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Oscars 2020 Series

Oscars Film Reflection Series: Joker

In an ongoing series, Drew Trotter of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers is sharing his reflections on this year’s Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees. For the whole series, click here. Image Credit: The Joker Promotional Image, from gallery at https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/joker (Fair Use: Criticism)


Joker (R, 122 mins.)

Director: Todd Phillips. Writers: Todd Phillips and Scott Silver (screenplay). Based on characters created by: Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller.

Plot Outline: In Gotham City, mentally troubled comedian Arthur Fleck is mistreated by society. He then embarks on a downward spiral of revolution and crime. This path brings him face-to-face with his alter-ego: the Joker.–Summary drawn from IMDB

Options for Viewing It: Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube


Joker centers on the most powerful performance of the year: Joaquin Phoenix as the title character. He deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actor. Phoenix is in almost every frame of the film and has been asked to play a character so physically and emotionally damaged that it must have been extremely taxing for him. He lost a lot of weight to play the role, but the really difficult part of the performance is psychological. He plays a psychopath, though one with a history, tied both to himself and his mother. Much of the film deals with the abuse he suffers from others and the uncertainty and horror of revelations he experiences about his mother and her former employer, Thomas Wayne, the father of Bruce Wayne, who of course grows up to be Batman. Add to this, his rejection by almost everyone he meets, and the slow descent into complete mental breakdown at the end of the film forces the viewer, against everything that one wants to feel, to be sympathetic to his horrific plight.

This journey wrenches the viewer back and forth between acts of extreme violence, comic episodes (Fleck works as a clown, though little humor results directly from his profession), and scenes of heart-breaking inquiry by Fleck, as he seeks to find out why he is the way he is. Not surprisingly, this makes the film very difficult to watch, and it is not for the squeamish of heart, but of course this is the mark of superb writing and filmmaking, i.e. getting the viewer so engrossed in what is happening on screen that they cannot pull back from it to an objective place. As grotesque and bloody as this film is, the viewer has to admit that the production values are very high, most of all the performance by Phoenix.

One of the most disturbing things about the movie—and, yes, disturbing is a very good word to describe its influence—is the thoroughgoing reality of its presentation. There is no reliance on super-powers or supernaturalism of any kind and certainly not an ounce of “cartoonish” feel, even though it is set in the traditional Gotham of Batman and Robin. One feels like one is watching something that could happen any moment, at least until the end, when chaos so breaks out in the streets that the scenes become too much to believe. By that time, though, the damage to the viewer is done. Again, great filmmaking, but tough on the viewer.

I believe that to keep up with what is happening in our society and to be fully aware of what our neighbors are experiencing, reading what others say about the arts isn’t enough—we need to experience films and other art directly. This is one reason I teach techniques of film-viewing that are centered in helping people to objectify the experience. We need to be able to come out on the other side of the film-going experience with critiques that demonstrate the strength, goodness, and relevance of the good news we believe to a desperately hopeless and alienated world. We cannot do this without experiencing the movie itself. But the hard work of seeing the film, analyzing it, and comparing its themes and ideas to those of Scripture and the Christian faith takes knowledge and practice, and I admit that not everyone can do it.

More can and should do it than try to, however, and I believe we need them to step up in these perilous times. The mammoth box-office response to Joker suggests that there are literally millions of kids out there (and maybe not a few adults), who are so pushed to the breaking point by their own states of alienation, loneliness, and especially hopelessness, that they find solace (let us pray not motivation!) in Joker’s finally letting loose and killing without conscience. It actually is worse than that: he explicitly states that, rather than feeling bad about his murders, he finds an exhilaration in them. This movie has a very dark and destructive take on life in our world, and, if its take is true, then we are certainly lost, and there is no hope but to burn everything down and hope against hope that something better, some new better society, will rise phoenix-like from the ashes, as some of the radicals in the sixties suggested.

But Christians know the dispiriting message of Joker is not true, that there is hope and goodness in the world, and that love will triumph in the end, and has already triumphed in Christ and His cross and resurrection. To be able to articulate this good news, though, to a world skeptical of its messengers will take those messengers going the extra mile by walking alongside the skeptics on their journeys, and, having allowed them to take their best shots at instilling in us thoughts of chaos and destruction, showing them a better way.

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Oscars Film Reflection Series: Jojo Rabbit

In an ongoing series, Drew Trotter of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers is sharing his reflections on this year’s Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees. For the whole series, click here. Image Credit: Jojo Rabbit Promotional Image, from https://tickets.jojorabbit.com/ (Fair Use: Criticism)


Jojo Rabbit (PG-13, 108 mins.)

Director: Taika Waititi. Writers: Taika Waititi (screenplay), Christine Leunens (novel, Caging Skies). Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi, Sam Rockwell.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, War.

Plot Outline: A young boy in Hitler’s army finds out his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home. —Summary drawn from IMDB


Jojo Rabbit is perhaps the strangest, most disconcerting of the nine nominees for Best Picture. Framed around the thought-life of a ten-year old boy in a small town in Nazi Germany, Jojo dips in and out of his imaginary world, often resting in scenes of dialogue with his imaginary friend, none other than Adolph Hitler. This Hitler, not surprisingly, is a very different one from the historical leader of the Third Reich. He flops and dances around, as a ten-year old’s dreams would have him do, sometimes being authoritative, sometimes simply a friend, and only slowly becoming threatening as Jojo begins to see him as he “really is.”

A coming-of-age story of sorts, this movie achieves a balance between the horrific and the comic in a way that I have rarely seen except from Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s films all center themselves, though, in alternate realities that are objectively presented. Jojo is a psychological romp through a small boy’s world, and Jojo’s fantastical innocence about Nazism, war, and, of course, Hitler himself, is disquieting to the viewer. As viewers, we know at least enough about these things not only not to romanticize them as a ten year-old, but also to react to the main character’s fantasies with the desire to correct him, even shout at him and rebuke him. One of the strongest things about the film is the part of Scarlett Johansson, who plays Jojo’s mother, and is outstanding in the role (she was also nominated for an Oscar). Never rebuking him for his fixation on wanting to be a good Nazi, she just loves him, correcting him as a good mother would, all the while quietly housing a Jewish girl behind the walls of her house without Jojo’s knowledge.

This film grows on the viewer, long after leaving the theater. It was disturbing to me, while I viewed it; after all, what can be funny about Hitler?! There’s an obvious parallel to the original film version of The Producers, in which Jewish comedian Mel Brooks tells the story of a scam involving the imaginary play Springtime for Hitler. While many critics feel that Brooks succeeded at what he wanted to do in that film, and the same could be argued about Jojo Rabbit, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jewish friends and what their reaction to the foppish, silly Hitler in this film might be. But Jojo’s sympathy for the young boy in his misguided innocence, as he begins to experience both the destruction of the world he has built in his imagination and the tragic realities that were possible in the real Nazi world, wins one over as a means to explore generally the horrors of war, racism, unthinking militarism, and particularly the outrage of Hitler’s Germany.

Jojo Rabbit is an alternately sweet, funny, tragic, but always thoughtful movie about little boys, fantasy, reality, and growing up. It is as discussion-worthy as any of this year’s nominees, the heart-wrenching ending providing perhaps the richest food for thought. An amazing film.

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Oscars Film Reflection Series: The Irishman

Image Credit: The Irishman Promotional Image, from: https://www.theirishman-movie.com/ (Fair Use: Criticism)

In an ongoing series, Drew Trotter of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers is sharing his reflections on this year’s Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees. We welcome you to watch along with the series and share your thoughts in the comments or on Facebook. This week, continuing in alphabetical order, Drew invites us to reflect with him on The Irishman. For the whole series, click here. 


The Irishman (R, 209 mins.)

Director: Martin Scorsese. Writers: Steven Zaillian (screenplay), Charles Brandt (book). Cast: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Stephen Graham, Jesse Plemons.

Genre: Crime, Drama.
Plot Outline: A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement with the slaying of Jimmy Hoffa.

—Summary drawn from IMDB

Options for Viewing It: Netflix


I love that the IMDb plot outline entry for this picture is a simple sentence: “A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement with the slaying of Jimmy Hoffa.” Like most simple sentences (that are true anyway), it hides a plethora of facts, thoughts, and meanings that could fill several books.

The Irishman may be master director Martin Scorsese’s finest work. Not only does it accomplish in feel and atmosphere what no one has ever accomplished like Scorsese, i.e. portraying the world of crime, especially the Italian Mafia, but it enters into almost all the realms of characterization, philosophy, and movie story magic that the master has ever visited.

Starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino, the supporting cast is superb with Stephen Graham, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, and Jesse Plemons doing quite a bit of heavy lifting. Scorsese’s direction is flawless; I can’t remember when a three-hour movie was this captivating. And that viewer-friendly pace is accomplished with relatively little action. Amazingly, Scorsese has made a character-driven relationship film out of a mob-based crime story. And it is historically founded to boot, which adds another layer of difficulty (Did that really happen? Does it matter?) to the story.

This movie may go down in history even more for a technical innovation than for the better-known elements of filmmaking at which it excels. De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino are all now over 70, but they are playing their characters at everywhere along the timeline from their 40s to their 70s. To be able to make each man appear younger—smooth out facial wrinkles, slim down faces, necks, and waistlines, etc.—Scorsese’s crew invented a new camera able to accomplish this remarkable feat with very little intrusion into the actor’s space.

One humorous story illustrates how some things which demonstrate age cannot so easily change as wrinkles on the face. Pacino has a scene in which he, as Hoffa, is sitting in a comfortable chair in his living room with his family, watching a news report on John F. Kennedy. Hoffa intensely disliked Kennedy because of the way Robert Kennedy as Attorney General was cracking down on the Teamsters Union, and he gets so fed up with what he is seeing onscreen, that he leaps up out of his chair, swearing at the television as he leaves the room. When they were filming the scene, on the first take Pacino got up out of the chair like a 75 year-old man would, and the camera man noticed it, went over to Scorsese, and pointed out to him how jarring this would be to the audience, given how young and virile Pacino would look on film. Scorsese agreed, but knowing how famously irritated Pacino can get on set, said to the camera man, “You tell him.” Pacino actually accepted the challenge and finally was able to leap out of his chair as a much younger man would do, and the scene was saved.

The film centers on a mob henchman named Frank Sheeran (De Niro), and is told in flashback through Sheeran’s eyes as he sits in a retirement home, thinking back over his life. Scorsese uses voice-over to fill in some information, but it is never used lazily. Sheeran was “loaned” as a bodyguard to Jimmy Hoffa when Hoffa became famous. The film chronicles Hoffa’s proud slide into oblivion, after his prison sentence causes his fall from grace as the head of the powerful Teamsters Union. Hoffa loses his grip on the reality that he is simply not as invincible as he thinks he is, and eventually he pays for his hubris with his life.

In history, of course, Hoffa simply disappeared; this film gives one (confessed, but not proven) theory of what happened to him. The movie shows the inch-by-inch way in which little decisions lead to ultimate ones, especially when attitudes and emotions like pride, anger, inattention, and unwavering loyalty get in the way of doing the right thing. There are several scenes at the end of the film demonstrating Sheeran’s remorse for his mob activity; confession, forgiveness, and absolution play an interesting role. One cannot help but be sympathetic toward the Sheeran, who through most of the movie talks about his mob work as matter-of-factly as a plumber would his work on the pipes of a house. At the end, though, the remorse seems genuine, as he realizes what he has done.

Sheeran’s remorse is worth dwelling on for a moment. The film opens with a long, hand-held tracking shot meandering down a hallway of what the viewer quickly recognizes is a nursing home. The people the camera passes are all with someone else. Significantly, the first couple passed, sitting in chairs facing one another and seemingly in animated conversation, are a young priest and an older woman. The camera continues its journey past groups playing cards, engaging in other games, eating with each other, until it finally comes to rest in front of, and facing, Sheeran as an older man sitting in a wheelchair. He is utterly alone in a remote room, unlike anyone else in the home. His alienation could not have been made more plain.

From this vantage point, Frank begins telling the story of his life from being a small-time trucker to joining the union to becoming one of the most trusted hit-men in the Italian mafia. His loyalty to the Buffalino mob was unwavering, but the viewer’s difficulty with Sheeran is he seems to treat his cold-blooded murders exactly like his earlier truck-driving: he’s just doing a job, carrying out orders, being a good company man. Late in the film, when he is reflecting on his life in the nursing home, we see flashbacks of him trying to make amends with family and God, but he is not sure at all how to do this or even what he has done wrong.

He tries to reconcile with his two daughters, who as adults have abandoned him. One daughter refuses to speak to him; she hasn’t for years. Poignantly, Sheeran can remember the date she walked out of his life so many years ago. His second daughter is willing to talk with him, but when she asks him what he is apologizing for, he simply stumbles around and can’t really answer. He is lost and confused about how to think about his life, a life he thinks he has led with honor and loyalty, but that has made him a pariah in the eyes of society and his own family.

But when we see him at confession, though the scene starts with him having to be coached word-by-word what to pray, it ends with him praying, confessing his sins personally (though still not being willing to specify what he has done), and receiving absolution from the kind and wise priest, who tries to press him ever closer to true repentance. At one point, Sheeran says quietly, “What kind of man makes a phone call like that?” remembering, presumably, the call to Hoffa’s wife to console her, when he knows he himself has murdered Hoffa just a few days before, but Sheeran cannot bring himself to talk to the priest about the phone call specifically.

He stays in that state until the film closes with a remarkable shot of him in the distance in his bedroom, visible from the hallway only through a small crack in the door. Tiny, alone at Christmas-time, physically disabled, he has lost anything resembling life, though perhaps the crack in the door, left open by the priest at Sheeran’s request, speaks of the hope he has that redemption is possible somehow. The film ends on that shot with a cut to black. Is Sheeran truly remorseful in any meaningful sense of the word? The viewers must decide for themselves.

What can we learn from The Irishman? Perhaps the most important lesson is that of the need for us all to have a moral compass outside ourselves, governing how we act. The Irishman, like The Godfather before it, raises huge questions of family, friendship, and loyalty as values used to determine one’s actions. Good as these are in many cases, when any person makes one or more of them absolute, the person who does so is headed for trouble. With no ultimate moral code, much less any revelation, providing the means for making decisions, we all go astray like sheep without a shepherd.

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Oscars Film Reflection Series: Ford v Ferrari

Image Credit: Ford v Ferrari Promotional Image, from: https://www.20thcenturystudios.com/movies/ford-v-ferrari (Fair Use: Criticism)

In an ongoing series, Drew Trotter of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers will be sharing his reflections on this year’s Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees. We welcome you to watch along with the series and share your thoughts in the comments or on Facebook. This week, Drew invites us to reflect with him on Ford v Ferarri. For Drew’s introductory post, click here.


Ford v Ferrari (PG-13, 152 mins.)

Director: James Mangold. Writers: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller. Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Caitriona Balfe.

Genre: Action, Biography, Drama.

Plot Outline: American car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles battle corporate interference, the laws of physics and their own personal demons to build a revolutionary race car for Ford and challenge Ferrari at the 24 hours of Le Mans in 1966.

—Summary drawn from IMDB

Some Options for Viewing: Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play


In my last blog post, I announced this series of nine posts, one on each of the films nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We will look at the nine movies in alphabetical order, starting with the James Mangold helmed Ford v Ferrari.

Ford v Ferrari is not a “racing picture,” though Formula 1 racing, especially the grand-daddy race of them all, Le Mans, is at the heart of the plot. In this context, Mangold has given us a fine buddy picture utilizing two of the best actors on Hollywood’s A list: Matt Damon and Christian Bale. In the hands of these two performers Ferrari has that wonderful blend of being a sports movie with much deeper heart than the plot could ever realize on its own, looking into a variety of themes— perseverance, family vs. work, winning at all costs, corporate greed, the quest for excellence, the nature of friendship, and even the usefulness of words, when the world collapses. Though all these topics are treated in the movie with enough seriousness to make them worth discussing, we will concentrate on a few things the movie teaches us about friendship, perhaps the central theme of the film.

When the historically-based movie begins, the Italian luxury car company Ferrari has won Le Mans five years in a row, and has so outdistanced its competitors that Enzo Ferrari mocks them openly. He particularly picks on Ford, and its owner Henry Ford II. Ford, played by the wonderful Tracy Letts, fed up with his company’s declining sales, decides to follow a strategy pitched to him by Lee Iacocca (John Bernthal) to enter wholeheartedly into racing in order to make Ford a more attractive car to younger buyers. They first try to buy Ferrari, but after appearing to be very interested in selling the company to Ford, while actually using their offer to jack up the price Fiat ultimately pays him, Ferrari says to Ford’s envoy, Iacocca, “Tell him (Ford) he is not Henry Ford. He is Henry Ford… the Second.”

Back in Detroit, Ford decides to get more deeply into racing by building a car that can beat Ferrari. Enter Matt Damon, playing Carroll Shelby, who was the last American to win Le Mans, but has had to retire from racing because of a heart condition. Shelby is asked to design the car and put together a team to beat Ferrari at the next Le Mans, and he immediately hires the high-strung Ken Miles (Christian Bale), the best racer Shelby knows. The movie then proceeds through twists and turns to the finish line at Le Mans, where the inevitable happens: Ford wins but in a way the viewer would never expect.

This is a magnificent film, nominated by many festivals and film awards groups for everything from sound editing to production design to best actor (Christian Bale). It may be the best traditional, linear film of the nine Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, since many of the films this year use a number of different devices to keep the audience’s attention, as we shall see in future posts. There are no tricks, no camera bells and whistles, no editing jumps from here to there—just good, solid filmmaking. Ferrari offers a well-told story, acted superbly by all involved, directed with wisdom and creativity. A story which could have slipped into maudlin melodrama at a number of different places, remains on point the whole 2½ hours plus, holding together several threads without losing any of them or dragging the picture into the deserts of boredom.

The most interesting thematic element is in the friendship between Shelby and Miles, both of whom have gone down in racing history as legends in their fields. The two men were from modest backgrounds, and each was the epitome of the self-made man, so they often sparred. Two of those fights are shown in the film. One is a comic roll around outside in Miles’s neighborhood, his wife Mollie mockingly bringing both men some ice tea when it is over.

The other fight is more serious and more instructive of their friendship. It takes place when Miles’s hot temper loses a sponsorship for them from Porsche. The argument starts slowly, beginning with a disagreement with an official about a small rule they had violated, then escalates into getting Shelby and Miles disqualified from the race. Shelby asks Miles if he likes losing. The short-tempered Miles lashes back, and Shelby, noting that Miles’s son Peter is there, says, “Did you bring your son out here to watch you act like an idiot or to get disqualified? Which?” At this, Miles throws a wrench at Shelby and stalks off. Shelby picks up the wrench and later frames it, giving it to Miles, when Miles actually ends up winning the race. Shelby knows that Miles’s anger was worth tolerating because it was an essential part of his psychological “toolbox”. His relentless quest for perfection, also symbolized by the wrench, was inextricably linked to his anger, playing a large part in making Miles the man he was. Shelby loves him in spite of his faults.

The two men are friends, even though one is the boss (Shelby) and the other the employee. Their friendship is based in a mutual respect for the other’s talent: Shelby the cool, collected manager and designer of the renowned Shelby Cobra, Miles the hot-tempered, reckless, artist who can drive better than anyone in the world. The movie makes clear, as was apparently the case in life, that Shelby’s patience preserved their friendship more than once.

Friendship is a lot of things in the Christian life, but it is always patient and trusting. “…there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Prov 18:24, ESV).

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Loving Your Neighbor By Watching the Oscar Best Picture Nominees

academy awards photo
Image credit: “Academy Award Winner,” by flickr user Davidlohr Bueso is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0). Caption from flickr: Photo by Dave_B_

Can watching movies help you live out Christ’s command to love your neighbor? We welcome Drew Trotter, Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, to the ESN blog for a series on the 2020 Best Picture Oscar nominees. If you missed any of them this year, we invite you to watch along as Drew unpacks how they can be springboards to conversation with colleagues, students, and other neighbors in our lives. 


Christians go to the movies for a number of different reasons. Most, if not all, of us go, like everybody else, to be entertained. We want to escape the drudgery or the sameness (or both) of our lives into worlds we don’t normally inhabit, worlds of superheroes or space travel, of cowboys or battlefields, of pageantry or plainness, but worlds that are filled with characters and stories we don’t know or experience in our own daily lives. Sometimes we go to be surprised. We don’t know anything about a film, and a friend invites us, and we go. Sometimes we go, expecting to be challenged by the sadness of a story, or by its hilarity, or by its social or political message.

I’d like to use this space to challenge us to go to the movies, which I’m going to discuss, for any or all of these reasons, and for one more: to learn how to love our neighbor better.

Over the next nine blog postings, I’m going to look briefly at the nine nominees for Best Picture of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards, the category won in a surprise by the South Korean film, Parasite. These pictures form what one of the most powerful, creative, and far-reaching artist communities—often known by the short-hand of its most well-known location, “Hollywood”—believes to be the nine most worthy films of the past year. There is no elaboration of what “Best” means in this vote; the award is simply described by the Academy’s website as for “the best motion picture of the year.”

But just because the Academy doesn’t tell us why they vote for one picture or another, doesn’t mean there aren’t some guidelines for their voting that are discernible. Indications are that the award is bestowed because of a complex mix of technical excellence of production, story-telling power, and superb performances by the director, writers, and actors of the film. Often, for instance, the Best Picture and Best Director are shared by the same film, as they were this year by Bong Joon Ho. Perhaps even more often, one or more of the actors of the winning film wins an acting Oscar. In short, the quality of the Best Picture is recognized as being both technical and artistic. Interestingly, this rarely has much to do with Box Office performance. The Best Picture is the result of an artistic community recognizing which film they, as professionals in the industry, think to be the best. It is usually not a popularity contest.

What does this have to do with loving our neighbor better by going to the movies? The answer to that question has to do with how much we believe art affects the society in which it is produced. Abigail Adams is credited with saying, “The theater has been called the pulse of the people,” and you may be surprised to find that Leonardo DiCaprio agrees with her, though he is of course talking about the movies, not the live theater. When he won the Golden Globe a few years back for his portrayal of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, in his acceptance speech, he said this about Martin Scorsese, the film’s director: “You’re not only an incredible visionary, but you put the very fabric of our culture up on screen.”

You may or may not cringe at the thought of Martin Scorsese’s vision of the world being the way the world actually is, but like it or not, it is hard to argue with the numbers of people being influenced in their thinking by Hollywood. In 2019, Box Office receipts alone were $11,319,833,245 on sales of 1,236,899,638 tickets. Though the dollar figure is quite high, the important number is the 1¼ billion tickets sold last year. People in America are still going to the movies in droves and this does not even count the presumably even greater number of people watching Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, and any number of other streaming sources for movies. Admittedly, the number of tickets sold last year is slightly lower than 2018’s 1,321,858,931 but the difference is not appreciable, and with often higher ticket prices, it is remarkable that the numbers have increased both in ticket sales and in box office dollars in three of the last five years, year over year.

What this means is simply this: American movies are having an enormous impact on the lives and thought processes of a significant portion, perhaps the majority, of our nation’s populace.

But are the nominees for Best Picture the largest Box Office grossers of the year? No, not by a long shot. This year’s movies, however, did have a significant box office draw on the whole. Five of the seven traditional releases (i.e. not the two Netflix movies) are in the top thirty-five box office movies of the year, and the lowest box office draw, Parasite, is by far the highest grossing foreign film of the year. This showing at the box office by the nominees was so extraordinary that The Hollywood Reporter called it the best showing by best picture nominees “in recent memory” (except for last year, which was buoyed by Black Panther’s huge box office numbers).

Let me bring us back to loving our neighbors by going to the movies, specifically viewing the nine Best Picture nominees for the Academy Award. The numbers show that your neighbors are going to the movies, and this year these particular movies. These are the movies that members of one of the most powerful and influential communities of artists are putting forward as their “best” product. These two reasons provide argument enough for our premise that movies are both a barometer, and a medium of instruction, of our society, but there is a third reason.

Often we seek a way to talk with our neighbors about spiritual matters. This year’s movies address the following issues, any one of which can lead the thoughtful, caring person into dialogue over the deepest hurts, fears, angers that humans exhibit: winning and losing with the deck stacked against you by corporate greed and power (Ford v. Ferrari); loyalty, decision-making, making a slight turn in the wrong direction and eventually paying an enormous price (The Irishman); how childish, unthinking fantasy can lead one to support unthinkable atrocity (JoJo Rabbit); how evil one can become if one embraces evil choices(Joker); what it means to grow up, learn to live life on your own terms, yet retain your ties to the ones who have loved you the most in childhood (Little Women); marriage and how two people who love each other can destroy it (Marriage Story); what brotherhood, commitment, and duty mean in the test of war (1917); entertainment and its role in American society (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood); and family, wealth, class, and their effects in the modern world (Parasite). What better way to begin a serious conversation with a neighbor than to take them to one of these movies, or by now, to invite them over to watch them on your streaming service?

I look forward to thinking through these nine films with you, and I hope you will see each of them …because you love your neighbor.

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