Few of us will ever get an invitation to an early screening of our life’s work like George did. Yet we will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. To be a two handed warrior is to live for that heavenly red carpet affair, not its pale imitation at the Kodak theatre. Part 3 of our annual repost of one of the most read THW series.
Part 2 of annual repost of most read series in THW’s brief history:
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) provides a wonderful expression of the complicated interplay between modern Physicalism and Idealism as life-interpreting stories in the life of its main character, George Bailey.
Like George Bailey and Ricky Gervais, we all eventually find ourselves wondering: Is there a reward for knowing and trying to do the right thing? (Either in heaven or on earth) Or, is it all a waste of time?
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Wrong Man’ tells the story of Emmanuel Balestrero, arrested for a crime committed by his physical double. It portrays in miniature what theorist René Girard has described as a ‘mimetic crisis.’ The plight of the central character is not a product of blind chance, but rather due to the mimetic fears, desires, and vanities of the members of society that accuse him. Our failure to resist the flawed but contagious human desire to punish a scapegoat for every wrong suffered, not only fails to bring justice to the world, it subjects innocent scapegoats to suffering injustice themselves.
Part of 4 series: René Girard: Greatest Christian Intellectual You Never Heard of
Nearly two decades of using film to teach worldview to undergraduate students has resulted in a few surprises in which films have had the deepest cultural impact upon a generation.
In the past 25 years only THREE Academy Award-winning films have managed to break into the coveted top 50 all-time box office earners.
By necessity I have developed my own informal (and often intuitive) system for finding worldview-shaping films that you might find interesting as you consider your own choice in films.
The public-relations-driven, artistically myopic, and sometime overtly political nature of both the studios and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences often make Oscars an unreliable measure of true greatness.
Two Handed Warriors first annual Oscar Poll. Don’t forget to vote!
Most popular Blog Post of the Year–Casablanca and the Four Levels of Worldview: Why Everyone Meets at Rick’s–evoked a solid conversation with screenwriting experts, Jim Hull, Key Payton, and Stanley D. Williams. it was fascinating to see how concepts that my worldview students found helpful really did apply to real live screenwriters.
Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais’s Atheism joke and recent essay in the Wall Street Journal “Why I’m An Atheist,” provide a great background for examining an all-time great Christmas movie and one of the best defenses of Theism in Hollywood history–It’s a Wonderful Life.
Striving to attain mastery as a Two Handed Warrior occasionally results in some very enjoyable if unintended consequences. Learning to “reverse engineer” Academy Award-winning films in order to teach worldview (see Teaching Worldview Through Film) somehow led to my inadvertently…