First they clobber you with commercials, all of them featuring exceptionally bad music with the volume turned up so that your bones vibrate.
Then come the previews, about a dozen of them. And they all look like the same movie! Is it my imagination, or are movies getting uglier? They previewed a new Stephen Spielberg film based on a video game, “Cowboys and Aliens,” and all the actors looked like they’d just crawled out of the gutter trying to find another drink. I guess they just don’t make movies like “Casablanca” anymore–you know: with smart dialogue, fascinating multi-dimensional characters, and an actual story line. Who needs that stuff, when you can base your movies on video games and comic books?
I’ll have much more to say about “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I,” in the review that I’ll write for Chalcedon (www.chalcedon.edu ). But here are a few short takes.
1. Why do some of the characters in this movie say “My God,” when there is no God in J.K. Rowling’s alternative universe? Correct me if I’m wrong, but what role would God play in a world where children and bad guys wield fantastic magic powers and function as gods themselves?
2. Is it my imagination, or does one of the female villains in the movie bear a striking resemblance to Hillary Clinton?
3. If there is no God in the Harry Potter world, and the good guys and the bad guys use exactly the same techniques to get their way (you can tell the bad guys from the good guys in this movie because the bad guys are even uglier than the good guys), what is the source of morality in this alternative universe?
4. Why do so many Christians, especially Christian parents, seem to have no problem with this stuff?
Once again we see that modern Christians seem perfectly content to take the culture as they find it, and make no effort to bring it under the dominion of Christ the King.
Maybe that’s why our culture is turning into a cesspool.