Late One Night (2001)

When a stranger arrives in a small diner, he must face the wrath of obstinate unbelievers, forcing the stranger to defend Christianity, despite their numerous attempts to undermine his faith. That's the storyline of a short Christian film called Late One Night, written and directed by Dave Christiano.

I have enjoyed Christiano's previous work, but there is a trend in his films of too much talking. They are often short on cinema and long on dialogue. This was excessively apparent in the feature film Unidentified and is somewhat apparent in Late One Night. Clocking in at just over 30 minutes, Late One Night is overly talky, but still effective in its message.

The leader of the unbelievers, played by Brad Heller (who also appeared in both of The Moment After films) berates the stranger, played by Josh Gaffga, continually and repeatedly stating how fake Christians are in their actions and words.

The payoff for the film is nicely done, but Heller's character has a lot of important, albeit inaccurate assumptions of Christians and the stranger does little to answer his detailed concerns and, instead, answers with generalities. That being said, the film could have lost a good 10 minutes and it would have been far more effective.

I commend Christiano for sticking to his guns and making Christian shorts and features for about 20 years. He's truly dedicated to his mission and his faith. He's doing what I wish I was doing, making Christian flicks for a living.

Gaffga sits quietly, listening
to Heller's berating.

I also respect Christiano's loyalty to his actors. Filmed six years ago, a few of the leads in this short appear in Christiano's weekly half-hour Christian series called 7th Street Theater, airing on TBN Sunday nights at 11 p.m. EST.

Late One Night is a good Christian flick with interesting subject matter and lively discussion points. I only wish Christiano would put down the typewriter every once and a while and pick up a pencil and a blank storyboard and figure out how to tell his stories visually.

Some Things Never Change

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics
does not mean politics will not take an interest in you."
- Pericles (430 B.C.) -

2500 years later, same song, different verse.

Fortune

Here's a new fortune from my favorite Chinese restaurant.

A palm can say a lot, especially when it smacks you.

Is that supposed to be uplifting?

The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1821)

Mel Gibson got a lot of flack about his interpretation of the passion of Jesus in his movie The Passion of the Christ. Many people were unaware that most of that movie was indeed inspired by the visionary book of the venerated (pre-Saint) nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, called The Dolorous (or Sorrowful) Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Emmerich, herself, was illiterate. But a well known poet of the time, Clemens Brentano, was brought into her life and wrote down her visions as she had them. He would re-write and edit the visions with her so she would approve his wording.

The process of having the visions was extremely painful for Emmerich, who welcomed the suffering as she had a life-long yearning to participate in the passion of Jesus. This dedication and selflessness was rewarded with the vision of Jesus' passion, crucifixion and resurrection in complete and amazing detail. However, with each vision she also experienced the emotions involved.

The visions are so detailed and exact that one cannot help but believe them as true. The book relates such detail from descriptions of the simple bridges crossed when walking near the Garden, to Pilate's house, Herod's palace, neighborhoods and how all of the people in the bible intertwine with this blessed event. She states that the Ark of the Convenant was, at one time, housed in the same building as was held the Last Supper. She states that the same cave used to hide after the Garden of Gethsemane was the same cave used by Adam and Eve to hide after the fall. She mentions the chalice used at The Last Supper was an antique that was stored on Noah's Ark and survived the flood. The visions encompass and expound the stories in the bible, but never contradict them.

It is an amazing book, plain and simple.

I have often believed that a human's ability to understand the spiritual realm is equivalent to an ant trying to understand the subtly of human existence. An ant may know we are there and that we have some power over them when we want, but they know nothing nor can they comprehend human emotion, relationships, goals, dreams, etc.

Sister Anne & Clemens Brentano

The same ignorance, I believe, is what humans have when we try to understand the divine. I always go back to my favorite quote from Thomas A Kempis', which states "There is nothing more insignificant to God than human wisdom." After all, we, in our own arrogance and ignorance believe that God works as we do, that because we are created in His image that He, therefore, must approach life the way we do. We feel we know so much when, in reality, we know so very little.

I've always believed that, if you could imagine God as an artist, His pallet is full of wonderful colors and, by comparison, the human palette merely contains various shades of gray. God can use all of His existence to express Himself... nature, angels, weather, free will, His will, comets, galaxies, the universe itself are all individual colors available to Him in His palette. We can barely understand the complexities of human existence and are incapable of God's options. The simple constraint of time means we struggle to understand actions, consequences and events that occur over multiple generations. But, for God, our centuries are but a second.

What is beautiful about The Dolorous Passion is that it feels like we're getting a glimpse into this big picture. Since time has no meaning to God, when we see tying of Adam to Jesus, from Noah to the Last Supper, from David to Nicodemus, of Roman soldiers to Jesus infancy and his very birth, etc., it all makes sense in some much larger level... like by reading the bible we have understood the players in the story, but not the grandeur and the connections of the story itself... it's the difference between understanding a movie trailer and understanding the movie in its entirety.

Emmerich's visions of Jesus visiting Purgatory, Limbo and Hell after his crucifixion and before his resurrection are riveting, daunting, scary and, on some level, familiar and true.

Reading this book has been a wonderful experience and I strongly suggest anyone looking for a better, fuller understanding of their faith to take the time to visit the wonderful visions of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich.

You will never forget it.

Breach (2007)

I've heard it said that the true makeup of a man is what he does when no one is looking and the film Breach illuminates that distinction between our private acts and our public acts to great effect. The story of Breach is an intriguing one. It is the true life story about a novice FBI agent assigned to help uncover the workings behind the greatest and most damaging traitor and spy in American history.

Ryan Phillippe plays Eric O'Neill, the young and hungry FBI agent and Chris Cooper brilliantly portrays legendary spy Robert Hanssen, who's double-life caught everyone by surprise. Hanssen was a walking dichotomy of morality. He was both a very devout Roman Catholic who avoided occasions of sin while, at the same time, providing information to the Russians that he knew would cause the death of many double-agents.

I have found, in my life, that the more I understand my faith, Catholicism, the farther away from Heaven I get. It's the difference between being a good person and being a holy person. It's not that I won't make it to Heaven, or that I can't make it, or that my faith is keeping me from it... it is that the more I understand what is required, the more I understand what being holy means and what is expected from me through my faith, the more I realize how incapable I am of getting there on my own. After all, how can an imperfect being reach perfection without assistance from the perfectly divine?

O'Neill and Hanssen in church.

It's this reliance on faith, propelled by his own sin, that Cooper so effectively shows in Breach. The man is in a constant state of various levels of agony. The film subtly shows his devout faith as a requirement, a balancing act, because of his moral flaws driven by arrogance and pride are causing him to commit mortal sins against the very God he worshiped. I never sensed Hanssen's faith was fake, or put on for show, but instead the moral weight on the scales of his soul that kept him from falling forever into a self-created hellish abyss.


Other wonderful actors, such as Laura Linney, Gary Cole and Dennis Haysbert round out the cast, but it is the weighted, struggled and tortured performance by Cooper that takes this spy film to an entirely different level.

Breach brings one of the darkest moments in U.S. intelligence history to the screen with a multi-layered, effectively moving and intriguing film filled with at least one Academy Award worthy performance.