A good-movie overload--not a bad problem to have.

Dana and I have been busy watching Mad Men on our Netflix, so we've seen approximately two movies (Doubt and Benjamin Button) since Christmas. That changed last week, when Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino played at our town's wonderful historic, volunteer-run theater on consecutive weekends. (You'll have to excuse our town. It's a little slow when it comes to getting good movies.)*

*Of course, both movies were playing at the mall theater a month ago, but we're cheap. And we love seeing movies at a historic theater.

So when I've gone from seeing two movies in three months to watching the two best movies I've seen in at least a year within the span of a week, you know I've got to write about it. I'll avoid spoilers, so have no fear and read on.

Slumdog: I couldn't help but compare Slumdog with the 2002 Brazilian film City of God. Both chronicle life in the slums, both are coming-of-age films, and both follow two boys as they take morally diverging paths from their roots in a makeshift childhood gang ("The Tender Trio" in City of God, "The Three Musketeers" in Slumdog). Slumdog took off a ton of the harder edges of City of God--an absolutely brutal film--and with the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" conceit and occasional humor, tinges the entire thing with a latent sunshiny glow. In doing so, I think Slumdog loses a little bit of City of God's epic scope, but it also makes the film much more accessible to mainstream audiences. Sure, it's comparatively whitewashed, but I had the strong impression that Slumdog is essentially City of God with some significantly redemptive qualities--a reward that's more than worth sitting through the brutality for. And that is most definitely a good thing.

The one thing that troubled me about this otherwise fantastic film--and it may be more my fault than the movie's--was the simplicity of its theme. I like to come away from movies that bill themselves as substantive thinking about difficult moral decisions, ambiguities and conundrums, and just generally pondering the meaning of life. I didn't really have anything like that to think about as I left Slumdog. I came away with an incredible affirmation of life itself, but I didn't see much more there thematically than "love conquers all" and the moral purity of Jamal. (The game show bathroom scene and the one that followed were an indelible illustration of the latter.) It was an epic love and rags-to-riches story--two of the classic themes in movie history--extremely well told. Is a familiar story told incredibly well enough to make a movie an elite one? Or are my expectations outrageous?

I talked about this with my friend Matt, and he suggested that the main theme was instead redemption--that out of the most horrible circumstances, Jamal's family, his love relationship, his place in life are redeemed through his honesty, loyalty and moral purity. Oh, right--that's probably the "redemptive element" City of God was missing. On second thought, I'll take that as a theme. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

Gran Torino: An absolute gem of a film. This may have been one of the most Christian movies I've ever seen. In fact, the Christ-imagery almost reaches the point of overkill at the end, but it still remains a profound, complex, fully alive example of just what atonement, grace and freedom truly mean.* The problem for most evangelicals is that this wonderful explanation comes wrapped up in an R-rated stream of f-bombs and racial slurs--"many of which, quite frankly, [Focus on the Family had] never heard before." (Spoiler alert on that link). It's a shame, really, that that will keep many Christians from seeing such a fantastic movie. A few friends of ours said folks from our church were arguing with them this week that Gran Torino was an awful, anti-Christian movie. They hadn't even seen it. I'm not saying the flood of racial epithets aren't disturbing--they're ridiculously offensive, and I'm not sure I'd recommend this movie to my mother--but let's look past the f-word count and focus on the more substantive values of this film, shall we? If we avoid it as typical Hollywood corruption, it's our loss.

*I'd love to go into a deeper examination of that imagery, but it's really tough to do without spoilers. And you should all go see it, so I'm not going to ruin it for you.