Monthly Archive for June, 2009

(I wrote this piece originally as a part of the last post, and I ended up liking it enough that I thought I’d separate it out. I hope you’ll get a chance to look it over.)

The world is changing, it occurs to me. Why do we even have countries anymore? Forming a nation on this particular body of land, and a certain type of people breeding there, seems to me to be a slightly outdated, unstudied concept. We always used to do it because…well…you have to live somewhere, and someone has to live near you, and you might as well give that place a name. We had no means to easily communicate with people far away, so we clustered up in the groups we could manage. Who can deny that this system is now irrelevent? Most of the things that keep us locked in that model now are simply repercussions from thousands of years of status quo; emotional and economic baggage at best. But hypothetically eliminating that, look at the situation honestly: we can travel between continents in a matter of hours, communicate in fractions of a second, so why isn’t the concept of a nation being rethought? Is it so impossible?

Oh, I’m sure you’ve got reasons it shouldn’t happen, Dear Reader, but there have been good reasons not to do most of the great things in history. I think humanity should begin reconsidering how we organize ourselves. I love America and have little intention of giving her up, but the ordering of the world is ridiculous. You get born on this continent, you have all the opportunities in the world, but if you’re born over here then you’re a drugged-up soldier before you’re twelve. Sins of the father is one thing, but innocent people are reaping the fruits of despots who aren’t even third cousins. In the past we have grumblingly lived with this situation on the grounds that we were powerless to remedy it, but I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true anymore, or if we just wish it was. All of these leaps and bounds in air travel, communication, medicine, technology, and still we can do nothing? Really?

We are getting advanced. We can do things our ancestors could not do, and one of the most basic side effects of this is that our accountability goes up. No one owns up to this, because the iPhone instruction manual doesn’t say, “By the way, this thing makes poverty your problem,” and of course diffused responsibility is one of our most basic sins. We have fashioned the means to access the entire world, so the entire world is now our problem. It’s hard to admit that eBay has moral implications, but it absolutely does. Christ said to love your neighbor as yourself, and we have drastically increased the size of the neighborhood. I’ll do you one better: Christ preached peace and mercy between people who lived a day’s journey from one another, and there is hardly a corner of the Earth the human species cannot now achieve in that amount of time. In truth, it has only been through a cruel twist of fate that our species has been too infantile to address itself as a whole until recentlty. This was not a natural state for us to be in, it was like my arm being unaware of my legs, and the sooner we are rid of it the better.

When the human species is over, it will have been defined more by what’s ahead of us now than what is behind us. Our existence up to this point has been incredibly limited, almost hilariously so when considered against what we are capable of. We used to understand “made in God’s image” as a comment on our physical proportions, but increasingly we are aware that the Bible was referring to our minds. We used to stretch out our arms with tireless energy, trying to touch the ceiling of our potential, but we’re high enough now that it’s starting to get spooky. We’ve made weapons so big they would kill us all if we used them, and our scientific progress has been so rapid that the only thing stopping us is honest-to-God cold feet. And this is nothing: give us a few more years, we’ll start traversing space in earnest instead of dipping our toes anxiously in the shallow end. We have yet to encounter the vast majority of existence.

America and Europe are simultaenously the engines that propel this change and its most ardent foes. The more we realize the ramifications of where our technology is taking us, the more we are going to quietly backpedal. The reason for this is obvious: we are incredibly well off, and it is quite possibly against our basic self-interest to change anything. There is no curse quite like being on the loving end of an unbalanced system, because you are its greatest slave. I’m not saying the things we have are ill-gotten, but they are not as rightfully “ours” as we would like to pretend. Freedom is everyone’s, and the loss of freedom anywhere is everyone’s problem. There is so much we are just accustomed to: our kids can go to college even if we can’t afford it, we can retire with pensions, we have medical insurance and a government that is accountable to us. It doesn’t really make sense to give any of this up, but at the same time we unquestionably have more than we need. The reconciliation of those two facts is going to take a long time and be very ugly, but at the other end of it we will have taken the kind of step forward whose only precedent is the birth of democracy. We will paradigm shift the entire planet, and we will begin to think God’s thoughts after Him.

I can’t help but suspect that nations are harmful in the long run, because no matter their strengths they remain a dividing force, a way to arbitrarily prioritize life with geography. At their best, they encapsulate and defend ideas about human nature, but their longterm goal should probably be to spread those values to everyone and then self-destruct. Or maybe that’s a bit much, but they should at least have a healthy sense of their own futility. Nations may not need to die, but they at least have to change. We are, after all, members of the human race before we are Americans or Russians or anything else, and our loyalty must go in that order. If there is a chance to unite the world and exist as a whole, and there unquestionably is, then we are morally obligated to seize it. I am reminded of the first Christians, who whole-heartedly intended to simply update their native Judaism, and instead helped forge a system of belief that took them to every corner of the Earth. They must have felt an awful twisting sensation in their gut, as if they were going against everything they knew. They were thinking in the past, and God was in the future. I think the same thing is happening now.

I’m actually not terribly concerned with logistics, I don’t think they really matter. The thing I’d like to see is a psychological change, which I am convinced would precipitate all the practicals far more adroitly than I could guess them for you now. Maybe nations will stay in place, maybe the world will become so united in compassion that their dissolution would be redundant. Either way, you have to start on the battlefield of opinion and work up from there. Once minds and hearts are changed nothing can withstand them, but the first one is always the hardest, so I suppose my work begins with me. I’d like to start seeing the entire world as my neighbor, and I’d like to start obeying Christ’s commands.

Just got back from a screening of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” I’m not even going to talk in detail about it, because it’s exactly what you think it is. Exactly. Truth be told, the “Transformers” series constitutes a cinematic weak spot for me. Many of my friends criticize me for being unforgiving of popcorn cinema, and they do so quite accurately. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” spoiled me, I expect nothing short of magnificence, and blowing something up just doesn’t cut it anymore. Still, I also have an affinity for sheer, awe-inspiring artistic spectacle, and in this way Michael Bay’s movies about Hasbro toys come to life get the better of me. The amount of crap they blow up is so incredible that I’d pay just to see them do it, no story included. I mean those three-story robots actually look real! The first one was passable: some of the comedy worked and some of it did not, but the pace was quick and the special effects dropped my jaw. I was literally flabbergasted that action scenes of this magnitude were even possible, and I was so delighted with their execution that I whole-heartedly came to the conclusion I had gotten my money’s worth. Also, they had Shia LaBeouf, who inexplicably grows a whole bunch of talent and charisma whenever Michael Bay directs him (more on that later).

Problem is, “Revenge” is your standard recession-age tentpole movie: a creature born of fear, mindlessly placating the “make it bigger” mentality, terrified to actually be something and displease anyone. It’s really a very desperate animal, it knows that its only chance to receive your approval is by sheer exhaustion. It wants to smother you. In the first one, it was amazing enough just to see the Autobots roll out, but now that’s old news, and the boys and girls at Paramount are panicking, packing more and more TNT into every square inch of film. Did you know that in some of the major action scenes of this film, it took ILM five days to render one frame? There are twenty four frames in a single second of most movies.

Still, I got my money’s worth again…I guess. Most of the major set pieces in “Revenge” were absolutely beyond belief, they were so big I almost could not help running numbers in my head: how many stuntmen? How many second units? How many render farms? That’s all I went in for, and that’s what I got. I can’t claim that it’s “good” of me, but I do think the sheer technical achievement of these films is so gigantic that it warrants a sort of amnesty. You forgive opera for being pretentious because it’s incredibly technically complex (and because it’s deeply meaningful, but you know what I mean), and a similar sort of thing goes on here. In the end, though, I think the original “Transformers” is actually more impressive. There’s a certain point by the end of this new film where none of what’s happening means anything, there’s just been too many robots, too much ka-boom. It all washes out and becomes redundant, especially the climactic battle, which was a pacing nightmare. The original film was a spectacle, but there was still a freshness to it all, and the filmmakers relaxed and let the wonder of what was happening sink in. The sequel may be bigger, but I think the original had more awe.

On the subject of Shia, many of you know I am not a fan of his…except here. The original “Transformers” was an incredibly uncomfortable experience for me, because the little jerk made me love him, especially when I could tell he was improvising. His shtick meshed so flawlessly with the tone of the picture that, lo and behold, the whole thing came to rest on his shoulders. He created an emotional center of the film. John Turturro and Jon Voight were making idiots of themselves around him (and you know how I love you, Turturro), but Shia was right on key. It was one of the most inspired leading comedic performances I have ever seen. And even worse, he was totally credible in the action scenes. Most people don’t give actors credit for being believable in a gunfight, but there’s actually a massive difference between a subpar hero and a great one. Your performance has to be 100 percent, you have to sell us that you’re in the fight of your life (for 20 takes in a row), and that does not happen just by grimacing. Think about how you didn’t believe that Adrien Brody was in peril for a single moment of “King Kong,” and how flat his stupid car chase with the gorilla was as a result. Or recall the tepid sense of threat in “Episode II,” and again you’ll find the acting to be the culprit (except for you, Ewan McGreggor, you were awesome). In “Transformers,” by contrast, the action has grit and substance because Shia, damn him, makes us believe he’s in trouble.

I still don’t like him in anything else, though.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll come to regret defending these flicks in any fashion, it’s certainly happened before. Matter of fact, I’ve begun compiling a list of movies I told everyone I liked and then later realized were crap. Would you like to see it? Of course you would.

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. My family, who I saw it with, tried to tell me, but I wasn’t listening. I had Spielberg, aliens, and the man in the fedora himself. I wasn’t ready for the truth. And I don’t hate the film for the reasons some other people do; I was fine with the aliens, I still think Area 51 was a perfect piece of pop folk lore to incorporate into the series. But with the passage of time, the more I think about that stupid refrigerator escape scene, the angier I get. What an absolute turd. Putting Indy in the atomic age, in the Cold War, should have been solid gold material, and they absolutely blew it. The blame? George Lucas, and George Lucas alone. Word around the campfire says that Frank Darabont’s (writer/director of “The Shawshank Redemption”) script is incredible, and Spielberg and Ford both loved it, but ooohhhh no it wasn’t good enough for George [note: that's just the rumor, so maybe I'm wrong]. You can almost taste Frank’s version, hidden in the waves of arbitrary plot machinations and paper-thin characters contributed by King of the Ewoks himself. I swear, the same exact crap that screwed up the prequel trilogy came back with a vengeance here. He’s getting lazy, he just doesn’t care enough anymore.

2. Quantum of Solace. We actually watched the opening car chase of this film in a class of mine, then deconstructed it from an editing and shooting perspective, and came to the conclusion that it was a textbook example of how not to make an action scene. While nowhere near as bad as Indy 4, “Solace” is still guilty of a flat villain (not the fault of the actor, who was great), a relentlessly stupid “evil plot,” and the hollowest Bond girl since that other chick in “GoldenEye;” you know, the one who didn’t kill people with her thighs. When I first saw it, I was blinded by the awesomeness of Daniel Craig as Bond, but repeat viewings have left me with that special headache that comes from a meandering, unsatisfying cinamtic experience.

3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake). I saw the re-do before the original, and it scared the pants off of me, so I grudgingly endorsed it, even though I found it mean-spirited and cold. Then I saw the original, and realized that all the scary elements in the remake had been plundered from the source. Also, there was significantly less grotesquery and gore in the ancestor, and with that I promptly disowned Marcus Nispel’s crude little horror shop.

4. The Crow. “Dark City” (from the same director) was cool and I had some half-formed childhood memories of “The Crow” being really spooky, and that mixed with an oddly difficult search for the DVD created a thirst too easy to satiate. Initially, I thought it was great. Then I realized it was a plotless mess.

5. Desperado. Some movies begin so wonderfully that they fool you, and “Desperado” is one of them. The first third is so sexy, so deliriously effective at bringing John Woo south of the border, that you almost forget that the middle of the movie makes no sense, and the third act literally does not exist. Robert Rodriguez is either the laziest writer in Hollywood or something went very wrong on that set. Go watch it again: right as the climactic gun battle should begin, where the Mariachi is hopelessly outnumbered and far from any cover, the screen fades to white and we suddenly cut to Antonio Banderas without a scratch on him, dusting off his hands, emerging victorious. What?

6. The Matrix Sequels. Defending these things was like trying to bucket water out of the Titanic. With every argument I got into, a creeping feeling snuck into my stomach, because the points my opponents were making…were all true. One day I just picked up the DVDs and threw them across the room. Most sequels take your money and suck quietly, but “Reloaded” and “Revolutions” genuinely tainted the memory of the original. They dashed our hopes for our own “Star Wars” trilogy (thank God Peter Jackson showed up with “The Lord of the Rings”). The first one was a classic, a flat-out masterpiece, but it will never be remembered the same way again.

7. Spider Man 3. My official line on that one was that it was messy but still somehow loveable. That was far too kind. “Spiderman 3″ was punishment from God. It had Tobey Maguire, the whitest man in the world, with stupid-looking dyed black hair doing a dance number. A dance number. And it’s still the most expensive film ever released. Because he has more or less publicly apologized, and because he made the “Evil Dead” movies and “Drag Me To Hell,” I don’t hold it against Sam Raimi. But what a piece of crap.

And now, on a brighter note, here are some movies I initially disliked and then grew to adore:

1. Blade Runner. Saw it in the sixth grade, had no idea what had happened. Saw it freshman year of college, couldn’t even finish it. Pulled it out of a drawer three years later and watched it every day for two weeks until I knew every word that came from every character’s mouth.

2. Most Kubrick Movies. Same thing, you put them away and go “whatever.” Then you wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about them, and Stanley laughs at you from beyond the grave.

3. The French Connection. I remember as the credits rolled, my first thoughts were, “So the bad guy gets away and the good guy shoots a fellow policeman on the day of his greatest victory? This sucks!” I was angry for about six months, and refused to watch the thing, but its gritty, 70s atmosphere was already getting soaked into my bloodstream. The next time I popped it in I couldn’t think of a negative thing to say.

4. A History of Violence. A friend of mine and I saw it in the theater, and at the time I had never seen a Cronenberg picture. I found myself…uncomfortable almost the entire time: where were the grisled heroics I was expecting? The long stream of vigilante justice to round out the climax? The action scenes were brutal and staged with a deliberate absurdity, much like violence in real life. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. And yet every time I saw the DVD on the shelves,  I confess I found myself more fascinated by it than others of its ilk. As soon as I had let go of the hope that it would be “Death Wish 9,” I came to see a unique and thought-provoking film that deals with one of my most treasured themes: is the identity we assume as real as the one we are born with?

5. National Lampoon’s Animal House. No, I don’t know what was wrong with me. For some reason, the first time I watched this comedic masterpiece I was…I don’t know, I must have been doing speedballs, or hallucinating, or something. When I watched it the second time and collapsed on the carpet in front of our couch from spasms of laughter, all memories of this disastrous “first vieweing” were erased.

6. Mulholland Drive. It’s hard to blame anyone for not liking this one the first time through, it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense…or does it? Thorough study reveals a real solution to the puzzle, an answer instead of a bunch of artsy questions, and so “Drive” becomes an avante garde masterpiece.

7. The Wicker Man. Unless forewarned, which I was not, everyone feels like the Devil just backhanded them when the credits roll on this bad boy for the first time. But of course, that’s the price you pay for what may be the single most original story in cinema history.

Wish me luck, Dear Reader. In a few short minutes, my wife and some friends will be escorting me to a local mall where, I am told, new cloting will be selected for me. Promises have been made that this is a minor trip, that we’re only getting a few select things, but of course you can trust women in this matter about as far as you can throw them. It’s not like if there’s some kind of incredible sale on something we didn’t plan on getting I’ll have any bargaining chip to retort with. “You said we were only getting jeans” doesn’t even need a reply, it’s such a whiny, adolescent defense. I’m going out there helpess, completely at their mercy.

The good news is that I normally quite enjoy employing my wife as my resident stylist; she bought me the suit I wore to Mimi’s funeral, and I think it was quite a hit. She got me interested in the wrinkle-free collared shirts that Brooks Brothers sells, and I am now addicted to those. For the most part, it’s a harmonious relationship, because for some reason women enjoy clothing men more than they do themselves. It must be some kind of advanced, grown up version of playing with dolls. I also think male clothing is less stressful and gives you more options, and they need vicarious breaks from the hellish whirlwind of their fashion lives.

It’s also good because Corelyn has impeccable taste, even considering men. I’ve noticed recently that Allen women all have a profound understanding of and comfort around the opposite sex. More and more I encounter ladies in everyday life who are befuddled by us, completely at a loss, and it’s taken me some time to realize that I’m quite unforgiving of this completely understandable shortcoming because all of the relevant females in my life can read a man like a book. It follows naturally that they can also dress them. Caroline and mom also used to be partially in charge of my fashion statements, and they were responsible for selecting the style of jeans and cologne that I wear to this day.

Anyway, it’s about that time, and the womenfolk are impatient to get going. It’s best not to keep them waiting.

I’ve been away for too long. You must forgive me, Dear Reader, for I have been a camera department intern on an indie feature being shot out here in Los Angeles. Since the gig was non-union, we were regularly worked for 14 hours a day and that gave me only so much time to come home, stare at an episode of “South Park” with an exhausted look on my face, then fall over onto the ground. Ten hours later, I’d be right back on set. It was pretty grueling, but also one of the most informative and useful experiences of my life. In a lot of ways, it was my first real “set,” my first experience having a real job to do on a professional gig.

Some of you may know that my grandmother, whom we affectionately call Mimi, passed recently, and I’ll be flying out to Texas for the funeral. Mimi was a wonderful woman and I’ll miss her always, but I must confess I feel a lot of gratitude to the Lord for the way she went out, which was incredibly peacefully. She lived a rich and happy life, then departed with a gentle whisper from this world, and if there’s nothing we can do about death then I wouldn’t have it any other way. Really, my biggest problem with the situation is that people have to die at all.

I must admit, my memories of Mimi are harder to trace and pin down than her husband’s (we called him Boo), who passed a little while back. Boo was a storyteller, a magnetic presence in a room, he’s probably the origin of my love of public speaking. Mimi, in my experience, left a much more careful impression, she was never really interested in being the center of the room. This is weird for me, of course, because my entire immediate family right down to Jacob and Natalie are lovers of attention, happy to take center stage. The only person who can probably relate to Mimi’s take is Corelyn, who often finds herself sitting quietly at our family gatherings, terrified by this gaggle of type-A personalities wrestling for control of the conversation. Even though Cor never got to know Mimi, I think the two of them would have understood each other well.

Through being married to Corelyn, I’ve come to believe I appreciate Mimi more. As a kid it was easy to love her, because like any good grandparent she spoiled me, but I doubt that at that age I really appreciated her. I don’t think I understood how many things would fall apart if Mimi wasn’t there. I don’t think I comprehended how much of what I took for granted literally depended on Mimi. We would have these massive family gatherings, and I would just assume they chugged along on some magical family power; that meals just found their way to tables, events just planned themselves, communication between everyone just happened. I would hear stories about my father growing up, and I never thought about who made those precious family times happen, who organized the vacations, who laid the blueprints of behavior that would be emulated in my own upbringing. Now I’m beginning to realize that Mimi had long been the engine of the Allen family, the driving force that pushed it forward. I associate the Allen family with a lot of things, and most of them were forged into being by my grandmother. She set the tone for how we would behave around others and amongst one another, what would define us as Christians, and how we would go about raising families of our own. Everything I know about my family is rooted in her influence.

My clearest memory of her is from the last time I saw Boo, at a visit to our house in Alexandria. We knew that Boo had been fading, and Dad warned me that when I went in to see him, he might not remember who I was. Honestly, it was a little like ol’ Boo was holding court, you would visit him in the side porch basically one at a time. When I went in, it was ostensibly to see him, but the person I really spoke to was Mimi, because her mind was at 100 percent, and his was somewhat less than that. As soon as I sat down, she smiled warmly at me and turned to her husband, spoke maybe three words, and his eyes lit up: “Well, hello there Andrew!” I quickly learned to direct my conversation entirely at her, even if my question was for Boo. I ran out of things to say very fast, and felt quite awkward, but Mimi wouldn’t let off the hook for one second, she kept drilling me with “what’s going on with…” and “tell me about…” Every time I would answer, I could see that Boo was struggling a little bit, so Mimi would turn and rephrase my sentences, sometimes only minute little changes, and he would get it instantly. I couldn’t understand why he understood her and not me.

The reason that memory is so vivid is because it was so unlike Mimi to be so forceful in a conversation, to propel the thing forward relentlessly like that. She had always been a gentle personality, the kind that would let you drift away whenver you felt like it, but now she was unstoppable. Looking back on it, I realize that Mimi was just being herself. It was necessary for her to be like that, so we could all have one last family gathering, and so that’s what she did. Whatever the difference was between reality and what we all wanted, it was my grandmother who would build the bridge to cross it. I can’t even imagine the kind of work she went through to get herself and her husband on an airplane to come visit us, and once they had arrived, she was the only way we could talk to him as if no time had passed. She made it possible for us to all be together.

I don’t really have much else I’d like to say on the subject. Bye, Mimi. I love you.