Welcome statement


Parting Words from Moristotle (07/31/2023)
tells how to access our archives
of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….

Friday, May 11, 2012

And now for some relieving laughter

Now that we've had a moment of silence (and removed our black arm bands) following Tuesday's election, let's indulge in some weird laughter by watching the 2005 Danish film
Adams æbler [Adam's Apples] (2005: Anders Thomas Jensen) [In this black comedy, a utopian clergyman finds his starry-eyed outlook challenged by a neo-Nazi ordered to perform community service at his church.] [E] 5-9-2012
The operative words in that brief description from Netflix are black comedy. The film, writes New York Times movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz (in his review "Religion with Guns," published March 15, 2007)
The clergyman (Mads Mikkelsen)
and Adam (Ulrich Thomsen)
is one of the latest examples of the post-Pulp Fiction bloody comedy [Pulp Fiction is one of my all-time favorite movies]. It's also one of the weirdest, mixing glib humor with dead-serious spiritual inquiry.
    My wife and I actually watched it the day after the election, so we had our laughter prior to putting on our black arm bands on Thursday. The movie and the passage of "Amendment One" in North Carolina do have one thing in common—weird. Well, two—religion also.
    But, then, religion is weird. You justify voting for the Defense of Marriage Act by quoting Leviticus 18:22, which states that homosexuality is an abomination, but you conveniently ignore
  • Leviticus 11:20*, which says the same thing about eating shellfish,
  • Leviticus 25:44, which states that you may possess slaves,
  • Exodus 21:7, which permits you to sell your daughter into slavery,
  • Leviticus 19:27, which forbids you (if you're a man) from having your hair trimmed,
  • Leviticus 11:6-8, which forbids you to play football [well, literally, it says that touching the skin of a dead pig makes you unclean],
  • Leviticus 24:10-16, which requires that you stone your neighbor to death if he curses and blasphemes,
  • Leviticus 20:14, which requires you to burn people to death if they sleep with their in-laws....
The black humor is pretty thick here too.
    Still, I recommend Adam's Apples if you like black comedy in film and are looking for an excellent one. (By the way, every time the Bible that the clergyman gave Ivan falls onto the floor, it falls open to the first page of the Book of Job.)
_______________
* I didn't check all of these references (I break out in a rash when I open the Book of Leviticus), but just used them as I found them, in a humorous letter to Dr. Laura Schlesinger written by James M. Kauffman, Ed.D., Professor Emeritus Dept. of Curriculum, Instruction, & Special Education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Schlesinger had said on her radio show [I am told by my friend Jason Jolley]
that homosexuality is an abomination, according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned by an observant Orthodox Jew under any circumstance.

No comments:

Post a Comment