The complex emotional life of rich people in Hawaii rendered simple and uninteresting to critical acclaim.
Your Correspondent, Also known as Papa Apoplectica
One Line Review: Coriolanus
This fucking amazing film hammers home, yet again, that contemporary education systems make no mistake more commonly than to expose children to the works of William Shakespeare too soon and hence dampen their reception forever.
Your Correspondent, Is a very apoplexy, lethargy: mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible
Film Review: Melancholia
That which the science trusting John says “will be the most beautiful sight ever” turns out to destroy the world. Claire is obsessed with being happy and will spend any amount of money to achieve it on behalf of her little sister, Justine.
Justine is so utterly depressed that she can’t bring herself to bathe, to embrace her husband on her wedding night, or take the promotion offered to her at the advertising agency where she is a feted success. Yet he is the only one, who cries over her favourite meal, sobbing “it tastes like ashes” that is able to face the cataclysm when it comes.
This is so perfectly the anti-Tree of Life that it boggles the mind that it was made at the same time. It could easily be taken for a tedious bore. It deals with questions of what reality is for, if anything at all. But while Malick’s movie is about the dance of grace with her children, Von Trier’s movie is about the dance of death of a hostile universe, where “the earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it, no one will miss it”.
Justine’s childhood involved a love for Abraham, a horse, her steadfast companion. At marriage, she forskaes him for her husband, who promptly leaves her. He cannot fulfill her after all. He has become hard to maneuver and irrelevant. She must be shouted at to even take the horse out, she takes to beating him in her frustration.
Grace can still be found, in the flight and song of birds and the fall of blossoms but it means nothing. Abraham, family, marriage… nothing provides a framework that allows sense to be made.
In the middle of Tree of Life we see the violence that creates the world. At the end of Melancholia we see violence as the world is destroyed. In Tree of Life, the world is made new and harmony is achieved. In Melancholia, the world is destroyed and the illusion of harmony is finally obliterated. Only the Justines of the world could see life for what it is.
Your Correspondent, Super-gay horses are one of the signs of the apocalypse!
One Quote Review: The Grapes Of Wrath
D’ja hear about the kid in that fourth tent down?
No, I jus’ come in.
Well, that kid’s been a-cryin’ in his sleep an’ a-rollin’ in his sleep. Them folks thought he got worms. So they gave him a blaster, an’ he died. It was what they call black-tongue the kid had. Comes from not gettin’ good things to eat.
Poor little fella.
Yeah, but them folks can’t bury him. Got to go to the county stone orchard.
Well, hell.
And hands went into pockets and little coins came out. In front of the tent a little heap of silver grew. And the family found it there.
Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor. Pray God some day a kid can eat.
And the associations of owners knew that some day the praying would stop.
And there’s the end.
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath, p. 250.
This novel is the what humanism looks like and it is the most articulate and piercing critique of capital-and-ownership driven markets you will ever need to read. Astonishing.
Your Correspondent, Closet Amish
One Line Review: Submarine
You know you are getting old when a movie that sets out to evoke how deadly it was to first kiss the girl you’ve fancied for ages as a teenager leaves you gleeful with reminiscent delight.
Your Correspondent, Don’t ask how, just know that he’s more powerful than ever
One Line Review: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will all sleep, and we will all be changed– into godless fecking Commies.
Your Correspondent, He lives to suck another day.
Best Of Music 2011
For the last few Christmases my friends and I have had a tradition whereby we each compile a CD worth of music that we discovered in the previous year as a sort of retrospective and best-of of the year. The music need not be released that year, it just has to be new to you.
The project is really cool because as the years go by, each CD we each make is like a sedimentary layer of our tastes becoming inexorably more middle-aged and less cool. Or alternatively, less self-conscious and more fun. Regardless, you see changes! And you discover the new music that your friends have been loving. My best of this year involves songs that were recorded by friends and songs from the 1930’s so this YouTube playlist is incomplete but a pretty good representation.
Your Correspondent, Hopes to see him bring ’em all back to life
One Quote Review: For All The Saints by Tom Wright
In particular, we must take account of the well-known and striking saying of Jesus to the dying brigand beside him, recorded by Luke (23:43). ‘Today,’ he said, ‘you will be with me in paradise.’ ‘Paradise’ is not the final destination; it is a beautiful resting place on the way there. But notice. If there is anyone in the New Testament to whom we might have expected the classic doctrine of purgatory to apply, it would be this brigand. He had no time for amendment of life; no doubt he had all kinds of sinful thoughts and desires in what was left of his body. All the standard argument in favour of purgatory apply to him. And yet Jesus assures him of his place in paradise, not in a few days or weeks, not if his friends say lots of prayers and masses for him, but ‘today’.
A deadly tight little book by Tom Wright on the Biblical testimony about life after death, the confusion of Purgatory and the importance of our liturgy matching our Gospel narrative.
Your Correspondent, All his dreams involve combing his hair
One Line Review: On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Undiagnosed bi-polar man ruins his idiot friend’s life, features plenty of successful hitch-hiking.
Your Correspondent, Boys and girls in America, have such a sad time together
One Line Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin
I suspect this is the clearest depiction of the love of God in a mainstream movie since Gran Torino.
Your Correspondent, Thinks movies can be better than the books when they are so radically different