I'm about half a dozen movies behind, so I'll start with the one we watched most recently and move from there...
Munich
This movie is done so well that it deadens the viewer's soul. Set all over the world in the wake of the Munich Olympics and the kidnapping of Israeli athletes, Munich follows five decidedly unprofessional assassins as they track down the perpetrators of the terrorist act, shooting some and bombing others. As the PLO operatives fall, period news footage documents the retaliatory acts of violence, and by the end of the movie, the protagonist, a young father who can no longer return to Israel (I'll leave why for now), is broken and paranoid and exiled. Two hours and forty minutes of this left me with nothing to say in the end; James Wood and the rest of the cast do good jobs, but the overriding pessimism overwhelms the film.
7/3 Edit: Geoffrey Rush, not James Woods, plays the role I had in mind.
Memento
Yes, I know everyone else on the planet has already seen this one. I dig movies with a sense of structure and craftsmanship, and to see such things in an action movie made my evening. It's nice to see what the Matrix actors do when they're not hanging out with Ted Theodore Logan and Cowboy Curtis.
Hitch
Another Mary pick. For a chick flick, it wasn't bad--unlike most, this movie never fell to the temptation of taking itself seriously. Will Smith, departing from his usual roles, played a smooth-talking, well-dressed black man who gets the girl in the end. Wait... or was that Hugh Grant who always played the same role?
24 June 2006
17 June 2006
25 May 2006
A movie slump
Herbie: Fully Loaded
Even when Matt Dillon is trying to be a NASCAR driver, he still sounds like Matt Dillon. Even when Justin Long is trying to be an auto mechanic, he still sounds like Warren Cheswick. Even when a Herbie movie tries to be clever and 21st-century, it's still a Herbie movie.
The Producers
I think Mel Brooks has become a nostalgia piece for me and not much more. I like Space Balls and Blazing Saddle because I liked them in high school. Robin Hood: Men in Tights is only barely tolerable, and other than a continuing amazement at the kinds of gay and minority jokes that Brooks can get away with in the twenty-first century, I didn't much enjoy The Producers. Okay, there was an Oedipus joke, and one doesn't find many of those in movies, but beyond that, kaput.
Capote
This one did what it did well, but there wasn't much of it. The story follows Truman Capote as he researches and writes In Cold Blood, focusing on the lies he tells to condemned men and his inability to consider them human unless he's in the room with them. Those moments of forgetting are some of the most haunting I've seen in movies in a while, but because the actors playing the death row inmates underplayed their roles, the contrast between Capote's salon coldness and the human moments with the killers didn't come across.
Even when Matt Dillon is trying to be a NASCAR driver, he still sounds like Matt Dillon. Even when Justin Long is trying to be an auto mechanic, he still sounds like Warren Cheswick. Even when a Herbie movie tries to be clever and 21st-century, it's still a Herbie movie.
The Producers
I think Mel Brooks has become a nostalgia piece for me and not much more. I like Space Balls and Blazing Saddle because I liked them in high school. Robin Hood: Men in Tights is only barely tolerable, and other than a continuing amazement at the kinds of gay and minority jokes that Brooks can get away with in the twenty-first century, I didn't much enjoy The Producers. Okay, there was an Oedipus joke, and one doesn't find many of those in movies, but beyond that, kaput.
Capote
This one did what it did well, but there wasn't much of it. The story follows Truman Capote as he researches and writes In Cold Blood, focusing on the lies he tells to condemned men and his inability to consider them human unless he's in the room with them. Those moments of forgetting are some of the most haunting I've seen in movies in a while, but because the actors playing the death row inmates underplayed their roles, the contrast between Capote's salon coldness and the human moments with the killers didn't come across.
21 May 2006
20 May 2006
More Movies
Walk the Line
My brother Ryan was right: this was basically Ray with white people. Joaquin Phoenix (the hardest-to-spell actor that I can think of at the moment) looks more like Elvis than the actor who plays Elvis in the movie, and he lacks Cash's rumbling voice, but the film was a good one. It has the predictable etiological tales before each song's recording, the reunion with lifelong love at the end, and the text screens with cities and dates in the middle. Not a bad movie; its main fault is that it came out after Ray rather than before.
Rumor Has It
This one wasn't nearly as good. Standard Wizard-of-Oz-chick-flick plot--girl runs off to exciting, rich, potentially origin-demystifying older man, realizes that all she ever wanted was at home with her more conventional attorney boyfriend, returns, marries. Game over. The running pop culture reference to The Graduate didn't really do much work. Blah.
I was hoping to have a review ready for Dr. Strangelove, but as things happened, I mistakenly requested the special features bonus disc instead of the movie. Ah, well. Nuclear war will have to wait.
My brother Ryan was right: this was basically Ray with white people. Joaquin Phoenix (the hardest-to-spell actor that I can think of at the moment) looks more like Elvis than the actor who plays Elvis in the movie, and he lacks Cash's rumbling voice, but the film was a good one. It has the predictable etiological tales before each song's recording, the reunion with lifelong love at the end, and the text screens with cities and dates in the middle. Not a bad movie; its main fault is that it came out after Ray rather than before.
Rumor Has It
This one wasn't nearly as good. Standard Wizard-of-Oz-chick-flick plot--girl runs off to exciting, rich, potentially origin-demystifying older man, realizes that all she ever wanted was at home with her more conventional attorney boyfriend, returns, marries. Game over. The running pop culture reference to The Graduate didn't really do much work. Blah.
I was hoping to have a review ready for Dr. Strangelove, but as things happened, I mistakenly requested the special features bonus disc instead of the movie. Ah, well. Nuclear war will have to wait.
18 May 2006
Did I miss the nineties?
Spending the first half of last decade in a suburban Indiana high school wasn't a bad gig: I got a good high school education, built up some discipline and leadership learning to be the bass drum line's captain at the same time that I learned to play bass drum, and thought myself a bit of a bohemian (or at least a bit anti-establishment) as I took on a big part in the school's "underground" paper. This week I caught up on what was happening on the east coast.
Rent
Mary and I rented this musical last week (did you catch that subtle one?), and I had big expectations going in. I'd read about it a number of times in the late nineties as a sort of Broadway manifesto for Generation X, a celebration of life and love in the time of AIDS. I wasn't disappointed on that front; I recognize the irony of watching such a musical years after its run was over, on DVD, in my subdivision house, and Mary wasn't buying any of it (she kept whispering to me that the characters needed to get jobs), but the effect was still there. The musical features an ensemble of characters, some of whom never had any luck and some of whose privilege has atrophied as they waited for "the big break" to land in their laps. At least half of the major characters have AIDS, and the second act moves along through one character's death and funeral.
Every political drama (and most of 'em are political) has to have an "other" against whom the characters struggle, and this musical is sophisticated enough that the major characters never really identify theirs. At various points the "other" seems to be "the corporation" (though nobody is really certain what "the corporation" does other than close down tenements and co-opt young bohemians), at others "society"'s indifference to AIDS (though the characters in the film don't seem very activist about that). Indeed, part of what makes the lovable characters so frustrating is that they have the drive neither to get ahead within corporate capitalist systems nor to organize against them. Instead they live quasi-parasitic lives, getting decent jobs only to quit them months later or killing rich women's dogs in behalf of other rich women for a few hundred bucks (I'm not making that up) or simply robbing ATMs for cash. The characters don't live in a moral world coherent enough to do much more than survive. But they sure do sound good surviving. Jesse L. Martin (of Law & Order fame) particularly sings the heck out of the score, and all of the movie seems to work.
Angels in America
This one I read rather than watched; the multi-hour HBO version didn't appeal to me. Angels in America happens a few years earlier than Rent, but the politics of AIDS still dominates the story. This one is more overtly political, the bad guys being Roy Cohn and the Republican party. Several characters in this one have AIDS, but hypocrisy rather than survival is the thematic connector. Louis, a gay secular Jew, spouts all kinds of quasi-racist theories and grand speeches along the way. Roy, the Reaganite power player, has had a number of secret gay affairs even as he's pushed through anti-gay legislation. Joe, a Mormon who has struggled against his own sexuality and driven his wife to Valium by means of emotional abandonment, doesn't tell Louis (who has abandoned Prior, his AIDS-stricken boyfriend) about his own anti-gay judicial career or his religion as they've developed a sexual affair. There are more characters and more hypocrisies, but those are the basic ones.
I'm not a big fan of partisan allegory; I like my politics a bit more nuanced. That said, this play breaks out of the liberal morality play in some very well-written moments, most powerfully when the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and Louis say the Kaddish over the dead body of Roy Cohn (hey, don't act like I've ruined it for you--the power ain't in the plot). The ghost of the (in this play) falsely accused Communist finally finds rest when she forgives the man who pulled the strings to get her the death penalty--if that's not powerful, I don't know what is.
Throughout the play there's also a quasi-apocalyptic, quasi-Hegelian, quasi-God-is-dead motif running, and the angels of the seven continents do play parts, but I'm willing to trade Kushner the Brechtian stuff for his characters--they're at once despicable and lovable, and as long as a producer leaves out the last, cheap-gag scene with Roy Cohn (I'll leave this one a mystery), it stands as a complex and human exploration of power and (dis)loyalty and history.
Incidentally, Mary and I also watched Bewitched some time last week. Think of how dumb a movie based on a dumb sitcom starring Will Ferrell (I love ya, Will--go back to doing stand up!) might be. Yeah, you've basically got the idea.
Rent
Mary and I rented this musical last week (did you catch that subtle one?), and I had big expectations going in. I'd read about it a number of times in the late nineties as a sort of Broadway manifesto for Generation X, a celebration of life and love in the time of AIDS. I wasn't disappointed on that front; I recognize the irony of watching such a musical years after its run was over, on DVD, in my subdivision house, and Mary wasn't buying any of it (she kept whispering to me that the characters needed to get jobs), but the effect was still there. The musical features an ensemble of characters, some of whom never had any luck and some of whose privilege has atrophied as they waited for "the big break" to land in their laps. At least half of the major characters have AIDS, and the second act moves along through one character's death and funeral.
Every political drama (and most of 'em are political) has to have an "other" against whom the characters struggle, and this musical is sophisticated enough that the major characters never really identify theirs. At various points the "other" seems to be "the corporation" (though nobody is really certain what "the corporation" does other than close down tenements and co-opt young bohemians), at others "society"'s indifference to AIDS (though the characters in the film don't seem very activist about that). Indeed, part of what makes the lovable characters so frustrating is that they have the drive neither to get ahead within corporate capitalist systems nor to organize against them. Instead they live quasi-parasitic lives, getting decent jobs only to quit them months later or killing rich women's dogs in behalf of other rich women for a few hundred bucks (I'm not making that up) or simply robbing ATMs for cash. The characters don't live in a moral world coherent enough to do much more than survive. But they sure do sound good surviving. Jesse L. Martin (of Law & Order fame) particularly sings the heck out of the score, and all of the movie seems to work.
Angels in America
This one I read rather than watched; the multi-hour HBO version didn't appeal to me. Angels in America happens a few years earlier than Rent, but the politics of AIDS still dominates the story. This one is more overtly political, the bad guys being Roy Cohn and the Republican party. Several characters in this one have AIDS, but hypocrisy rather than survival is the thematic connector. Louis, a gay secular Jew, spouts all kinds of quasi-racist theories and grand speeches along the way. Roy, the Reaganite power player, has had a number of secret gay affairs even as he's pushed through anti-gay legislation. Joe, a Mormon who has struggled against his own sexuality and driven his wife to Valium by means of emotional abandonment, doesn't tell Louis (who has abandoned Prior, his AIDS-stricken boyfriend) about his own anti-gay judicial career or his religion as they've developed a sexual affair. There are more characters and more hypocrisies, but those are the basic ones.
I'm not a big fan of partisan allegory; I like my politics a bit more nuanced. That said, this play breaks out of the liberal morality play in some very well-written moments, most powerfully when the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and Louis say the Kaddish over the dead body of Roy Cohn (hey, don't act like I've ruined it for you--the power ain't in the plot). The ghost of the (in this play) falsely accused Communist finally finds rest when she forgives the man who pulled the strings to get her the death penalty--if that's not powerful, I don't know what is.
Throughout the play there's also a quasi-apocalyptic, quasi-Hegelian, quasi-God-is-dead motif running, and the angels of the seven continents do play parts, but I'm willing to trade Kushner the Brechtian stuff for his characters--they're at once despicable and lovable, and as long as a producer leaves out the last, cheap-gag scene with Roy Cohn (I'll leave this one a mystery), it stands as a complex and human exploration of power and (dis)loyalty and history.
Incidentally, Mary and I also watched Bewitched some time last week. Think of how dumb a movie based on a dumb sitcom starring Will Ferrell (I love ya, Will--go back to doing stand up!) might be. Yeah, you've basically got the idea.
16 May 2006
Honest Boethius
Just finished The Consolation of Philosophy yesterday. The final three chapters deal with those lovely questions of divine foreknowledge, determinism, and human agency. Boethius, an unapologetic Platonist, unsurprisingly advances the Platonist argument that the same action that seems undetermined to "human" reason can be known exhaustively to a divine mind.
Such an argument normally infuriates me; the person "in the know" advances an inscrutable divine mode of knowledge with one hand and gives an exhaustive account of the character of that knowledge with the other. (And the really irritating ones compare it to the trick where one offers a three-year-old a great big nickel in exchange for an itty bitty dime.)
Yet when Boethius advances it, I still don't disagree, but I don't get mad. I thought at first that the classicist in me was giving him a pass. But when I spent a few minutes thinking about it, I realized that when the argument comes off of Boethius's page, it's not Boethius saying it: it's Philosophy personified. At least Boethius is craftful enough to let a semi-divine character make claims about divine knowledge.
The argument is still bunk, of course. :)
Such an argument normally infuriates me; the person "in the know" advances an inscrutable divine mode of knowledge with one hand and gives an exhaustive account of the character of that knowledge with the other. (And the really irritating ones compare it to the trick where one offers a three-year-old a great big nickel in exchange for an itty bitty dime.)
Yet when Boethius advances it, I still don't disagree, but I don't get mad. I thought at first that the classicist in me was giving him a pass. But when I spent a few minutes thinking about it, I realized that when the argument comes off of Boethius's page, it's not Boethius saying it: it's Philosophy personified. At least Boethius is craftful enough to let a semi-divine character make claims about divine knowledge.
The argument is still bunk, of course. :)
13 May 2006
Return of the Blog
The school year is over.
I uploaded my grades yesterday, and within an hour I was back in the books, reading what I want to read.
Mary and I have also rejoined Blockbuster online, so I've watched a fair number of movies this last week or so. And in the old tradition (that cut off a year ago, when we cancelled in favor of satellite TV), I'm going to do brief reviews of some of them:
The Family Stone
Before you start in, this one was Mary's pick. Pretty standard "everyone ends up with the one that makes 'em happy" chick flick. Everyone hates yuppie Sex and the City woman. Things get worse. Movie-ending couples end up alone with one another, some sleeping together. Food spills. Everyone's cool with everyone. Marriage occurs. Mother dies and inspires everyone with memory. Not a bad movie, but not precisely memorable either.
The Constant Gardener
I've been looking over my shoulder for the four days since I saw this one. Big corporations conspire with big governments to squash the small people, most of them sub-Saharan Africans. White liberals and black physicians try to speak up and expose the corruption. Corporations hire hit men and kill white liberals and black physicians. Kind of a downer.
Cinderella Man
This one picked me back up. The ending should surprise nobody, but nonetheless, it's nice to see a down-on-his-luck working-class family-man overcome his hyphens and Jethro-from-Beverly-Hillbillies's dad to score a victory for his kids and his wife and the working class.
More reviews to come...
I uploaded my grades yesterday, and within an hour I was back in the books, reading what I want to read.
Mary and I have also rejoined Blockbuster online, so I've watched a fair number of movies this last week or so. And in the old tradition (that cut off a year ago, when we cancelled in favor of satellite TV), I'm going to do brief reviews of some of them:
The Family Stone
Before you start in, this one was Mary's pick. Pretty standard "everyone ends up with the one that makes 'em happy" chick flick. Everyone hates yuppie Sex and the City woman. Things get worse. Movie-ending couples end up alone with one another, some sleeping together. Food spills. Everyone's cool with everyone. Marriage occurs. Mother dies and inspires everyone with memory. Not a bad movie, but not precisely memorable either.
The Constant Gardener
I've been looking over my shoulder for the four days since I saw this one. Big corporations conspire with big governments to squash the small people, most of them sub-Saharan Africans. White liberals and black physicians try to speak up and expose the corruption. Corporations hire hit men and kill white liberals and black physicians. Kind of a downer.
Cinderella Man
This one picked me back up. The ending should surprise nobody, but nonetheless, it's nice to see a down-on-his-luck working-class family-man overcome his hyphens and Jethro-from-Beverly-Hillbillies's dad to score a victory for his kids and his wife and the working class.
More reviews to come...
25 April 2006
19 March 2006
16 March 2006
Why I'm not "Big O Orthodox"
Conversation over at the Ooze has been fairly fruitful of late. I've advocated for academic study bibles, tried to give an account of some feminisms' potential for Christian theology, and discussed an archaeological approach to theology.
As I've discussed these things, I've once again come into some degree of conflict with converts to Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, and I'm starting to get a handle on why my own intellectual and theological convictions in the end won't likely make a very good fit to the ancient episcopacies. That's not to say that mine is the only way or even a good way, simply that if I'm honest, and if my honesty ends up serving a role in the larger life of the Church, it's going to serve better outside of those traditions. So this will be an honest account, my own, of the differences between theirs and my stories of Jesus and the world.
Every history of theology is also an account of Jesus' place in history. Orthodox and Catholic Christians (especially those who have converted into those traditions) tell a compelling story about the Incarnation and intellectual history. When God sends Jesus into the world, intellectual conditions (within the sects of Judaism and in the larger Greco-Roman contexts) were just perfect for the Gospel to emerge. The rites of first-century synagogue and temple life translated well into Christian liturgical forms, and Hellenized Alexandrian Judaism and middle-Platonic forms of thought served as handy wineskins for the new wine.
Yes, I did just stack the deck there. You're very clever for catching it.
Thus philosophical questions that seem to have arisen in the centuries after the first CE (or AD if one prefers) are at best rehashings of the oldies but goodies and at worst direct attacks on the contexts and forms that best sustain the intellectual life of the faith. Questions of race and class and gender, to the extent that they call into question old formulations, are invitations to sinful resentment. Epistemological inquiry might look like a denial of the very possibility of truth. And so on.
Thus the history of the Church's intellectual life is one of conservation and of corruption, and not much else.
Oops. You caught me stacking the deck again. I'm not so clever after all.
I tend to see Christian intellectual theory differently. One of the images that most readily occurs is the rending of the temple curtain. Whatever the primary symbolism of that action in the aftermath of the crucifixion, it evokes some fear and trembling: the most holy place isn't the same place it used to be.
The point of this bit of theatrics is that Jesus, as I imagine Jesus, is a man and a phenomenon too grand to be grasped in one generation. I doubt that many would dispute this in the abstract, but in more practical terms I mean that a reliance solely on those first two centuries is likely going to miss something. Theological data, like scientific data, are theory-laden, and if we Christians rely solely on the theoretical frameworks constructed in Platonic and Stoic times and places, we're going to be stuck with dead theories about a living God. Inventing new content to supplement the self-revelation of the Trinitarian God is not what I'm after; instead, I hope that people in different times and different places can see different things that might have been hiding behind their temporal and spatial neighbors' bad philosophies.
This is not to say that any generation is going to have any sort of direct access to an un-theory-laden Jesus or an unmediated crack at the Biblical texts; it's simply to say that as frameworks change, this era's contribution to the grand conversation might be to open up space to see what a Trinitarian God looks like apart from the Platonic insistence of some sort of "atemporal" realm. Or perhaps a hopeful and critical look through Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy might let us evaluate more helpfully our reifications and too-tight categories.
Of course every generation is going to have to discern, through the indwelling Spirit, the harmful and helpful in every time and every place. Nobody that I know advocates an unthinking embrace of every new kind of thought. On the other hand, if the Church, extended in time and space, needs my generation's critical faculties in order to clarify this or that bit of divine revelation, I can hardly ignore the cloud of witnesses waiting to see how I'm going to run that race.
As I've discussed these things, I've once again come into some degree of conflict with converts to Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, and I'm starting to get a handle on why my own intellectual and theological convictions in the end won't likely make a very good fit to the ancient episcopacies. That's not to say that mine is the only way or even a good way, simply that if I'm honest, and if my honesty ends up serving a role in the larger life of the Church, it's going to serve better outside of those traditions. So this will be an honest account, my own, of the differences between theirs and my stories of Jesus and the world.
Every history of theology is also an account of Jesus' place in history. Orthodox and Catholic Christians (especially those who have converted into those traditions) tell a compelling story about the Incarnation and intellectual history. When God sends Jesus into the world, intellectual conditions (within the sects of Judaism and in the larger Greco-Roman contexts) were just perfect for the Gospel to emerge. The rites of first-century synagogue and temple life translated well into Christian liturgical forms, and Hellenized Alexandrian Judaism and middle-Platonic forms of thought served as handy wineskins for the new wine.
Yes, I did just stack the deck there. You're very clever for catching it.
Thus philosophical questions that seem to have arisen in the centuries after the first CE (or AD if one prefers) are at best rehashings of the oldies but goodies and at worst direct attacks on the contexts and forms that best sustain the intellectual life of the faith. Questions of race and class and gender, to the extent that they call into question old formulations, are invitations to sinful resentment. Epistemological inquiry might look like a denial of the very possibility of truth. And so on.
Thus the history of the Church's intellectual life is one of conservation and of corruption, and not much else.
Oops. You caught me stacking the deck again. I'm not so clever after all.
I tend to see Christian intellectual theory differently. One of the images that most readily occurs is the rending of the temple curtain. Whatever the primary symbolism of that action in the aftermath of the crucifixion, it evokes some fear and trembling: the most holy place isn't the same place it used to be.
The point of this bit of theatrics is that Jesus, as I imagine Jesus, is a man and a phenomenon too grand to be grasped in one generation. I doubt that many would dispute this in the abstract, but in more practical terms I mean that a reliance solely on those first two centuries is likely going to miss something. Theological data, like scientific data, are theory-laden, and if we Christians rely solely on the theoretical frameworks constructed in Platonic and Stoic times and places, we're going to be stuck with dead theories about a living God. Inventing new content to supplement the self-revelation of the Trinitarian God is not what I'm after; instead, I hope that people in different times and different places can see different things that might have been hiding behind their temporal and spatial neighbors' bad philosophies.
This is not to say that any generation is going to have any sort of direct access to an un-theory-laden Jesus or an unmediated crack at the Biblical texts; it's simply to say that as frameworks change, this era's contribution to the grand conversation might be to open up space to see what a Trinitarian God looks like apart from the Platonic insistence of some sort of "atemporal" realm. Or perhaps a hopeful and critical look through Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy might let us evaluate more helpfully our reifications and too-tight categories.
Of course every generation is going to have to discern, through the indwelling Spirit, the harmful and helpful in every time and every place. Nobody that I know advocates an unthinking embrace of every new kind of thought. On the other hand, if the Church, extended in time and space, needs my generation's critical faculties in order to clarify this or that bit of divine revelation, I can hardly ignore the cloud of witnesses waiting to see how I'm going to run that race.
13 March 2006
The Death of the Blog?
Well, I've got baby pictures at least...
I don't know whether I can blame a lack of time for my paucity of posts lately. I've had spurts of free time between classes and teaching and parenting, but I've tended to do other things. I've played a few downs of Madden. I've watched a bit of TV. I've read a few non-assigned texts.
It might be that I just don't have the spare creative capacity to write lesson plans and papers and Sunday school sessions and blog entries. I don't know.
But hey, at least this is one!
I don't know whether I can blame a lack of time for my paucity of posts lately. I've had spurts of free time between classes and teaching and parenting, but I've tended to do other things. I've played a few downs of Madden. I've watched a bit of TV. I've read a few non-assigned texts.
It might be that I just don't have the spare creative capacity to write lesson plans and papers and Sunday school sessions and blog entries. I don't know.
But hey, at least this is one!
26 February 2006
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