Lights, Camera, Action!

Two Poems of Old Age

By Moristotle

The first poem below more or less wrote itself one morning, in the moments after I experienced the internal argument whether or not to flip that light switch. In the days that followed, my ruminations grew to include the ideas of the second poem, and I thought at first that I could work those ideas into the first poem. But I soon learned that I couldn’t – or it would be better not to. For better or worse: “Practicing to Die” and “Rehearsing to Live.”


Practicing to Die

Don’t do it! 

Do it! 

No, don’t do it!
I yell at myself in the silence of my mind.
I remind myself I’m carrying a tray,
better safe than sorry.
I used to lift a finger to flip off the kitchen light
as I passed toward the dining table.
I have done it many times.

Movie Review: Black ’47

Or just when you think things can’t get grimmer

By Bob Boldt

If you are ever looking for a bleaker Irish travelogue, look no further than Lance Daly’s 2018 Irish period drama film, Black ’47, whose title refers to the most devastating year of the Irish famine, 1847.

Boldt Words & Images:In memory of Regula Zeller

Regula Zeller (1948-82)

For Day of the Dead 2018

By Bob Boldt

Readers of my short story “Let Me Help You with That” [published here on January 30, 2016] have already been introduced to the artist Regula Zeller, who was my artistic collaborator and lover, now nearly half a century ago. We experimented on a number of film multimedia and graphics projects. I recently retrieved from storage a portfolio of her work I almost forgot I had. It was close to All Hallows Eve, and I had a dream in which Regula appeared, young, beautiful, and erotic. The dream inspired the audiovisual poem “A High Coup Calavera #5,” my annual Calavera poem in honor of Day of the Dead, which I dedicated to the artist:

Book Review: Jonathan Price’s just-published collection of film reviews

In the Nick of Time

By Ann Weldy

In this interesting and somewhat quirky selection of reviews from the past six years, most of them first published on a friend’s blog, Jonathan Price reveals a fluent and graceful writing style, imbued with his joy in films and illuminated by his wide acquaintance with literature and cultural history. The book is organized around eight themes, each given a chapter comprising several essays, rather than the more usual chronological order, and this arrangement provides useful coherence among the texts and the films they present.

Movie “Review”: They Are Everywhere

Theological implications

By Moristotle

The 2016 French-language film Ils sont partout, directed by Yvan Attal, struck me the other night, when we watched it on Netflix, as a comedy – despite being about the very serious topic antisemitism. Nominally it’s antisemitism in France, but, like the Jews, antisemitism is everywhere.

Movie Review: Lateness in Art and Life

A late review of Late Quartet (2012)

By Jonathan Price

This film foregrounds music in ways that are rarely done in American cinema, though it uses the focus to trace the elaboration of a 4-way intimacy. It’s a quartet, not a tercet, so it’s not the traditional romantic triangle, but there are three men in various involvements with a single woman, all of them playing classical music together for 25 years as a group designated “The Fugue.” This one woman is in various stages and types of love with the three men; however, we don’t see a great deal of bedroom antics onscreen – a brief fling by the married man with a much younger woman; a longer affair between the one offspring generated by the two married members of the quartet and its chief violinist. So the focus is primarily on relationships and music rather than bedroom acrobatics.

Movie Review: The Post

The war goes on

By Jonathan Price

Perhaps it’s just my imagination or prejudices, but it seems to me an inordinate number of recent feature films – supposedly a form of film fiction, and hopefully art forms in themselves – are either infinite sequels of mildly successful previous films, or retellings of actual events (history or news in some sense). What’s missing, more frequently than before, are fiction films that create characters that probe deeply into what’s behind history or human character or behavior. I suppose to some extent, this is a false dichotomy, and there have been very good films made from actual historical events: I could mention, e.g., Patton. But when I go through my deep mental catalog of great intriguing films, they are nearly all fiction films, even if their origins are murky or dubious or quasi-historical: The Rules of the Game, Shoot the Piano Player, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. This is a brief list, but for me it seems representative.

Movie Review: All the Money in the World

A Moral Fable

By Jonathan Price

For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Many souls are being lost in the pursuit of wealth in this film (2017, directed by Ridley Scott) Very few souls seem worth saving, perhaps that of Paulo Getty’s mother Gail (Michelle Williams), devoted to her son. risking the world and abandoning her divorce-gained custody of her other two children to get him back. Perhaps also worth saving is her aide and eventual co-conspirator, Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg).

Movie Review: War & Art – Part 2

Maudie

By Jonathan Price

A very different kind of film from Dunkirk [reviewed yesterday] is Maudie, an indie biopic about a Canadian folk artist, Maud Lewis, which played in only two theatres in town for a week. Like Dunkirk, it is based “on a true story.” But Maud’s life and art are different from our common parables about human existence, or the life of an artist. And so the film is a commentary on the intensity and power of personal vision, dedication to beauty, and the transcendence of loneliness and suffering. A single film can do all that. Maud lived her entire life in a small town in Nova Scotia, and most of her adult life in a small house on its outskirts.

Movie Review: War & Art – Part 1

Dunkirk

By Jonathan Price

In my unrelenting search for something worthwhile to feast my eyes on in late afternoon or early evening and take me from the Trump-drenched world to other worlds worth contemplating, while munching on the obligatory bag of unbuttered popcorn, I recently saw two films, Dunkirk and Maudie. The titles, as so frequently, tell you very little; the names of places or people or events, and they promise very little, unless you happen to know about these things in advance. They don’t really tell you about content or feeling or approach. You’re supposed to learn these on your own, through general cultural knowledge, or the deluge of previews in previous visits to movie houses. And I probably see more previews than the average moviegoer, trying to get my movie fix at least twice a week, arriving early to locate a suitable seat and to see previews.

Boldt Words & Images: Transformation (video)

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: The text of the author’s talk delivered on April 9 to his local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, in Jefferson, Missouri, was published on March 26.]

Movie Review: The Most Hated Woman in America

Who is Madalyn Murray O’Hair

By Moristotle

Netflix’s latest streaming release, The Most Hated Woman in America, doesn’t flatter Madalyn Murray O’Hair, nor does it flatter the religious people who hated her for “standing up” (as she put it) for the First Amendment of the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, including freedom not only to believe, but also not to believe. Her lawsuit, Murray v. Curlett, led to the landmark 1963 Supreme Court ruling that ended official Bible-reading in American public schools.

Boldt Words & Images: Transformation

By Bob Boldt

[From a talk to be delivered on April 9 (two weeks from today) to the author’s local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, in Jefferson, Missouri.]

From Maxim Gorky’s anecdote about Lenin listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata:

Movie Review: Manchester by the Sea

A stillness at the center

By Jonathan Price

Manchester by the Sea, starring Casey Affleck, Ben’s younger brother, is a superb film, the best I’ve seen all year and, in fact, in some time. And that’s as far as you should read here if you haven’t already seen (and want to see) it, because the rest of what you’ll find here will tell you a great many things about what happens and what’s key in the film.

Movie Review: Gladiator

A deeper analysis, with reflections on Christian reviews of the film

By Kyle Garza

[Editor’s Note: The author reviewed Gladiator on August 10. Today’s extended review goes into greater depth and critiques some other sorts of reviews of the film.]

Long before Braveheart (1995) and Gladiator (2000) and Troy (2004) had kicked off a new cycle of epic films that mixed history, legend, and cinematic entertainment, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Beowulf stood as cornerstones of epic poetry, defining for millennia the standards of what it is to be an excellent man. Despite thousands of years between them, the modern cinematic epics still retain much of the same poetic elements that their written predecessors had, and the definition of masculinity which they offer has not varied far.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 3)

Hitchcock thrills with North by Northwest

By Rolf Dumke

Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful film North by Northwest (1959) is my top American thriller. It mixes up the life of Roger Thornhill – a smug advertising executive and self-contained ladies’ man, only hounded by his overly protective mother – with the violent world of cold-war espionage and counter espionage. In the bar of the Plaza Hotel, Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) – decked out, as usual, in a well-fitting suit – is called to the telephone by a bellboy and becomes entangled by mistake in a net of spies and counterspies.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 2)

Billy Wilder, itchy and hot for Marilyn

By Rolf Dumke

The Seven Year Itch (1955). This film must have excited millions of adolescents and men in America and in the world in the last sixty years. It has an iconic scene etched in my memory. Marilyn Monroe is standing on an iron grate before a shop in New York City when a rumbling subway thrusts its way through the tunnel below, causing cool air to explode upward through the grate to swirl up her wide, white summer dress. She tries to push it down, to contain the swirling skirt and limit exposure of her thighs, smiling and giggling in delight, because the cool blast is so pleasant on a hot day.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 1)

America in 3‑D, shaken and stirred

By Rolf Dumke

It Came from Outer Space (1953). This was the first American film I saw with my friend Gene in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square. We went because of Gene’s enthusiasm for the new 3-D film technology and my interest in Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I had just read, after my local librarian’s nudge to read Verne’s adventure stories rather than the Black Stallion girl’s books.

Growing Up in America: American movies in the 1950s

Prolog

By Rolf Dumke

Movies in the 1950s were an intoxicating and disturbing experience for an immigrant boy. They exposed the psychic underbelly of an America disturbed by Freud, sex, women, and crime; troubled by the Cold War struggle between patriotic Americans and communist traitors; haunted by Ray Bradbury’s and Orson Welles’s impending attacks by aliens from outer space; and unbalanced by the drama in American high schools that created or cemented social barriers, allocating dramatically different life chances among its students.

Movie Review: Gladiator

Finding Elysium

By Kyle Garza

Since its introduction to the big screen in the year 2000, Gladiator has met heavy-handed criticism from Christian film critics, largely because of its “gratuitous” violence. I argue, however, that the violence in Gladiator is always purposeful, serving the greater purpose of characterizing the virtues in its combatant protagonist, Maximus Decimus Meridius. Upon a first viewing, Maximus’s story seems to be yet another tale of vengeance and gore that encourages our desire to see wicked villains slain. With a little more reflection, though, we can discover that Gladiator has much more to say about love and service, and in fact uses Maximus to discourage bloodlust and carnage as mere means of entertainment.