It was no surprise to me last night that at the Oscars the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was crowned the best movie of 2022. In fact, it seemed apropos for the spirit of the age we live in.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is simultaneously one of the most truthful movies of all time, yet by the end, one of the most trite. The film perfectly articulates Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilism in a way even he would be proud of. In a godless multiverse of unlimited possibility, where a person will live out every single choice ever possible or impossible (who knew there was one where you have hotdogs for fingers) the movie rightly shows the pointless, hopeless nature of such an existence. There is no meaning or purpose because nothing matters, there are no consequences. It brings to mind the writer of Ecclesiastics when he says,
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastics 1:2-9
The movie echos what humanity has known for a very long time, without something to hold on to, outside ourselves, life is meaningless. The film’s message is bleak, yet 100% accurate in its diagnosis of a godless universe or multiverse.
Channeling the spirit of the age the film tries to pull off its biggest trick by being the very definition of gaslighting. It does this by trying to pretend that regardless of the message we’ve just spent most of the movie witnessing, we should be nice to people, love our families, even when things don’t make sense. (Because as the movie shows so effectively, nothing does make sense, ever). It is an audacious move. Yes, yes, the movie just showed you, how futile all of existence is, in any universe but you should still be nice to people, try and love people who are close to you. It’s absurdist to the extreme, yet it feels right in a world where gaslighting people and asking them to ignore what is right in front of their face is a way of life. Love is absolutely meaningless if there is no meaning. If there is nothing that matters, if there are no consequences because there is no one to be accountable to and in one universe you chose to love, in the next you’ll chose hate, the choices lead to the exact same place, nothing.
But what if things were not so? What if love was not just some etherial human idea but a person. What is love, it is God because God himself is love. Therefore, if God is love, love has definition outside humanity. So, what is love? Timothy Keller says,
“The problem is that if you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God. Please think about it. Loving people can get angry, not in spite of their love but because of it. In fact, the more closely and deeply you love people in your life, the angrier you can get. Have you noticed that? When you see people who are harmed or abused, you get mad. If you see people abusing themselves, you get mad at them, out of love. Your senses of love and justice are activated together, not in opposition to each other. If you see people destroying themselves or destroying other people and you don’t get mad, it’s because you don’t care. You’re too absorbed in yourself, too cynical, too hard. The more loving you are, the more ferociously angry you will be at whatever harms your beloved. And the greater the harm, the more resolute your opposition will be…So it makes no sense to say, ‘I don’t want a wrathful God, I want a loving God.’ If God is loving and good, he must be angry at evil—angry enough to do something about it.” ¹
Love is God being angry enough about our helpless, meaningless lives to do something about it. The Apostle Paul makes this point when he says in Romans, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.“
So what is love? Again I turn to Keller,
“It bears repeating: All love, all real, life-changing love, is substitutionary sacrifice. You have never loved a broken person, you have never loved a guilty person, you have never loved a hurting person except through substitutionary sacrifice.” ²
Everything Everywhere All At Once brilliantly shows us that in a godless world, there is no hope but thanks be to God that we don’t actually live in that world. We live in one where God himself stepped into time to do what we could never do. He took our bleakness and made blessing, our irrelevance and gave us relevance. There is not truth in being gaslit. Being “nice” in a world with no God is pointless.
“How can we escape this self-referential trap and truly become unselfish? If secularism, psychology, and relativism on the one hand and religion and moralism on the other don’t actually give us what we need to be unselfish, what does? The answer is, we need to look somewhere else besides ourselves. We need to look at Jesus. If he is indeed a substitutionary sacrifice, if he has paid for our sins, if he has proved to our insecure, skittish little hearts that we are worth everything to him, then we have everything we need in him. It’s all a gift to us by grace. We don’t do good things in order to connect to God or to feel better about ourselves. What a meager upgrade to our self-image these good deeds would bring, compared with what we receive from understanding why Jesus died for us and how much he loves us. If you really understand the cross, you are blasted out into the world in joyful humility. Now you do not need to help people, but you want to help them, to resemble the One who did so much for you, to bring him delightWhether you think they are worthy of your service doesn’t come into it. Only the gospel gives you a motivation for unselfish living that doesn’t rob you of the benefits of unselfishness even as you enact it.” ³
There is an answer that is better than willful ignorance, it is the knowledge that there is a God that is everywhere, all at once. In fact there is nowhere we could go where he is not. The Psalmist says, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” We live in a universe of consequence with a God who is love and there is nothing outside is preview. We don’t have to earn his love because as the Apostle John says, in the first letter bearing his name, “ There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.” Our love is therefore given meaning, because God being love, gives it meaning. And that is something that makes life worth living, even when it doesn’t make sense.
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Keller, Timothy. “The Cup.” Essay. In King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus, 176–77. New York, NY: Dutton Redeemer, 2011.
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Keller, Timothy. “The Feast.” Essay. In King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus, 168–68. New York, NY: Dutton Redeemer, 2011.
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Keller, Timothy. “The Ransom.” Essay. In King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus, 151–51. New York, NY: Dutton Redeemer, 2011.
I’ve not really liked the previous MCU films for the character of Spider-Man. He’s never felt like Peter Parker because they’d stripped him of the emotional core that makes the character who he is. Thankfully this has been rectified in No Way Home. This is another film in 2021 that knew exactly how to use nostalgia perfectly. If only the Star Wars sequels could have been this good. The movie is not without its issues but it comes together in the end, well. Don’t miss 
2012 was a difficult year for me as a Star Wars fan. Disney bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas and the very first thing they did was cancel a show I was in love with. 
Christmas of 2015 arrives and so does the first film to continue the Skywalker Saga. There is an awakening of Star Wars mania, the likes that had not been seen since 1999. As the world revels in this new Episode, I struggle. I said then in my review, “The movie is clearly more worried about appeasing fanboys than truly inspiring the next generation of fans.” I saw the movie 6 times, as I wrestled with how I felt about it and it just never settled for me. From the first viewing, to the last, I was never able to find my peace with the movie. Yet there was always hope, there were more movies to come in the new Trilogy and luckily there were also other Star Wars movies coming in-between Episodes VII and VIII.
The Last Jedi had taken all the story points from The Force Awakens and told us they were not important. Snoke – you don’t need to know about him. The mystery of who Rey is – not important. The villains like Hux that were so scary in the first movie – actually they are incompetent boobs. Luke Skywalker – not the hero you thought, actually he’s a failure who seems to have learned nothing from his experiences in The Empire Strikes Back and more importantly, 
Regardless of its “failure” status, Solo was a home run for me. From the moment the movie began, I had a smile on my face that never left. Not only was the movie fun, but it felt like Star Wars. It also did something that I did not think possible, it gave us new things, while at the same time respecting the past. I fell in love with Alden Ehrenreich as Han, yet more importantly, I also fell for the new characters. Qi’ra and Enfys Nest were awesome. The addition of Crimson Dawn to the underworld and the reveal of its leader, left me wanting more of this story. But it also gave me hope. The use of Maul seemed to indicate that the Star Wars films might start to embrace the larger universe as well as reward fans for their loyalty to all Star Wars had to offer. (I’m still hoping Disney will #MakeSolo2Happen)
The Sith longed to find the way to everlasting life, yet they were always doomed to fail because of their selfishness. The only way to save someone from death is to give up one’s own life. There is always a cost to one’s self to save someone or something else. Rey shows that when she heals the snake, Leia shows that when she uses the last of her life to bring her son back from the dark and Ben does so when he brings Rey back from the brink of death. There is a real beauty to the fact that Ben does the very thing Anakin desired in his fall, bring back the one he loved from the dead. 
Listen to 
Her struggle for identity is also a frustration. This should be the core of the movie, the question of, “who am I.” She’s a woman without a past, that is tortured with memories that don’t make sense, yet you never feel that. Honestly Veers and Danvers are pretty much the same. There is not a shift in characterization or tone, it is all one note and that note is, “I’m too cool for school.” In the end, the lead character ends up being the least interesting person on screen.
It’s been ten years since Joe Cornish has directed a film and let’s hope that after this we will not have to wait ten more for another. His latest movie, The Kid Who Would be King is an utterly delightful retelling of the Arthurian legend in a modern setting. This film feels like the Amblin films from the 80s, full of heart but with a poignant message to boot.
From my original review, “James Wan has created the most comic book, comic book movie ever. Everything about Aquaman is fantastical and completely out of this world which he embraces with loving arms. Instead of shying away from the weird, Wan just goes for it in a way that’s always a sight to behold. It’s Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, Godzilla and Star Wars, all in one.” Along with Solo, this is the most fun I had in the theater this year. Don’t miss 
Peter Jackson’s masterpiece is one of the most important films of the year. He brings the First World War to life through the magic of technology, reviving 100 year old footage and colorizing it to let us see the war the way the soldiers of that time did. He also allows the men to speak for themselves so that the story told is their story. I cannot recommend this enough.
Don’t miss 
J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was released in the UK in 1997 and created a phenomenon that has lead to the sale of over 500 million books, in the 7 book series. Going back to the beginning, Rowling sells the rights to the series in 1999 for a mere £1 million. By the time that the first movie is released in 2001, there are 4 of the books in the series have already been released and in fact, every movie released will have the next book in the series already out. This means, for every Harry Potter film, there is never a time when people watching them, either don’t already know what happened, because they’d read the books or they could easily go and read online what they missed.
So, what’s changed? Why are people so angry at Rowling and what she’s doing with Fantastic Beasts? Why have we forgotten the fun of eagerly waiting for the next installment of her work, all while having the time of our lives trying to figure out, from the breadcrumbs she’s laid, where the story goes next? We know she is a master at using the tiniest detail to create something completely unexpected and wonderful. I mean, Deathly Hallows the is the proof. If you look at the structure of her screenplays, it’s very similar to how she wrote her books. You can feel the structure with the way she creates mystery, places people and things in the movies that might not be as important yet, but will play a larger role later. Then, she throws you for a loop by upending the mystery, explaining how what you thought was happening wasn’t quite right.
This sense of entitlement and peevishness is destroying our ability to enjoy things. As creators continue on in their creations, there may be things that change over time, but shouldn’t they be given the freedom to do that? It is their work after all. So what if Rowling has decided that McGonagall is older than we thought, does that really hurt anything? If she expands on what we know of boggarts, the Mirror of Erised or anything else, what’s wrong with that? Why do we think that just because we know something about a part of Rowling’s universe that we know everything? She’s continued to reveal things she knows about her creation that we do not and telling the creator they are wrong or have messed something up is the height of arrogance. In many ways, we’ve forgotten how to be okay with not knowing everything and having someone, other than ourselves be the arbiter of what’s “canon”.
Bradley Cooper has established himself as one of the best actors in Hollywood, versatile and adaptable, he’s made a name for himself in his serious dramatic roles, as well as comedy. Now Cooper is flexing a different muscle, as his directorial debut A Star is Born drops and it has garnered significant critical praise, with the talk of Academy Awards swirling around the film like a cyclone.
All the fame, money, sex, drugs, things, even people, cannot fill the hole that burns so brightly inside of us. We, like Jack are left trying everything under the sun and yet left wanting. Like Solomon in Ecclesiastes you can almost hear the characters in the movie saying, “
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