Breaking In The Habit

If you grew up watching The Goonies like Fr. Tito did, it has a special place in your heart. It’s a childhood adventure of going out on your own, finding buried treasure, and saving your family’s livelihood. There is excitement and intrigue, camaraderie, and even a little teenage romance. For a preteen in the 1980s, it was the ultimate film.

If you didn’t see the movie until you were in your late teens and it’s already the early 2000s… the feeling might be a bit different. That was my experience of the movie, and while I don’t “hate” it–it’s still a well-made movie and, at times, very charming, I just don’t have the love for it that the cult following would expect.

It is that disparity that Fr. Tito and I set out to discuss in this week’s Everyday Liminality. Is is nostalgia? Is it that certain things age differently than others? Is it that you have to be a certain age to appreciate something? Most likely a bit of it all.

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.