The Top Ten Movies of 2019!

I'll tell you upfront: the 11th edition of this list is Disney-heavy. I literally forced myself not to include Aladdin or Frozen 2 on the list because it would have just made it ridiculous how many spots they had on here and I don't get paid by Disney to give them every spot. (If anyone from Disney would like to pay me to include more of their movies on the list, I'll happily kick the 3 non-Disney movies off this list and start belting out "Let it Go" ASAP)

These lists are interesting to me because they don't always end up lining up with which movies were my favorite when the year is over. Emily is encouraging me to reorder last year's list with how I ended up feeling about them when it was all said and done but there are always a few surprises and sadly disappointments. (A great example: probably the best movie I've seen in 2018 was Paddington 2.)

The truth is that this year's list was one of the hardest lists to make because of how great these movies look. There are movies on the bottom of the list that could have easily been on the top of the list in other years. Without further ado, list #11:

1. Star Wars: Episode IX (December 20th)

To anyone who knows me, this shouldn't be a surprise. I loved The Force Awakens in 2015 and while I don't understand the irrational hatred from some of The Last Jedi, my immediate response to seeing it was: it'll depend on how they finish the series. I've written about this before but I think the biggest weakness that these Star Wars films have is a lack of overarching vision between the movies. Without a finale to put it in context, The Last Jedi kind of felt like a movie made by someone who didn't really enjoy The Force Awakens. At the very least, it did not feel like the continuation of a story-line but a new direction. I am hopeful that the return of JJ Abrams as director (he also directed The Force Awakens) will put some cohesion between the three movies. I'm also hopeful we'll get an answer to the question that's been on everyone's mind: is Chewbacca related to Luke Skywalker?

2. Avengers: Endgame (April 26th)

Star Wars is the only movie that could have possibly kept this from the top spot and even then it's my enthusiasm just short of obsession of Star Wars that is probably blinding me to the truth that this movie belongs there. Although the trailer of this movie would ruin Avengers: Infinity War, I'll avoid spoiling it and tell you to go watch it on Netflix before finishing this blog. I've never seen a movie where I immediately wanted to see its sequel. They did such a great set up with Infinity War that it's only the track record of Marvel films that leads me to believe they can deliver a follow-up that won't feel disappointing. Based on the trailer of Endgame, it looks like they just might do it.

3. Spider-Man: Far From Home (July 5th)

Spider-Man: Homecoming might be my favorite Marvel movie. Besides growing up as a Spider-Man fan (I had a single paperback, black and white copy of a story line between Spidey and Doc Ock that I read so many times that the front cover came off.) that movie just felt so pure in its storytelling and framing. Without going into spoilers for Infinity War, I'm not sure where they'll go with this story but Tom Holland is such a convincing high school Spider-Man that it'll be worth the ticket regardless of what they decide to do.

4. Toy Story 4 (June 21st)

Have you ever been to a concert where no one was asking for an encore but the performer came out and did one anyway? Meet Toy Story 4. I love the Toy Story movies. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are perfect. Toy Story 3 was way better than it had any business being. It felt like they were bringing things to a close. And yet, we're getting Toy Story 4. The key to whether an encore is worth it is if it adds to what came before. Knowing Pixar, I think this will. Just for existing, this movie is a good reminder that just because a chapter comes to a close does not mean our story is over. I'm interested to see what they do and I'll try my best not to hold it up too much to Toy Story 3's near-perfect standards.

5. The Lion King (July 19th)

The first movie I can remember seeing in the movie theater was Home Alone 2 but the first movie I can clearly remember wanting to see and then being blown away by the experience of seeing it was The Lion King. Director Jon Favreau has already proven with The Jungle Book that he can take a classic and make a movie that adds value without being a shot for shot repeat of the animated version. Just the fact that they brought back James Earl Jones as Mufasa is enough to get me in to see this one!

6. Downton Abbey (September 20th)

I love America. I also have a very strong affection for the UK. (If they made a Great British Baking Show movie, it'd be on this list!) Downton Abbey was one of those shows that I assumed I wouldn't like so I avoided when it started gaining popularity. After flying through the first couple of seasons, this show was probably the one I would look forward to the most every year. The stories were just so well done and it was such an interesting setting (the upper-class in the WWI-1920's UK) that it felt like a book I couldn't put down. The show wrapped up neatly in 2015 but much like Toy Story, it is so good that you don't mind an encore that you weren't necessarily screaming for.

7. Captain Marvel (March 8th)

The way that Infinity War wrapped up was perfect marketing for the upcoming non-Avengers Marvel movies because it feels like you need every puzzle piece to how the story will resolve that you can get. I've only become acquainted with Captain Marvel in the past couple of years but the decision to set this movie in the 1990s with a CGI de-aged Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury is interesting enough that I think this will be worth the ticket regardless of how much it points to Avengers: Endgame.

8. Dumbo (March 29th)

The second animated-classic-live action- remake on this list, Dumbo was not one of my favorite movies as a kid. Oh, I watched it plenty of times but it scared me. (Those pink elephants!) This movie looks so interesting with it's art deco vibe that I'll overcome my fear of pink elephants to give it a try. You can't always judge a movie by its trailer but all of the trailers they've released for Dumbo make it seem exactly like the heart-warming, original take on the animated film that you'd hope it would be.

9. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (February 8th)

The first LEGO Movie was great. It was funny, it was original, it couldn't be topped. We live in a world were "couldn't be topped" is a challenge not a warning to movie studios (See Toy Story 4 and Downton Abbey) so here's a sequel. (Seriously, if you've seen the first one I'm not sure how you end the movie the way they did and still have a sequel?) Chris Pratt is at his Andy Dwyer finest as Emmett and I think that this will fall in that same category where it may not reach the greatness of the first movie but it'll be worth seeing anyway.


10. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (May 31st)

Finding the movie for the 10th spot on this list was harder than the other 9. First, I never watched the last Godzilla movie. Second, it's not a genre that I normally would be interested in. (I did see the 1998 Godzilla movie in the theaters though and it is not easy to rewatch now but I loved it as a kid.) The main draw to this one is that it seems to know that it's going way overboard (for an American Godzilla at least) with the number of monsters in the movie but it's gladly pushing that envelope. To top it off, you have Eleven from Stranger Things and Gary Hobson from Early Edition so that alone is worth rounding out this list.

Why I Deleted* Twitter and Subscribed to the Chicago Tribune

The age of life expectancy in the United States has declined for the third straight year. This is out of the ordinary. So out of the ordinary that the last time it happened was during World War I. They had an excuse when it happened that time (WWI and a flu pandemic) but experts are confused as they look at our relatively peaceful circumstances in 2018. Two of the largest factors in this decline are suicide and opioid addiction. Even if these are the main causes of this decline, we're still left to ask: why?

Ben Sasse argues strongly in his book Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal that the main contributor to our increasing despair and even why so many are turning to opioid abuse stemming from a single issue: chronic loneliness. As most people can recognize, loneliness is not just the lack of people around to whom you are connecting; it is a lack of connection to people even when there are people around you. Loneliness has been a problem since the Fall of Man but it seems to be getting worse at an increasing speed.

Why do Sasse and others believe that this loneliness is expanding so rapidly? It stems from our increasing lack of "rootedness" in our communities and the disappearance of  tribes that have traditionally given us our place of connection. This blog post could go in a thousand different directions from here: churches that are so large that people come in and leave without connecting with the people around them, a lack of connection to neighbors out of increasing fear of strangers and bad intentions, etc. The biggest impact that this idea had on my own life is the place I have allowed my iPhone to shape my news consumption and keep me from living in the present with the people around me.

Twitter can be an extremely impressive tool and one of the great things that it does is allow news to travel at speeds never seen before. While many once saw the advent of cable news as bringing the news to the world at instant speeds, we now can have "reporters" giving us accounts with handheld cameras and word processors in their back pockets in the form of their phones. I have prided myself in knowing more about the news than most other people, knowing more facts about an issue or debate and knowing it fast.

Unbeknownst to me, I was doing more than increasing my knowledge on the issues; I was overloading my brain with the need for instant facts, regardless of whether or not I understood their context. Before we started getting all of our Amazon packages within two days, we started to believe that actions needed to occur instantaneously.  If someone replies to a text 30 minutes later rather than 2 minutes later, were they trying to send a message of being upset? If an investigation into a sitting President's administration goes on for two years, does that mean that the investigator is being unfair rather than thorough? We expect instant results, and when we don't get them we are unsatisfied.

Constantly checking Twitter for the latest news was shaping the level of importance that an individual story deserved, and it was keeping me from placing my focus on the real people around me. Should we become hermits who stay away from news and just trust that the world will work itself out in our ignorance? I would say no. While there is a danger of being "overinformed" or rather "fast food informed" through overindulging in internet or cable news, being informed about the major issues in our country, state and local communities is a vital part of actually being connected to each other. I care about what's happening in my local community not because of whether it benefits or hurts "my team" but how it benefits or hurts my neighbor. I can't know what will benefit or hurt my neighbor unless I know what is going on, and unless I know my neighbor.

So how did I decide to be informed without constantly overindulging in internet/cable news? I'd like to reintroduce you to the local newspaper. I know the newspaper as an industry is going out of business. I know that people tend to trust sources of news that they agree with rather than the traditional news media. Yet, there is still value in hearing from people with whom you disagree and in keeping the structure of being in control of when the news comes to you. My news comes sometime before I wake up at 5am since the Chicago Tribune has not yet been missing from our front porch when I go check on it. Sometimes I have time to read the paper before heading to work while other times I don't get a chance to read it until I get home. The truth that the internet/cable news industry doesn't want you know: almost all news does not need to be known immediately and most news is clearer if you wait a little after it happens.

I don't imagine that everyone has the problem with Twitter that I do. Whether its Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Candy Crush, Fortnight or old-fashioned "web surfing," the temptation to get lost in our digital world is a constant one for almost everyone. Every day and increasingly, every minute is a choice of whether to be present and find our community with people or to settle for the false sense of community that we receive from our digital devices. I'm not advocating for chucking our phones and computers out the window but we must realize that they will either be a tool that we control for specific purposes or an oppressive master to which we subject ourselves.

Case in point: I still have a Twitter account. I like following Ben Sasse (although he tries to limit his Twitter usage as well), Lin-Manuel Miranda (we don't agree on politics but I almost always appreciate his perspective and attitude on life), Haley Byrd (the best/funniest congressional reporter on Twitter) as well as actual real-life friends. What I found while clearing out the number of people I follow on Twitter is that most of my actual real-life friends haven't tweeted in years or don't tweet very often. I deleted the Twitter app off my phone but still allow myself to check it occasionally (it's hard to go from 40-50 times a day to zero) but I'm hoping that by keeping myself from the draw of the constant news cycle that I can be more rooted in my community while keeping informed.

What to do now? Maybe I'll go see if I can find those real-life friends who haven't been tweeting...

(Right after I tweet about this blog post)




*Full disclosure: I deleted the app off my phone, but I still have a Twitter account.

Preparing Well for 2020

The 2018 election hasn't even happened yet and already the wheels of the 2020 Presidential election are beginning to churn. You could argue that they never stopped churning after 2016, but politicians will start campaigns, visit the early primary states, and people will start attaching themselves to a candidate. You could argue that 2016 was the ugliest campaign season in the last 100 years. I'm fairly certain that I was unfriended - or at the very least unfollowed - over politics, and I know that I'm not alone.

2020 has all of the signs of being even worse. While this sounds depressing, it can also be a chance for all of us to think about how to engage each other better before we get tied up in the mess of the election. If we think and plan ahead about "how" we speak to each other, when we get to the specific "what" we speak to each other, we can hopefully leave the election season less divided. Here are a few things that I hope we can remember that will make this possible:

1. Rudeness is not persuasion.

This is something that I thought most people understood, but I found out the hard way that wasn't always true. I would share a link to a story about a specific politician or a political issue and a couple of people would respond with personal insults or over the top accusations. Not only did this never cause me to consider adopting their position or politician, I doubt it encouraged anyone on the outside to do so either. 

I imagine it may have made those people who were rude feel better about themselves, but it hasn't been lost on me that I haven't heard from those people since the election of 2016 ended either. 

2. You're much more likely to influence someone over coffee than over the internet.

Even if you avoid being rude to other people on social media over politics, there's another issue that occurs: political overload. If you aren't the one running for office yourself, your Facebook wall, your Twitter feed, or your Snapchat snap, shouldn't be completely full of political memes or links to why you don't like the the other candidate. It isn't that you shouldn't advocate for your positions or candidates, but there is a point when the flow of memes causes people to stop paying attention. Comments are usually full of either people who already in agreement with you or the people from the previous section who just like arguing.

This doesn't mean that it isn't worth persuading people! Our form of government is founded on the idea of ideas being debated and considered. We've become so polarized that people rarely consider ideas that come from outside of their political tribe. It would help the health of our country if people tried to convince each other of their positions in a non-social media forum. This will help us build the depth of our ideas by having to defend them in more than a couple of sentences, and it will help us see something else important-- the next point:

3. People are more than their political beliefs.

People on either side of the political divide tend to define people by cut and dry labels: liberal, leftist, far-right, conservatives. Some labels we embrace as part of our identity while others we bestow on others without bothering to ask if they would consider that label for themselves or not. The truth is that while labels are easy and in some cases generally helpful, they can also have a harmful effect - causing us to forget that people are more than their political beliefs.

We're at the point where we politicize everything from the restaurants we do or don't eat at to which sports we watch. When we politicize people, we lose that there is a multitude of our personalities, talents, interests and virtues that have little to do with what political tribe we belong to. The harm, then, is to ourselves when we miss those things and don't allow ourselves to view people as people. As Christians, we believe that all people are created in the image of God, and so for a Christian to politicize a person, you are diminishing your ability to recognize that their identity is not rooted in politics but in their status as a being created by a loving God.

4. There is benefit to listening to opposing viewpoints without responding.

When we do listen to the viewpoints of others we often feel the need to respond quickly with our own point of view. Pastor John Piper recently explained why he doesn't share his political opinions on a specific issue, and it caused me to pause. His reason: he doesn't have the expertise or wide-ranging research to speak authoritatively about most political issues. This flies in the face of how I normally operate. Normally my process is: read something about an issue (or at least read the headline), think I know about that issue, tell other people what to think about that issue. The truth is that if I actually want to be responsible with my political viewpoints, I need to start with a lot more listening and understanding along with pushing myself to actually look into multiple viewpoints before deciding that I know everything there is to know.

The other option is this: I don't need to have an opinion on every political issue or politician! Sometimes it's enough to say: I'm not sure what to say about this and want to keep from speaking out of ignorance. Not speaking can actually be more helpful to other people than deciding that a half-baked political opinion needs to be shared.

5. This is NOT the most important election in your lifetime.

I love reading about history. The biggest thing I often walk away with after reading a historical biography is that as much as things have changed, there's so much that hasn't. Basically as soon as the country began, people were viewing issues through party lenses and using media sources to communicate their spin. Another thing that hasn't changed is that people almost always view the current election as the most important election in their lifetime. 

The number one perpetrator of this viewpoint: politicians. If they can convince people that this election will either cause the survival or destruction of the country, state, city, water reclamation district, etc. then they can get people to actually show up and vote. While this might seem like a simple political tactic, what it does is cause tribal identity to intensify. When you think that the other side is going to destroy your community, why wouldn't you huddle up with your "team" to protect yourself?

The truth is that this country tends to moderate itself over time. When one party has control of multiple branches, or when one of the parties becomes more liberal or conservative, balance sets in, and the other side gains in power to offset. That doesn't promise that this will always occur, because no country has the right to eternally exist (just ask the Roman Empire) but it should help us recognize that much of what seems like urgent life-or-death power struggles have been happening for 200 years and will probably keep happening as long as we have a two-party system.

In politics, winning isn't everything.
The 2004 election was the day after my 18th birthday so I didn't vote that year. Well over half of my primary or general election choices lost in the following 14 years. We can be fooled into seeing politics as a game to win or a battle to fight. What politics actually is, is an opportunity to bear the sword of government in a very small way ourselves. What this means is that we need to take our votes seriously as an action that has influence beyond our own interests, but also that the very action of voting carries meaning itself. I imagine that as long as I don't vote for a minor party or an independent (which I have!) that over time the balance of "winning" will be closer to 50%. Sometimes we "win" and sometimes we "lose," but we've only truly lost when we view our identity and the identity of others in their political views rather than viewing ourselves and others as full, complex, changing human beings.