24th Favorite Movie - Saving Private Ryan

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

So we are past the halfway point! The end is in sight! Hopefully I will finish this thing sometime in October, which will have been one year from when I started.

A second straight Steven Spielberg movie comes in at #24 on my list, Saving Private Ryan. And there is actually one more Spielberg movie to go at #18. Bethany has gone on record saying that if it is not E.T., there will be serious repercussions. I have not seen E.T. since we went to see it in the theater for my birthday party when I turned 8. But that does not mean it could not have made a sizable impact on me... As you can tell, Bethany is a big E.T. fan. She has a life-sized doll of him as well as a pillow of his face. When I was moving in, the pillow gave Tommy B the creeps and he turned it around so it wasn't looking at him. Anyways, more on E.T. and Spielberg in a few weeks.

I really have no time to talk about this movie except to say it really should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1998 instead of Shakespeare in Love. I heard that Band of Brothers is really good too, so I just queued it up in Netflix. I'd write more but I have to go to Disneyland now. WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!

April Adventures

Ever since I started traveling internationally, about every six months I start to get the itch. It's time to get on a plane, leave the country and go on vacation. In April, I get to do all three of those things, but on three separate trips. It's less exciting than it sounds but it's been a busy month! The foreign country was Mexico, the plane trip was to LA on business, and the vacation is a weekend at Disneyland. All of this is mixed in with the usual full-time job, part-time grad school, and volunteering with the youth group. Oh yeah, and I have a husband that I like to talk to every once in a while, haha. Needless to say, things have been really busy, and blogging is a last priority! Thankfully Danny keeps up with his movie blog or our page might have expired.

Back to the chaos that has been April. It started on Easter Sunday when we left Oakland with 40 teenagers to drive to Mexico for a week-long spring break mission trip. Driving a 15 passenger van full of teens through the dirt roads of Mexico is stressful, to say the least. Despite the fact that I maxed out all my vacation time at the new job, this was not a vacation. Most of the trip was great - we had a good group of kids, did some great construction and ministry at Rancho de sus Ninos orphanage and had a lot of fun. Then Thursday hit. I won't go into details, but I'll summarize by saying we had some discipline issues that escalated so much that by the end of the night the adults decided to bring them home a day early. Instead of making the trip home in two fun days, we did it in one rough day. After a major delay at the border (another long story) we left the Mexican border at 5 pm and had to drive all the way to Oakland through San Diego and LA traffic. We rolled into Oakland at 3 am and I spent the next two days in a fog that felt like jet lag. I have to take a minute to brag about Danny and what a great job he did on this trip. I was impressed to work with him and so proud to be his wife! It's incredibly difficult to lead a trip like this Mexico mission trip, but even more difficult when there are discipline problems, and he handled everything with such integrity. His theme for the week was "speak the truth in love" and he had to do a lot of that!

Here's a picture of me helping some girls decorate hair clips.


After Mexico I had a day and a half to rest and do laundry, and then got on a plane at 5 am to fly to Pasadena and visit the Fuller main campus for two days of meetings. I had a blast being at Fuller as a staff member and meeting all my co-workers from around the country. I flew home Tuesday night just in time to get to my 7-10 pm class. By Wednesday, my brain was fried!

On Friday Danny and I are driving to LA to play at Disneyland for two days - just the two of us! This will be my third trip to (or through) LA in three weeks, but I think this one will be the most fun! This will be our first getaway alone since our honeymoon, so we're excited to get out of town for some much needed R&R. We're not taking any teenagers, and I'm not taking any homework!

Talk to you again - sooner than two months this time, I promise!

25th Favorite Movie - Jaws

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

The first time I saw Jaws, I was about eleven years old. It was in the middle of the summer, there was nothing to do, and so my mom brought home a few movies on VHS from the public library for me and my friends to watch. I think we had just gotten our first VCR. Kinda funny, huh... to think that now we have Tivo and DVD and movies on the internet and I didn't have a VCR in my house growing up. Anyways, I started watching and got really frustrated and bored because they were not showing the shark. So I found the fast-forward button and just fast-forwarded to all the "good parts" with the shark attacks and didn't bother with the rest.

I don't think it needs to be said, but I will say it anyways: this is not the best way to watch Jaws.

Some of the best scenes in this movie don't involve the shark at all. The scene where the shark hunter tells his sea farin' tale is one of the best. Or the one with the body underwater that is guaranteed to make anyone who hasn't seen it before jump. Or the suspense for the first half of the movie... when you know that there will be an attack, but you don't know which one of the people in the water it will be. Stephen Spielberg is just a master, at everything. I have always liked directors like Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola but right now I would have to say that my two favorite movie directors are Stephen Spielberg and Spike Lee.

Anyways, if you haven't REALLY seen this movie before, maybe you've just heard all about it or done the tram ride at Universal Studios or caught a few minutes of one of the zillion showings on TNT... check it out. But not now. Wait until the summer, in the height of tourist season, like August. I have a friend who preaches the importance of watching certain movies at a certain time of year, and this is one of them. Two others are American Graffitti and Stand By Me, which he always watches toward the end of the summer.

Oh, and as for Jaws 2, Jaws in 3-D, and Jaws 4... like Ocean's 12, they never happened.

26th Favorite Movie - Malcolm X

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

The third and final Spike Lee movie to make my list ties him with the most of any other director on here. Stay tuned next week to see who the other director is who has 3 movies on my top 50 list. Actually, next week we will be in Mexico with the high school group working at an orphanage. The next couple of days Bethany and I are trying to take it easy to rest up for the loooong drive down and back.

I think there are two main reasons why I appreciate this movie so much. The first has to do with the filmmaking. Denzel is amazing as always in his performance and Spike Lee makes the movie feel so epic... and I'm not just talking about the 3+ hour length, but everything he does lends a grandiose sense to what you are watching. The second reason has to do with the person of Malcolm X himself. While I do not agree with some of his beliefs, there are certain attributes in him that I admire. The spiritual transformation that he went through. The humility he shows before God. The passion he displays in the pulpit. The drive that keeps him going even when he is tired, has been betrayed, and is getting death threats.

Malcolm X is also interesting to me because it shows a man trying to balance his family life with a very demanding work schedule. Something I have been thinking about lately is the idea of "putting family first before work". That is something that I hear talked about a lot and I agree with... but I think how it is played out may look different at some times. For most men, work is how we get a lot of our self-worth, and it seems to me that if someone is passionate about their work at times that will directly cut into family time. If the person is in the middle of a project, has an important business trip to take, or needs to take classes or tests in order to become more proficient at work, during that "season", time with the fam will likely be impacted. But sometimes that season goes on for too long. Sometimes we men take on more work in order to provide a more stable home and future for our families... when all our wives and children really want is to see us around more (the great book For Men Only by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn talks about this). If we ALWAYS put work first, that is a problem.

I started thinking about all of this after watching 2 movies this last week. The first is called Something the Lord Made, and it is about the men who performed the first successful heart surgery about 50 years ago. You get the feeling watching the movie that they weren't exactly home for dinner every night... but their families understood that was because they were on the verge of discovering something that would save thousands of lives. But you also never get the sense that the men didn't adore their familes, they just had important work to do that they were very passionate about. The other movie is The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith. Again, this guy loved his son but was also passionate about becoming a stock broker. He had to put his son into a day care that he didn't feel all that great about and was always dragging him around on sales visits and studying for a test he had to take. But I think in both of these movies the characters DID put family first in their hearts, even though they chose jobs that may have kept them from spending more time with their families. I just hope that when/if the time comes for Bethany and I to have children (calm down, Grace!), that I would be able to find the right balance between work and family, because I think it is one of the most important factors in a man's life.