

Fairly nice.

Ontological Suicide

"In the New Testament field, some critics have made a great song and dance about the fact that the details of Jesus' life, or the fact of his resurrection, cannot be proved 'scientifically'; philosophical rigour should compel them to admit that the same problem pertains to the vast range of ordinary human knowledge, including the implicit claim that knowledge requires empirical verification."

--N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, page 34.

Always enjoyable to watch an opponent fall on his own sword.

Pining for Mount Doom

Craig, James and I are currently sitting in James' and Sproul's room. Why? Because it is toasty warm, and all of the other rooms are so cold. Outside, it is four degrees (with a wind chill), and it got up to sixteen degrees in town today, though at our house, only up to twelve. My goatee has frozen on five different occasions. Our water pipes froze (despite being insulated), and will not be thawed till tomorrow. To top it all off, our furnace has broken. How warm is it in our toasty-warm little cave? With our mighty space heater on full blast, it just crested freezing.

NSA Choir Christmas Concert

This is the NSA choir (not the entire school--two seniors are missing), and our first big performance. It actually turned out rather well, and there should be a higher quality video coming out before too long.

Finals

I have two presentations and one paper to write this week, and then next week is finals. For History, I need to know all of Thucydides as well as the tours of Alexander the Great and all of the dates and stuff. For theology, I need to be able to outline and summarize (orally and in prose) every book of the Old Testament, as well as all of our lectures and I have to be painfully detailed on the magnificent book of Song of Solomon. For Latin, I need to memorize all five declensions, all verb forms and everything from ablativus temporis et accusativus cum infinitivus to adjectival forms and whether it is masculinum, femininum or neutrum, as well as the Pater Noster et Credo. For Music, I need to know all lecture and reading material, and be able to sing all solfege patterns (major and minor 2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 7ths and octaves, ascending and descending. When I am given any note and told to make it Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti or Do, then told to sing a Re Fa La off of the Sol, etc, as well as reading music cold), a couple of Psalms that Dr. Erb (who is magnificent) put to music, and the songs from last term.

Then, on Friday morning I drive home for two weeks before heading to Spokane to do sales for the last part of my break. There are four books due the first week of classes, so the break will be rather full, but I hope to get to relax somewhat before next term.

I cannot wait to be home.

Opinions on Obama?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081208/pl_politico/16292

Wilson

When Mercy Is Cruel

Topic: Foundations of Mercy



Abraham Lincoln once asked how many legs a sheep would have if we called the tail a leg. "Five," came the answer. No, Lincoln replied, it doesn't matter what we call it, a sheep will have four legs regardless of what we say.

The Bible gives us the categories of mercy and cruelty. Both of them are defined by God, and not by what we want to call them. These are objective categories, over which Jesus is Lord, and not subjective realities where each one of us gets to roll our own.

For a stark example, a father who refuses to chastize his son physically is a man, Scripture says, who hates his son (Prov. 13:24). But he could, especially in these times, say that striking your son is a fine example of physical abuse, and that he refrains from disciplining him this way because he loves his son. If a man went down to social services for a bit of advice on controlling an unruly son, do you think that man would be told by the social worker there that there was nothing wrong at home that a good whipping wouldn't fix (Prov. 23:13)?

This is the core battle in all temptation, the battle for control of the definitions. The first instance of it happened in the Garden when our parents fell. Who was going to define the tree of knowledge of good and evil? On their account, Adam and Eve were not eating ruination; they thought they were becoming as God, which was a good thing they thought. In Romans 1, Paul says of the idolaters that they were professing to become wise while they were becoming fools. As they were becoming stupider and stupider, they persisted in giving honorary doctorates to each other.

Now this principle applies to mercy as God defines it, and mercy as man apart from Christ defines it. When man in rebellion against Christ defines mercy, what they are talking about is cruelty. A godly man's tender mercies extend down to life in his barn, and in a similar way, the cruelties of the wicked extend into everything. Even the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel (Prov. 12:10). A young man may believe all that he was told about sexual liberation, and how important it was not to deny that which was so obviously "natural" to him, and so he pursues the way of fornication, obviously a good and pleasant choice, he believes. What has he done, but give his honor away, and his "years unto the cruel" (Prov. 5:9)?

Why listen to these people at all? Why listen to what they have to say on love, justice, sexual ethics, redistribution, politics, mercy, or economics? "Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps" (Dt. 32:33). They hate God, and they do not love what He loves. The devil, remember, is the father of liars. He does not come to us, tell us the unvarnished truth, in order to allow us to make an informed choice. He lies. And so his cruelties are decked out with noble sounding phrases.

And evangelical Christians go for it. I read just yesterday that the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, a man named Richard Cizik, voted for Obama in the primary (at least), is now in favor of civil unions for homos, and thinks that "character issues" trump disagreement over things like the slaughter of the unborn. There is no other way to describe this than to acknowledge that God has struck our leaders with a judicial stupor. Cizik talks as though character issues are one thing over here, and support for genocidal mayhem is over there. Having a sweet character is here, and approval of sodomy is there. God was clearly in the wrong for His judgment of Sodom's sexual immorality (Jude 7). He should have come down and judged them for their character issues instead.

No doubt, listening to a talk by Cizik would be an experience in listening to sentimentalist bromides all wrapped up in cotton batting. But at the end of the day, he doesn't care about the unborn -- his tender mercies are cruel.

"The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh" (Prov. 11:17).

You can tell if the rot has set in pretty easily. What might the principal mercy opportunity in the United States be? Think about it. A million or more little babies are being chopped into littler pieces. And as soon as someone starts saying, well, yes, "but that's a political issue. I am more interested in broader issues of mercy and social justice," the rot has set in. And it is called a good thing -- progressive. But as Joe Sobran recently put it, if termites could talk, they would call what they do to a house "progress." And of course, it doesn't matter what we call it. The house will still collapse.

Posted by Douglas Wilson - 12/8/2008 10:01:45 AM | Print this post

Limerick

Courtesy of Jeff Moss

There was an old fellow from Lyme,
Who married three wives at a time.
When asked, 'Why the third?' he said, 'Haven't you heard?
Bigamy, sir, is a crime.'

I Can Live With That

Sorry about the delay in posting. I am currently on a sheetly denuded bed (on my sleeping bag) in Spokane, mooching off of our neighbor "linksys" while avoiding "GetOff." Today, I had a twelve hour day in which I made between $165 and $225. How? By being my (apparently schmoozing) self.