Date Night

This is a terrific movie.  I saw it in theaters, and then again this weekend as I recently found it for cheap at Wal-mart.  I watched it on my own ‘date night,’ and the movie almost made me feel guilty because watching a movie is our typical routine; I’m now inspired to be more like the Fosters and change it up a little bit.

Phil and Claire Foster are a solid married couple with kids.  They are very busy and perpetually exhausted, but they have a good relationship.  They are a team, and they have a longstanding weekly date night tradition.  They are a great couple to root for and to idolize.  They aren’t perfect, but they obviously love each other and are committed to putting in the effort to make their marriage work, and over the course of the movie they resolve many of their issues in a healthy way. (And, they are portrayed by Steve Carell and Tina Fey, two of my favorite comedy geniuses, so that’s another reason to love ’em).

Here’s an example of the way the Fosters are a connected couple even while they are stuck in their ‘routine’ date night (at the same place every week, ordering the same food):

This is a movie about making a good relationship better, about not letting your routine sap away the romance, about learning how to really work together, (Claire has a hard time letting Phil help her with their household responsibilities, saying “It’s just better if I do it myself”), and about making the decision to be proactive in saving your marriage.  Towards the beginning, another couple confide to their friends that they are divorcing, having decided that things were boring and unsatisfying and they had become “just really good roommates.”  That is a common position in our culture today; this relationship isn’t working for me anymore, I’m not happy, I want better/different things, so it’s over.

The Fosters aren’t necessarily “happy.”  They are definitely frustrated.  Their lives aren’t filled with excitement.  And yeah, they are really good roommates.  But that’s not all they are.  They are also a man and woman who truly love and care for each other, even if they don’t always seem to appreciate the others’ efforts.  And their response to the news of their friends’ divorce is to say, let’s do something different.  Let’s go on a real date, let’s get dressed up, let’s try to put some sparkle into our routine, let’s not let that become us.  It’s an incredibly refreshing and positive message.

The film earns it’s PG-13 rating, so it’s not a family film, but young adults and up should definitely take the time to check out this excellent, positive and realistic example of a healthy marriage relationship.  Besides, it’s funny!

This one is worth paying the babysitter to go see.

Repo Men

This film came out in 2010, and I thought it looked like a very interesting idea for a story, but I didn’t get a chance to see it in theaters.  That turned out to be no great loss, because it wasn’t all that good.  But it did have one line that I really, really liked.

The premise: in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where artificial body parts are reliably mass-produced.  So there’s almost no need for anyone to die, ever, because they could just keep replacing everything as it wears out or gets sick.  But capitalism doesn’t work that way, and in this story no one can truly benefit from the wondrous technology because the company that sells the organs won’t make a profit that way.  The procedures and equipment are all incredibly expensive, but who can refuse to sign the payment contracts to get a new liver, knowing it means death if they don’t?  “You owe it to your family.  You owe it to yourself,” repeats a smarmy salesmen (played by Liev Schreiber).

He also states, “we can’t make money if people pay.”  That’s where Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) come in.  They are the Repo Men, and their job is to repossess artificial organs on which the purposefully too-high payments have fallen behind, by cutting them out of the receivers’ bodies.  This typically means the person dies, but Remy and Jake aren’t bothered.  It’s “just a job.”  And they always read a statement asking if the patient would like an ambulance to be on hand before they cut them open, but it’s clearly a legality as Remy is shown reading it after knocking his victim unconscious with a taser.

Then there’s the twist that you see coming a mile away: Remy suffers an accident and has to get an artificial heart himself.  Now he’s on the other side of the system.  Suddenly aware of his own mortality, he can’t bring himself to do any more repo jobs, and therefore can’t make the money to pay off his own heart.  After that it’s pretty much just an action movie, running around trying to escape and fighting various people off, and the entire third act kind of falls apart story-wise, and the ending is really stupid. It’s like somebody had this great idea, and then it just became an excuse for stereotypical fight scenes.

Part of the message here seems to be a critique of the American health care system.  It says that doctors don’t care about their patients, that profits are more important than people, that hospitals are evil corporations and everybody could really be perfectly healthy if only the people at the top weren’t so greedy and corrupt.  Of course it’s all hypothetical, and in the real world things are not so extreme or so black and white, but sometimes fiction provides a safe place to talk about controversial subjects.  Despite it’s descent into illogical sequences of gun fights, knife fights, and fire extinguisher axe fights, Repo Men could be a good way to start a conversation about the flaws in our health care (and health insurance) systems, and what we can do to prevent this kind of future scenario.

My favorite line was something Remy said when he finally decided to quit his line of work, no longer able to believe in the mantra “it’s just a job” that he himself had once repeated. “But it’s not just a job, is it?  It’s who you are.  If you want to change who you are, start by changing what you do.”  That is excellent advice!  I don’t know of any Bible verses that specifically support it.  But C.S. Lewis dedicated a section to it in his book Mere Christianity (Book 4, chapter 7).  Here is an excerpt:

There are two kinds of pretending.  There is a bad kind, where the pretense is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you.  But there is also a good kind, where the pretense leads up to the real thing.  When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are.  And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.  Very often the only way to get a quality in real life is to start behaving as if you had it already.

So let’s practice living like Christ.  Let’s change our character by consciously deciding to act how God wants us to.  Then when the Reap-o Man comes for our souls, we’ll be ready.

Oh well, at least the first two thirds of the movie were good.

Digest Movies: Goals

I’ve decided to make it a goal to add a minimum of three new posts each week.  I will try to keep up with most of the new theater releases, although I may not be able to watch all of them.  If I get a request to review a particular film, whether new or old, I will make an extra effort to do so.

I added a FAQ section to this blog and included a list of some of my favorite movies, so I will attempt to get reviews for all of those up at some point as well.  And when Oscar season comes around, I’ll try to review all the best picture nominees.  I usually make an effort to watch them anyway.  If you have any movies that you would like to see me review, let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

-pagelady