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The Eternal Moon Journal: First Step

Tonight, I’m feeling pretty good. I just wrote the character profile for a protagonist that has existed in my thoughts for years. He’s a lot like me, taken by grandiose ideas but enjoys working with his hands and appreciates beauty.

Having written over eight hundred words for this character, I find myself on the top of a slope where one inch forward sends me sprinting, then tumbling, down a hill of creativity where the forward momentum is overwhelming, at which point I have no choice but to write – write like a mad man.

Dark Times

It wasn’t always like this, having this growing urge to write the story, unable to stop until it’s finished. For years – many years – I slogged through the creative process, fighting “resistance,” pushing myself to write, despite my mood. It was easier to fight that creativity-sucking mosquito when I was around writer friends. They held me accountable. But just as often as they pushed me to write, they were also visibly frustrated by my apprehension to write characters, to write scenes, to tell a damn story.

They said I had good ideas, and they wanted desperately to read a story by me.

But I was afraid to pull the trigger.

Telling a story meant putting my money where my mouth was because I had often criticized movies and books for not being well written or for being emotionally shallow. Whether my criticisms were sound or well-founded, it didn’t matter, because, ultimately, behind all that was a heavily implied claim that I was a good storyteller.

Character Development

I would later become a great storyteller, able to write short stories on the spot and read them to the nearest open ear in the room, which was often my wife and her family. But to get there, I had to recognize the fact that I had a lot to learn about self-confidence and belief in who I was. The arrogance had to die, and humility had to take its place. Pride had to die for the art to come forth.

The journey was painful at times. Some late nights, alone, in the light of my lamp, with Pad Thai and a coffee to keep me company as I wrote in silence.

Light At the End of the Tunnel

But as it turns out, I don’t function well in silence. I don’t work well alone. When my wife came along, the creativity burst out unexpectedly. Finally, someone who wanted to hear my ideas and was genuinely excited to hear more. She is my ear. My muse.

Her constant encouragement helped shape the creativity that pours out of me today. Now, not only do the ideas pour out but the characters, plot, and world-building do as well.

Get Ready for Awesome

So, I can say with confidence, that beginning next year, as in early January, after New Year’s Day, I will begin chronicling my progress. The goal is to write and finish my novel, The Eternal Moon. Publication will be a battle for another year. For 2025, the battle is to forge the pages of The Eternal Moon in blood with meat and tears.

In 2025, be prepared to plunge into the story of the far future, a Christian science fiction story of epic magnitude similar to Dune and Star Wars. It’s time for good and evil to clash for the last time.

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Santa in September, Part II

Alright, so, Santa relaxing in September was where we left off. He’s resting before gearing up for the holidays, and he’s living off his stash of silver and gold, which is precisely what would attract the naughty who would want to steal his treasure.

There are a few things this begs to question. Does Old Saint Nick have a way to defend himself? How wrong could things go? Whom can Santa call on for help? And we’ll answer them in that order.

Santa carries around an umbrella, a tool he can offer others and defend himself with. Of course, it’s a magic umbrella, capable of surprising anyone who uses it or gets hit with it.

No matter how careful Santa tries to be, someone’s bound to notice his uncommon form of payment and want more where it came from. Something he cannot avoid is paying someone on the naughty list for passage somewhere.

Entranced by the precious metals in their hand, the naughty one, with street smarts to boot, takes mental note of Santa’s defining feature, his eyes. They are the eyes of a saint, warm and welcoming, and leaving a lasting impression on anyone who comes in contact, though they don’t know it.

One Saturday, having chosen a different AirB and B in the back country, as he has for the first three Saturdays, Santa settles in for a quiet day inside, Christmas songs on his heart, a Safeway box of sweet and sour chicken stabbed with chopsticks on the table, and a stack of wood in the fireplace ready to catch flame.

The latched door is pried open with a crowbar and kicked in. The naughty figure stands tall in the doorway, cold air blowing in from outside. Santa remains sitting, unfazed. He’s known this man since his first letter, which asked that his dad come home from the war for Christmas.

As Santa purses his lips at the encounter, the imposing figure, wearing leather gloves, grips his crowbar and points it at Santa’s leather stash of silver and gold. Santa slowly shakes his head, unfazed by the razor’s edge upon which the moment hangs.

The figure steps inside and closes the door with a slow creak. Santa sighs. The figure walks over to Santa, his steps measured for instilling terror in his victim. As he looms over the old man sitting in his chair, Santa shakes his head.

That leather grip on the crowbar tightens with silent rage, but the thief sidesteps Santa in his seat and goes for the bag of silver and gold, opening the sack to see the coins glittering from the ceiling light. A shadowy grin appears on the thief’s face as he chokes the bag closed and stands up, only to turn around and see Santa standing before him, making eye contact at his level. He too has a imposing presence, his red suit somehow giving him a transcendent presence.

Where everything changes is in Santa’s eyes. They tell the thief’s entire life’s story in one look. How he’s become this thief, who helped him along, and how Santa feels about it, compassionate but furious. Most powerful though is how he feels in Santa’s eyes: small.

The sack hits the floor with a sharp, metal thud, and the thief raises the crowbar to a striking pose. Santa’s eyes remain locked on his, unchanged.

With time standing still, the thief lowers the crowbar, having lost the upper hand, having felt exposed and disarmed. No one had looked at him before, stared at the monster within, only to show compassion and outrage.

The figure walks passed Santa and heads for the door before he felt a sharp pain against his temple and blacked out, Santa towering over him with his umbrella.

With the man on the floor, out like a light, Santa sits back down to enjoy his now-cold sweet and sour chicken, the fire in full blaze. He’s just not in the mood for Christmas songs anymore. But the rest of the year – and the naughty list – press on him with urgency and empathy.

It’s almost October, and he’s still got plenty of silver and gold to last him the ferry ride home. Iceland will be his last stop.

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The Wild Robot Review

Since Hollywood has regressed into wokeism, directors and writers have made cringe a predominant narrative characteristic, a reason for movie-goers to stay home and watch movies from a time not poisoned by woke culture. The “message” has infected entertainment so deeply that fun, it seems, has flat-lined into a coma, except The Wild Robot is a sign of brain activity. Is this animated film enough of a wake-up call for us to smell the coffee, or, more accurately, the popcorn?

On its face, The Wild Robot tickles instant curiosity with an oxymoron for its title. Other, more expensive book adaptations have failed to hook so simply – calling out Disney’s John Carter, which was uninspired and gutted from the original book’s superior title, A Princess of Mars, attached to which was a truly grand story that got stripped of all its best parts to appease creatively bankrupt Disney. DreamWorks Animation wisely avoided repeating Disney’s bone-headed mistake.

Proud of its origin as a children’s book series by Peter Brown, directed and written by Chris Sanders, The Wild Robot rewards admission by supercharging its first ten minutes with a setup for the story that feels brisk without being disorienting and doesn’t try too hard for laughs by honoring the slapstick, cartoonish humor of beloved, timeless Looney Tunes.

The Setup

This story begins on the beach with the washed-up remains of a shipment after a lightning storm – cue Cast Away vibes here. Inside the torn shipment container is an intact, folded-up robot, which curious otters investigate and inadvertently activate. Powered on, the strange being introduces itself in multiple languages as ROZZUM of Universal Dynamics before mimicking the wildlife to escape a massive, oncoming ocean wave.

Having climbed a rock face in a crab-like fashion, the robot faces the tree line of a forest, at which point it taking its first steps into the wild. The robot tries making contact with the animals, offering assistance to every creature along its path, snapping photographs of the shocked creatures as proof of the completed task.

Quickly registering the language barrier as problematic, ROZZUM folds up like a standard-issue Trade Federation droid and enters “processing mode” for several days, absorbing data from the wildlife interactions, foliage gradually covering her up. The squeaks and squabbles of the animals become conversations, revealing the nickname the scared animals have given her, The Monster.

Emerging from the overgrowth, ROZZUM loudly broadcasts to all animals, using a dazzling, Las Vegas-style light show, that she’s there to help. One brave little ambassador bunny asks if ROZZUM wants to kill everyone. ROZZUM unwittingly replies, “Negative…” and, without skipping a beat, a moose knocks her to the ground with his antlers, only for her to recover unharmed. At this, the wildlife scatter in clouds of dust!

Servicing this island has gone beyond what ROZZUM was programmed for. At her wit’s end, or the lack thereof, she activates the homing beckon atop the island’s highest peak underneath storm clouds, expecting her creators to come pick her up. Of course, lightning strikes, and she’s back on the ground, up against the tree, and shortly thereafter, at the mercy of glowing, blue-eyed raccoons in the black of night. They overwhelm her for parts, including the homing beckon, which blinks green right when a raccoon snatches it.

Having recovered the homing beckon through a series of comical tussles, ROZZUM then gets chased through the trees by a ferocious bear until she loses her footing and falls to a ridge near the water where a nest meets her on impact. Sticking out from a pile of branches under pouring rain is a single adult goose wing, and sifting the wreckage reveals one unbroken egg with a living creature inside. ROZZUM doesn’t know what to do with it. A hungry fox comes along and snatches it, but she rescues the egg from the fox’s mouth.

The Emotional Hook

The egg cracks open. ROZZUM repairs it. A foot breaks through, and out from the shell comes a cute gosling who imprints on the robot, thinking its mother is the towering robot with complex subroutines and an inner core.

An Unlikely Pair

Overwhelmed by a closeup of his mother’s circular, robotic face, the gosling screams, but it’s attached at the hip. ROZZUM must raise the helpless little one, as Pink-Tail, a mother possum, followed by her 7-then-6 surviving baby possums, points out… The baby will die without a mother.

ROZZUM has found her task – a daunting one at that.

The Stakes

Making up the difference where the robot’s programming comes up short, Fink (the fox) and Pink Tail help direct on generally how to raise the gosling. The first step is food, followed by learning to swim, and finally, flight. Mother and child get nicknames: “Roz,” and “Brightbill.” Unfortunately for Roz as a first time mom, nurturing her child is not as simple as 1-2-3-done. Roz builds a home for Brightbill to eat and sleep safely as he grows.

Once Brightbill becomes an adult, his unlikely family “launches” him into a nearby lake for swimming lesson, which backfires in a way neither Roz nor Brightbill are ready for. Being a runt, Brightbill faces the pitfalls of integrating with others of his kind. He’s different, behaves as if he’s got modes and a processor, and, generally, has no clue how to be a goose in the wild. The others mock him mercilessly.

Despite the wedge between him and Roz, Brightbill faces a dire imperative. The senior goose leading the Great Migration warns Roz that if Brightbill doesn’t build endurance for the long journey, he will not survive the winter. The laws of nature apply to Brightbill regardless of his disadvantage to other geese, and the Great Migration demands more than wings. Where his wings faulter, his heart must pay the balance.

This is a matter of life and death, not a typical theme for an animated movie. But it’s a welcome one all-the-same in this harrowing struggle. Brightbill’s friends push him to stay in the air even when he gets tired. During the winter, while far away from the island, Brightbill, having trained to reach his full potential, finds that his past struggles prepared him to lead all geese out of a shooting gallery, a testosterone-inducing scene in which he has them form up behind him through a harrowing ground-to-air conflict reminiscent of daring World War 2 planes dodging ground fire.

Takeaways

As subtle as it may be to some, The Wild Robot is a highly sophisticated piece of entertainment, a blend of the story types institutionalized and underdog, promoting the qualities for greatness: Grit, hope, and courage against insurmountable odds. Roz discovers her wild side by breaking away from her programming to give the little one a chance at life in the wild. Brightbill takes on challenges none of his kind were trained to handle, and in doing so, becomes their leader.

Surprisingly, for a movie out of Hollywood, The Wild Robot contains powerful, counter-cultural themes of discipline and bravery, relegating agendas like global warming (glimpses of water-submerged landmarks) and inclusiveness (prey and predator living under one roof on the island during a killer winter storm) to mere aesthetic and humor-masked surface plot. These agendas tastefully take a backseat to the characters we care about, giving The Wild Robot an emotional edge over lesser films.

Such a heartfelt story elevates this Chris Sanders-directed film to on-par status with the likes of Pixar’s Wall-E, while firmly setting it outside the exclusive club consisting predominantly of Pixar’s earlier works, like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, and another film by DreamWorks Animation, The Prince of Egypt.

The Wild Robot earns its screen time at the theater where the smell of popcorn and stories adorn the walls of those sacred halls where imagination goes to fly. No time of death here. Storytelling is still fighting like Brightbill to survive the killer winter of wokism.

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Jesus Revolution Review

Directed by Brent McCorkle and Jon Erwin, “Jesus Revolution” is about the intertwining of the lives of a pastor, a former hippie, and a love-struck teenager, set against the backdrop of the American Christian church of the 1960s. The movie is a sincere, albeit candid, narrative about faith, setting itself apart from other Christian films by depicting believers as fragile, inflexible, self-righteous, egocentric, and troubled by trauma, rather than faultless and devout. It underscores Jesus Christ who ultimately embodies goodness as the true beacon of unity for us flawed, sinful individuals.

The moral cringe and preachiness that Christian films are known for failed to pass the audition phase for this production staring Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and Jonathan Roumie (The Chosen). Chuck Smith, a modest Southern California church’s pastor, played by Grammer, shepherds a stiff, traditionalist congregation, but he is not the hero. The ex-hippie Lonnie Frisbee (Roumie), who befriends Smith with the goal of opening church doors to hippie converts, is God’s catalyst for breathing new life into Smith’s formal, dry church, and yet, neither he plays the hero.

Young and on a search to find himself, Greg gets led away from military school by the affection of a girl into a life of drugs, the hippie way to connect with the divine. Greg stumbles across Lonnie’s path because of a near-death experience, and they become friends. The charismatic, long-haired evangelist, guided by the Holy Spirit, begins the Jesus Movement, and Greg, clinging to a sense of belonging he gets from his friendship with Lonnie, is very much along for the ride. The only person weighing him down is his despondent, co-dependent mother. Greg here is the film’s protagonist, but true to the established pattern, he’s not the story’s hero.

There is a greater plan at work in America in the 1960s. Headed by Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee, the Jesus Movement made waves across the nation, leading untold thousands to Christ with divine power unseen since in American history. The movement had such a profound impact, it is still felt today by those who lived it and saw their lives changed forever. Led not by charismatic razzle dazzle or an ingenious non-profit outreach strategy, the Jesus Revolution ignited a fire of faith in youth on a powerful and massive scale that only the mysterious whims of the Holy Spirit could accomplish. The movement is depicted as a radically unified gathering that saw miracles of equally radical proportions. No magician’s kits were used in the making of such a movement.

Sadly, to contrast the Holy Spirit, one pesky element had to rear its ugly features, the human condition. The nature of man had something to say about this matter, and it didn’t turn out beautiful like the changed lives of the people converted to a life of following Jesus. This masked spirit of darkness manifested in none other than Lonnie himself as the leader got taken by the publicity and mass appeal of the movement, a false sense of power and importance that drew his attention away from the sight of God.

This layer of Lonnie Frisbee’s story was noticeably absent from the film. While the omission of Lonnie’s less-than-righteous exploits frames the Jesus Movement as rosier than it is remembered by those who experienced it, the film nevertheless is a heartwarming reminder of what a spiritual revolution can look like when God’s jealousy for his beloved manifests in powerful ways that no man-made fabric of culture can hold back, let alone squelch, before God accomplishes his task(s).

Most importantly, “Jesus Revolution” highlights the Christian pursuit of righteousness, bolstered by the love of a relentless God who wants nothing less than the hearts of his people, naked and unashamed to call him LORD. Such a standard of righteousness is not easily cultivated. Humility in the face of pride and eyes fixated on God to turn away the fear of man and self-perception are necessary qualities for Christ to shine through.

Despite the flawed human element in Jesus Revolution, there is certainly a hero. There’s no use looking in conventional places for this hero. Classes on theology can’t promise to reveal the hero in hiding, least of all at the pulpit, in between the pages of the Bible from which the blue and black-suited pastor reads with stoic, crystal clarity. This hero made the first appearance at Pentecost where the Church felt for the first time the pure, unfettered power of God in their longues, which is exactly where Greg met the hero while submerged under water during his baptism with Chuck Smith, an army of teenage onlookers on the beach waiting for their turn to feel the fire of holiness from God in their chests.

“Jesus Revolution” portrays a divine encounter that ignites a lifelong bond with the Savior, who understands our suffering and molds our hearts to resemble his own—more valuable than gold or rubies.