Back when I was attending seminary—this was an Episcopal seminary, in Virginia—every time I went to chapel I’d see this Scripture painted on the back wall around the window: “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel.” I had plenty of time to study those words (especially when the sermon was boring). As I read and reread that saying of Jesus, I thought about what it takes to spread the Gospel. What tools do you need?

First, obviously, you need to know what you’re talking about. You must be thoroughly familiar with your faith, with its teachings and practices, with the Scriptures. You need information, knowledge stored up in your head. As St. Peter says, “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the faith that is in you” (I Pet 3:15).

You need something else, too: you need love. St. Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds “he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” A missionary—whether it’s one who travels to another continent, or one who talks to a neighbor over a back fence—must have love and compassion for those who need the Gospel. It’s no good to approach it like it’s an argument you’re determined to win. I knew an evangelical protestant once who believed that it was his job to tell every person he met about Christ. After that, it was up to them to act on it. If they didn’t, he said, they’d go to hell, but it wouldn’t be his fault, because he told them.

Well, he may have been conveying some information clearly (it might not be accurate information, but it sure was clear), but he didn’t frame it with love. It didn’t come from the heart, so it didn’t have much chance of getting into someone else’s heart. Without love, as St Paul says, we are nothing but “a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.”

What does it take to be a missionary? You need to know your stuff, and you need to have a tender heart toward the people you are trying to reach. But there is one more thing that Orthodox Christianity would contribute to the ministry of evangelism: beauty.

You’ve heard of St. Vladimir, Prince of Kiev. It was under his reign that Russia became a Christian nation, in 988 AD. He would have been a challenging guy to evangelize. Vladimir was his father’s youngest son, and born of a concubine, so he had to fight for the throne, and killed his brother in the process. He wanted to marry a princess but she rejected him because of his mother’s low birth. So Vladimir killed her father and took her by force. Like many Asian princes he had a vast harem—7 wives and 800 concubines—and built temples to his pagan gods, where he offered human sacrifice, including Christians. Now, picture yourself ringing his doorbell, armed with a few tracts and the Orthodox Study Bible.

But Vladimir eventually decided that his people should adopt a single religion, and representatives of Judaism, Islam, Western and Eastern Christianity came to the court and presented their arguments. After that he sent envoys out to visit their countries and observe each religion firsthand.

When these delegates returned, they told Vladimir first what they saw among the Muslims in Bulgaria. The 11th century chronicle reports that they said, “There is no joy among them, only sorrow and a great stench; their religion is not a good one.” They spoke of the Western Christian churches they saw in Germany, and said, “We saw many ceremonies in their temples, but of beauty we saw none.”

Then they said what they had seen at the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople:

“We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for on earth there is no such splendor or beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among humans, and their worship is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.

“And we cannot forget that beauty. Every man who has partaken of sweetness will not afterwards accept bitterness, and so we can no longer remain apart from it.”

That convinced Prince Vladimir. He was baptized in the Crimea, and ordered that the pagan idols be dragged from their temples and thrown into the river. The Orthodox Christian faith that spread through Russia grew deep and strong. It sustained the Russian people so well that, when Communists persecuted them with torture and imprisonment, some 20 million Orthodox believers died for their faith.

Our Orthodox worship is strong on beauty. We fill the walls and even the ceilings of our churches with icons, the stories and heroes of Christian history. We illuminate these images with candles and oil lamps, and the light shimmers from the glossy paint and gold backgrounds. Our clergy and altar servers wear vestments of different colors of brocade, highlighted with gold and embroidered.

People who visit an Orthodox service are immediately struck by the visual beauty, but that’s not the only sense affected. The whole service is sung and chanted, so the words of our prayers are framed with music. Incense rises from golden pots of incense. We taste the Eucharistic bread and wine, venerate icons, touch the hem of the priest’s vestment, and greet each other with a holy kiss. This is a very rich sensory experience, touching every one of the five senses. It’s very similar to what Prince Vladimir’s envoys saw at Hagia Sophia, because we are members of that very same world-wide, timeless church.

Although beauty can help bring someone like Prince Vladimir to Orthodoxy, in our current culture some people mistrust it. They think it might lead to idolatry, and we might worship these beautiful things instead of looking through them to God. (I got an email once from a Baptist who had visited a Divine Liturgy, and noticed when the priest went by during the Great Entrance that some people bowed to venerate the hem of his garment. He asked me, “Why are they worshipping the priest?”)

A few years ago I was being interviewed on an NPR program, and the host asked me, “All this fancy stuff you do in church, the icons and candles and incense, doesn’t it get in the way? Doesn’t it distract you from worshipping God?”

I said, “Imagine that it’s your anniversary, and your husband has taken you to a nice restaurant. There’s a white cloth on the table, roses and candles, a glass of wine, and violin music is playing in the background. Does that distract you from feeling romantic?”

Now, it’s true, you can have all this beauty and just take it for granted. You can go to church every Sunday and just yawn your way through it. But that’s not the fault of the church. A married couple could plow through a fancy meal without once looking each other in the eye. But that wouldn’t be the fault of the restaurant. They did everything they could. Beauty is not enough, all by itself. It’s not the goal, just a way toward the goal, which is life in Christ.

Yet beauty in worship is not an option; it is something God commands. After the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, as they were wandering in the wilderness, God told Moses how to furnish a tent to be their place of worship. He told him, for example, that there needed to be a box to hold the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Now, today we’d say, “Oh, sure,” and run out to the mall and buy a clear plastic storage unit with a snap-on lid. But God did not ask for something merely functional. He told Moses to make this box, the Ark of the Covenant, from acacia wood, and to overlay it with gold—not only on the outside, but the inside as well. Even though the inside of the Ark would not be seen, it should be beautiful and costly, because it was being made for God.

The Lord gave Moses further instructions: he said that the rings and poles for carrying the ark should be golden as well, and that a mercy seat should be placed on top of the ark. Two cherubim, also made of hammered gold, would face each other above it. And that’s just the ark and mercy seat; there are also the table, the lampstand, the tabernacle, the veil, the altar, and the priestly vestments. All of these were likewise adorned with gold, silver, embroidery, and precious stones. The Lord is specific even about small details: he says that around the hem of the priests’ garments there are to be embroidered pomegranates of purple, blue, and red, interspersed with golden bells: “a golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, round about on the skirts of the robe” (Exodus 28:34).

Think about it: even though the children of Israel were refugees, wandering in the desert and living in tents, God still commanded Moses to use extravagant resources in making worship beautiful. Beauty matters. As you picture this lavish worship space taking shape you can identify with Prince Vladimir’s envoys: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.” Once that beauty had been tasted, they said, they could never be satisfied with anything less.

As missionaries, at home or abroad, we must prepare ourselves to do the work God gives us. We must know the Scriptures well and have a good understanding of our faith, so that we can present it clearly. And we must have love for those we speak to, so they will feel welcomed and invited into God’s household.

But when a visitor comes to join us for worship, the focus is no longer on us, on our knowledge or our loving character. In worship, it’s about God, and all signs must point in His direction. An atmosphere of beauty teaches wordlessly about the nature of God. It teaches that He is not just a concept to be endlessly discussed; that at some point our capacity to grasp him intellectually fails, and we fall before him in worship. Beyond all we know and cannot know about God, he reigns in beauty. Beauty opens our hearts, and stirs us to hunger for more, to hunger for the piercing sweetness of the presence of God.

A visitor may not at first see what we’re seeing, but he can see that we see something. When I was a child I was near-sighted, but no one realized this and a number of years passed before I got glasses. Till then I kept having the frustrating experience that my parents would want to show me something, but I couldn’t see it. They would point, for example, at a bird in a treetop, and say, “There it is, do you see it?” And I would squint and try to follow the line of the pointing finger, and just see a greenish blob that was probably a tree. Sometimes I would say, “No, I don’t see it;” sometimes I would pretend I had, just to get it over with.

But you know what? I never said, “There is no bird.”

When a visitor comes into our worship, he might not see what we’re looking at—in this case, not a bird in a treetop, but God in His heaven. But the visitor can see us. He sees us worshipping with awe and gratitude, hears us singing ancient and Scriptural hymns that Christians around the world have offered for millennia. He sees candlelight flickering on the gold of icons, and hears the bells on the censer. He tastes the antidoron, smells the incense, and is greeted by other worshippers with the kiss of peace. Every one of his senses is affected. Maybe he doesn’t yet see the Lord we worship, but he see us, and sees that we see something; that we are being held rapt by the presence of something awesome, terrible, beautiful. He can tell that something is going on. And that mysterious beauty is a hook that pulls people further in.

Any missionary needs theological education, as well as love for those in the mission field. But we Orthodox know of one further element of missions: beauty. We worship in beauty because it is what God commanded. He instructed Moses to provide elaborate beauty in worship—gold, incense, embroidery, carved wood, vestments, “a golden bell and a pomegranate.” But not because God needs these things – as the psalmist says, he already owns the cattle on a thousand hills. No, it is we humans who need such things, and their use in worship empowers mission in ways that, literally, can’t be conveyed in words. Beauty sets the heart aright, and opens it to God.

Summary: In this comedy a single thirty-something organic foods executive can’t sustain a pregnancy, so she hires a ditsy surrogate to carry her baby to term.

Stars: **

Rated PG -13

Genre: Comedy

Released: April 25, 2008 by Broadway Video

Directed by: Michael McCullers

Runtime: 96 min.

Cast: Tina Fey (Kate), Amy Poehler (Angie), Greg Kinnear (Rob), Dax Shepard (Carl), Romany Malco (Oscar)

Baby Mama

By Frederica Mathewes-Green

When Chinese food was first becoming popular in the US, some decades ago, a saying quickly became a cliché: it tastes great, but an hour later you’re hungry all over again.

Some comedies are like that. As long as you’re in the theater, you could be laughing more or less continuously.

The Akathist [Annunciation] Hymn

of St Romanos the Melodist 

Oikos 1

An Archangel was sent from heaven to cry “Rejoice!” to the Theotokos; [1]

and, O Lord, as he saw you taking bodily form

at the sound of his bodiless voice,

he stood still in amazement [2]

Stars: 2

Cast: Frances McDormand (Guinevere Pettigrew), Amy Adams (Delysia LaFosse), Ciaran Hinds (Joe), Lee Pace (Michael), Shirley Henderson (Edythe Dubarry)

*** 

Miss Guinevere Pettigrew does have quite a day. It begins on a blustery London morning in 1939, as Miss Pettigrew awakens on a bench in a London train station. She had lost her job as a governess the day before, and no job prospects are in sight. She gets a meal in a soup-line but it is knocked out of her hands; she collides with a stranger, and her suitcase spills across the sidewalk. With nothing left to lose, Miss Pettigrew forms the bold plan of trying to pass herself off as the applicant sent by an employment agency to be social secretary to nightclub singer and social luminary Delysia LaFosse. (The film is based on a 1938 novel which was reissued in England in 2000, making the author, Winifred Watson, a minor celebrity at 94.)

On the road, shuttling between airports and motels, I sent my daughter an email: “I’m on my way to Branson, Missouri. They say it’s like Las Vegas, but for Christians over fifty.” She wrote back, “I can’t even begin to imagine what that means.”

I could; I imagined it would be laughable and hokey. (You could point out that I am a Christian over fifty and should get off my high horse, but I would only blink at you.) This little town of 6,000

[Cast: Jessica Lange (Arvilla), Kathy Bates (Margene), Joan Allen (Carol), Tom Skerritt (Emmett), Christine Baranaski (Francine)]

Oh boy, a movie about a 1966 Bonneville convertible! That’s the car my sisters and I learned to drive on. Ours was silver with a black interior, purchased brand-new off the showroom floor with every possible extra. We called it the Batmobile. It’s in retirement at Louisa’s place now, but I like to think of it as resting up.

I went to see the cinematic “Bonneville” filled with hopeful nostalgia, but, I regret to say, it’s a really crummy movie. Though the car appears in the film, it’s mere eye candy for a story about three middle-aged women (“middle,” that is, if you know lots of 120-year-olds). They’re using the spiffy vehicle to make a road trip from Pocatello, Idaho to Santa Barbara, California. Though road-trip movies have been overdone, it could still have been enjoyable, especially as a comedy retaining down-to-earth, wisecracking Kathy Bates. But “Bonneville” is also burdened with a *serious* plot element, one that feels contrived and manipulative.

It’s that Arvilla has just lost her husband, Joe. After his retirement, Joe became an adventurous traveler, and began taking Arvilla around the world. Death came while they were on a trip to Borneo. As the story opens we see Arvilla coming home in a taxi, clutching a container of Joe’s ashes. She had made him a promise to scatter them, the where and how left unspecified.

But Joe has a daughter from his first marriage, Francine, who feels strongly that he should be buried next to her mother, in the family plot in California. She offers Arvilla a deal: turn over the ashes by the time of the memorial service next week, and I won’t sell this house. (The house was left to Francine in a pre-Arvilla will, and a theoretical later will amending that can’t be found.)

Since the unseen Joe looms large throughout the film, what kind of guy was he? Francine tells Arvilla that perhaps Joe never made a new will, since there were many things he said he’d do but never got around to, like moving to where he could be part of his grandchildren’s lives. Later we learn that Joe had programmed Arvilla’s phone so that a call from Francine would trigger the sound of a screaming raptor. Pretty hostile behavior, and there’s no obvious reason why Francine deserves it. Apparently she is Joe’s only child.

There’s also something creepy in the fact that Arvilla has placed his ashes in a pottery jar Joe purchased on one of his travels, one that had originally held the hearts of human sacrifices. Later, Margene recalls the time Joe gave her a gift of a shrunken head. My guess is that a shrunken head makes a hilarious gift only if it’s not Caucasian. If it were, it would be too obvious that you are holding the decapitated head of a young woman, say, or a child, or even an old man like Joe.

The film gives away this alternate view completely against its will. We are herded toward thinking that Francine must be in the wrong, because she’s uptight and wealthy. (How wealthy? One day we see her and her husband playing tennis next to the porch of their home; the next day, the view from the porch shows a swimming pool. Wow.) Her father is presented as her opposite, an adventurous free spirit who won’t be chained to the expectations of narrow, proper people.

Does that sound familiar? It’s the same narrative Baby Boomers internalized decades ago, when “narrow, proper people” meant their parents. Now that those foils are fast disappearing, Boomers are swinging around to paste the label on their children. (Another Jessica Lange film, “Big Fish,” preaches the same sermon.) Once a rebel, always a rebel, even if you have to invent someone to rebel against.

From the moment that Arvilla and her friends Margene and Carol hit the road, I knew exactly what was going to happen [SPOILER ALERT]: Arvilla would go ahead and scatter Joe’s ashes, and fool Francine by handing her a jar containing ashes of some other kind. I didn’t foresee exactly what those ashes would be, and it is a moment of piercing cruelty—if you see Francine as a real, grieving person, that is. But “Bonneville” is determined you’ll see things only from its jerryrigged perspective.

“Bonneville” does have its bright points: Kathy Bates is operating in a different, more authentic universe than the rest of the cast, and provides some genuine laughs. The color scheme of the movie is consistently attractive, too, if unrealistic (when the women are in an autumn environment, they wear harmonizing outfits of orange, brown, and khaki green; when they’re at the beach, they’re all in white, beige, and light blue. And I sure don’t think the ’66 Bonneville came in burnt orange.) Joe’s ashes have gotten the Hollywood treatment, too. My husband, a pastor, has had occasion to deal with cremated remains (“cremains,” in the funeral industry’s cute little euphemism). What Arvilla keeps tenderly releasing to the wind is ashy and fine as dust; what you’d be more likely to see, on looking into the shoe-box-sized container, would be dried, pulverized bone, with some chips disconcertingly larger than others.

The visual center of the drama is Jessica Lange’s face, and unfortunately she’s had that thing done where the zone from eyebrows to cheekbones has been ironed out sideways with extra starch. You’d think any actor would especially prize and protect control of the myriad subtle muscles around the eyes, but this surgery pins everything back so tightly that the eyes look taut and masked. The rest of Lange’s still-lovely face is soft and believable, and it’s a shame she didn’t leave well enough alone. She’s an actress of substance, with two Oscars on her mantelpiece, and could have easily sold us on the beauty of a natural older face. This surgery doesn’t even deliver what it promises: it doesn’t make anybody look young, just weird.

“Bonneville” seems carefully constructed to get older women to come out to the movie theater, and self-consciously adorable “Red Hat” ladies will eat it up. They may be able to bring some men with them, with the car providing catnip for the guys the way Brad Pitt did for female viewers in “Troy.” For anybody else, the film is a bust. The ’66 Bonneville was a great car, but these talented ladies deserved a better vehicle.

Talk About It:

1. For every movie about breaking free from authority and being true to yourself, there’s a movie about loyalty to friends and family no matter what. Why are we so ambivalent about commitment? How can we know God’s calling in these situations?

2. Scripture teaches that we must not favor either the rich or the poor (Leviticus 19:15, “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great”). We know well that we should be kind and compassionate toward the poor. But how should we treat the rich?

3. Early Christians associated the burning of a body with desecration; burning was for garbage. Christ’s incarnation and bodily Resurrection taught, on the contrary, that the body was worthy of honor (in sharp contrast to Gnostics, who regarded the material world with contempt). Should Christians prefer to bury a body intact? Or is cremation as valid an option?

Even if you go around with one or several fingers stuffed into each ear, you will not be able to exclude the words “Hannah Montana” from your field of consciousness. No American citizen is permitted to be unfamiliar with the words “Hannah Montana.” What you are permitted is to be uncertain of what the words mean. Unless you made the decision to have a seven-year-old granddaughter about now, without taking sufficient forethought for the consequences.

I’ve resisted learning about the Hannah Montana industry until recently, despite the acquisition of my own seven-year-old granddaughter, herself a Hannah.

That’s too bad, because this format has been the foundation of some terrific, thought-provoking films. You take a sizeable number of characters, most of whom have never met, and set their stories in motion. As the multiple plots unfold, each character is being drawn closer to the center, where a resolution awaits that, in the best of these films, can be simultaneously unexpected and inevitable. Let’s coin a term and call them “drawstring” movies, a subset of the genre known as “ensemble” films.

This will sound like an odd thing to say about a comedy, but “Walk Hard” is an ambitious movie. It starts with 6-year-old Dewey Cox picking up a guitar in a rural general store and belting out a blues number, and proceeds to show him singing with his polite high school band, then going through an Elvis phase, on into protest songs, Dylanesque songs with incomprehensible lyrics, rock, hard rock, frenzied growling rock, music like the Beatles in their India phase, music like the Beach Boys—oh, you name it, it’s in there. So in addition to telling a hilarious, fast-paced story that hits all the clichés of singer-biography movies (lots of drugs, lots of rehab, lots of wives, plenty of costume changes, hairstyle changes, and the accumulating wrinkles of age), the film must also deliver spot-on music parodies. What’s more, this is music that audience members know very, very well, so it’s not like parodying, say, Puccini. Those watching the film could sing the original models of these songs in their sleep. The performer, too, must be top-notch, and not just a good actor but a singer able to go from Bobby Darrin to Bob Dylan, John Lennon to Johnny Cash, in a heartbeat.

Well, it works. If only for the music numbers, this movie deserves a standing ovation. Much of the credit goes to John C. Reilly, an actor with a rubbery face and the voice of an angel. He played simple, good-hearted men in two of my favorite recent movies, “Magnolia” (1999) and “The Good Girl” (2002), but it was in “Chicago” (2002) that I first heard him sing, and the sweet sadness of his “Mr. Cellophane” placed a heart at the center of that frantic, heartless story. In “Walk Hard,” Reilly has to produce a seemingly-impossible range of vocal styles, and does it well. The material he has to work with is excellent too, as perfect in exemplifying these many genres as the songs of “A Mighty Wind” were to the folk scene. Give the “Walk Hard” soundtrack album to your hippest musical friends this Christmas (the ones hip enough to not mind some double-entendre lyrics) and they’ll be delighted.

The story begins as Cox, now an old man, is backstage with his guitar, awaiting his cue. As he stands with head bowed, leaning against a wall, the nervous stage manager reminds him that he goes on in two minutes. But Cox’s longtime friend and his band’s drummer (an unnamed character, well-played by Tim Meadows) tells him that, before he performs, Dewey has to think about every single moment of his life. This first laugh in the film sets up a pattern: characters enunciating exactly what the film is trying to get across, as if dimmer audience members are in danger of missing it. For example, the next scene shows young Dewey and his brother Nate setting out for a day of fun. Nate keeps saying things like, “It’s a good thing I’m going to live a long, long time!” and “Nope, nothing horrible is going to happen today!” The boys end up dueling with machetes in the barn, and with one swipe Dewey cuts his brother in half at the waist; the unoccupied legs now stand beside to the top part of the torso, which is upright on the ground. Dewey tells Nate he’ll be OK, but Nate says, “I don’t know, Dewey, I’m cut in half pretty bad!” The doctor is unable to save Nate, and Dewey is so traumatized that he loses his sense of smell. “You’ve gone smellblind!” his mom exclaims.

A half-dozen years later, Dewey and his band are performing at the high school talent show, singing a mild number consisting mostly of “Take my hand.” From the first lines, however, the teens dance with abandon, while adults react with horror and rage. “This music is an outrage!” says one, and a preacher waving a floppy bible says, “You know who’s got hands? The devil! And he uses them for holding things!”

I could go on citing funny lines (well, one more: Dewey’s wife complains, “But what about *my* dreams?” and Dewey says, “I already told you, I can’t build you a candy house”)—but in the end, too many funny lines began to feel like a problem. Parody requires that the flaws of a typical music biopic be exaggerated, so the plot moves with absurd speed; good guys and bad guys are starkly distinguished, and idyllic and miserable moments follow each as swiftly as the bumps on a roller coaster track. The characters don’t have time to attain any weight of their own, and the breakneck story has no punch.

It’s only a comedy, of course, but it still could have been better. Compare “Walk Hard” with “Anchorman” (2004), another comedy produced by Judd Apatow. The idiots and egoists who populate the TV-news world of “Anchorman” are hilarious, but they also have their feet on the ground as real, consistent characters, with believable (if ridiculous) motivations. “Walk Hard” gets to feeling more like a spray of birdshot. One joke after another comes at you, not all of them successful, and around about the middle it began to sag. This comedy is less like Apatow’s usual work (off-color comedies with some surprisingly conservative themes, like “40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”) and more like such parodies as “Scary Movie,” “Epic Movie,” or even the granddaddy of this genre, “Airplane” (1980). A lot of “Walk Hard” is genuinely funny, and the music is truly impressive. But the substructure, the story and characters, are pretty thin.

I brought with me two youngish adult friends, who disagreed; they both thought it was hilarious, and one said it was the most she’d laughed since the first time she watched “Anchorman.” But, she said, next time she’d want to have the fast-forward button handy. Not only is there plenty of crude language, and a more than sufficient quantity of toilet humor (when Dewey gets his sense of smell back, he lingers joyfully over a handful of horse manure), but there is an naked orgy scene in a motel room during which a waist-down view of a man fills a corner of the screen. The filmmakers must have thought this uproarious because the same view recurs a minute later, but viewers over the age of 14 will not find it particularly clever. For some potential viewers, that bit of information will be enough to decide them not to go at all. It’s a shame that a film with so much that is genuinely entertaining, and musically impressive, will alienate viewers with a moment that isn’t even funny. “Walk Hard” could have traveled a lot further if it had avoided the low road.

 
Movies are great at sweeping an audience up into intense emotions and experiences; even when a plot is flimsy, a good roller-coaster ride can be worth the price of admission. It’s not so easy to make a movie about something that isn’t happening. In “Grace is Gone,” what doesn’t happen (at least not for a very long time) is a dad breaking the news to his daughters that their mom is dead. We watch him not tell them in the living room, in the car, in restaurants, in motels, at an amusement park – he doesn’t tell them all the way from the upper Midwest to Florida. He grimaces and weeps, he calls his own answering machine to hear Grace’s recorded voice, but he can’t bring himself to get it out to the girls. The whole movie is like being stuck in bed with a cold.

I’m going to try not to gush, but it’s hard when a movie is this delightful. “Enchanted” is even more than that, it’s original—lovely, fresh, funny, and charming to a princely degree. And this is where you and I can start to lose each other, because there’s no reviewer so smitten as the one who expected to endure a so-so movie and was surprised to find something really very good. Gratitude produces a review with a rosy glow, but if you read that review and buy a ticket expecting to see the best thing next to “Citizen Kane,” you could well be disappointed. It’s the very same movie, but it depends on where you’re coming from. That gap between discovery and verification is a communications hazard for readers and writers of all kinds of reviews. I know all that, but I can’t help it. “Enchanted” knocked me out.

 
The Church of Stop Shopping? The name might ring a bell. During last year’s pre-Christmas shopping season, this parody gospel choir roamed the country, stopping in places like Mall of America to offer carols rewritten to warn of the evils of consumerism. The music-and-comedy troupe was founded by “Rev. Billy” (Bill Talen), who preaches the Stop Shopping gospel (“We’re on a mission to save Christmas from overconsumption”) while costumed and coiffed to resemble the most terrifying wide-eyed faith healer on TV. (Actually, the Anglican-style clergy collar doesn’t go with this character, nor the pre-Vatican II Catholic confessional, but we’re not asking for historic accuracy here.)

“What Would Jesus Buy?” is a documentary about that cross-country pilgrimage,

For some time now I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s terrific 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. (You should interpret “some time” to mean “a pretty long time,” because not only is this a hefty-sized book, it’s about science.) In his introduction Bryson, an entertaining travel writer, explains how he came to write a book about the origins of life, the universe, and everything. He says that when he was in the fourth or fifth grade the cover of his science text showed the earth with a quarter cut away, revealing an interior neatly arranged in colorful layers. Not only did Bryson enjoy the thought of unsuspecting motorists sailing off the edge,

“Idiocracy” is the most thought-provoking bad movie I’ve ever seen. But, stand warned, it’s pretty bad. No kidding. The plot is flimsy, the characters are flat, and the minutes fly like hours. You’ll be desperate for it to end, long before the 87 minutes run their course. Tedium, thy name is “Idiocracy.”

And yet it lingers in the mind. The day after you see it, you’ll see it everywhere.

The energy in the kitchen of an elegant Mexican restaurant in Manhattan is cranking up steadily, as the staff braces for the noon rush. One waitress, Nina, is running late, which is becoming a habit. She dashes in at the last minute, but Manny, the owner, tells her this is one time too many, and fires her on the spot.

As Nina storms out, the head chef, Manny’s brother Jose (a mysteriously tragic guy, peeking out through a forest of beard and hair), follows her outside to make sure she’s OK. When he learns that she is pregnant,