ex cathedra: Ex & Cathedra: At the movies

Friday, June 10, 2011

Ex & Cathedra: At the movies

I lost all respect for Roger Ebert when he came down on the side of seditious Chicanos during 2010's Cinco de Mayo event. Nevertheless, I'm nodding to his (and the late Siskel's) show.

The Tree of Life. Well, long and ambitious, if nothing else. A meditation on the Book of Job, the evolutionary unfolding of the cosmos after the Big Bang, and the life of Texas family in the 1950's.
Good acting. Unusual in being so open to a Judeo-Christian set of questions about God, meaning, death, faith, without contempt or chic ironic distance. And a rendition of growing up as a boy in America in the 1950's that this American boy of the 1950's recognized right away. A portrayal of a father who is flawed but not pathologized. Nature vs grace. The Garden and the Fall. Plus some Oedipus and 2001 A Space Odyssey. Death and suffering. Unusual, often beautiful, but too self-conscious about Meaning.

One commentor at a review site, one Ahmed from Bagdad, said it was based on "Gilgamesh, an Iraqi folktale." Iraqi folktale...One of the terrible things about the internet is that it lets you know how very many stupid people there are in the world. And these are the ones who have net access and can speak a second language.

I Want To Believe. This is the second X-Files movie. Made in 2008 . God, what a dog's breakfast. Grotesquely dark and violently gruesome, some Saw with the usual hamfisted theology games about belief and guilt, plus pedophile priests, psychics, gay marriage and Mulder/Scully sort/sorta-not being involved. For slash fans, though, at one point Skinner finally cradles Mulder in his arms. Otherwise, pretty literally stomach-churning.

The Jewel In The Crown. Not exactly a movie, but a 1984 BBC mini-series about the closing days of the British raj in India. One of those stories of human passions contained by strict social structures, which always fascinates me. (And for which the Brits used to be a great source.) Still well done: complex and interesting characters, fine acting, a lost world made sympathetically vivid.

Hangover II. I only saw the trailer. I can't imagine wanting to see any more.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's only job is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.