Companion piece
with Ed Roger’s
post yesterday
[I discovered the February 10, 2008 post, “38 years ago (when I was 27),” when I was looking up Janis Joplin relative to Ed Roger’s re-post yesterday.
I was also reminded that the original date of publication was my mother’s 100th birthday.
Note that I no longer maintain a list of movies watched; hence, the rewording of the opening.]
By Moristotle
Well into the sixth of Earth’s major extinction events, he believes it is still possible for mankind to save itself
By Moristotle
My wife and I watched Sir David Attenborough’s biography of his (and Earth’s) life yesterday afternoon. Attenborough is 94 years old, near the end of his own life. And much of Earth’s life is also near its end, including human life, if we don’t act quickly to halt the Earth’s sixth major extinction event in its last 2.5 billion years. (The fifth occurred about 66 million years ago, following the collision of a large asteroid or comet – 7 to 50 miles in diameter – with the Earth, which led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.)
Francis Ford Coppola’s failed translation of Joseph Conrad
By Rolf Dumke
I found Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) wonderful. But I think that his celebrated Apocalypse Now (1979) contains too much slaughter. And, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Coppola agrees so far as to say, “Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.”
Midsommar: The worst movie ever?
By Jonathan Price
We live in a movie desert. Those of us not fortunate enough to live in LA or New York or some other hub of creative movie theater distribution encounter a summer full of sequels or remakes, no longer just the second or third, but now the fourth or perhaps the tenth. Or we can learn the sordid details about nearhistorical events with which we are mostly familiar. Or we can see the fantastic monsters created by CGI, or their mighty and clever semihuman superantagonists, who use wit and special weapons and skills to defeat them. Into this theater desert enters a film with an “o” and an “ar” in its spelling of midsummer, and I’m hooked by my attraction to foreign films, and to the memories of great Swedish movies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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When the United States had a President we could honor
By Moristotle
[Originally published on December 31, 2012, but with a different subtitle. It’s still my daughter’s birthday, but she’s more likely at home than on a boat.]
Yesterday I went through the blog's 2012 archive [accessible through the bottom section of the sidebar]. The blog began the year as "Moristotle: A sometimes ironic celebration of life on Earth" – or was it still "An ironic celebration of life, love, laughter, and learning" or "...of evolving life and learning on Earth"? However exactly it started out the year, you can see by the masthead how we think of it now.
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.
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.
Why I decided to retire
By Moristotle
In the final hours of overnight between Thursday and Friday, the remnants of sleep inundated me with what felt like some hidden layers of past remembrances, with feelings of loss, of shortcoming, of empathy for a few people along the way.
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.]
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.
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:
In great difference, a thematic commonality
By Kyle Garza
Weekend before last, people poured into theaters to watch two very different movies: Logan and The Shack. While I’ve not seen The Shack, I have read the book, and I did go see Logan that Saturday.
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.
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.
Companion piece
