The following are Good Things:
A re-imagined image of St. George the night before he fought the dragon. I don’t think I can actually call this an “icon”, but like all good art it conveys a spiritual reality the same way that icons do.
A beautiful, if completely impossible, ending to Harry Potter. CS Lewis would applaud.
I’ve been playing lately with Pandora, creating a set of music stations custom-tuned to my tastes. The procedure is simple and addictive: seed the radio station with an artist or two that you like, then listen and give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to individual songs in order to fine-tune its preferences. My impression is that the algorithm they use for finding similar music is very good, and it has already returned me much very good music that I would probably have never found otherwise.
Most surprising so far: Depeche Mode. I had seeded a station with Xiu Xiu and was grooving out to similar indie synth-pop when I heard a track that I especially liked. When I clicked to give it a thumbs-up, I was surprised to see it was none other than Depeche Mode. Yes, they’re indie-famous, but I was only vaguely familiar with them and hadn’t liked the songs I had previously heard. So I listened for a little while longer, heard another exceptional song, and came to find out that it was Depeche Mode again. Not only that, but it was the same album as before (Playing The Angel). Then it happened a third time. At that point I took the hint and just ordered the album from iTunes.
The album Playing The Angel turns out to be pure goodness. Hooray for Pandora.
P.S. If anybody else has a Pandora station they want to e-mail me, send it to me at jaspax around gmail.com, or listen to one of my stations at that address.
Annie Hall
This is Woody Allen’s “masterpiece”. I suppose that the scare quotes are a bit harsh, because I could see why the film is so well regarded: Larisa and I both laughed out loud at several points, it has funny, memorable, well-developed characters, and a solid script.
The characters turned out to be the problem, however. We are supposed to identify and sympathize with them, and thereby chuckle at their foibles in an “It’s funny because it’s true” way. This did not happen with Larisa and me. I didn’t identify with any of the characters, and Larisa even less so–instead, I found them pathetic and more than a little irritating. My primary reaction was pity, followed by disgust. Now pity can carry a narrative a little ways, but unless it’s tempered with something more palatable it gets old quick.
The result? I spend the latter half of the film waiting for it to be over, and at the end was rewarded with the knowledge that the characters’ self-centered neuroses and self-inflicted dysfunctions would go on as before. Hooray.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
My expectations of this film before seeing it were that it was a vaguely classical romance, sort of Casablanca-esque. It was supposed to be great, and it had Audrey Hepburn–how could you go wrong?
Well. Once we started watching it because obvious that we were not seeing a great movie, just a great actress. Hepburn is wonderful, beautiful, funny, and endearing. Everything else in the movie is terrible. The plot takes forever to get moving, and lurches erratically from one movement to another. The only secondary character I liked was Cat. The sets are boring. There’s that horrible faux-Japanese upstairs neighbor.
But worst of all was the male lead. The casting department appears to have ordered the most generic beefcake they could find from Blondes ‘R’ Us, and then given him instructions like, “That was too animated. Could you put a little less feeling into it?” He filled me with a boredom that grew every time he appeared on the screen and quickly spilled over into annoyance, then hatred. I wanted to punch his bland, vaguely chubby chin by the end of the movie. I sincerely hoped that Golightly would leave with the Brazilian, just so we wouldn’t have to see him any more.
The producers evidently hoped that Hepburn alone could carry this film. If the rest of the film were merely mediocre, she might have. Alas, that’s not the case.
The Good Part
We also saw two Kurosawa films–Seven Samurai and Rashamon. They more or less made up for the above disappointments. We also went to see X-Men 3, which was not as awesome as it should have been, but which wasn’t nearly as bad as the reviews had led me to fear.
The Last Samurai is a very curious book that I came across in a very curious way. While I was at UW a classmate of mine in a Greek class loaned me the book saying that I would enjoy it. She enjoined me solemnly not to harm it and to give it back promptly when I was finished, which I agreed to–but subsequently she dropped our class together and I have never seen her again. So I was left with the book, which turned out to be a good deal since it is a beautiful piece of linguistic fiction.
An excerpt:
….Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.
An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years. There was one with the characters Hakkinen, Hintikka and Yu, set provisionally in Helsinki–against a background of snow with a mass of black firs, a black sky & brilliant stars a narrative or perhaps dialogue with nominative genitive partitive essive inessive adessive illative ablative allative & translative, people would come on saying Hyvää päivää foir good day and there might be a traffic accident so that the work tieliikenneonnettomuus could make an appearance, and then in the mind of Yu Chinese characters, as it might be Black Fir White Snow, this was absolutely ravishing.
I think that DeWitt gives away her motive for writing the book in this passage, because she has indeed written a book in which the word tieliikenneonnettomuus makes an appearance, which is sprinkled with Greek and Latin and Hebrew and Japanese and Inuit, in which grown men cry over the loss of the subjunctive mood. It is the perfect glossophile’s book. It’s also tremendously funny, so if somehow you are not a glossophile you will probably enjoy it anyway.
The only downside is some modern stylistic quirks, like dialogue without quotation marks and long, run-on sentences. These don’t bother me, but I remember Brett being very put off by them. Brett, if you read this, please try to look past them. I think you will enjoy the book regardless.
Steve Taylor is the man.
Larisa recently dragged me off to see The Second Chance, a Christian film starring Michael W. Smith and being heavily promoted through the various orifices of Christian pop media. “Dragged” is the operative word here: generally anything being emitted from those hadean circles can be written off as schmaltzy, propagandistic garbage, and it’s not anything that I would want to waste the cost of a theater ticket on. The plot summaries and clips that I saw did little to alleviate my hostility–but Larisa’s friends in Romania were clamoring to know what the film is about, so she insisted that we go. (Christian marketing forces are more powerful in Romania, because the levels of cynicism and ironic detachment are lower.)
Unfortunately, I had not reckoned with Steve Taylor, who formed my early years of music listening and saved me from the age when I thought that listening to Carmen was cool. Taylor is infamous for tweaking Christian subcultural norms, and he manages to pull the same thing off here.
The basic plot is this: Michael W. Smith plays himself as Ethan, a rock star/worship leader at a growing, white, suburban megachurch. (He doesn’t play him very well, though–Smith’s performance is definitely the worst thing about the film.) He’s engaged to be married, has designed a McMansion for himself and fiancee, and picks out $500 china sets for his wedding. His antithesis is Jake Sanders, who pastors a black inner-city church and works with hookers and gang members. During a fundraiser at the suburban church, Ethan for some reason gives Jake the microphone, and Jake proceeds to castigate all of them for giving just to relieve their white guilt, tears up a pledge card, and tells them to “keep your damn money.”
It was at this point that I began to like the film.
To punish Ethan for his part in the fiasco, he’s stripped of his rock star/worship leader duties and sent to work in the inner-city church for a few weeks. The predictable things happen: Ethan shows himself to be an ignorant, insensitive idiot, his golf clubs get stolen from his Lexus, etc. Jake, meanwhile, proves himself totally contemptuous of their suburban partners’ compassion-for-the-cameras, but well-adapted for working with hookers, gang members and immigrants. Eventually lessons are learned, Ethan abandons his rock star/worship leader lifestyle to come live in the slums, and the church is saved from demolition with some impromptu community activism.
What I liked about the film is that, as a film made by the Christian media machine and given to a Christian audience, it is completely subversive. The villians are the wealthy boardmembers of a suburban megachurch trying to practice “stewardship” by supporting a new baseball stadium, while the hero is a black firebrand who swears from the pulpit. The major character’s development involves forsaking worship rockstardom and his lucrative book deal to engage in something that’s actually sacrificial and communal. In other words, all of the major trends in contemporary evangelicalism are lampooned, all in the context of a film made by and targeted towards contemporary evangelicals. This is why I love Steve Taylor.
OTOH, if you have never been a part of evangelical subculture, you probably won’t find the film subversive or even very interesting. It’s fairly daring for an “in-house” movie, but it’s still an in-house movie. If you have ever attended a megachurch or bought a “worship” cd, however, you’ll probably get it.
In this post about Hamlet, Leithart has posted a beautiful Russian poem about Hamlet, written by Pasternak and translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France:
The buzz subsides. I have come on stage.
Leaning in an open door
I try to detect from the echo
What the future has in store.A thousand opera-glasses level
The dark, point-blank, at me.
Abba, Father, if it be possible
Let this cup pass from me.I love your preordained design
And am ready to play this role.
But the play being acted is not mine.
For this once let me go.But the order of the acts is planned,
The end of the road already revealed.
Alone among the Pharisees I stand.
Life is not a stroll across a field.
I just started reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and like most LeGuin novels, it’s wonderful. I will post a full discussion and interaction later, when I’ve read the whole thing.
Larisa and I are going to go see Serenity tonight. I will post spoilers and reviews when we get back.
UPDATE: And we’re back. Actually, we got back last night, but now is when I have time to write.
I liked the movie overall, so I’m going to start out by making some negative observations.
These are minor points, however. Overall the movie was fun. The plot is nothing extraordinary for sci-fi: a guy Simon rescues his psychic sister River, hooks up with a bunch of defeated revolutionaries working as petty thieves, gets an all-powerful secret agent on their tale, and all sorts of wacky things ensue. Lots of people get shot. Even more people get beaten bloody by River. (Aside from being psychic, she’s also tough. And crazy.) A few people get eaten by Reavers. Discovery of unknown planet and massive conspiracy leads to gigantic space battle. Good defeats evil. Hooray!
Despite my glib synopsis, the movie is very compelling. The characters are realistic, not mere plot-devices, and Whedon excels at combining disparate elements in them to good effect. The Captain Malcolm’s southern accent threw me at first, but I fell in love with it by the end of the movie–and it’s not just window dressing. It establishes his character: a gentlemanly scoundrel. The humor is, as usual, excellent and definitely Whedonesque. At least one major character dies, perhaps more. (I say “perhaps” because lots of people die, and I’m not sure if some of them might be major characters in the context of the television series, but not as much in the movie.)
Basically, it was everything I hoped for. I eagerly await the DVD’s.
Went and saw the movie (you know, the only one anyone cares about right now) at the theater with my cousin today. Here’s my review: it’s better than any of the other prequels. It’s probably as good as Return of the Jedi, but not nearly as good as Return of the King. The rest of this is just random observations:
Now I want to watch the original trilogy again–the redemption of Darth Vader has a much deeper meaning when taken in light of the prequels.
Here is an arrangement I can live with: a while ago I got a message from one Jason Boyett, who reads my website. Yes, I’m as shocked as you, but let’s move on. Mr. Boyett had written a book, and he wanted to get the word out about his book, so he was looking to give away free copies thereof in exchange for a review.
Yes, that’s right: I was going to get a free book in exchange for reading said book and saying nice things about it. But what if the book sucked? My journalistic integrity would be on the line, and then I would feel bad for taking the book and then having to say bad things about it. I pondered this quandry for a good fifteen seconds before I decided to screw my journalistic integrity and just take the book.
Fortunately, it doesn’t suck. Crisis averted.
The book is called Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse: The Official Field Manual for the End of the World, from Relevant Books. I’m not sure if the title is really that long, but those are the words on the cover, so let’s just go with it. Somewhat like The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook, this provides a pretty detailed overview of ways that the world could end, and what you can do about it.
We start out with the Apocalyptionary, which defines all sorts of useful terms that you will need to know to understand the rest of the book. You need to read this chapter in order to be able to understand the rest of the book, unless you’re the sort of person who already knows what parousia means. In which case you should just read the chapter for the snarky commentary.
Following that comes the best part of the book: a list of failed prophecies of the end. It turns out that people have been predicting the end–and being wrong about it–for over 2500 years. This part is definitely the funniest section in the book, although to be fair Boyett’s got some help here, as most of these whack jobs don’t need a lot of snark to look funny. I was surprised by some things, though. Who knew that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had wrongly predicted the end eight times? And did you know that Benny Hinn, Lester Sumrall, and Kenneth Hagin had all also predicted the rapture without any luck?
But of course, fringe Protestant groups aren’t the only ones getting everything wrong, as we also hear about an Orthodox chap named Smirnov who predicted Armageddon (or something) in 2002 via e-mail. The freaky thing about this is that I actually remember receiving the e-mail mentioned in this book. Creepy. (But the world didn’t end, so we’re okay.)
Next chapter has a list of potential antichrists, whose only flaw is being somewhat dated since both John Paul II and Saddam Hussein are looking much less likely as antichrists these days. Then the most serious part of the book, an overview of different eschatological interpretations of the Bible. And then, for all you non-religious folk, a list of ways for the world to end via natural disaster or technological catastrophe. See, something for everyone. And don’t forget the Endies, a list of awards for apocalyptic fiction. These were really funny, and they mention Kurt Cameron twice.
So the book is good, and there are lots of worse ways that you could spend ten dollars. And it’s gotten me into an eschatological mood, so sometime in the next few days I’m going to post some thoughts about the right way to live in the Last Days.