When Good Actors Happen To Bad Movies

I've always loved Jason Lee. He cracked me up back in the day in Clerks, and now in the day on My Name Is Earl. (Even Tom Selleck is jealous of THAT moustache.) I even thought his voice over work as the evil mastermind Syndrome on The Incredibles, was, well, incredible.

So I was totally floored the other day to walk in my living room and see what my kids were watching on TV: Jason Lee starring in a modern-day remake of Alvin & The Chipmunks.

Good actors making bad movies. Why does this happen? How does this happen? Actors with big bills to pay? Bad Karma? Why o why?

I mean, Jason Lee used to be a professionally sponsored skateboarder. So how do you go from having that much indie-cred to talking to three computer-animated, helium-voiced chipmunks?

Not that he was alone. There were tons of great actors in this cinematic, um, gem. OK, well maybe not great (David Cross, one of the girls that was in Best in Show) but certainly not the types of actors that I would think "need the work"

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that no one is great all the time. I mean Bill Murray starred in Garfield. The Beatles wrote "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" Michael Jordan tried to play baseball. Even Bono went around on tour for years looking like this:



The more I thought about it, I realized that there is something strangely comforting to me that no one is "great" all the time. Even the ones that I put up on the highest pedestals have their faults. Their moments of awkwardness or regrets. Their moments of falling woefully short of expectations. I tend to fall woefully short in so many areas that it is easy for me to look to others and think that they have it all figured out. But they don't. None of us do.

And I couldn't help but think that God must have similar thoughts about us. He's our biggest fan. We are his children, afterall. But their are those things we do - whether it's a belief, an addiction, a habit - that He just can't stand. Not because he doesn't love us, but rather because he loves us. Just like I didn't stop loving Bono and U2 after listening to the Pop album or stop liking Jason Lee because I watched 20 minutes of Alvin & The Chipmunks (20 long minutes), God just doesn't stop loving us through the midst of our struggles. Actually, He uses those valleys and low points in our lives to bring us to heights in which we hadn't dreamed possible.

God loves us when we're great. And when we're not. And I have an Alvin
& The Chipmunks re-make to thank for reminding me of that fact.