Tuesday Recuperations
I think of all the huhu made over Million Dollar Baby, all the money and awards, and I can't understand how 21 Grams made so little money. It's the best film I've seen all year.
Further kudos to the older film The Ice Storm, which we rented a few months ago. We've been working our way through Hitchcock also, and he's good, but good for his time. His technique has been surpassed and worked into later, greater films.
Still love Finding Nemo. Fish does phobia exposure work and rescues son.
I saw my doctor yesterday. Great idea. Antibiotics and some really good cough syrup. I feel much better already! And my lungs sound good, nothing but bronchitis.
Back to Billy Budd, the reading for tomorrow's Am. Lit. class. Reading all that Patrick O'Brian has helped me understand much of the naval background I missed when I read Melville's novel in college.
My copy of the book is so old it has a mail in cigarette offer in the back.
Love to all
Further kudos to the older film The Ice Storm, which we rented a few months ago. We've been working our way through Hitchcock also, and he's good, but good for his time. His technique has been surpassed and worked into later, greater films.
Still love Finding Nemo. Fish does phobia exposure work and rescues son.
I saw my doctor yesterday. Great idea. Antibiotics and some really good cough syrup. I feel much better already! And my lungs sound good, nothing but bronchitis.
Back to Billy Budd, the reading for tomorrow's Am. Lit. class. Reading all that Patrick O'Brian has helped me understand much of the naval background I missed when I read Melville's novel in college.
My copy of the book is so old it has a mail in cigarette offer in the back.
Love to all
Comments
The Buddhists have suffering down to an art form. Their whole religion is directed to eradicating it. I'm not suggesting that suffering isn't addressed in Christianity (Christ's crucifixion comes to mind readily). However, its gaze upon it is not as totalizing as Buddhism. It lacks a mythos for suffering on a social scale it seems to me. Please redirect on this notion if it pleases you.
Now to my main point. When did it become clear to you that they were no longer making movies for you and your generation anymore? Sure, maybe we 40-plussers get a few major motion pictures tossed in our direction ever year, but face it, the meaty part of the market is 20-35 year olds. At 35, that's when I started to lose interest in the new major releases, started to rewatch all the old movies from the past. I had a sense they were no longer for me (then again, I feel that way about the majority of things in American pop cullture). Million Dollar Baby seems to be a movie that packs a message that would resonate with a younger set. Is the disappointement/disgust you have for it nothing other than an understandable malaise for the new and pat and shallow?
I suspect this is why many of us turn to religion in mid-life. Pop culture has failed to provide any meaningful response to life's vicissitudes. If one directs one's attention to plumbing the depths of Goodfellas, a contemporary classic in my opinion, it doesn't really give one a sense of how to direct one's passions. The myhts of the movies start to become unpacked and realized for what they are—messages that were designed to affirm a young person's view of the world.
Is "deep religion" (the tendency to scour the texts of the great religions) in mid-life, an artifact of the lowfat intellectual diet we are reared on through the moving picture? Are we tempted by the motion picture the way children are tempted by candy, only to realize that after a while one cannot live on Three Musketeers bars alone?
I ask these questions only because I sense that American pop culture has moved on from my concerns. For myself, without a great religion to hang my hat on (and without a proclivity to be involved in one—indeed, I believe I am genetically incapable of faith) yet as someone who understands the need for a moral life and sensibility, perhaps even believes in it, I wonder what other kinds of myths our culture perpetuates for how a life can be lived
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I suppose I will need to go to the library and study the great dieting and self-help texts. Can one be a Jungian and still watch TV?
nice to see you posting here. I just bipped into my blog for a moment and you've given me more than I can begin to process quickly. City of God...I don't think I've seen it, though S and I have done a number of Brazilian films. I'll check our Netflix queue and if we haven't done it, we'll do it. I must say, you've turned what I thought to be a pretty minor into profound discussion.
Suffering...Christianity is a centuries old, very human and quite imperfect response to the message of a savior. How the Holy Spirit works, if I can even comment, seems different in different people and places, though His goal is always increased faith and loving action, development of the self, often through suffering. Buddhism is odd (and its different schools are often qualitatively different) in that it acknowledges suffering, almost in friendly fashion, then spends its energy on alleviating it through detachment, meditation, the acceptance of impermanence. Some branches are without metaphysical religion...it's almost an ancient self-help system then. But it shares, with Platonism and Christianity, the belief that this world and its suffering is somehow transient and temporary.
Making a distinction between Christ of the gospels and Christianity at large, I'd say Jesus says a few things: one, Christians can expect to suffer; two, Jesus suffered so we shouldn't be suprised when we suffer also; three, Christians are called to explicit social action to alleviate physical and spiritual suffering (at the peril of their souls, according to Matthew); four, Jesus, or the paraclete, is spiritually available to us to help bear our pain; five, the suffering of some will be forever annihilated in eternal life, that of others annihilated in eternal death (or so I read it).
Christianity, as I try to understand it anyway, is not primarily a philosophical system, though it's become that on the grand scale. It's a simple message: Jesus, who possessed unique power on earth, died for our sins; his sacrifice becomes efficacious for us when we turn to him; this restores us to the Creator in a special and direct way. Then we are supposed to live lives of loving action and prayer, communion with Jesus. That's about it.
As I try, rather slowly and stubbornly, to know Jesus better, live more like him, I find myself continuing to focus on his representations in the gospels, imperfect as those may be. Perhaps I should rely more on the direct approach. I can't deny I experiene something in church I don't experience anywhere else, not in nature, or family love, or art. And that experience has nothing to do with the Book; not directly at least. It's a presence, a space.
That's about all I can respond to now. I love to see you up here Victor (I was going to call you Rich in my blogs, but this moniker works). Your mind is first rate. Keep writing.
Oh, on Hollywood: it's all about money. Not much art gets made these days. I'll be sure and try the film you mention and when I see it respond to it up here.
Your friend
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