Stand well back ignite. It could have wrong in one of 2 ways: it could have been staggeringly crass and insensitive; or it could have been insufferably earnest and self-righteous. It certainly isn’t the first, and it only verges on the second for about five minutes towards the end. It’s real and funny and true, earthed in the realities of multi-cultural London highlighting the simultaneous diversity and intolerance of the city of a hundred villages that will be wonderfully familiar to any who have lived there.

There are two strands to the film’s plot: one the man’s search for his father and his own roots, the other his daughter’s desired engagement and marriage. So it touches on keystones for diversity and maintaining distinctiveness, but no-one’s pretending it’s a major contribution to issues of holding ethnic and religious diversity together. In citing the ‘we all worship the same God’ argument however briefly at the end, it displays a theological ignorance that won’t seem to go away from the debate, especially from many of the apparently more intelligent observers.

Even so. It’s a bright, smart, funny and beautifully played film. It could only, really, have been made in the UK. And so much the better for it.

Winter’s Bone Low-key, slow-burning family drama/thriller. A masterpiece, and right out of nowhere.

Toy Story 3 The perfect end to a perfect trilogy.

Inception Very possibly the best action movie ever, and certainly one of the most intelligent.

The Social Network The Facebook given the Aaron Sorkin treatment, and in the process it becomes a Shakespearean epic.

The Lives Of Others Finally seen on DVD, and every bit as good as everybody said. Beauty and brutality meeting head on.

A Single Man Colin Firth is heartbreakingly good in the best screen evocation of depression I’ve seen. More hopeful than might be expected.

Precious Hope forged in tragedy, pain that’s real and people that resonate. True in so many ways.

A Prophet A prison film, a reflection on hope and spirituality, and on what makes people who they are. Another masterpiece for 2010, I think.

The Road As important as the book, but suffers unfairly in comparison with the printed version. See it.

Where The Wild Things Are More beauty and wonder in 5 minutes of this than the whole of Avatar.

Sherlock Holmes Yes, the Guy Ritichie one really is good. So much fun.

Douglas Coupland is, in that sense, cursed. His first novel, Generation X, popularised a term which became the moniker for a generation, defining for many what the then emerging term ‘post-modern’ looked and sounded like. Subsequent books like Life After God and Microserfs charted the impact of McJobs on employee and consumer, expressed a simultaneous spiritual searching and isolation, and developed a style of writing that spun memorable images and turns of phrase from an increasingly throwaway culture. A perceived downturn in creativity and cultural impact was always likely – and so, sometime after the (for me) near-perfection of Girlfriend In A Coma, things seemed to tail off. His books were less talked about, patronised by a forever coldly distant literary establishment and generally not given much attention. My personal feeling is that this was a little unfair – none of the more recent books may have been great, but take a look at the body of work as a whole and it stands comparison with most. It’s still a mystery to me why Coupland seems to remain without awards. Is it snobbery? Is it the so-called elite’s fear of being proved wrong all these years?

So to discover that his latest was to be titled Generation A caused concern. The title smacks of a sequel to a vastly superior original in a desperate bid to get much-needed attention for an inferior work. Need I worry? Scarcely. It’s not just his best since Girlfriend In A Coma; it may just be his best, period. It’s as if the last 6 novels have been distilled perfectly into this one, at once trumping them and yet also making perfect sense of them; showing them to be undiscovered minor jewels ready to shine in the adjacent glory of a far bigger rock.

The territory is typical Coupland; we have the story of 5 unrelated characters a few years in the future. We discover a world where no bees have been seen for years and the effects of this are subtly, beautifully and gently revealed. What unites the 5 is that, quite out of the blue, they are each stung by a bee. They become instantaneous celebrities, research objects, and … Well, to explain the rest without undue spoilers is probably impossible. But it is brilliant, beautiful and poignant.
I was once told by a colleague at the conservative seminary where I trained for ordained Christian ministry that Coupland’s novels are about ‘people taking drugs and doing whatever they please’. He hadn’t read any of them, of course. Generation A is the definitive and devastating response to such ignorance. It speaks to thoughtless consumption and attendant environmental crisis without a hint of hectoring. It takes post-modernity’s trumpeted death of the big, over-arching story to describe our lives and retorts that the road to humanity’s survival lies in the telling and re-telling of stories. This, Generation A concludes, must be done in relationship and in community – that’s where commonality is discovered, difference celebrated and progress enabled. Fight the death of narrative, he says, with narrative itself. That’s a challenge to churches and Christians (and, I’m sure other faith communities, but I can only speak with knowledge of the church) as much as it is to those locked behind suburban front doors, watching ‘reality’ TV shows, chatting on Facebook and wondering why they don’t know their neighbours.

Generation A portrays humanity’s internal warfare of selfishness and generosity as eloquently as many sermons on Paul’s epistles. It comments on conspiracy theories, suspicion of corporate identities, the prevalence of mental illness, mood-altering drugs and the fearful pursuit of scientific progress at all costs – all without forgetting to entertain, intrigue and make a few jokes. It is, ultimately, what I’ve always loved about Coupland without ever being quite able to prove until now: a definitive example of speaking prophetically to a culture you remain within; citing its dangers, distanced only just enough from its infections but also in love with and understanding of it.

Coupland never claims Christianity, but many Christians – especially those of us who claim prophetic insight or evangelistic zeal or concern for culture – should sit at his feet and learn. Generation A builds on Coupland’s earlier work to function as ever more pure salt and an increasingly brighter light for a culture he can’t bear to see die but that he fears lurches towards self-destruction. It’s bold, funny, daring, shocking and gripping. It should be essential for church leaders, study-group leaders, social-workers, politicians, scientific researchers….anyone who purports to care. It never will be, of course, but it should. Therein lies the very essence of this, Coupland’s latest tragedy; that is, though, in the way of so many of his characters, also his latest and greatest triumph.

It is all of that. How good is it? It’s good enough to make a story about socially inept people sitting at a computer screen fast paced and insightful into the human condition. Of course, we don’t know how accurate it all is. What we do have, though, is a story of those society would call the deserving rich – the old money Harvard graduates with an Olympic rowing future – being gazumped by the nerds and the morally dubious. There’s no real attempt to make anybody that likable; the film starts with the creation of Facebook’s 1st generation – David Zuckerberg is cruelly (he thinks) dumped, and creates a website for rating physical appearance of women students against each other. This has been called misogynist. It may be – but it’s soon left behind. What it is, really, is a young man who has no idea how what he does affects others. The man we’re shown here has no sense of how he interacts with others and what people are really saying; it’s a kind of emotional autism – he’s simply unaware.

This barrels on throughout the story; a man who seems slightly detached from everything around him, as if he really is seeing through a glass darkly, hearing through cotton wool. So this a kind of Shakespearean reinterpretation of history to lay a grid on a story – the grid of how we build tools and structures to help us cope with our own inadequacies. We do this so well, with such art and self-deception that we’re almost completely unaware of what we’re doing. Of course, you can add an extra layer of irony when you consider how we now use our Facebook status updates and the like to present to the world how we want to appear to others.

Few people – perhaps only Sorkin – could make such an unlikable people such entertaining company. And make you think also. Good work.

You get Winter’s Bone, a thing of stark elegiac beauty, a thriller/family drama that comments deeply on issues of rural poverty, the nature of broken families, gender roles and the sometimes traumatic rites of passage of growing up forced on some before their time. You get a film that’s everything and nothing, where the music hymns the deep beauty of the scenery, the hidden beauty of the people and the stark beauty of broken down buildings and burned out cars.

It’s the story of a 17-year-old girl, playing mother to her mother and her younger siblings, and forced to try to track down her disappeared, drug-dealing father for reasons best left for the film to unfold for you, in the shockingly understated way it does. I realise all that I’m saying makes this film sound so dull and worthy. It isn’t. It has the very best sort of tension – a slow-burning one. Your heart and soul will break for the daughter-mother at the center of it all. The story grips and shocks, and there are twists which you won’t see coming, lulled by beauty both visual and aural. It speaks to issues of poverty and identity and family right at the heart of a fracturing society.

In short, this is a rare film. It’s one of the best of the year, as well as one of the most important. See it, then buy it, and meditate on it in front of an open fire, with low lights and a strong drink.

Reading Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats, the same sort of thoughts go through the mind. It’s generally best not to compare a film adaptation with the book it is based on – arguments of fidelity are pointless when you are dealing with two radically different art forms. Even reading a book requires interpretation and a kind of mental editing, so of course that happens to the power of twenty in film adaptations. The film of this book, though, was not without merit – but was ultimately disappointing. Good actors were left in search of a tone; the story just didn’t work and the final scene blew any good work that had gone before almost completely out of the water. In that context, though, the book the film was based on is a far more satisfying experience. Episodes portrayed in the film are noticeable here, but they’re in the context of a piece of investigative journalism related as a journey down an increasingly bizarre rabbit hole. Ronson’s tone is just right – he doesn’t mock, he doesn’t patronize – he allows the surreal events to speak for themselves. Members of the military researching how to stop a goat’s heart just by looking at it? Hamsters? Honestly, what else do you need to say? It’s one of those books you want to read in the same room as other people so that you can annoy them by reading sentences out and share the laughter. The laughter, though, is somehow never cruel and given the subject matter, that’s some commendation.

It’s the economy of style that works so well.  It serves comedy and it serves serious reflection equally well. Whether that later is in the influence of harmless madness on the darker aspects of the War on Terror, or a son’s quest to discover the truth of his father’s death – in each case the material breathes as Ronson step as graciously out of the way as Ewan McGregor’s character unhelpfully intruded.

So how and to whom to recommend this? Some may be put off by the film; either because they enjoyed it or they didn’t. Either way, it’s better; funnier and more insightful. Some may be put off because it seems a little too serious; who wants to read about Abu Ghraib again? I’ll leave it with this, then – I read almost all of this on a through the night flight, time flying by, laughs and pauses for thought staying just long enough to season the tepid airline food and recycled air. There was neither too much nor too little of each. Forget the film. Whatever your tastes, just read this.

Or maybe not. Sarah Palin and the Tea Party loom heavily on a confusing electoral horizon. Whatever happens over the next weeks and months, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the American political and cultural landscape will continue to be spoken of in religious accents for a long time to come. If that analysis is correct, then Jesus Camp is just a hint of what we can expect to hear much more of.

It’s a documentary (and a beautifully shot one – scenery and colour shimmer and shine, computer lights glow effervescently) about an evangelical Christian children’s pastor and the camp she runs for children in classic middle America. She’s Becky Fischer, and she’s a formidable person. Interwoven with interviews and footage of the camp and children, we listen in on a talk radio host, a Christian appalled by the tenor and tone of the religious right’s tactics. The film climaxes with a (presumably) staged phone conversation on-air between him and Becky. He ends shaking his head in disbelief and numb with anger.

So we see a model of children’s work where not only do the children pray in tongues and campaign against abortion, but they talk of finding that their non-Christian friends provoke a ‘funny feeling’ in them. Evolution is a lie; there’s only one sort of church that God likes to go, the children tell us. The young people are told that Harry Potter should be stoned to death (which, you may argue, is tricky for a fictional character).

What to say? Cards on the table – I’m a Christian, I’m a church pastor who, in the UK at least, would be placed in the evangelical/charismatic portion of the church. I don’t like labels for reasons this film makes clear. People like Tony Campolo – for a long time a bearer of the evangelical label – have now begun to call themselves ‘Red Letter Christians’ (referring to the editions of the Bible which print the words of Jesus in that colour). We also need to say this: a film is edited. There’s no intention to show Becky Fischer and team in a good light; Jesus Camp is designed as a hatchet job, and that it does very well. But it’s hard to imagine there’s nothing good about her and her work. It should also be made clear that an ‘outsider’ looking in is always going to be confused and a little alienated. It’s a little like walking in on a large family gathering where you know no-one.

But. Surely I can’t have been the only one left thinking of clanging cymbals and resounding gongs when I’ve seen this? As the children speak with all the freedom and conviction of those learning a new language from an audio tape, there was little or nothing to suggest that these were children who knew their pastor loved them. They were targets, numbers to be moulded, shaped and sent out. What’s going to happen when life goes wrong? When they experience more of the walk of Job? Towards the end of the film, the children and parents take a trip to Ted Haggard’s church, one of the poster boys of the American Christian right. They meet him and shake his hand; and we hear Haggard talk of how God knows what we do in private. Not long after the release, revelations came out of Haggard’s alleged use of male prostitutes and crystal meth. These were largely uncontested, Haggard resigned and underwent counselling. You couldn’t make it up. The heart of many Christians will break for public pain and children not taught to love or be loved  – instead we poignantly hear of Becky’s love of ‘the American lifestyle’. The idea of America as a Christian country is spoken of as a given, not a debate to be had. The heart of the outsider is surely left cold with indifference to a brand of religion that has tongues of men and angels, but none of the love Paul urges as of prime importance in 1 Corinthians 13; but also hot with fury at the face of American religion to a world left unaware of the subtlety and honesty of faith exercised by so many with integrity and conviction.

A more contemporary translation of Paul’s passage on love in 1 Corinthians describes those who exercise supernatural gifts without love as ‘the creaking of a rusty gate’. No matter the editing and the shaping hand of a director with an agenda, never has healing and quietening oil been so desperately needed.

That may not be entirely fair, but it’s how it looks. So the good things: Oliver Stone is no Aaron Sorkin, but he does have a capacity for making you feel more intelligent – spinning complex ideas into fast-moving plots which you don’t follow entirely, but somehow manage to keep enough of a handle on it to make you feel better about yourself. Michael Douglas may be treading water, but he does tread this type of water better than anyone else; no one does slimy grin and wink better than him. That’s about it, though.

There are at least 3 films in here – a love story/family drama; a drama-documentary on the economic crisis; and a morality tale for our times on big business and the climate meltdown. Not even a conspiracy theorist or a story-teller of the stature of Stone can pull all that together. It’s a film that is so much less than the sum of its parts that you can’t help but think you must have fallen asleep at the crucial moments: but you haven’t … as I said, it’s all quite gripping. It just doesn’t add up. And the ending – it’s just an attempt to sugar-coat a pill that’s now so bland as to be irrelevant. It’s a shame really. A few things would have helped. Cut the film free from the baggage of the first. Tell a new story, in a new context – and focus on one theme. You don’t need to cover everything in order to say something. Wall Street should have been put to bed. Now it’s a sleeping giant.

That, though, would be a little simplistic. There’s a theory that in fact there exists only a small limited number of plots, with variations on the different themes – a big book published not so long ago lays its bets at the number seven. Every book, play, film or series sticks to one of these templates. If that’s true – and to be honest, looking at the evidence closely, it’s unarguable – then all the makers of these two films are doing is being more honest. Why draw wool over the viewers’ eyes? Make it easier for everybody, and tell them which of the basic plots they are selling.

These are two very different films. The A Team has none of the charm of the series, little of the wit and even less of the plot. It’s lazy and flung together with a cheap Iraq backdrop as a vague attempt at contextualization. It’s hopelessly miscast for just about everybody – and I really have yet to see an action film in which Liam Neeson really carries it off (don’t even start me on Taken). Using the title it does it no more than cynical manipulation, a desperate attempt to piggy-back on misremembered childhood Saturdays.

Karate Kid is, though, somewhat better. It just works. There’s nothing that different to the original – what needs to be updated has been, and the old film is gven loving nods in cute references which will be picked up by adults accompanying children to the cinema. It is, though, the film’s central relationship that carries it so well – Jackie Chan is in fine form as the mentor. Jaden Smith in the title role is very, very good. He carries the physical transformation from insolent sulking child abroad to young man in the making with conviction. He has an easy screen presence who is not far away from overshadowing his off-screen father’s. There’s nothing new in this, but if the seven plots theory is right then for storytellers there really is nothing new under the sun anyway. I’m not sure why it needed to be set in China (other than the odd shot of the Birds’ Nest stadium), unless it’s short hand for ‘far-off’ these days. Which is fine, unless of course you live there. Or nearby. If you’re being literal, it should be called Kung-Fu Kid – but then no one would see it. It might have been better off set within American borders, and then used as a metaphor for pluralism, multi-culturalism or something else. Then it would just have been a bit odd.

Mostly, though, this is just good fun – with a young boy who is good enough to make you forget just how bad a performance his screen mother puts in. Nothing new under the sun? Maybe. The challenge then, is to reinvent well enough to make us forget that. Not easy – but true creativity is found where there are limits as opposed to endless open spaces of resources and ideas. On that basis, the new Karate Kid is a creative piece of mass-marketing to be applauded and enjoyed, especially at the expense of The A Team.

It’s quite a simple story, really. A writer is under suspicion of not being the good pro-government voice he appears to be; a dedicated officer is assigned the task of getting the required evidence from surveillance. Evidence is, of course, a loose term – this is someone the Stasi wants to put away. So they just need the right kind of fabricated material. The trouble is, as the listening ear listens in, he is conflicted. He is changed by what he hears, and finds himself working both sides, trying to save the writer’s life and career.

Not much there to remind me of Shawshank, you might say. Here it is, though. What changes the Stasi is the beauty around the writer. Primarily the music he listens to – but other things, also. The party where ideas are exchanged; the plays he writes; the hum of a community of creativity that never idles. It’s something entirely new to him. As he sits in his room, listening to the writer’s life and apartment – such a contrast with the quiet grey of his own life and surroundings – he’s transported from a prison he wasn’t conscious of to a world he’s never encountered. It’s not far from that memorable Shawshank scene where opera music over the loudspeakers briefly gives every last man in the old place a taste of beauty and a dream of something else; the very effect in a nutshell which Tim Robbins’ character, Andy, is there to bring to each of them. Some of them embrace it, some them fly from it (either ignoring him, attacking him, or damaging themselves). In both films beauty transfigures brutality.

The result of all this in The Lives Of Others is a final 20 minutes at once surprising, inevitable, true, beautiful and tragic. In a quiet way, it certainly inspires action. Extreme dictatorships tend to seek to control scientists and eliminate artists. There are good reasons for this. It’s when we create with love and truth that we are closest to the God in whose image we are made. He creates us to engage in creativity. In doing so, light shines and darkness finds itself powerless.