My Christmas Presents to You, 2024

In a Japanese inn beside a river, the employees and guests are going about their mundane business.  A waitress takes a break standing outside by the river then goes back to work.  Two-minutes later, she is back outside by the river, not knowing how she got there.  She goes to do something else, and then two-minutes later, she is back by the river.  She is caught in a time-loop.  But unlike the day-long time loop in Groundhog Day, everyone in the inn is experiencing the same thing.

The film proceeds with these two-minute segments, each of which is filmed in one shot.   The characters get together to try to figure out what is happening, though their meeting is cut short after two minutes, whereupon they blip back and have to pick up where they left off, until they blip back again after another two minutes.  In the course of these two-minute repeats, funny stuff happens, then a love-story develops, then things get poignant, then philosophical, then interesting as the truth comes out.  River is a very positive movie, reflecting on the value and meaning of every moment, or, rather, every two minutes.

This review says, “It’s been 12 hours since I watched River. I’ve seen three movies in the meantime, all of which I loved, and yet I still can’t stop thinking of River. It’s that good, that funny, that smart, that just plain awesome. It’s a flat-out phenomenal sci-fi comedy that everyone should see.”  This review sums up the critic’s reaction in the headline: “‘River’ Is a Hilarious and Sweet Palate Cleanser for the Soul, with the deck, “No joke, this Japanese Indie might just be the best and most satisfying film of the year.”

River is actually the sequel to another time travel flick about that short interval of two minutes by the same filmmaker, Junta Yamaguchi.  Entitled Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, it’s about some techies who have a computer monitor that shows what will happen two minutes into the future, and then things get complicated.  In this movie, the whole movie with its incredibly complex farming is filmed in one long shot!  A critic calls Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes “arguably one of the decade’s best science-fiction films.”  I’ll throw this one into your virtual Christmas stocking too.

I would recommend, though, that you watch the sequel, River, first.  You will have to be able to handle subtitles, but you’ll get used to them soon.

Both movies can be streamed for free on Tubi and via Prime.  (There is a lot of material on these channels entitled “River.”   Search for “River 2023.”

The Bee and Not The Bee

Hamlet struggled to decide which one is better,  “To be, or not to be.”  For your next present, I am giving you both “The Bee” and “Not the Bee.”

You may well already have Babylon Bee, the Christian satire site that made it big when it also started satirizing the rest of the world, including politics, whereupon it kept being flagged by social media censors without a sense of humor as “fake news.” It still covers religioin sometimes (e.g., 7 Ways “Die Hard” Points Us to Jesus and Newly Discovered Scroll Reveals Fourth Wise Man Who Brought Baby Jesus A Priceless Lego Millennium Falcon).  But its sharpest skewers are for our culture (‘Liberals Are Disrespecting Marriage!’ Says Man On 3rd Marriage), our government (Congress Proposes New Law Banning Anyone From Reading Spending Bill Until It’s Passed), and our politics (Newsom Says With Another $25 Billion He Could Double Homelessness By 2030).

But you might not be aware of Not the Bee.  This is a site run by the same people who run The Babylon Bee, but it features not fake news but actual news that just sounds like it’s a Bee satire.  For example,

The Didache

On Thanksgiving, I posted a prayer from The Didache.  The title of this text of only 2,300 words means “teaching” and has the subtitle “The Lord’s Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations.”  It’s the earliest document we have from the early church, with some scholars dating it 100 A.D.

It lays out the ethical principles of the earliest church, very much in the line of the Sermon on the Mount, also addressing some of the practices that were commonplace in the Greco-Roman world and that have come back, so that today’s church also has to deal with them.  Specifically, it addresses homosexuality (“you shall not commit pederasty”) and abortion (“you shall not murder a child by abortion “).

It also speaks about the church leadership of those days, in which we learn that the very earliest churches did indeed have pastors.  We also learn about how baptisms were conducted back then:  by immersion if there was enough water available but if not, by pouring three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Didache is a fascinating window into our heritage as Christians and into the church of our some of our earliest brothers and sisters in the faith.  You can read it here, a site that features five English translations, the original Greek, and a wealth of scholarship.

You can also download the Kindle edition of The Didache: The Original Greek Text with Four English Translations for free on Amazon.  

Pokey LaFarge

Finally, I give you the gift of music, presenting an artist that I have come to enjoy greatly and maybe you will too, the singer-songwriter-musician known as  Pokey LaFarge.

I would describe him as an retro Americana artist who takes rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, country, swing, blues, and every other kind of American music you can think of, and mashes them together into a catchy, tuneful style uniquely his own.  Here is how his style is described in his Wikipedia article, from music critic Aarik Danielsen who says of Pokey and his band of excellent musicians, that they are  “artfully dodgy ambassadors for old-time music, presenting and representing the glories of hot swing, early jazz and ragtime blues” who have “made riverboat chic cool again.”  Whatever the heck that means.

Let me give you some samples from YouTube so you can get a sense of his music, and then I want to tell you something surprising.

Here was my first introduction to him, from his appearance on the Marty Stuart show, his tribute to the great Midwest and to St. Louis where he used to live, “Getting by on Central Time”:

Here is a happy one:

Here is one I can’t get out of my head:

A few weeks ago, Pokey was in his old stompin’ ground of St. Louis, so we went to his concert.  It was incredibly energetic and filled with virtuoso performances from him and his band.  But towards the end, after a break for the band, he came on stage and got serious.  Pokey is a funny, quirky guy, and his songs are often ironic in that postmodern kind of way.  So the hall got dead silent.  He told about how he had cheated on the woman who meant more to him than anything and that in doing so, he ruined his life.  But then he said how he found forgiveness in Jesus, and how the woman he loved forgave him too, and how now they are married and blissfully happy.  He said how he still slips up sometimes, but now his life is filled with joy.  He said, “And this is where you leave.” No one in the audience, comprised mostly of hipsters, except for our party, left, as far as I could tell, and instead they applauded and called out their support.

I had read an interview with him in which he said he had returned to his faith.  But, he assured the interviewer, he doesn’t proselytize. “I’m not a gospel singer. I’m not a Christian making Christian music, but a Christian making secular music. I’m supposed to be a witness … just being a bridge.”

Whereupon at the concert, he proselytized, telling the crowd that they probably had burdens too and that Jesus could help them.  And then he sang a a gospel song.

(Pokey has a notorious song built around a bad word–which he said he doesn’t perform any more–so you might want to skip that one on his Spotify play list.  It’s on the album “Rock Bottom Rhapsody.”  The other albums could be rated PG, which is how he  advertised his concert.)

Photo:  Two Kids Opening Presents, VFW National Home via Flickr, CC BY 2.0