Saturday, April 14, 2007

Stranger than fiction


Will Ferrell is an IRS agent who one day starts hearing someone narrating his life, and becomes alarmed when they state that he is soon to die. From this moment, he desperately seeks out whoever it is that is writing his story, to beg them not to kill him off. Maggie Gillenhal plays his love interest, and Dustin Hoffman is hilarioust as a professor of literature theory, who helps Ferrell deduce who the narrator is.

This is a very clever and entertaining film, but also really, really tragic. Because it's based on the premise that this life is all there is. So the most important thing for Ferrell's character is to find the narrator, and stop her writing his death. There are some really touching scenes as Ferrell comes to terms with the inevitability and immediacy of his own death - for the person without God there is nothing but terror when faced with death. There's no hope. Death must be avoided at all costs, because with it comes the end of all happiness.

How very different from the hope we have in Jesus Christ - that death is not to be feared, because Christ has the keys of death and hell! He has conquered death, and so all it holds for us is life eternal, in the presence of God, and the absence of sin and suffering.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time." 1 Peter 1v3-5 :)