Living

The first thing we did after seeing Living was call to thank the woman who had recommended it! Then we did something you can read about on the link we sent her next: www.RichDrama.com/OneDay. That's for a film I helped make with a similar theme.

A few hours earlier, over lunch -- with a friend from Germany we have known since she was a toddler and is now flying private jets -- the tag on my tea had this quote: 

The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.

--Michel de Montaigne

They could have put it before the closing credits of Living. 

It's told in fascinating fashion, but, well, there's a purpose to that. 

It's a basic rule of script writing that you introduce the protagonist first, so the audience knows who to follow. That's not the case in Living. We first meet a young man on his first day at London's County Hall in the Public Works Department. This film mostly tells the story of Bill Nighy's character, Mr. Williams. We never learn his first name, which is fitting for life in a British bureaucracy in 1953. The role has earned Nighy an Oscar nomination, and for good reason! But this film is as much about the next generation learning how to live as it is about Mr. Williams doing that at the very end of his life. 

These days I very rarely recommend films that don't come out of the Christian film industry, but I do wonder if the writers had help from Holy Spirit, because there was so much they got right. So right that it earned Kazuo Ishiguro an Oscar nomination for Writing -- Adapted Screenplay. Certainly they started with great source material: Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. 

Here's the one caveat I must mention to parents and any addicted to porn: There's one scene with a strip tease, and a woman takes off her top. The audience is watching from behind, but if I were watching it again, which I expect I will, I would look away at that moment. 

That incident is not in the screenplay. Appreciate your prayers for me as I'm preparing to submit a couple of screenplays. Once they leave the screenwriter's hands anything can happen, and the only recourse a screenwriter has is removing his or her name. One of my profs in grad school had to do that. 

Parents, for more details you should know, read the PluggedIn review or your favorite source of what's decent and what's not.

Pray Living inspires purpose in many lives!

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See the rest of Olympic champion Eric Liddell's Chariots of Fire story in Beyond the Chariots, another story about living with purpose. Watch it online and book a live performance.