Book (and movie) of the Week

After my sophomore year in college I interned at a little church in Canton, Texas. I somehow convinced the church that they should send me and a bunch of high school kids mountain climbing in Colorado. So a van-full of us headed to Wilderness Trek. As we made the long journey, somebody popped in a CD they recently purchased. It was not the music you would expect from a teenager. It was the soundtrack to the movie Last of the Mohicans.

This music became our theme music for the week. It felt like "in the woods adventure music" (which is probably what the music was intended to feel like). We latched onto the soundtrack even though most of us had not seen the movie, and I'm pretty sure no one had read the book. So the day after we returned from Colorado, we gathered to watch the movie, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
(you can listen to a song from the soundtrack while you read the rest, go ahead, it's really good)


Hadn't really thought about it since, until a couple of weeks ago when I started reading Last of the Mohicans. The book is a great adventure novel, with wonderful dialogue, and an extremely interesting philosophical perspective. If you love history, or need to learn a little, the book provides a glimpse at a formative time in U.S. development. There is also a priceless exchange about the desirability of christian virtue. The book is almost worth reading simply for that moment.

The most interesting part of reading the book was that I had already seen the movie. This is a rarity for me as I make a point to read a book before catching the film. However, I saw this movie some fifteen years before reading the novel. Yet it still colored my reading of the book.

I expected the book to be somewhat different, but was blown away by how far afield the movie actually went. As I read the book I kept waiting for a particular character to die a heroic death (he never did) and was utterly surprised by the death of another character who survived the movie. The love interests were even different. Reading the book after seeing the movie had no effect. I went in truly knowing nothing. Or even worse, being completely misled.

Now, a movie that I thought I really liked, I am repulsed by. They shouldn't even be allowed to call the movie "Last of the Mohicans." It should be something like "A Movie Using the Character Names from the Novel Last of the Mohicans."

The point being I liked the movie, until I read the real deal. How often does this happen in life? Growing up my family never really ate steak. A couple of times I had some "steak-like" thing at home. Then I went to Perini Ranch. Holy Cow! (No I mean it, I believe the cows they are serving at Perini Ranch are set apart and unique, and the first time I went there was definitely a religious experience.) We think we've had good chocolate cake, and then discover The Great Wall of Chocolate. Or closer to the heart, I thought I was busy with a lot of responsibility in college. Then I had children. I had no idea! Or we date somebody and think they are pretty great. Then we meet the one, and we immediately wonder what we were thinking.

Now, all this can be skewed to mean the grass is always greener, or don't settle, or there is no contentment. But really that's not the truth. The truth is that we often do settle. We become unwilling to try something new, we stick with the same old routine, and we never experience amazing things right around the corner. Now, we all have our comfort zones. But renting the same movie again and again means that we miss the possibility of something great. Sure, we avoid renting a stinker, but is that really worth it?

We have no idea what we can accomplish, if we would just try something new. Why not try the sushi, try a different kind of book than we typically read, go for it at karaoke, attempt the job our self instead of calling in a repair person, rent a movie we never heard of? Or even better, send in the resume for the job we think we can't possibly get, go back to school, give up our job to be a missionary, or open our hearts to an adopted child. If we would give up the fear of failure, how high could we sore?

I remember when I was young my Dad decided to take our family to a movie. This was unprecedented. I can count the number of movies I've been to with my father on one hand. This is one of two I believe he suggested. So we were really excited. But he was taking us to some movie none of us had ever heard of. I know that I griped about this, maybe others did too. But I was overruled. So we went and watched the movie. Turned out, it wasn't bad. Good plot, good acting, good directing. I enjoyed it so much I have probably seen it twenty times since. It was a little movie called "Raiders of the Lost Ark".