Breaking In The Habit

Tired of election coverage at this point? Looking for a more optimistic view of the political world? You might be interested in the 1993 movie, Dave, the story of a presidential look-alike who agrees to stand in for the president but gets more than he bargained for. When the real president has a stroke, advisors in his inner circle use the look-alike as a surrogate, attempting to lead through a puppet. Only, they picked the wrong guy with too much on his mind to do what they want.

Optimistic, wholesome, and entirely unrealistic, Dave is a great escape from our current world, and an inspiring take on how politics could work.

For years, Crash was my favorite movie of all time. While it isn’t anymore, I still find it to be a remarkable movie with challenging questions for our lives. While some will say that it is simply a movie about race relations, it is so much more than that. It’s about prejudice in the more broad sense, about challenging expectations of good and evil, of recognizing the beautiful individuality of every person, that each and every one of us has the possibility of heroic feats… and embarrassing evil.

It is at the same time a cynical movie and and endearingly hopeful. It shows what we can be at our worst (and how prevalent that is in our world) but that even the worst sinners have opportunities for redemption.

For me, it’s a reminder that every moment is an opportunity for holiness, that it doesn’t matter what I did before, I can still return to God. But opportunities are not guarantees.

Crash is rated R and is not something suited for children, but for the mature teen or adult, it is the sort of the movie that can be discussed for ages.

Everyone loves St. Francis. Really. Everyone. Throughout history he has been lauded by Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and people of good faith, environmentalists and hippies, even a 19th century business tycoon. His appeal is far and wide, and the images depicting him are as diverse as any saint.

Meaning… that when people try to make movies about him—and they do—they are going to be all over the map.

In honor of St. Francis week, Br. Tito and I watched two famous Franciscan movies (Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Francesco) to see how popular media has portrayed Francis is the past. Admittedly a bit underwhelmed, we spend the second half of the podcast imagining our own Franciscan movie.