Tony Jones » movies

Weekend in Nashvegas

Tony Jones — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 14:49:38 +0000

I arrived in Nashville on Thursday evening, just in time to take in the closing movie of the Nashville Film Festival, Cyrus, with the incomparable Gareth Higgins. My tripartite review:

John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei can act more with their faces than most actors can with their whole bodies.
Jonah Hill is uncomfortably huge (by that I mean he’s so overweight that it’s uncomfortable to watch.
It’s billed as a comedy, but it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny. It’s much more a tragicomedy.

After the film, I crashed the festival closing party and enjoyed the buffet.

Yesterday I ran a JoPa Productions Social Media Bootcamp for Pastors and Ministry Leaders at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. Good times. And last night, as is my Nashvillian tradition, I joined Jay Voorhees at the legendary Station Inn to hear some bluegrass. On stage was the equally legendary Roland White and a breathtakingly good back-up band. At one point, Jay (a guitar player) looked to me (also a guitar player) and made the motion of chopping off his fingers, which is how I often feel when watching pickers who are so accomplished.

And today I’m addressing a group from the Alliance of Baptists about the intersections between emergence and their fellowship and about the Didache.

Gareth schooled me on the joys of bohemian Nashville, and I think I’m slowly converting…

More Satire from Rick Bennett

Tony Jones — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:24:23 +0000

Rick Bennett has taken his satire to a new level with this piece, imagining an Oscar roundtable discussion with Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, Ed Young, Jr., David Dark, and a fictional Baptist pastor (think Pastor Dan before he met Neo). Here’s a snippet from the lattermost:

Rev. Smith: My wife made me go to see Blindside. I liked it. Sandra Bullock makes a pretty blond. I didn’t see anything else besides Up, when my grandkids brought it over. It was cute, but I didn’t like the chicken creature. Was it a girl? Thought it was a boy until the baby came along. I don’t like gender confusion. I did like the talking dog. That Hurt Locker sounds kinda interesting, but I suppose it has bad language. They always ruin the war films with bad language.

via cheaper than therapy: Oscar Roundtable.

My Long Strange Trip with Larry Norman

Tony Jones — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:53:19 +0000

A couple weeks ago, I watched (and blogged about) the David Di Sabatino documentary film, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher. David was kind enough to drop me an email after that post, and kinder still to send me a copy of his more recent film, Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman.

It’s odd that I ever got into Larry Norman music when I was in high school, but I did. In spite of growing up in a mainline Congregational church and having to this day never heard a Randy Stonehill song (as far as I know), someone turned me on to Norman’s music and I loved it.

I didn’t get the millenial theology, that’s for sure — famously, Norman’s song, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” was used in the campy Christian rapture film, A Thief in the Night. And Norman’s music didn’t sound like the other Christian rock that my evangelical friends foisted upon me: Petra, White Heart, and Stryper.

Instead, Norman’s music sounded more like my favorite music: Led Zeppelin and their ilk. His songs were often driven with acoustic blues rhythms, and his lyrics were shockingly raw:

Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day,
and you’re still lookin’ for the perfect lay.
Why don’t you look into Jesus,
He’s got the answer.

That was all a bit of a neck-snapper for this nice, white suburban boy.

The fact is, it was clear to me even in the 1980s, when I was listening to Norman’s music on cassettes in my 1976 Ford Pinto hatchback that he was from a different version of Christianity than I. I wondered what, if anything, I had in common with the Christianity that he was singing about.

I wonder that less today, but I am even more fascinated by Norman, Frisbee, and the Jesus Movement revival in the 1970s. Fallen Angel isn’t particularly kind to Norman, but only because it tells the truth. Like so many other gifted artists, he was tragically flawed and left a wake of broken relationships (including an unacknowledged son in Australia) and sour business deals behind him. Throughout the many interviews in the film, the main feeling among those interviewed seems to be that they’re shaking their heads and wondering what-could-have-been. And, not coincidentally, that’s almost verbatim what Chuck Smith, Sr. says at Lonnie Frisbee’s funeral in that film.

Both Frisbee and Norman died pretty much alone, far from the adoring throngs of fans that they’d known in the 1970s. Maybe they were abandoned by the church (as they both claimed), or maybe they pushed the church away by their strange and sometimes abusive behavior. Or, most likely, it was a combination of the two. But, in any case, I’ve found both of Di Sabatino’s films to be poignant and tragic, and to open a window into an aspect of recent Christian history with which I was previously unfamiliar.

Lonnie Frisbee and the Non-Demise of the Emerging Church

Tony Jones — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:17:41 +0000

Well, it seems that my long-time friend and occasional sparring partner, Andrew Jones (TSK), has (once again) said we’ve reached the end of the emergent/-ing church movement. TSK’s ambivalence for the “emergent/-ing” language and the partnership that some of us in the States have with publishing houses is well known. And I think it’s always dangerous to start to declare something over as an historian when one is still up to one’s ankles in it.

To be fair, TSK clarifies in a comment on the post when he writes that in 2009 the ECM became,

less radical and non-offensive but actually larger in scope and impact than it has ever been.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

I used to think I knew what the term “radical” meant, but then I entered a doctoral program in theology. How that term is used in the academy versus how it’s used in the streets and in the church is virtually unrelated, as far as I can tell. What I now mean by “radical” is informed by Marxism (another word that’s dirty outside the academy, but everyone in the academy seems to know what you mean when you use it).

Karl Marx (he looks as nice as a grandpa)

In short, what Marx did was to see what others did not see,

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. (from The Communist Manifesto)

The capitalist system, he’s saying, is predicated on constant changes in production, which both wipes away all former fixedness of human existence and precludes the ability of the bourgeoisie or the masses to reflect on their existence because they are always too busy trying to keep up with said changes. What is “radical” about Marx and Marxists is their ability to see and proclaim this, and to potentially catalyze a revolution that will overturn this way of being. Of course, it’s somewhat ironic that now, 150 years after Marx, his ideas live on the academy but are virtually unknown in politics.

That being said, is the ECM still “radical”? Has it ever been? It seems to me that, yes, there is some radicality left in the ECM, for it seems to me that emergents are and have been among those proclaiming that the “emperor has no clothes” — here the “emperor” being the conventional church. And, contrary to Aaron Stewart, who commented at TSK,

The Emergent conversation is coming to an end because people eventually get tired of just talking,

the fact is that those of us in the ECM have spent a lot more time doing than talking. To push that even further, why that dichotomy? When TSK travels Europe and talks to folks about starting new, off-the-grid Christian communities, is he “just talking”? Am I, when I write a book or a blog post or give a talk somewhere? Of course not. Talking is actually doing, so let’s all stop using this tired trope, okay?

And secondly, is the ECM becoming “less offensive”? Let me shake my Magic Eight Ball. Mine reads, “Outlook not so good.” If my personal and anecdotal experience is any guide, the ECM is more offensive than ever. In the States, the Evangelical Intelligentsia has determined that emergent leaders are not true evangelicals, leaving pastors like Dan Kimball and Bob Hyatt to choose between evangelicalism the ECM. Personally, I have been disinvited from three speaking engagements this year, and one that I’ve got coming up in 2010 was moved off of a college campus and into a nearby hotel because of my presence at the event.

TSK notes that the conventional church in the UK and Europe has been more accepting of emergence in their midst, even supporting leading ECM thinkers like himself and Jonny Baker and underwriting emergingchurch.info. Agreed. From Rowan Williams on down, it seems that European church leaders are generally more comfortable with theological and ecclesiological innovation than their American brethren (although the protesters that have greeted Brian McLaren in Scotland and France and Germany show that European acceptance is not universal).

Interest in the ECM is peaking among mainline leaders in the States, if my speaking schedule is any indication. I, for one, hope that this does not mean a lack of controversy — in fact, in one speaking engagement to which I just agreed, I’ll be speaking alongside Will Willimon, and we’ll be taking contrary positions on the benefit of denominati0ns. That might lead to some controversy.

***

Lonne Frisbee

Last night I watched the documentary, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher. Although the productions leaves something to be desired, the content of the film is both fascinating and harrowing. In brief, Lonnie Frisbee was a gay, drugged out hippie who converted to Christianity during an acid trip. As it turned out, he had a knack for preaching and healing, and he was pivotal in the genesis of both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Associations, and he was like a son to Chuck Smith, Sr. and then to John Wimber. But as his sexuality became more public, they both turned on him. When he died of AIDS in 1993, he had been ostracized by the churches that he helped found, and he was surrounded only by his longtime friends from the Jesus Movement.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Max Weber‘s definition that charisma is,

a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

That’s Lonnie Frisbee in a nutshell.

More damning, however, is Weber’s conclusion that religious charisma is always routinized and bureaucratized as the generation that follows the charismatic leader attempts to capture the charisma and make a living from it.

And that is Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard.

If anything — and I think that TSK may agree with me on this — the question that looms over the ECM is whether it will become domesticated as the first generation of leadership passes the mantle to the second. But, the truth is, the answer to that lies not with me or TSK, but with you. Yes, you.

[UPDATE: It seems that TSK took my post to be more in-your-face than I meant it. I really used a couple disagreements he and I have and used them as a jumping off point to reflect on movements in general, and the ECM and Calvary Chapel and Vineyard specifically. My apologies to Andrew if this post seemed overly antagonistic.]

St. Gayle Haggard

Tony Jones — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:01:28 +0000

Last night, I watched the HBO documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard, and then caught the second half of Ted and Gayle Haggard’s appearance on Larry King Live.

I went in quite skeptically. I know a couple persons who knew/know Ted, and they describe him as something of a meglomaniac. No surprise, Alexandra Pelosi paints Ted as a sympathetic figure. In fact, using footage from her earlier documentary that features Haggard, it’s clear that she has a real affection for him. Through the doc and the LKL appearance, I couldn’t really get a handle on Ted. He’s pretty circumspect on many issues; for instance, he just wouldn’t answer the question when a caller from Orlando who described himself as a gay Christian man asked Ted about the possibilities of being a gay Christian. Ted’s response was basically: read your Bible and get into a good church. Ted obviously doesn’t feel the authority to judge anyone right now, which is surely smart on his part.

What stunned me, both in the doc and more acutely on LKL, was Gayle Haggard. Either she is one of the finest actors I’ve ever seen, or she is one of the most spiritually and psychologically healthy persons on this planet. She answered every question with composure. She’s not the stand-by-your-man-no-matter-what, mindless, conservative evangelical woman that some have portrayed her to be. Nor is she the unkempt, sexually uninterested wife that Mark Driscoll infamously insinuated when the scandal broke (of course, Mark’s orginal post is gone, but the Internet never forgets!).

She is, instead, thoughtful, kind, gracious, and forgiving. She has stuck with Ted through a truly horrific experience. She has accepted his remorse and granted him forgiveness. And, as a cherry on top, the Haggard’s eldest son, Marcus, joined them for the last bit on LKL and he was even more composed than Gayle. This is a truly extraordinary family…

…Or, they are positioning themselves for a new career. I’ve been told by one insider that the Haggards, basically broke, are hoping to establish an income by writing and speaking about their trials. Indeed, at the end of LKL, both Gayle and Ted said several times that they want to “communicate their story.” Fishing for a book deal? Speaking gigs? A reality TV show? Very possibly. So, my cynical side has to acknowledge the possibility that Gayle’s (and Ted’s and Marcus’s) grace and composure is actually a patina, covering a family in great distress trying to dig themselves out of a massive financial hole.

I suppose time will tell.

I’ll Be Watching Haggard Tonight

Tony Jones — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:06:04 +0000

My friend, Patton Dodd, has a piece up on Slate in advance of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard, premiering tonight. Patton used to work for Haggard and New Life Church, primarily as a writer and editor, so he writes about Haggard with some authority. Money Quote from Patton:

Two years have gone by with little more than occasional peeps from Haggard, and now he’s back in The Trials of Ted Haggard, an HBO film directed by Alexandra Pelosi, a sort of sequel to her Friends of God,
that documents Haggard’s dreary life in exile–no job, no home, no
friends, no ministry. Earlier this week, when CNN’s Anderson Cooper
interviewed Pelosi, he tried to open with a question about the fallen
minister’s “spiritual restoration.” Pelosi interrupted Cooper before he
could finish the question, saying she couldn’t speak to Haggard’s
mental or spiritual condition. Fair enough. But Cooper’s question is
the right one–for journalists, for Haggard, for his former church, and
for countless other congregations that have suffered similar betrayals.

I spoke to Patton on the phone last night, and one of the more vexing questions in my mind is this: Why is Ted Haggard promoting a documentary about himself? It seems odd, doesn’t it? Would Roger Smith promote Roger & Me? Definitely not.

I’d like a journalist to ask Pelosi and/or Haggard what is the financial arrangement between them, and that might color how we all view this “documentary.”

Regardless, I’ll be watching it tonight. And I’ll be interested to read all of your comments here.

Dysfunction Junction

Tony Jones — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:50:15 +0000

Last Saturday night, rain and general fatigue scuttled my plans to head into Manhattan, so my hosts and I went to see the film, Rachel Getting Married at the wonderfully quirky and historic Avon Theater in downtown Greenwich, Connecticut.

Several little surprises awaited me. One was that we spontaneously met up with Chuck Royce, president of the Royce Funds and of the Royce Foundation, which owns the Theater. In other words, Chuck purchased the old theater to save it from demolition. Chuck also happens to be an active member of Trinity Church. Chuck epitomized a common experience I had in Greenwich: you just wouldn’t know that these are some of the wealthiest people in the world. We sat next to one another in the back row of the theater, and he’s the epitome of unassuming generosity.

The second surprise was that the movie was filmed in Fairfield County, Connecticut, just down the road from where we sat. Fairfield County allegedly has the highest concentration of wealth of any county in the U.S. — in fact, the day after I left, Newsweek pondered the question, “What Are Rich People Thinking?” in a story that pondered the unlikely Obama victory in a county of richies whose taxes he will surely raise. It’s a quirky place, pockmarked with massive mansions and old country charm, inspersed with ultra high-end retailers and, as Ian pointed out often, $125,000 cars. It also makes for a strange backdrop for a quirky, indie film, and I would think that the setting would place this film out-of-reach for the imaginations of many Americans who just don’t understand New England.

The film itself is brilliant, if a bit long. First, the aesthetics. It is filmed exclusively on handheld cameras which I love, though I know that others hate it. Even more interesting, from my POV, is that the film’s soundtrack is all in real-time, primarily supplied by a wandering group of musicians playing fiddle, oud, and hand drum — they spend most of the film on the porch of the home at which the wedding is taking place, noodling around and preparing for the nuptials. It’s hard to know quite what to make of the Indian theme of the interracial wedding, since it’s never referenced. It’s almost like going to see a Shakespearean play set in World War II Germany.

The story is tragi-beautiful. Anne Hathaway, as has been noted consistently in reviews, is off-the-charts good at playing a young junkie who’s sister is getting married. Hathaway’s Kym is the broken keystone in the arch of a family barely holding together. The tragedy in the family’s past is unthinkable, and Kym becomes the focal point of the pain that they all carry with them. I won’t spoil the plot, but will only note that Kym gives the singularly most painfully awkward, shift-in-your-chair uncomfortable toast ever filmed. This cringe-inducing scene alone, including the cuts to the pained expressions on other actors’ faces, is proof of Jonathan Demme‘s filmmaking brilliance.

Outside of the theater, we all rolled our eyes at how close-to-home this movie felt. Demme and the cast really captured the pain and unexpected joy of living in a family rife with grief, chemical abuse, divorce, passive aggression, and conflict avoidance. I’m guessing more than a few seminary classes on pastoral counseling will assign this film in coming years.

Day One in Australia

Tony Jones — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:52:09 +0000

It’s not a short flight from San Francisco to Sydney – about 14 hours. But I did get to watch Lawrence of Arabia, one of my all-time favorite films. Then I watched And When Did You Last See Your Father?. I wept at the end of that one, which is my wont on flights. In fact, I’ve cried more on airplanes than anywhere else.

It wasn’t that big of a deal on the Qantas flight to Sydney, since it was dark and no one was seated next to me. The flight from MSP to SFO was a different story. Bright as day and seated between two guys about my age reading business magazines, I read the last two chapters of Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul and wept like a baby. That is a beautiful book of faith found, lost, and refound, written by Tony Hendra (who played Ian Faith in This Is Spinal Tap). I highly recommend it.

I arrived in Sydney at 6am and was retrieved at the airport by a long-time friend, Fuzz Kitto. I’m staying with Fuzz and Carolyn in Sydney, and their house is a bustle of activity with several young women living there now. The vibe there reminds me of Tom and Christine Sine’s Mustard Seed House in Seattle. The Kittos, of course, know the Sines and just about everyone else I know around the globe.

Since I refuse to use neck pillows, I didn’t sleep much on the plane and got pretty tired as the day wore on. I spoke at a “book launch” for The New Christians at noon, then had a great time on a radio show for the Australian Broadcasting Network that will be aired on Sunday night. In between, Carolyn took me to Coogee Beach for a Chardonnay. That evening, we met with a dozen emergent church types for an incredible meal cooked by Fuzz that included the best pumpkin soup I’ve ever tasted.

I fell asleep in Carolyn’s car on the way back to the Kittos, and crashed hard when I saw the bed.

All in all, a great first day with many good connections. And Sydney is a breathtaking city.

Soul Searching: The Movie

Tony Jones — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:43:56 +0000

Many of my blog readers will be familiar with Christian Smith’s excellent book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual and Lives of American Teenagers. It is, quite simply, the best quantitative study on teenage religiosity ever published, and it was based on the most comprehensive sociological survey of teenage religion ever undertaken. In fact, Smith’s research actually undermined my own assumption in Postmodern Youth Ministry that many American teens are “spiritual but not religious.” They’re not, Smith found. Instead, they’re quite religiously conventional. That is, however religious their parents are, that’s how religious they are.

Well, Chris was nice enough to send me a complimentary copy of the FILM that has just been released about the project. And let me say this: If I were a youth pastor, I’d set up a screening for all the parents at church as soon as possible.

The movie is part-documentary, part complement to the book. It definitely spends the most time on Christian teens (since they do make up 85% of the population), but also profiles a Jewish teen and a Mormon teen. In line with Chris’s book, the Mormon boy—a cool-looking surfer from Southern California—is the most impressive kid in the film. The Jewish girl is a close second.

One of the Christian ministries profiled is Outreach Red Bank in New Jersey. I’ve known of this youth group and met its founder, Christian Andrews, and they deserve a place in this film. Honestly, I would be hard-pressed to minister in New Jersey, since I find it such a depressing place. Another kid in the film, who endeavors to be a filmmaker himself, describes his New Jersey high school as a “horrible place.”

The movie is not perfect. You don’t really get to know any one kid well to fully empathize with him or her. They might have done better to spend 15 or 20 minutes on four kids instead of 5 minutes each on 10 kids. Catholics and Muslims will feel cheated, as will Wiccans, Hindus, and Buddhists. And there are at least two typos in the occasional subtitles (used when the teens have thick accents), which makes me think it might have been rushed a bit in production.

But those quibbles aside, this movie must be shown at churches and, I hope, at the YS Conventions next fall. For the best parts, I think, are when Chris Smith looks directly in the camera and clearly explains that religiosity is good for teens (by every measure), and teen religiosity is a direct result of parental influence.