Eastern Promises (A Christian Movie Review)

This film is so offensive to the morality and cleanliness of a Christian mind, I must urge people not to watch it. You cannot mix clean water with dirty water and get clean water; your mind is something worth protecting.

Without spoilers, I will list the offenses:

As with most mob/organized crime movies, most of the characters are deplorable, and the movie goes to lengths to shock us with how commonly, every-day brutal these people are. But what tips the scale is that the film deals with, essentially, human trafficking. As the name implies, the film shows how young (often underage) Russian girls are tricked into coming West and then forced into prostitution.

UNDERAGE CHILDBIRTH:
The opening scene of the movie has a grisly murder, but the very next scene depicts a 14 year-old girl coming to a pharmacy for help, and then leaking lots of blood from between her legs and feinting. She dies in childbirth (to go further is to introduce spoilers).

UNDERAGE SEX:
In a later scene, the son of the local crime boss and his second are enjoying themselves in the locked room where the forced prostitutes are kept. Some of the girls are enjoying themselves, but most seem scared and act perfunctory. The son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), forces Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, "Aragorn" from the Lord of the Rings) to have sex with one of the girls to prove he isn't queer. Nikolai does so in a graphic sex scene with one of the underage girls, easily distinguishable by her underdeveloped breasts. It is hardly something I ever needed to see that particular actor do, let alone any two people in the world.

KNIFE FIGHT VERSUS A NUDE OPPONENT:
Another protracted scene features two men armed with knives attacking a naked mobster. During the fight scene, no effort was made to hide the victim's nudity, and several full-frontal nudity shots are presented. The fight is also accurate in its depiction of a knife-fight. As a weathered Jujitsu expert from Japan once told me, "If you ever get in a knife fight, expect to get cut. It's just going to happen. The goal is to live, not to avoid getting cut."

INNOCENCE DOESN'T MATTER:
Mild spoiler: In the movie, a baby's life is consistently threatened; in one graphic scene she is taken to a river to be drowned.

CLOSING:
So, while the quality of the movie is good, the acting is good, the movie is such an affront to the Christian mind that such kind, beneficent people really do not need to see this.

The Natural History of the Only Child

Wired has a decent article on why family sizes are shrinking, called "The Natural History of the Only Child."

"exactly why families are shrinking is a mystery. Rising living standards seem to have something to do with it. It's certainly true that as living standards rose in England -- as children died less from diseases, as the country overall became richer -- the size of the English family shrank. When other countries became wealthier, their families shrank, too. These days, affluent countries tend as a rule to have smaller families than poor ones."

I have read and written thoughts about this before, but the key the author found was a good one: It is the biological idea of what it costs to raise a child. As the idea moves from "I have to feed them and have them so they can help me survive" to "I have to feed them and clothe them and send them to college" to "I have to feed them and clothe them and buy them lots of things and send them to college and I want a big screen TV", we have less children, just as animals weigh their ability to "pay" the cost of having offspring.

"It turns out that animals have evolved a balance between offspring and effort. Some can even adjust how many offspring they produce, depending on whether they are under stress or live comfortably. Ruth Mace, an expert on family size at Imperial College London, argues this week in the journal Science that humans are governed by the same kinds of rules. When the standard of living goes up, the cost of living goes up too. It takes a family in Addis Ababa (the urban capitol of Ethiopia) a lot more money to raise an additional child than a family out in the Ethiopian countryside. That may be one reason why the population is exploding in rural Ethiopia, while in Addis Ababa it is actually shrinking."

Of course, some people, such as myself, make the conscious decision that "I can't pay for all of them to go to college, so I will have to raise them to work hard and get good grades", in other words, downgrade what is perceived as necessary to raise a child, and then we have more children.

"If Mace is right, then as long as the world keeps creeping out of poverty, families will continue to shrink. How small they can go is an open question. But perhaps we should stop thinking of families with only children as some odd fluke of neurotic New York life. It's just human biology played out to a logical extreme."

iPhone: Security really means Lack of Liberty

Two very interesting articles from Wired Magazine:

1. With iPhone, 'Security' Is Code for 'Control' by Bruce Schneier
   
2. iPhone's Security Rivals Windows 95 (No, That's Not Good) by Kim Zetter

The first details why companies are in love with "locking down" their devices so that no competition and worm its way in, and more importantly, how companies confuse "Security" for "Control" as a way of pulling the sheets over consumers, who are hindered, not helped, by such measures.

The second shows just how little real security the iPhone has, while its "lock-down" controls are so tight, updates can brick your modded iPhone.

That just goes to show you where Apple's concerns really lie.

ChristianAnswers.net selects my review of Rambo

ChristianAnswers.net selected my review of Rambo (IV) and added it to their site. I was quite pleased to see that they had selected and made one edit to my review. It is the third "Positive" review, listed under my real name.

Their one edit is highly appropriate: they remove reference to the Missionaries in the film appearing to be Protestant (check the original review in the post before this). I have reproduced it here:

Positive - Many folks will go into “Rambo” expecting an action film, and, if critics are to be believed, a mediocre-to-poor movie experience. While horrendous, nihilistic films such as “No Country for Old Men” are lauded, Stallone's latest movie, daring to elicit images of faith and Christianity in a world gone wrong, is slammed.

True to form, this is a movie about the brutality and evil human beings are capable of; expect cursing, God's name called in vain, townspeople being killed in ethnic cleansing and sadistic games, local women being sexually assaulted (although the actual rapes are omitted) and a high body count as the rescue team / mercenaries clash with the Burmese Army, or SDPC.

As with the first three “Rambo” films, the fourth movie functions as a beacon to Western moviegoers to the plights of a people who are, for whatever reason, not receiving proper media attention. The first film was concerned with the treatment of returning Vietnam Veterans, the second film dealt with the possibility of American POWs in Vietnam, the third film was about Russia's War against Afghanistan, and the fourth film is about the systematic slaughter and relocation of various ethnic groups in Burma or Myanmar.

In the movie, appropriately, two theological camps are depicted:
While John J. Rambo, at the outset of the movie, seems atheistic, the mercenary commander (Graham McTavish) is openly so, famously saying to a Christian Missionary he is rescuing “God didn't save you, I did.”

The Christian Missionaries, on the other hand… speak to all Christian values, and this is important. At no time are any of them displayed as losing their faith, and the wife of the mission leader never casts an eye towards John Rambo over her husband, although she does attempt to reach him through words. The effect of this, you will have to see the film and wait for the ending.

The film is ultimately more complicated than its surface; it serves to educate through entertainment, without beating the viewer over the head as to its Christian message (which will appear subtle to non-Christians who don't know what to look for), but giving the viewer a thorough thrashing as to the harsh realities of war and abject cruelty of people over another, largely defenseless, group. Do not take your children, but do watch this movie.

My Ratings:

• Moral rating: Better than Average
• Moviemaking quality: 4.5

—David Rodriguez, age 32

"Rambo IV" is Deeper than it Surface: A Christian Review

Many folks will go into "Rambo" expecting an action film and, if critics are to be believed, a mediocre to poor movie experience. While horrendous, nihilistic films such as "No Country for Old Men" are lauded, Stallone's latest movie, daring to elicit images of faith and Christianity in a world gone wrong, is slammed.

True to form, this is a movie about the brutality and evil human beings are capable of; expect cursing, God's name called in vain, townspeople being killed in ethnic cleansing and sadistic games, local women being sexually assaulted (although the actual rapes are omitted) and a high body count as the rescue team / mercenaries clash with the Burmese Army, or SDPC.

As with the first three "Rambo" films, the fourth movie functions as a beacon to Western moviegoers to the plights of a people who are, for whatever reason, not receiving proper media attention. The first film was concerned with the treatment of returning Vietnam Veterans, the second film dealt with the possibility of American POWs in Vietnam, the third film was about Russia's War against Afghanistan, and the fourth film is about the systematic slaughter and relocation of various ethnic groups in Burma or Myanmar.

In the movie, appropriately, two theological camps are depicted:

While John J. Rambo, at the outset of the movie, seems atheistic, the mercenary commander (Graham McTavish) is openly so, famously saying to a Christian Missionary he is rescuing "God didn't save you, I did."

The Christian Missionaries, on the other hand, feel protestant yet speak to all Christian values, and this is important. At no time are any of them displayed as losing their faith, and the wife of the mission leader never casts an eye towards John Rambo over her husband, although she does attempt to reach him through words. The effect of this, you will have to see the film and wait for the ending.

The film is ultimately more complicated than its surface; it serves to educate through entertainment, without beating the viewer over the head as to its Christian message (which will appear subtle to non-Christians who don't know what to look for), but giving the viewer a thorough thrashing as to the harsh realities of war and abject cruelty of people over another, largely defenseless, group.

Do not take your children, but do watch this movie.

Pandora: Spiritual Successor to the GP2X

The "lead developers" behind the GP2X community have decided to create their own handheld device that answers all of the problems that the GP2X has (aside from having a very small userbase), and I'm quite jazzed about it:

That's a 3d render, not an actual unit.

It includes Wi-Fi, a touch-screen, dual-analog controls, a Directional (D) Pad, four game buttons (top right), a clamshell design (which the NDS and cellular phones have proven to be wonderful), it supports powered USB devices, has dual SDHD slots (high density SD cards and regular SD cards), has a 3d graphics processor (GPU), 128MB of RAM, will run X-Windows and has a miniature keyboard!

All for 200 GBP (Great Britian Pounds) or, with import fees, $320. I'd much prefer to pay $200, but this is still a neat device. Here's the wiki.

Here is what I posted in the big "Will you buy it?" thread:
Well I'm buying this, easily. I got all hot & bothered over the fact that the Pandora answers my every complaint of my GP2X, which honestly doesn't get used much anymore.

The GP2X:

• Has cheap construction / joystick
• Has no Wi-Fi
• Doesn't support powered USB devices
• Sucks as soon as you need a keyboard
• Doesn't have Touch Screen (MK1 & MK2)
• Can brick itself
• Doesn't have SDHD
• Doesn't have an analog stick, never mind two of them
• Volume control was always wonky
• Dual-core implementation just makes developers go bat-guano insane.
• Did I mention the joystick was bad?

The Pandora, in one fell swoop, handles every single one of these problems. The Touch-Screen GP2X, to my knowledge, still has all but one of these problems.

I am so jazzed about the Pandora that I would like to pre-order one now so that I can be sure to get one later.

Plus, the Pandora:

• Can feasibly run X-Windows
• Has a 3d processing GPU
• Can run PSX games, with an appropriate emulator
• Can support a nice handheld application (something less clunky than DSorganize please)
• Can get on the Web and run Firefox!
• Has a keyboard!

As for everyone whining, I will point out that researchers at Harvard (those with doctorates, not undergrads) have found that people are actually very bad at estimating what will make them happy, yet it appears to be human nature to take your own advice, based on no empirical data whatsoever, over the advice of others who have tried and used something. Granted, that's hard to do here, but like Nintendo before the Wii launched, you either have faith in the designers of the product or you don't.

New Year's Day Adventure

On New Year's Day my 3 daughters, baby boy and I hit a local public forest and traversed its unpleasantly frequented depths.

Lupita is 5'2", 117 lbs at 10 years old. You've seen her pictures on teh interwebs, and they are up to date (if not, make with the clickies, she's a cute kid). She is my Tiger.

I bought her a real, authentic Swiss Army Knife for Christmas and she took her first opportunity to use it (we were following a creek in the forest) to find out just how sharp Swiss Army Knives are and lanced her thumb. She didn't cry, she just said "Ow!" and then looked at me, and I could see this wave of shame wash over her face, and then she cried, not for the pain, but because she felt she'd done a bad job: I had trusted her with the knife. Mistakenly, she thought I didn't think this would happen.

I told her, "I knew that was going to happen." "You did?" "Of course. I had knives explained to me but it only made sense after I cut myself with them. Trust me, it's not a mistake you make often after the first time."

I hadn't, however, thought to pack bandages, antibiotic cream or anything else I used to take with me on horseback rides other than lots and lots of water. So I cut my undershirt and made a bandage and wrapped her thumb well.

So we hurried back; I had all of my kids with me. Alejandrita (alay-hon-dree-ta), my 5yo daughter, waited to trip until we were out of the forest and on the paved sidewalk, and Dulce Maria ("Sweet" Maria), my 8yo daughter, went down with her as they were holding hands. They screamed. Alay had a skinned elbow and Dulce a skinned knee. So I cut my shirt up some more after licking the wounds clean.

We came back home (this was all on New Year's Day) and Maria Alejandra, my lovely Latina, was much amused. Everyone but the two boys (myself and my son) were hurt.

Lupita also noticed that Jose Francisco found his younger two sisters' reactions perplexing. She caught the look on his face, he peered at their wounds, and then looked at Maria's thumb, which had bled a bit through the impromptu wrapping.

I put powdered vitamin C on Lupe's cut, which BURNED, but worked great. It was much better this morning. Dulce was terrified of it, so Maria applied neosporin.

So it was a good day. Life is not complete without crying daughters.