Author: David Opderbeck

We recently rented the movies Sahara and The Muppets Wizard of Oz. Both of them stank like a wet dog on an August afternoon.

“Sahara” is an adaptation of a Clive Cussler novel. I’ve never read any Cussler, but my neighbor loves him. Cussler is a swashbuckling treasure hunter who writes about swashbuckling treasure hunters. This story has something to do with a lost Civil War ironclad ship that is burried in the Sahara desert, an evil African strongman, a swashbuckling treasure hunter and his goofy sidekick, a babealicious World Health Organization epidemiologist, and a multinational corporation that generates energy or something in a high-tech solar-powered desert facility and burries toxic waste in the underground river that supplies water to the noble nomadic freedom fighters and humble townsfolk that live nearby.

If I lost you at “babealicious World Health Organization epidemiologist,” I don’t blame you. This film takes every stupid buddy and spy movie cliche, chunks them in a blender, throws in a few idotic plot twists cut between absurd exploding chase scenes, slaps on opening and closing credits, and calls it a day. I was really in the mood for a dumb-but-fun action film — some gadgets, a few explosions, the bad guy buying the farm and the good guy getting the girl — but this was just dumb.

The “Muppets Wizard of Oz,” on the other hand, takes the classic Oz story, strips it of everything fun and magical, and refilms it with Kermit and friends using production values that must have Judy Garland & co. turning over in their graves. It used to be that you could count on the Muppets for kid-friendly movies with some witty adult-friendly wisecracks. In “Oz,” the jokes are simply vulgar.

For example, Kermit the Frog, as the Scarecrow, is found by Dorothy in the corn patch attached to a wooden cross. Kermit cracks, “has anyone around here seen The Passion of the Christ?” Wonderful. Now even Kermit is an anti-Christian bigot. Later, we meet Gonzo as the tin man. Toto — inexplicably presented as a three foot tall prawn (yes, a prawn, like a shrimp) rather than a little dog — manipulates some buttons and knobs to get the tin man working. Eventually, Toto twiddles some protrusions on Gonzo’s chest. “Those,” Gonzo says, “are my nipples,” to which Toto replies “I feel so dirty!” How debased! Have we really sunk so low that we need S&M / nipple references in Muppet films? Do I really need to explain this kind of thing to my kids? I feel dirty too, Toto. We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.

I could go on and on about the crude and idiotic stuff in “Muppets Oz,” but I’ll spare myself the unwanted Google hits and just suggest you let this one rot on the video store shelves.

This weekend we rented the movie Crash on DVD. It’s a fascinating, but flawed, take on invidual racism in Los Angeles.

There isn’t a “story” to “Crash,” or at least not a single story. Instead, there are multiple story lines, one for each principle character: an Iranian shopkeeper, two white cops, a black TV director and his wife, a black cop and his latina partner, and a white District Attorney and his wife, and two black carjackers. Each character is both racist and the victim of racial prejudice. Their individual stories intertwine over the course of a day, and we observe how each character’s circumstances and attitudes contribute to the racism they express and experience. In this respect, “Crash” is a postmodern film, with many complex stories rather than one metanarrative, and many questions and perspectives rather than one simple resolution. And on this level, the film works splendidly.

If the refusal to establish a simple, predictable Hollywood plotline is “Crash’s” glory, it’s also where the film stalls. “Crash” offers no hope for redemption. It never hints that any of the characters can reconcile their racial and cultural differences. Instead, it gives us the Iranian shopkeeper’s eventual mystical acceptance of his fate, the black cop’s unrelieved guilt, the white cop’s unrelenting conflict over caring for his ailing father. We can escape into unreality, become cynical, or become hard; there are no other alternatives. I would love to see a film as unflinching and complex as “Crash” that nevertheless provides a glimpse of the forgiveness and reconciliation we can find, even over intractable issues of culture and race, in Christ.

If you’re interested in how a postmodern sensibility might play into a studio film, or if you’re concerned about racial reconciliation, take a look at “Crash.”

(A final word of warning — the characters in “Crash” frequently say exactly what they’re thinking; as a film that explores some dark corners of human nature, the characters are often thinking things that aren’t very nice. There are many bad words, including liberal use of the “F***” word, and one brief scene involving a sexual situation. In my view, just about all of this was appropriate to the context of the film, but at the very least, if you have kids in the house, you’ll want to watch this one after they’re asleep and keep your hands on the “volume” button.)