It’s really not their fault. The issue is that they’re movies and so can’t do the same thing a book does. I think my biggest issue with the movies is that they can’t capture what I find so engrossing about the books

Harry is at the center of a war between light and dark, good and evil, charming and creepy. He is the lynch pin the rest of the fight is resting on, the one weakness of the uber evil villain, Voldemort. Harry started regularly fighting for his life when he was eleven and has had to do so again and again each book, I mean, year. In each book there is something to be overcome, some way to thwart Voldemort’s plans yet again, some crisis that forces Harry to grow up a bit more. And yet, when he wakes up the morning after the huge coup de grace he’s still just a boy.

Harry may be the epicenter of a war, but he’s also a kid going to school and having friends. So yeah he’s up all night fretting over the latest mystery, but in the morning he’s still going to have to take exams. He has two friends that will stick with him come hell or high water, but sometimes they have a fight. Sometimes Harry has to go say he’s sorry or figure out when to be truly honest and when to be tactful. Sure, maybe he’s the Chosen One who will defeat Voldemort once and for all, but there’s this girl that he thinks is really cute, but he doesn’t know how to talk to her. The grand, epic tale is told in the framework of everyday life.

This is the same reason I enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is, again, the Chosen One, the one imbued with powers to fight the forces of evil. But she’s still just a teenage girl. She might be late to class because she was talking to her Watcher about what she killed on patrol the night before. Or sometimes she needs to choose between fighting evil where it lurks or spending some quality time with her friends. Sure, the fight’s important, but so is her relationship with her mother. She only has so much time so which will she choose? The war she is fighting is fought in big and little ways throughout her day.

This is something that you just cannot capture in a movie. There’s just not enough time. So what ends up happening is that each Harry Potter book with it’s slow unfolding of events and it’s rich detail of daily life turns into an action movie with the one task that Harry must focus all his screen time on. The ins and outs of daily life are lost and the many of the hard decisions between destiny or friends are assumed. Destiny, of course; we don’t want this movie to be too long.

But that seems to miss the point. That turns stories that are about the tension between being special and being normal into straight up adventures. The movies lose so much of the lush details that make the Harry Potter world such a delightful and terrible place to be. And it removes the war from daily life. Suddenly the war Harry is fighting is a series of events that happen in a year and not a daily struggle.

I feel like there is profundity there, but that could just be because I enjoy the books so very much and look for profundity everywhere. But having the time and space to make the hero of the tale a normal person who is special means quite a lot to me. Because I am a normal person. I am a normal person in the middle of a way and while no, I’m not the Chosen One, I’ve still got my bit to play. There is a fight that is not primarily in the big events, but in everyday life. Battle lines are drawn up on whether or not you shout at that child, serve that person, speak those words. Battles are waged by very normal people who are also very special. And if my life were ever a book I would want it to be full of details and textures so that the world I walk through could be felt and understood. So that the reader could fall in love with the world they see through my eyes.

All of which is a luxury that is simply lost when a seven hundred page book is converted to a two hour long movie. Most of the bits I find so delightful are lost in the adaptation and all I’m left with are the highlights. I like the movie world Harry walks through and because I’m such a sucker for nifty visuals I might come to love it, but not nearly as deeply as I have through the books. The nuances are lost and the slow building of a mystery is completely shot to pieces. Much of the whimsy is maintained (for most of the movies anyway. That third movie was just too artsy.) and the important relationships are given their space and time for all that they aren’t completely fleshed out. So they are enjoyable moves, but they’re just not what I’m looking for in a Harry Potter story. This won’t stop me from watching them, but it makes reading the books afterwords that much better.

Indeed there is, but just as I am realizing this I have giving my falling geekness a shot in the arm of equal parts Red Bull and coffee. I have just finished reading a book about compost.

Now, this word ‘read’ can be understood so many different ways. There’s read as in “I had to read War and Peace over the summer.” Then there’s “I would have finished the book sooner, but this annoying thing called sleep was required.” I meant the latter. I read this little book on compost enthusiastically, avidly, excitedly and like several other adverbs, I’m sure. And while I read the book I would periodically run to Crystal to tell her all the nifty things I was learning.

The book is a really friendly little book. It’s called Mike McGrath’s Book of Compost and is written by, shocking I know, Mike McGrath. He is the former editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening and hosts a radio show called You Bet Your Garden which is kinda like Car Talk, but with gardening instead of cars. He has been composting roughly as long as I’ve been alive and is a really funny guy. The book is full of funny little asides, the illustrations made me chuckle and he always refers to the round, soft vegetables that are most common in gardens as “tamatas”. There is just enough science in the book so that one can figure out the principles of composting, but not so much that he lost me. And I am easy to lose when it comes to science stuff. Also, as he goes along he gives directions for more resources including websites, studies that were done by various universities and how to find contact information for your county cooperative agricultural extension service.

The book is divided up into two parts the first being the basics and the second being more advanced information that gets into the nitty gritty of making good compost. I read both parts. And was fascinated the entire time. I now know more about composting than I ever expected to.

Sadly, I had things to do yesterday so I can’t say I read the whole book in one day. It was a short book (194 pages) so the geek cred coming off that statement wouldn’t be much, but I could have phrased it in such a way. Like, “Yeah, and I’m such a geek I read an entire book about compost in one day.” But, as I said, it was not to be. I finished the book this morning while I ate breakfast, but reading a book in two days doesn’t give nearly the same status. So I’m hoping that just having read the book will be enough to raise me in the geek ranks.

I like tailoring what I’m listening to to my mood. It’s like eating a bite of just what you wanted or wearing the exact right clothes for your mood. It’s a form of expression all it’s own when you pay attention to what you’ve a hankering for and an emotional release to have someone sing just what you’re feeling.

For much of my growing up years I preferred to listen to male singers because I hadn’t figured my voice out and I could actually sing along with the deeper voices. As I’ve grown (and had some informal voice training) I’ve branched out to female singers. But there was still a gap, still a mood I was missing.

The female singers I enjoy, like Sarah McLachlan and Dido, tend towards melancholic and moody which is no problem for me, but they have a specific brand of moody. And when they talk about relationships they tend to talk about the jerk who dumped them or having a broken heart because this guy is not right for them or, on rare occasions, exulting over falling in love. None of these events or sentiments are quite what I would call my forte. I can’t relate to the specifics though I can enjoy their expressions of the emotions. So that music is great for certain moods, but I found that one mood in particular was going begging. I had no music for the loneliness that comes from being single.

Okay, I know that’s really specific. And I know it’s unfair to expect a songwriter to grok that very particular emotion and a singer to deliver such a specific mood to me. So I wasn’t expecting to ever have any music for my lonely moods in my collection. But then I stumbled upon Deb Talan.

Deb Talan is currently one half of a duo called The Weepies (the other half is Steve Tannen) who specialize in a folk-pop I think is charming. People have called them childlike and talked about their harmonies, which are beautiful, and their clever lyrics, which border on whimsical. They sing about simple things with great emotion and very quickly after I bought one of their albums catapulted into my top ten favorite music artists. I first heard about The Weepies from Paste Magazine which is a magazine focused on American indie culture. It had a story about the Weepies, talking about how they’d each been recording solo artists and fans of each other before they met and formed the Weepies. And somewhere in there they got married and had a baby boy.

What I didn’t know is that, before she met Steve Tannen, Deb Talan was singing about being very single. I’d desperately wanted some more Weepies music, but I’d already bought all three albums so I bought a Deb Talan album A Bird Flies Out. On it there are two songs that fit, that exactly fit that one specific mood of single loneliness. She speaks my thoughts for me and sometimes says things I’d thought, but hadn’t said out loud. She has no answers, but asks the questions so hauntingly that it satisfies.

In the song “How Will He Find Me” Deb Talan sings about wandering through the world wanting someone and waiting for him. But how will he find her? She’s nothing special so what is going to attract him to her?

If I don’t stand out like a star among the moons
if I am always late and he always backs away too soon
I walk the world with a skin so thin
I can wear no adequate protection
everything comes crashing in.
If I’m too wide open for this place
but not enough for him to recognize my face

And what shall I do with a drunken heart
with goggle eyes and the troubling hunger
reaching forward to trick mirror men
leaning out and in again.
If love is a game how can it be creation?
And if I’m wasting my time
how will he find me?

The part from “Saturn’s Light” that resonates with me the most is right at the end. She’s talking about watching people who are in love and almost taking it for granted when you are sitting all alone. And how sometimes just the wanting makes life difficult.

Saturn’s light throws a ring around the moon
and I said my prayers too soon, no one was listening.
There’s a hush on the street
I can hear my own heartbeat,
and my lonesome breathing
but my soul’s little bird can still sing:

Couples kiss across counters and tables
I smile and then look at the wall.
But some people hold hands and they don’t pay attention
like their love is somebody else’s invention.
Our heads say hold back, but our hearts run to strangers and say
“look at me, look at me, look at me.

I don’t plan on ever meeting Deb Talan. But maybe someday I’ll be able to tell her somehow how much these two songs she wrote five years ago have meant to me. How her art has been expression for me and how she sang my thoughts I don’t usually speak. Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell her, but for now I’ll just hit repeat and listen to that song one more time.

The main character of the movie is Matt Bruckner, a Harvard student studying journalism who is expelled just weeks shy of graduating because of a drugs possession charges. The coke they found in his room was actually is roommate’s, but Matt ended up taking the fall because his roommate’s father is a powerful man with lots of connections. Matt could fight it, but he knows he’d lose. So he just packs his things and leaves.

Matt tries to contact his journalist father who is once again out of the country on assignment, but if you’d like to leave a message…. So he gets on a plane to England to go stay with his sister. She is happily married and has a baby boy. There Matt meets his brother-in-law’s brother, Pete, a loud, brash, decent hooligan. Pete is the leader of a football firm. And here is where the movie bowed to my complete and utter ignorance of all things British football.

So you have the teams and they go out on the field and play. But each team also has its own unofficial firm, a cross between a gang and a group of hardcore fans gone mad. The firm supports the team during the matches and then fights for that team’s honor after the match usually by brawling with the opposing team’s firm. It’s all about reputation and honor- your’s, your team’s and your firm’s.

Matt gets pulled into this world and finds he really likes it there. He finds a place in the Green Street Elite, a good friend in Pete and a confidence he never had. And this by itself is not a good enough reason to enjoy this movie.

I found my reason in one line. In a voice over Matt says, “You know the best part? It isn’t knowing your friend’s have your back. It’s knowing you have your friend’s.” Green Street Hooligans is about a boy stepping up into a man because some thugs teach him not to be a coward. See, Matt probably would have lost the fight back at Harvard, but that’s not why he ran. Matt is a coward. He is a coward who’s father never taught him anything about being a man. In the GSE he finds a group of men who stand their ground no matter what. Even when they’re outnumbered and out gunned they stand their ground and dare the other side to try to bring them down. They fight for honor and each other. No, it’s not right. Yes, it’s brutal and it’s bloody. The movie is very clear on the point. But it’s the closest thing to manly these group of battered guys can come up with. So they teach it to Matt and he actually comes out better at the end.

Cause see, come the end of the movie why they fight is turned on its head. Matt’s last fight has nothing to do with reputation and everything to do with fighting because your friends need you. And within that fight is an even better reason to fight to the bloody death. Matt grew up. It came late, it came from the wrong people and it came with bloody consequences, but he did grow up. By the end of the movie he’d learned how to fight, why to fight, when to fight and when to just walk away.

At least two of my all time favorite television shows are Joss Whedon creations. (That would be Buffy and Firefly for those of you keeping track.) Somehow this man manages to consistently create characters that I come to care about and care about quite a lot. I don’t watch Buffy for the vampire fights or even the supernatural Scooby Doo aspects of the show. I watch it and keep watching it because there are a group of characters who have chosen to go through life together. Their life just happens to involve vampires, monsters, and apocalypses.

And yet the episode that touched me the most and tore right through my defenses is an episode about a very normal occurrence. Throughout season five Buffy’s mother has been struggling with a brain tumor. She goes through surgery which is a complete success, recovers and starts picking her life back up. She goes back to work, she’s able to take care of her daughters again and she even goes out on a date with a guy who sounds very nice. And then at the end of an episode Buffy comes home and finds Joyce, her mother, dead on the couch.

The next episode is powerful, heartbreaking and masterfully done. It feels more like real life captured on tape than a TV show. Halfway through the episode I realized there was no music, there were no background noises. All of the awkward pauses of grieving people who have no idea what to do echoed against an empty backdrop. All of the emotions were just what you could see; there were no musical cues to tell us what to feel. Instead of a musical score implying what we should be feeling we had to focus entirely on the actors portraying a world that has suddenly come apart.

We had to watch Buffy call 911 and numbly try to revive her mother. We had to watch the paramedics. We even had to see Buffy’s hopes as she imagines her mother is all right. We watched the doctor explain that Joyce had suffered an aneurysm and we heard what Buffy imagined he’d said. The first reactions of Buffy’s fourteen year old sister and all Buffy’s friends who had all looked to Joyce for mothering.

When we started the episode I decided I was going to try to keep my distance. It was far too familiar. I even succeeded for a time. I was clinical and noting movie making techniques. But it didn’t work. What really got me was one character’s confusion. Anya is fairly new to being human and she often says the wrong thing and doesn’t understand some of our social forms and assumptions. So she’s getting ready to go be supportive of Buffy with the rest of the gang, but she doesn’t know what’s going to be required of her. She doesn’t know what to do so she keeps saying the wrong thing and looks heartless. One of the other characters yells at her and she completely falls apart. What she said then made such total sense to me.

She said, “But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I knew her, and then she’s— there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead… anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And… and Xander’s crying and not talking, and… and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why!”

It’s the total confusion that went straight through my technical evaluation and my distancing. I understand that confusion. This group that habitually dealt out death to dangerous creatures had to deal with a death close by and no one, not one of them, knew what to do.

It was Anya again who said one of the few truly helpful things one can say to someone who is grieving. Into a moment of silence she says really loudly “I wish Joyce didn’t die! Because she was nice. And now, we all hurt.” It was when people said things like that to me that I felt like they’d really cared.

Part of me wants to watch this episode again and again just so that I can feel those feelings again because it was such truth there on the screen. And also so that I would remember because there are short, significant bits of my life that are a blur. Part of me never wants to watch it ever again because it was an accurate portrayal of life as it deals with death. There is something both appealing and frightening about that much truth. It rubs raw and leaves you feeling spent like you’d cried for a week.

When the episode was over and Raquel and I had dried our eyes I had to say again how impressed I was with the cinematography of the episode. Even the nearly random vampire attack near the end that was probably put in to break the tension had the feeling of reality while the coffin shopping and funeral in the next episode felt like TV. It’s this skill that makes Joss Whedon shows so enduring and engrossing. By the by, it’s also what makes them somewhat dangerous so I’d recommend you watch Joss Whedon shows with someone to talk about them with. Sometimes he turns truth on its head, but not this time. This time he got it exactly right.

I was looking forward to this movie. I enjoyed the book greatly, though it was a lot darker than I was expecting. The villain of the book, Capricorn, was, well, villainous. He was cruel, wicked and darkly cunning. He was actually a villain from a book who’d been accidentally read into our world by Mo, a book binder, bibliophile and wonderful reader, who discovered at that point that he had this ability. Capricorn and his henchman Basta set up shop in Italy and make a very fine life for themselves by oppressing the local farmers and villagers.

It was the oppression that especially struck me when I read the book. Capricorn kept the local people in fear by threatening them, their farms and their children. If someone was getting a little uppity he would send one of his thugs to hang out around the school yard where that man’s children were. And if he didn’t take the hint Capricorn would send Basta to burn his house down, frequently with him and his family inside. Like I said, darker than I expected for a kid’s book. But because Capricorn was so evil it was so satisfying to see him brought down by the good guys in the end.

The movie was heavily sanitized. Capricorn was only a little bit scary and Basta was a joke. I was disappointed, but I suppose it makes sense. It was still a fun movie. Fantastical and charming, witty and sweet with all the good bits I wanted to see. I wasn’t complaining as I left the theater for home.

I got back just as Seth and Crystal were getting ready to go. One of our elders and his wife were taking them out for sushi so they’d have a chance to talk about the many recent happenings. So I put the kids to bed and decided to watch the movie that had come for me from Netflix. It was The Visitor which looked like a charming relationship movie. It’s about an economics professor in Connecticut named Walter who’s shut off from the world. He has to go to New York City to present a paper he co-authored where he has an apartment he keeps, but hasn’t been to in over fifteen years, maybe more. He finds a couple living in his apartment because of a mix up or scam or something. He lets them stay and becomes friends with the man, Tarek, an illegal immigrant from Syria. Tarek starts teaching Walter to play the djembe. They go drumming together at the park and all is going wonderfully. But then Tarek gets picked up by the police because of a misunderstanding in the subway and they put him in a detention center. From there the movie proceeded to break my heart.

I knew going into the movie that it would probably be sad, but I thought it was going to be more about Walter’s relationships than about post-911 United States immigration policy. But no, my sweet, friendship movie made me sad and upset.

What happened to my movies on Monday? It’s like they switched places. The one that was supposed to have darkness that would be overcome was fluffy and cute and the sweet, gentle movie hit me in the face. Hard. Maybe Monday was just a bad day for movies.

I went into the movie with my filters up. The books and the movie all seemed to be aimed at young women, girls really, so I was betting on the movie makers trying to play on my heartstrings and my emotions. I wasn’t really interested in that thank you very much which gave me a sense of detachment. So I was sitting back from the movie and watching it while also paying attention to how I was ’supposed’ to respond. It was like watching a horror movie without the soundtrack. At times it was so ridiculous that Raquel and I laughed so much that I was afraid the other eight people there were going to get mad at us.

For those of you who don’t know Twilight is the story of a girl named Bella who moves from Arizona to a small town in Washington to live with her dad. She’s swarmed by all the kids at her new school because she’s new and she’s shiny which is rather disconcerting to her. There she meets a boy named Edward who turn out to be a vampire who doesn’t eat people. His entire family only eat animals and try to live in the world as normal as possible. Of course they fall in love and we get to watch all the horribly awkward conversations. Two-thirds of the movie is awkward conversations between Bella and Edward punctuated by awkward conversations between Bella and her father who are trying to reconnect after years apart. There’s some action toward the end when a tracker vampire who’s moving through the area takes an interest in eating Bella, but other than that it’s a very slow and personal movie.

The thing that I came away from the movie with is the idea that I am ’supposed’ to want a relationship like Bella’ and Edward’s. That their’s is the ideal romance and what I’m suppose to desire. Now, I actually liked most of their relationship. There were many times that the camera was just panning around the two of them talking. We have no idea what they were saying, but they were building their relationship on communicating with each other which is a rarity in the teen romance scene. But other than that the whole thing looked horribly painful and difficult.

He can never completely relax around her because if he did he’d probably eat her. She can’t fully explain anything to her father about her new boyfriend because the whole ‘he’s a vampire’ thing is kind of a secret. So I’m supposed to want and hope for this relationship that’s really a mess?

I’m really glad I didn’t seen this movie when I was a teenager and I plan on avoiding the books. Because while I am able to laugh at the portrayal of the relationship there is still something there that is appealing and desirable. Edward takes care of Bella. He protects her in a very real way and genuinely cares for her. At his best moments he wants what is best for her no matter what it costs him. Bella is fascinating to Edward. In the fiction, each vampire has special gift other than all the super strength and speed and undead qualities. Edward’s is that he can read minds except, for reasons that are never explained, he can’t read Bella’s. She is a mystery to him and so is fascinating. That’s why they spend so much time talking; he wants to figure her out and she’s letting him. That sort of relationship is very appealing. Which is why the movie and the series are so dangerous. There’s a relationship held out as something to desire that is full of messiness and icky parts. It’s also impossible because vampires don’t actually exist. But there is enough truth tucked into all those lies, enough good parts hidden away in the bad that it would be very easy to hold their romance up as an ideal and to want only that. This is what a lot of teen girls are reading and watching and many of them have no other example of love and romance. I’m glad I saw the movie if for no other reason that to be able to talk to them.

Plus, it was pretty funny.

It’s a simple book. A man is tucking his son into bed when the boy asks “Daddy, if I got taken by pirates, would you save me?” The father answers “Of course, son.” The rest of the book is the boy coming up with obstacles and asking if his father would still come to save him. Each time the rescue gets harder, but each time the father assures his son that he would do anything for him.

“Daddy, would you chase them if they were gorilla pirates?”

“Absolutely.”

“What if they took me in the jungle?”

“I would cut a path right through the bush.”

And so on. Really, it’s a very simple structure and I almost cry every time. Michael Rex’s artistic choices were brilliant because the father is a very normal looking man. He even has a tie on. At the end he’s scaled a cliff to stop the robot gorilla pirates from Mars and he’s standing on a hill ready to stop the robot gorilla pirates from Mars who are trying to put his son into their space ship. His clothes are torn and he’s got mud all over him, but his son is in danger and he would do anything for his son. That’s the page that always breaks me up.

I guess I’m just a sucker for a good daddy story. Women get to carry children, but men get to be a picture of God on earth. A Godly father is such a beautiful thing and makes me so happy to see. It’s like a picture that almost captures the original.

“Would you chase me even if it meant coming down here and dying for me?”

“Of course. I would do anything for you.”

Actually, I saw it twice this week. I went on Monday with Tom and Elizabeth and then I went on Wednesday with my dad. As Dad and I were driving to the theater he asked why I like this movie so much. I gave him the first reason that popped into my head and was rather surprised at what I said.

Iron Man is a movie about redemption. Tony Stark is a rich, fast-talking, playboy genius who’s gotten rich off of designing and manufacturing weapons. He cares about himself and no one else until he is attacked and captured after a weapons demonstrations by people wielding weapons he’d designed and sold. He’s injured in the attack and has to build himself a new power source for his heart. He makes a suit of power-armor to break out of his prison and makes it back home with a new perspective and a new heart.

And then he makes a better suit and there’s lots of explosions and fighting and flying, but that’s just gravy on the story. It’s a story about a man who is saved from what he’d been and from the legacy he was leaving behind. He uses his new heart to protect the people he’d thoughtlessly put in danger, he recognizes the value of the friends who stick by him and he never ceases being himself.

It’s that last part that I started talking about on the way to the theater. Too often in Christian stories a character is a well-rounded character made of flesh and bone until he is converted. As soon as a character becomes a Christian he turns into two-dimensional cardboard that is indistinguishable from everyone else. He loses all the bits that made him unique. I’ve read a bunch of Christian novels. Frequently, they start interesting and insightful, but then turn boring about the time the main character is converted. It very sad.

And it’s disorienting because that’s not how life goes. When a person is converted he doesn’t jettison everything that makes him himself. He’s washed clean of his sin, but not his personality. Maybe he has strengths that he had been using sinfully, but now he is free to use his strengths to bless and not curse.

Which is what happens in Iron Man. No, Tony Stark doesn’t become a Christian, but he goes through the best thing a fallen world has to offer. So he is free to use his genius and his money and his smooth, fast talking personality to protect and care for people. Plus, he makes a wicked cool suit that makes things explode. Honestly, what more could you want?

I give Iron Man four and a half stars out of five. It loses half a star for two scenes with some, how you say, sensuality. As movies go it wasn’t extreme and it was an important aspect of Tony’s character to establish, but, well, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The scenes are close to the beginning and once they’re past that whole element is gone from the movie. There was violence in the movie, but I thought it was well handled. It wasn’t gory or romanticized. And there’s supersonic flight! Did I mention I like this movie?

Lars and the Real Girl is a movie about a man who has distanced himself from people and doesn’t know how to go back. He won’t even have dinner with his brother and sister-in-law. The sister-in-law, Karin, is truly trying to connect with Lars because she can see he is not thriving and he keeps avoiding her or coming up with spurious excuses. My favorite part was when she tackled him and held him down until he agreed to come to dinner. He is so far from everyone around him, though, that he can’t even work through his people issues. So he turns to a doll that he believes to be real, though I’m guessing part of him knows she isn’t because he doesn’t have his normal ticks and troubles around her. Through being with Bianca and being able to say anything without fear Lars works his way back to the people who love him.

So that’s Lars and I liked watching him work through his issues, but what made this movie shine is the community around him. Lars needs Bianca to work through what’s bothering him so the town needs to pretend with him or it will all come to naught. So an entire town decides to pretend a life-size doll is real because they love Lars. I thought that was beautiful. And furthermore, one of the groups that makes up the town is the church Lars attends. I was shocked by how well the church was portrayed. Normally, they’re the dopes that break everything they touch, but in this movie for the most part they step up to care for their brother. Not perfectly, of course; that wouldn’t even be close to accurate. But throughout the movie the church shows true love for Lars.

I have decided that I really like indie movies. Lars and the Real Girl was a movie about real people who looked like real people and talked like real people. There were no grand speeches, but there were some very profound things that were said. My favorite not-speech was when Lars goes to his brother Gus and asks him how a man knows when he’s a man and not a boy anymore. Gus fumbles his way towards an answer, gives up, then tries again and actually comes up with something good. The answer sounded like something a normal person would say as opposed to many movies where answers sound like something a screenwriter would write. I think there is a time and place for grand sounding speeches, but I’m glad that there weren’t any in this movie. It was such a small movie with such normal people dealing with each other and movie talk would have ruined that.

Watching Lars and the Real Girl didn’t change how I think about my day-to-day life because I don’t currently know anybody who believes that a doll is a real woman. It did reinforce many of my ideas of life together. Life together as a community is difficult, can feel silly and is truly beautiful when done well.