"Everything in the World Can & Will Be Made Better, the Only Question is by Whom & How.."

Side by Side, review. A- , 4/5 *,  95% Tomato Meter.

This documentary is an interesting exploration of the current revolution in film making away from celluloid (photo chemical exposure) toward digital exposure.  It treats the evolution of the technologies, their respective strengths and flaws, and includes interviews with many directors and other people involved in film making, discussing the trend.

"Filmaking" has always been a somewhat insubstantial exercise, the "projection" of light through a film of chemical gauze; casting light, color and shadow on a blank wall.  The one substantial aspect of the experience has until now been the film itself, the alchemaic artefact that gave film it's material reality, gave it its "there, there."

Now, the industry is abandoning film for algorithmic traces on a silicon chip, fleeting ever further into insubstantiality, into ephemeral abstraction. There is more freedom to create greater fantasy there, they say. This is what progress is, in its lack of essence: slipping material bonds, consummating consciousness in a triumphant manipulation of and victory over matter, ultimately ascending to the point that we finally escape the constraints of matter altogether. Intellect and imagination slip their material bonds, and achieve gnostic transcendence.

So it is somehow oddly appropriate that Keanu Reeves - the star of Bill & Ted's Excellent Time Traveling Adventure (for isn't time travel one of the most fundamental subversions of this material space time continuum in which we are enmeshed?) and the Matrix Trilogy (one of perhaps the purest gnostic fantasies that Hollywood has yet graced us with) - is the auteur of this interesting documentary.  Fantasy land is becoming even more fantastic, and even less substantial than ever before. And Ted is there to report back to us upon progress's inexorable march.

Until the 19th Century humanity kept its artistic and intellectual record on substantial matter such as paper, plaster, animal skin and canvas. Camera film is is different from these in that light is not reflected off it, but rather through it. It is also more delicate than most of these more ancient media, and it poses more difficult challenges to archivists who seek to preserve it. In 1902 there was an international congress of film makers, who in the spirit of the French Revolution and the positivist tradition, came together to set an international standard for film, guaranteeing that film making and projecting technology would be universal and standardized, ensuring that all film shot from then until now would all be accessible using the same tools, the same industrial paradigms. 35 mm film is always 35 mm film, and can be fed into any projector manufactured to that standard in the last century.

In the 1970's and 80's however, video tape and computer imaging was developed. In the rush of technological development there has been much that has been produced that no longer can be viewed, because in that short rush of evolutionary change we now no longer have the tools to access some of the things created only ten to thirty years ago. Imagine trying to access information stored on a floppy disc, an 8 track or VHS tape. Not so easy, these days. Such technology is all too quickly obsolete and the information recorded with it now inaccessible.

Because now rather than  using film, or electromagnetic tape, or even paper, most imagery and text is being recorded on silicon chips, hard drives. What is the nature of this new medium? What are its weaknesses, its strengths?  In this film Sad Keanu

has found his voice, and while he gives quite a bit of time to advocates of film and critics of the dawning digital age, it's ultimately pretty clear that Keanu is proselytizing for the new order. It's hard not to be impressed by the power of the new technology.. Still, nagging questions linger.

For while it is true that the rush of technological advance has given us in some ways greater freedom - we can now watch movies on four inch screens that we carry in out pockets - it may be also true that we could be simultaneously eradicating our relationship with the past. The great paper libraries, archives and museums that used to be the main way we accessed knowledge and art - which meant interacting with the past, the authors and artists who created that record - are now largely obsolete, in that the record has been impixelated, recorded in magnetic patterns of 1's and 0's on an electric grid. It is both more immediate and manipulatable, while verging utterly insubstantial.

Is this new network more resilient than thousands of paper libraries - which while they can be burnt, can also be turned into samzidat? Is this new modality easier to censor and track?  Is knowledge and art now simply more accessible, or is it also more easily repressed, tracked and eradicated?  Is this brave new world an electronic tyranny like that of Tron, or an anarchic paradise like that in Avatar? Or something else, utterly different or something in between?

I seems we are about to find out.

A few closing thoughts concerning Keanu: I remember when I used to dismiss guys like him (or Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.) as being somehow unserious. Feminists complain about how women's voices and pov's tend to get discounted. Try being a very pretty boy. That seems to me an even harder row to hoe, in terms of being taken seriously, somehow.  Handsome man is not the same as pretty boy - most of them get discounted, sneered at.  If there's a Tiger Beat spread of you out there,

where you've been "lucky" enough to tap the collective libido of teenaged girls, you are finished. It's far, far worse than being a Playboy centerfold. No adult - male or female - is ever likely going to take you truly seriously again. Pity Justin Beeber and the Jonas Brothers, because when they hit their late twenties no one will ever pay attention to them again, and they won't know what to do about it. Expect to see them dishing to Dr. Drew on celebrity rehab in about a decade or so. That's how we treat our idols. Ours is a truly profane and irreligious society.

But wait.. Maybe not. Keanu is running counter the rule, here. Giving reviewers at venues such as the New York Times a reason to pay him respectful attention.. What is this?  Perhaps beauty, character and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. As much as we ugly people may find it hard to accept, beautiful people may occasionally be serious and smart, too.  Keanu has gone a proven it can be so, with this film.

Well done, Keanu. Bravo. Thanks for feeding my head. Now go do it again.



---

The Triumph of the Apes: All Bow Ye Before the Imminent Simian Singularity

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, review.  B - , 3.5/5*  80% Tomato Meter. 

First, this is a good movie.

I've seen several big blockbusters this year, and haven't had the energy to give them the pannings they deserved here.   They - Fast Five, Thor, Captain America, so forth - have been mostly crap.  I've only bothered to review movies that really impressed me here.   I decided the other day that I'm going to try to review everything I see from now on, keeping the less interesting stuff to a paragraph long review..  I need material for the blog (I feel your ravenous need, my public.. )  and the writing exercise will be good for me..

Anyway, I liked Thor mildly, because there was enough of the Eddas there to make it interesting to me, but the rest - I say "rest" because there were more than those other two, but I can't remember them since they were all such innocuous crap that I've purged them - were just awful.  Captain America  I had hopes for, but it was just a blur of mindless and uninteresting violence.  There was never a second that the "good guys" seemed at all likely to be frustrated let alone defeated, and the "bad guys" were clownish, imitation Nazis that were totally uninteresting.

Captain America had certain salient thematic elements in common with Planet of the Apes though..  Very interesting ones, to my mind, these days..   I'll write about them soon.. I'll definitely get to drawing comparisons and all that in a later post.  

Here I need to praise this film a little more.  This movie was smart by Hollywood standards, and the computer effects were absolutely amazing.  I usually dislike CGI effects, but the quality of the apes' depiction was superb, I occasionally even briefly thought that I could actually be looking at film of real hyper intelligent apes.   The level of verisimilitude is becoming almost lifelike.  

"Virtual reality" is making great strides, folks.  The fantasy almost leaps off the screen into life..    

The actor who played Gollum in LOTR, Andy Serkis, also played the lead ape in this film, Ceasar, and this performance was just as good as that one, but even more impressive as the computer effects are even better.  

So, the story was above average for a blockbuster, it held my interest, and while there were few surprises in the story, but it was executed well, and did everything I came wanting it to do.  It had moments of tension where there was true suspense (albeit all while knowing what was going to happen ultimately) ..

About the theme, now:  

It's an old one in cinema.  Basically, it's a gnostic dystopia.  The main human character, played by 

is a scientist whose father has Alzheimers.  He is driven to find a cure.  He is working on a viral treatment that he expects to cure brain damage caused by dementia.  They test it on a dozen apes..

And discover that it works.  But better than expected, in that it increases intelligence. 

The only surprise here (I'm not going to tell you the rest of the plot, you can guess what happens) is that the only appealing human beings in the film are James Franco's character, his character's girlfriend, and his father (John Lithgow).   All the other humans are assholes.  

The apes - Ceasar, the main ape especially - seem at first to be all cruel.. But, as the plot unfolds, they are revealed to actually be quite noble, in that they only kill humans who are begging for it.  

The rest of the human race is taken out .. Do not read the next sentence - I've written it backwards - if you want to be "surprised" :

.suriv eht yB 

So, the stage is set for the triumph of the apes, and the arrival of Charleton Heston.  His character is actually in the film, too, but referred to only tangentially.  (There are a few media reports in the movie telling us that a Mars mission launches, but then disappears.. ) There are a whole slew of tribute lines and names to the earlier film series, of course.   They're going to treat us to a new franchise, which I can't say I mind, so long as they keep doing it this well.  

Now, the message here in philosophical terms is that nothing essentially separates apes and men but intelligence, that by attaining greater intelligence is essentially a technical problem itself "solved" by intelligence, and that the super intelligent product of that innovation benefits from the extermination of stupid humanity by means of a ..  (backwards agin, don't look if you don't want to learn..) 

suriv..

Yeah.  Prophecy of the Illuminati, or just the rehash of really stale plot line?

You decide.   One species of apes is done, long live the reign of the more evolved apes!  

Evolution is inexorable, and you who are stupid cannot escape.

But the singularity isn't happening this week, in the meantime you get to go to the moves.  Enjoy.

---

Film Review: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I enjoyed this. 4/5*'s, B+ - 96% on the Tomato Meter, 76% audience approval.




This is a documentary by Werner Herzog, who received a unique permission from the French Ministry of Culture (this is their relevant site) to film in the Chauvet Cave, near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, in the Ardèche Valley near the Rhone in southern France.

They are dated to 40 to 30,000 years old. This is much older than the 20,000-year-old images at Lascaux, France or the 17,000-year-old ones at Altamira, Spain. This means that they are the oldest known symbolic representations created by a human being in the world. The oldest art, perhaps (indeed almost certainly) the oldest human "religious" expression (since the scientists studying it believe they were perhaps created as a part of a "shamanistic" type ritual) in the world.

As art they are absolutely stunning, to equal anything done by the likes of Matisse or the best of Picasso. Very, very beautiful. Most of the images are of animals, but one is (as Herzog puts it in the film) of a woman's sex, basically a depiction of a kneeling woman's rear that flows seamlessly into the head of a bison like animal. The oldest picture of a human being.

Herzog worked under extreme restrictions, only being allowed into the cave twice, because previous experience at sites like Lascaux have shown that even small changes in the atmosphere of such a cave can destroy the images by introducing mold and other contaminants. The cave is also dangerous to remain in for long due to high levels of carbon dioxide and radon that can sicken and kill the unwary.

The entire experience of watching this film is meditative. Nearly everything he shoots and most of the commentary is fascinating. The landscape and cave are in one of my favorite places in the world, and are stunningly beautiful.


This is the Pont d'Arc, the cave is located nearby:

Pretty stunning landscape, really. Thirty thousand years ago it was surrounded by glaciers during one of the recent glaciations that have covered Europe and North America. If you've (say) read Clan of the Cave Bear (one of my Middle School reads, back then I soaked up historical fiction, and stayed up all night one night to finish that book when I was in 8th Grade) or seen a paleolithic Venus, you know will have an idea of what the culture that created these images is all about:

He shot the film in 3-D, and I must say that this is the first 3-D film I've seen where it actually makes sense and adds something to the movie. The walls of the cave, and the cavern itself leaps at you a bit, giving a real sense of how the drawings meld with and use the topography of the wall to convey a sense of motion and depth.

Herzog is the same documentarian who made the film about that idiot Timothy Treadwell, "The Grizzly Man," who got himself and his girlfriend eaten by a grizzly in Alaska in 2003, and the bear who ate them shot by Fish & Wildlife. Treadwell was a total asshole, but Herzog's film about him is fascinating.

So this is the second project I've seen by Herzog who has had a very long career, most of which I've managed to miss despite my love for documentaries. I saw him interviewed by Stephen Colbert, where Stephen strains to be funny (I love his show, but the interview is the least interesting part of the show, while the reverse is true I think of John Stewart.. ) but does get some interesting reactions from Herzog.




I do have to say that Stephen does hit on what seems to me one of the central issues in thinking about things like this: This story is about origins, about consciousness and self-awareness, which means this story has profound religious implications.

"How can the drawings be 32-40,000 years old when the earth was created only 6,000 years ago?" That's a question that strikes to the heart of what 40% of Americans apparently believe, that the universe is only 4 to 6,000 years old, following the calculations of the likes of Bishop Usher and other "fundamentalists" who've done the math for us on the genealogies in the Pentateuch and a timeline of the rest of the Bible.

The radio carbon dating they've done on the drawings indicates that the drawings were created over a span of thousands of years - 40 to 32,000 years ago - in a cave that was never inhabited by humans, only used as an apparent ceremonial site. There is what Herzog and the anthropologists working at the site take to an altar in the cave, where they surmise some sort of ritual or ceremony was performed. The cave was inhabited by extinct cave bears, who left thousands of bones and claw marks all over the cave. At some point over 15,000 years ago the cave was sealed by a great landslide, and then only discovered in 1994 by the explorer who gives the cave its name.

Stephen asks Herzog "Are you making any of this stuff up?" driving at his apparent tendency to embellish his stories. But that question can be leveled at the entire phenomena. All sacred narratives tend to run up against the scientific record in ways that from a positivistic perspective seem to undermine them.

The question of how this cave relates to the narrative in Genesis seems to me to be a valid one. But it's also finally an unanswerable one.


In my last review took a couple potshots at people who seek to reconcile that narrative (or any other sacred mythology) to the latest scientific consensus in a "literal" way. As I say, I think that's vulgar and stupid.

As I said there, I also think that people who think that science has "disproven the Bible" and the existence of God are even bigger idiots.

The debate between the two sides is tiresome and mindless.

I say that the narrative and the physical environment do not need to be reconciled according to our current knowledge, because as one scientist in the film says, we know almost nothing.

The more I live, the more it seems to me that humility and wonder are crucial to not being a jackass.


Which, incidentally is one of the things I accuse myself of being. I have been too often a victim of cognitive dissonance born of my own pride and arrogance, and am still tempted frequently to pass that door..

Then alternately been tempted to rain down judgements and preach, and call people names. Which I think is what I just did.. Again. Ach.

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν.


I've decided that needs to radically change. So, when at the end of the film Herzog makes an extraneous editorial comment about the caves by taking us to a tropical terrarium fed by the waste water from one of France's many nuclear power plants near the cave - the water expelled from a cooling tower that controls the heat of a reactor is very hot, and not radioactive - by showing us a pair of albino crocodiles kept there, and opining that we are ultimately no better than they, and that if they saw the drawings they would be unperturbed, implying that the universe entire is just as unknowing and so ultimately meaningless..

I just shook my head and pitied him. He shoots this gorgeous film, full of astonishing things, and still can't help himself from making a statement of chic nihilism to put it all in perspective for us.

What can you say? You look at something so beautiful, and still doubt the transcendence of the human soul?


Poor fellow.



---

Film Review: Tree of Life

I liked this quite a lot. 4/5 *'s, A. Tomato meter 86%, audience only 66%.



(This is not the trailer, which they won't let me imbed on YouTube. This link takes you to the official trailer: Check out this great MSN video: 'The Tree of Life' Trailer )


I was initially puzzled why this film isn't being shown in more theaters, seeing as Sean Penn and Brad Pitt are in it, and it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.. Now that I've seen it, I understand. This film has only the slightest narrative, being a diaphanous stream of images depicting the life of a family living in Waco, Texas in the 50's, cast against a cosmic backdrop. Many people will not enjoy this at all. Think 2001 Space Odessy or Tarkovsky - if you know who he is, and like him, see this film. Otherwise, you may want to stay away.

The minimal story is focused on the eldest son, who we learn in the very first scenes will die when he is 19. The film then cuts to his birth, and begins to show us the dynamic of his family - Pitt plays his father, a man driven to succeed according to the cultural mores of 1950's corporate/upper class America, who clearly loves his sons, but treats them with a sternness and discipline that borders on pathological. His wife, played by Jessica Chastain (who is stunning here) is a much more gentle and non-judgmental personality.

The devastation they both experience at the death of their son is cast against this dynamic, but it is never explained how the son dies - if he commits suicide, if his death is any way influenced by his relationship with his father.

Then, we flash forward to one of the other two younger brothers in the family (it wasn't clear to me which) as an adult working as an architect in a skyscraper in some American city, somewhere like Dallas or Kansas City, played by Sean Penn. He's obviously still wracked by these events years later. Apparently the film is meant to be at least in part a mediation on life from this character's point of view.

Then, we shift into a long series of images beginning with the dawn of time, the Big Bang, the rise of life, terrestrial life, so forth, culminating in images that seem to suggest the end of the universe in fire and darkness.

The film then jumps back to tell the story of perhaps one year in the life of the family, where the relationship of the eldest son with his father is depicted. He is obviously haunted by his father's expectations and feelings of resentment and inadequacy. These drive him to commit some anti- social acts like launching a frog hundreds of feet in the air tied to a backyard rocket, stealing lingerie from a neighbor's house, and some other small acts of cruelty and disobedience that are clearly attempts on his part to react to the pressure of his father's expectations and the growing realization that he is very much like his father in both his strengths and weaknesses. All of this is cut with other impressions of a beautiful family life in an idealized 1950's setting, only with the occasional acts of cruelty or selfishness on the part of the son or his father to mar the idyll.

The finale of the movie (which comes after what seems to be a very long time, which I didn't mind apart from the fact that I saw the film at the Enzain dinner theater and had ordered three pints during the film, a choice which came back to haunt me in the last 20 or 30 minutes of the film, but not enough to actually make a run to the restroom.. ) is an apparent resurrection of sorts, an afterlife in which Sean Penn's character is seen walking along a long beautiful beach with all his family, and a large crowd of strangers.


That's basically the story. Very highbrow, high concept, but not particularly doctrinaire. The director, Terrence Malick, evidently poured himself into this film, and it shows. He's the same guy who directed A Thin Red Line, another great film shot with a very similar visual style, but with more narrative structure, and is a trained philosopher - ABD at Oxford on a thesis dealing with "the concept of world" in Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.. He had a divergence of opinion with his tutor, it seems.

Malick was raised Assyrian Catholic (that is to say Iraqi, or Chaldean Catholic) in Waco, himself, and that is also evident in the film. He also then went to a high class Episcopalian Prep School in Austin.

This film is obviously fruit of all of that study, and all of those philosophical and religious influences, and so is just as pretentious and interesting, as well as alternately staunch and new agey as you'd expect.

The family is Catholic and are often depicted at mass. Their priest is shown at one point giving a homily on the Book of Job in which he hammers home the futility of all worldly things, and the necessity of grace and the salvation of God which is beyond all human understanding: "his thoughts are infinitely above ours.."

The film also opens with a verse from one of my very favorite chapters in the entire Bible, also in Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" This is from Chapter 38 where God first takes the stage after Job has been sitting on his dung heap being heckled by his friends who have all sorts of opinions as to why Job has fallen on such hard times for the first 37 chapters.

The first 37 chapters are like much Christian discourse in other words: "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." They babble, then leave. It's like one long modern evangelical service, a whole lot of bullshit and preaching, only without any rock tunes. I could never be a low church protestant, getting preached and sung at all the time like that. I'm so glad we have liturgy and generally short homilies..

Anyhow, it's when Job is alone that God shows up and puts a pile driver through things. Job had been a bit upset that all these horrible things had befallen him, and was annoyed at God. But he never took up his so called friends' challenge to simply curse God and die. He kept on keeping on, cranky but faithful to the end, enthroned on his pile of shit.

Malick quotes the perfect line for every jackass who thinks they understand what the Book of Genesis "really" means in "historical" or "scientific" terms.

Where you there? Who are you to lecture me about what I did? You know nothing.


That no mere man may boast before He Who Lives and Reigns.


Malick leaves out - and this is telling, I think - the lines just before this, where God says to Job "Stand up. Gird your loins like a man. I will examine and I will judge you."

Judge. You.


This movie treats creation with such poetic power, and then casts the lives of this particular family against that cosmic backdrop in a way that is neither condescending or gimmicky. The grandeur of the human being, the human person, of our collective consciousness and our love, is as astounding as everything else in time and space - in fact, it is apparently the only thing that gives any of the other astonishing things that are any meaning. Only we contemplate, only we worship. Malick's film is one long testament to that truth.


But despite the proto- Christian themes in the film, and the repeated prayers in which every primary character prays and seeks the intercession of other characters ("I" love "you") in religious language, even addressing God as a person ("I give my son to you") the full blown presence of that transcendent Other is not felt. The film dances around this felt near absence gently, which is why it seems to verge on a sort of "new age" vibe..


The mother (Jessica Chastain's character) also makes a powerful statement at the beginning of the film that opposes grace to nature ("there is the way of grace and the way of nature") where grace is described as being selfless, liberating and free, while nature is described as grasping, controlling and selfish. The mother seems to be meant to be taking the way of grace, while the father and his oldest son follow the way of nature.

While I get the point, and somewhat credit it, I thought to myself that this is not technically true. I think nature is a manifestation of grace, and departing from grace disfigures, and is un-natural. The fall is the deprivation of grace in nature, that is evil, sin and death. Nature itself is good, being created by God (who is the only "super" natural being, even spirits and angels are natural, whether fallen or not, on this point I refer you to Aquinas) and in the Catholic economy of grace redeemed by the Church which is Christ's sacramental action, the energies of God that take on "material" expressions.

That's in a way a quibble (and note that I typed that off the cuff, so my way off expressing it may not be as precise or correct as it should be) but it's an important one.

I was left wondering about Malick's deeper agenda, whether he was thinking in terms of the Kabbalic or ancient Egyptian "Tree of Life" or other variations of that idea, and how much those ideas may have impacted his film.

I incidentally bought a beautiful papyrus of this depiction of the Egyptian mythological Tree of Life when I was living in Cairo, which I gave to Rich & JD. They've framed it beautifully, and it looks fantastic:

I really like it, and may need to go back to Cairo to pick up a few more.


The thing about this movie though is that while this is definitely affirming of the immense beauty and dignity of the individual human person, it sort of goes vague on the ultimate source of that personhood.

More unitarian than trinitarian in the final analysis, it seems to me. Not that that is a bad thing. I'm merely observing for the record.


Final word: see this film if it sounds at all interesting to you.

Just stay away from that third pint. It'll mess you up.


[Footnote: I just watched the video about the casting of the film that I post at the head of the review.. I apparently misunderstood what happened entirely, in that I thought the eldest son was the one who died, but apparently it was one of the younger ones. Sean Penn depicts the eldest son as a middle aged man.. i leave my review as is, because thaat confusion is a testament to the discursive, non- linear style of the film. I normally don't get confused by movies, but this one was unusually indeterminate. ]



---

Film Review: Bridesmaids

Enjoyed it. B-. 3.5/5 Stars.




I was just re-reading my last review, of Jane Eyre, and I it struck me that Mia Wasikowska is probably in fact very beautiful in the classical sense.. You could cast her in marble and stick her in the Louvre surrounded by dancing fauns on pan pipes and cherubs scrolling ribbons, and she'd fit right in, wouldn't she?

Anyway, last night I went to see Bridesmaids, which is being billed as a Judd Aptow type comedy starring women. It's got 91% on the Tomato Meter, which I have come to more or less trust. If the meter is above 80, the movie will probably at least entertain, and you won't regret seeing it. I watch a lot of movies, and so far only one movie above 80%, Scott Pilgrim vs the World (81% on the Meter) has registered a vigorous dissent from me. I hated that movie, and almost walked out of it, and wish in hindsight that I had.

I don't walk out of many movies, because I do my due diligence before hand, using sites like Rotten Tomatoes, and so usually know what I am getting into. Interestingly, the last film I did walk out of McGruber, (47% on the Meter) also starred the star of this film, Kristen Wiig. That film was brutal, vulgarity atop vulgarity, without any intelligence. I don't mind vulgarisms - scratch that, I enjoy vulgarisms if they strike me as witty, and do not mind them if they are used occasionally and for poetic effect, but incessant vulgarity without any wit, honesty or purpose assaults even my jaded sensibilities. That movie struck me a both stupid and obscene. I left after 20 minutes or so.

Sometimes I take a chance on films that are poorly reviewed because the movie has something that I think worth risking two hours and 10$ on. I'll see There Be Dragons (11% on the Meter) in the theater if I can for example, because the movie is about the Spanish Civil War and St. Jose Maria the founder of Opus Dei.. That is basically the trifecta for me: Spanish Civil War, Opus Dei, and pretty Spanish girls. It is also shares the title of my old blog, incidentally.. All of which is to say that I couldn't miss it if I tried, poor reviews be damned.

As for this film, I went to see it solely because the Tomato Meter is at 90% and I like Aptow'esque humor. As I say, it also stars Wiig, whom I like. Wiig is of course a cast member on SNL, and has been in a couple other films lately like Paul and Whip It that I enjoyed.

Anyway, this film was exactly what I expected.

It takes all the gender stereotypes, and runs with them.

It's got a lot in common with Jane Eyre, in other words. Only now, in a context where birth control and modern medicine (prophylactics, treatments for venereal disease, abortion, etc.) has stripped the sex act of its strum drang and consequences, we have a farce as opposed to a melodrama.

Which is to say we have a douche bag übermensch lawyer (natürlich driving a German sportscar and living in a typically disgusting modernist palace) who is going all friends with benefits with Kristin Wiig's character, only it's pretty clear that the Master of the Universe isn't really Wiig's character's "friend" at all. He expects her to behave like a porn star and prostitute, and be his ever obliging "f**k buddy" (as he calls her) who only comes over to get it on and sate his sexual needs, and then immediately leave.

I at least give Edward Rochester his props for more or less respecting Jane Eyre's person, and not taking advantage of her desperation like the douche bag lawyer does with Wiig in this film. Edward is not a total cad, in other words, and clearly really does love Jane despite his socially inappropriate and dishonest treatment of her.

This is what we've come to, see. Even when Wiig's character meets an honest, kind cop who clearly does like her for herself, she still hops right in bed with him, and then second guesses his motives when he continues to be kind to her. She immediately goes psycho on him, and pushes him away.

Typische, is what I'm saying. Sure to resonate with audiences everywhere, throughout our free world.

I'll just say you can take pot shots at Catholic sexual ethics all you want. Their one shining benefit in worldly terms is that when embraced they keep you from degrading and making an ass out of yourself like this.


Anyway, the film culminates (after many hijinks, much of which either had me hiding my eyes from the screen or laughing out loud.. There were one or two belly laughs in this film, which is why I recommend seeing it) in a marrige. Miraculously enough, after everything that happens, the marriage still comes off.


It is a completely garish, self- indulgent, disgusting and over the top affair, in which all the gross princess bride excesses are displayed.

The vows are exchanged on blocks in the middle of a reflecting pool, and as they both say "I do" a huge neon heart with "They did!" in it illuminates in the background, and fireworks go off.

Then Wilson & Phillips (the actual band) come out and serenade everyone with this:




No kidding. It was so inspiring, man. Cathartic, made me hope for tomorrow again.


Or whatever.


Tempus fugit, memento mori, is all I have to say.


In Austen all the marriages are simple affairs. Everyone shows up within a few months of the engagement in their church clothes, say the vows in front of the church and community - the old school ones, note - then they have a good dinner, and the couple rides off to have a honeymoon.. That's it. No decadent indecent display, no gush of treacly sentimentality, certainly no garters exposed..


The old vows in the Church of England go like this:

Groom: I,____, take thee,_____, to my lawful wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.

Bride: I,_____, take thee,_____, to my lawful wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.


Notice how the wife vows to obey, but the husband does not? Bracing stuff, isn't it?


Obedience being such the turn-on and all.


Anyway, I enjoyed this movie. It amused me, but it was pretty much a testament to how far gone we are culturally.


Most everyone says they want the romantic dream, but all too few see that it takes crucifixion of one's own will and desire to achieve it.


So it was foretold. So has come to pass.



---

Film Review: Jane Eyre

Really Liked It. Thumbs up. A- . 4.5/5 Stars.





Yesterday evening my mother and I saw this film at the Old Mill Playhouse in the Villages.

I'd noticed that it was being well reviewed (82% on the vaunted Tomato Meter) and so decided I needed to give it a try..

Because I am just such a complete sucker for period dramas based on classics, you know. Especially romances.. I'm a sensitive pseudo-sophisticate quasi-literate new age deeply in touch with his X chromosome type of guy, is what I'm saying.


From every version ever made of Les Liaisons Dangereuses to anything by Merchant Ivory – I snort it all like coke. E.M. Forrester to Jane Austen, The Four Feathers and Brideshead Revisited to The Scarlet Pimpernel..

It's all great to me. A well made film with women in bonnets and corsets is simply not to be missed.


But the odd thing is I can't remember ever seeing Jane Eyre before.. This is especially odd, because the novel has been made into a movie or TV mini-series over 20 times this last century. It is in other words a staple BBC, Merchant Ivory, A&E type classic, that along with the likes of Jane Austen, just keeps being recycled by filmmakers.

So, oddly enough, despite this burning passion of mine for period pieces, I don't think I've ever seen a single one of them.. I just googled the title, and there's apparently even been a well received version made in 1996 by Zefferelli, starring Charlotte Gainesbourg – a favorite French actress of mine, acting in this film in English – and William Hurt.. Her French accent is apparently close enough, if you're an Italian director working for an American audience..

Anyhow, I've read the novel once, long ago in high school. I remember liking it quite a lot, but that it was rather long. I'd much preferred it to Wuthering Heights which I also read once back then, but did not like it as much as say Pride & Predjudice.. (But then is there any novel that I like as much as Pride & Predjudice, other than maybe Emma? Err, no.)

I've never since re-read it, because the size of the book and the residual sensation of the story's heaviness have kept putting me off. I've picked it up a few times, hefted it, thumbed a few pages, and always then put it down to run back to reading Aunt Jane yet again, for (now literally) the 20th or 30th something time.



So, I walked into the theater tonight utterly free & clear, not remembering any details of the story beyond the fact that Jane Eyre was a governess who falls in love with her employer.. Actually, I also remembered the very end of the tale, which I won't divulge here.


Other than that though, it was a revelation, and a terrific one. Despite not having read the book in 20 years, I think I can still say with some confidence that this is one of the best adaptations of a novel I've ever seen.


Three things were especially superb:

First, and maybe most importantly, the casting is spot on.

Mia Wasikowska does her now customarily excellent (see the very good The Kids Are Alright and mostly mediocre apart from her fine performance Alice in Wonderland) work as Jane Eyre.

Jane is supposed to be plain looking (as is the lead male character, Edward Rochester) but rent with integrity and passion that causes many people she encounters to respond viscerally in either hate or love for her. Most particularly, the two main male characters Edward and St. John Rivers, both fall hard for her in their own very different ways.

So the casting here is key – Jane has to be plain but compelling. Mia Wasikowska is perfect, because she is exactly that. Her face is usually impassive, with her eyes emoting everything. She's not made up at all here, and her features – while regular and pretty – are not classically beautiful. She's like a tuning fork in her scenes, in that she vibrates emotion that emanates and fills the screen and audience. She's awesome, in other words, and while the rest of the cast (which includes Judi Densch) is also excellent and apt to their parts, she pretty much carries the film herself.

Second, while the visual pallet of the movie is mostly very dark, it is exactly apposite to the mood of the story. The landscape depicted (the moors of northern England) is exquisite, and seems almost sentient.

Third, while (as I've already said) I haven't read the book in ages, my mother (who has read it many times) says that the abridgment necessary to make such a long novel with all its interwoven subplots and dozens of characters into a two hour movie was both effective and very faithful to the original story.

It's a major pet peeve of mine when filmmakers take significant liberties with a story I love. If they do it egregiously enough it ruins the movie for me. This abridgment focuses on the central love story (as it had to) and had me completely fascinated from nearly the beginning.


A few more incidental observations:


The film has a magical realist vibe to it. I won't give much detail as to how this works, but suffice to say that it in some places it felt a bit like a supernatural suspense or even horror movie, in that the tone and mood are gothic and baroquely romantic, occasionally verging on the excessive. It's not clear what's happening in a few places, if you don't already know the story (and again, I didn't) the motives of the characters can occasionally seem opaque and mildly fantastic. Once everything becomes clear, it all makes sense though. If Bronte herself had been advising the filmmakers, I imagine she would have been very pleased with result.

So I really appreciated the how the film dealt with spirituality. Most of the characters are fervent 19th century low church English Calvinists, cousins to Scotch Presbyterians, and this is portrayed in what I felt is a rich and fair manner. There are a few cruel and judgmental bigots of the type that sometimes give Christianity a bad name, and then many others who I thought are depicted living their their faith in a normal, or sympathetic even admirable way. There is also quite a bit of folk mysticism in the film, where it's clear that the characters see the world in what many people today would call magical terms. They believe there are spirits and unseen forces about, and they are always interacting with and effecting what is seen.. I liked this a lot, because I've encountered this type of culture in places myself, and it charms and seduces me. This spirituality helps give the film its lyrical and romantic air.

I also was struck how the landscape and physical context – which includes technology – effects culture, spirituality and religious worldview- the moors are stark and forbidding, which clearly impacts how the people there see the world. Everywhere I go lately, I notice this same effect: the material imbues the culture.

I've been thinking how things that we today take for granted, such as mass literacy (a result of modern publishing due the printing press and now internet, as well as universal schooling that accompanied industrialization just over 100 years ago) or mass produced clothes (made by ginned cotton or other industrially made cloth, and machine sewn to universal patterns – and which now everyone, even the comparatively poor can usually afford many sets of, as well as now have the ability to launder them well and often) – deeply effected, and in effect created the class hierarchies that used to exist.

To have good quality, clean clothes was much more expensive, and so rarer then. Having them was an automatic class marker. So too was literacy (a high quality education is what clearly marks Jane Eyre off from the common class in this story) more unusual – because books and paper and writing instruments were all rarer and more expensive, then..


This story, like Jane Austen's work, is obsessed with social status and the role of women in 19th Century English society. The heroine is an intrepid and sympathetic girl, who seeks her happiness and freedom through her relationships. Like Austen's heroines, she is a gentlewoman, in that she is educated and from an upper middle class, minor gentry background, but because of the death of her parents is thrown upon the mercies of others and eventually has to become a governess to support herself.

She's much like Jane Fairfax in Austen's Emma, in other words. Accomplished, very intelligent, and of a good family background, but forced by her circumstances to work teaching children. This how she ends up meeting Edward Rochester. He becomes her employer, but because she is by birth also a gentlewoman, he can socialize with her in a way that he could not with a lower servant.

This gives the story much deeper pathos than anything by Austen. All of Jane Austen's main female characters are of more secure economic circumstances. Even the Bennet sisters in Pride & Prejudice would have had enough of an income to live lives of genteel poverty without the need to work themselves, had they all failed to find husbands. Furthermore, only one of the Bennet sisters needed to land a rich husband for the rest of them to be all financially well off.

Jane Eyre would be destitute without her work. Unlike all of Austen's central female characters, she is also a servant. This gives her story a tragic dimension and a heightened desperation, her character being much more in need of both money and emotional outlet, as well as other sorts of consummation and freedom.

The fact that there was in normal circumstances no divorce in 1840's England, and that marriage was much more serious affair then, is also important here.


It really fascinates and amuses me that modern women swoon so much for these stories, in which the most obvious (perhaps only clear) means that the women in them can truly fulfill themselves is by binding themselves to men of property and power. Jane Eyre is particularly egregious in this, because as I say, Jane becomes utterly abject before her employer Edward Rochester, withholding only her integrity from him, which is exactly what makes him utterly fall for her.

He's rude and brusque, deliberately promenading another (rich and more beautiful) woman before her, and not hiding that he had apparently had a child by an affair (which he could not have hidden, since the child was her charge as governess). He very clearly is attracted to her almost immediately, and does not hide this despite her being both his employee as well as her being about 20 years younger than he is. He comes and goes as he pleases, treats her rudely, and then occasionally shows her any kindness and attention.

But he is a furnace of desire. That he so clearly wants Jane works like catnip to her inner kitten.

She very naturally falls deeply and insanely in love with him, and.. Well, I won't give any major spoilers here. Watch the film, you'll see. The point is that for the better part of the story she does very little other than be coy and insist that he respect her. It's pretty clear to him though that despite her attempt at maintaining sang froid that her sang is actually quite chaud. Until the very nearly the end of the film, he senses this and pursues her, and so is the protagonist in their relationship, while until the very end she more or less just reacts to him.

Demure, principled, but also passionately charged: the perfect feminine vibe.


I mean, to be utterly clear, I dug it all too. I only mention it as it just doesn't really jibe with the feminist narrative of women wanting to behave actively in romantic situations like men.

Here's my take on it all: I think these stories show how male and female desire are symbiotic to the point that they are compatible theses to one another: women are attracted by desire, by being desired. Female desire is incited by being the object of desire, but in a tantalizing and authoritative way. Male desire exhibited with confidence, elan and self-possession – that's the thing.

Male desire is simpler on the face of it, but in the end still fickle. I'll simply say (again, without giving much away as spoiler) that there are three other romantic relationships than his one with Jane that Edward Rochester has in the film – one with an unseen but reputedly beautiful yet capricious French actress who had been mother to Jane's charge, and another with a beautiful rich girl who is invited to the manor, who exhibits a disdain for Jane. The third relationship is even more over the top than the others (this is a Victorian Gothic romance, after all..) It is very clear to me why he prefers the demure and passionate yet scrupulously principled, as well as kind and generous (which is to say extremely feminine and nurturing) Jane to them all.

I'll also re-emphasize in closing that the restraints that 19th century Victorian society placed on married people very clearly made love and eros a very serious thing. Theirs was the diametric opposite of our modern pick-up and divorce ridden culture. I personally admire them theirs, and despise ours. Give me their mores, give me their moral, emotional and spiritual seriousness. This freedom we have is trite and boring.


Anyhow, the upshot is that this is a truly excellent movie, one that I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend.



---

Film Review: Of Gods & Men

Absolutely Loved it. Thumbs way up, A+. 5 Stars out of 5.




First, immediately and for the record, this is one of the best films I have ever seen.

It works on every level: the screen play, though slow and leisurely in its pacing, is perfect for the story. It lets us into the life of the monastery, and gives a marvelous feel for what it is like to live in a religious community. The acting is simply perfect, especially that of Lambert Wilson who plays the abbot, and Michael Lonsdale who plays an elderly monk who is the monastery's doctor, whom runs their clinic which takes care of the people of the area, whom are too poor to get access to other medical care.

The story is one that is pretty well known in it's bare bones in Catholic circles.

If you were paying attention back in 1996, you know what is going to happen to these men. Which makes everything very poignant. The fact that this film is not primarily about the violence (though that violence does erupt very graphically once or twice in the film) but more about how the community reacts and evolves in reaction to the looming threat, is wonderful.

(This is that context if you are interested. )


This larger looming political context is at first only gently inferred. The fact that Algeria is embroiled in a civil war only becomes a part of the story when the Army shows up and demands that the monastery accept military guards. The abbot peremptorily refuses, and throws them out. This causes a debate amongst the brothers, since most of them were upset he didn't confer with them first. He tells them that he made the decision and it's non- negotiable because the monastery and Church cannot be seen as taking sides in the war, which is what allowing soldiers onto the grounds would do..

There's a beautiful scene where Michael's (the old doctor) character is talking with a young Algerian woman who comes often to see the monks, and often works with them in their gardens. She is struggling with some relationship that the movie does not explain. It's that sort of film, in which people come casually into the story a few times, and yet somehow they still become real, but without any exposition, merely on the strength of the tone and performances.

She asks Father if he had ever fallen in love. Father looks at her seriously with kind smiling eyes, and says "Of course. Many times. Then the greatest love took me, and I have been in love ever since."


That was only one of the many times this movie had me tearing up. In spite of all my struggles, and all my failures and problems, at the end of the day I'm in love like that, too.


To me, the fact that I can say I share that with such men.. To be associated with such love, with such heroism. It gives a vivid demonstration of why I unashamedly venerate them.


I will find an icon of them to add to my shrine.

Here's another picture of what they looked like in real life:

It occurred to me while watching this film that the logic of imputed merit in the theology of indulgences is now very clear to me.

This is the treasury of the Church. The merits of her saints. By grace, even a poor fool like me shares in their and her greatness.. I too share in their immense merit, though possessing little or none of my own. Their love and faith, and the graces they receive come also to me. The overwelling fecundity of the economy of grace, the consuming mystery of love.. Their sacrifices, their love, their prayers, their imitation of Christ and participation in his crucifixion.. It's not merely their story that inspires, it is the sacramental nature of their sacrifice that confirms and strengthens the Church. Including me.

No greater love a man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.

Thank you so much, my fathers. Pray for us.


Christ to them, they to me, the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son to us all.


It seems merely too great a gladness for me somehow to bear.


Know that this movie is no sentimental hagiography, though. It is not in the least bit saccharine or stereotypic. The life of the monastery and their interaction with the surrounding community is richly and gently depicted. You get a sense of the men and their personalities. Their fears, weaknesses, their struggles.

You see how communal life is, how they are challenged by their vows (I believe Trappist Cistercians take the normal three: chastity, poverty and obedience, as well as the Benedictine promise of stability to the community, meaning they are in normal circumstances to remain in the community they make vows in) .. Of how sometimes there are tensions and dissension.

You see them interacting with the local people - both Christian and Muslim - and even attending a Muslim marriage and discussing religion very kindly and openly with them.

I was thinking how their lives - their vow of stability, their emphatic humanity, how they all kept returning to the nature of their vocation to live their lives there, then, with those people, in that place and time. That is the logic of the Incarnation. Christ is not some gnostic new age archetype, but always uniquely experienced, personally, specific to each individual's time and place.

This is sacramental and carnal scandal of Catholicism: He came and dwelt amongst us. He loved them, there. He died and rose, and they saw him and touched him. Not figuratively, but actually.

That's what they do in the film. This is our place. God has called us here, to love one another not in some abstract idealist fashion, but in the fear and temptations of this very moment.

Like in Galilee and in Jerusalem. There. Then. Now in every tabernacle throughout the world, at every single of the hundreds of thousands of masses offered everyday, hundreds of masses in very instant, throughout the world. The sacrifice of Christ made perpetual, eternally now, but yet uniquely present to each one of us given the extreme grace and privilege of receiving him in an intimate and singular encounter of the Eucharist.


This is what it means to be a Christian. What it means to be a human being. Each of us are a unique theophany, an iconic encounter with the divine image.


That they so consciously embraced that vocation, and did not run away even though they were afraid and tempted..

It was Mary, Mary and John on Calvary.



I also really, really appreciated how the mass and liturgy of the hours was presented by the film in an authentic fashion. Most of the time Hollywood botches things sloppily. The fact that the details seemed all correct made the story flow.


Unlike Into Great Silence,




(Another film about another French monastery, a documentary of Cartusians in the Alps, also beautifully shot and maybe educational for non-Catholics, or people who have never been to a monastery.. )

This film actually moved me to prayer.

Into Great Silence had no narrative. It was just the film maker shooting in the monastery while the monks went about their work and prayer. I said in my last review below that the only other film I remember falling asleep in was The Matrix and that Ice Ice Baby flick, but I just realized that I fell asleep in Into Great Silence , too. Carthusian monks don't talk much. They take a promise of silence, and they generally only open their mouths to chant and eat porridge. It wasn't exactly a moving cinematic experience.. I mean, I fall asleep at adoration or early morning prayer all the time. Dim the lights at liturgy and start chanting and I'm out in 15 minutes.. And that's when I'm there in the presence of God myself, and praying too. Sitting watching other people pray for two hours is just nonsensical. It's like watching people eat or sleep. Not amusing.


This film is very different. There was prayer and mass throughout, but in snippets. Not only that, most of it is in French. Most of which I know myself from living and praying with Eucharistein for a year. I caught myself praying along sotto voce with them in the film. It was sublime. There was also Latin and Arabic in the film, which also was fun.

I kept on thinking of things I haven't thought of for a while.. missing people.. Of how those men remind me of amazing friends I've been privileged to know. And love.


Gloire à Dieu, au plus haut des cieux,
Et paix sur la terre aux hommes qu'il aime.
Nous te louons, nous te bénissons, nous t'adorons, nous te glorifions, nous te rendons grâce, pour ton immense gloire,
Seigneur Dieu, Roi du ciel,
Dieu le Père tout-puissant.



Now to wrap this up, the only negative criticism I'll make is that the larger historical context of those monks being in Algeria was not really explored. There were a few references to French colonialism, and it was clear that the Algerian Army and officials they interacted with wanted them gone.. The reason for that hostility isn't really explored.

I kept thinking of all the conversations I've had with Arab Muslims and Christians in which the colonial, medieval (Crusade and Islamic expansion/jihad) as well as ancient history is very very explicitly in people's minds.


One of the reasons I've come to despise Americans - and I need publicly to confess this anger, because I still boil with this after ten years - is how damn clueless and callously ignorant 99% of us are.


History - even the bulk of our own relatively recent past - is largely meaningless to us.


Take for example the odd fact that Saint Augustine is from Hippo.. Just for example, a random indispensable fact that some Americans might have as a trivia response.. But I know from talking to Arabs and Frenchmen that those monks definitely had St. Augustine very much in the forefront of their minds while living in Algeria, believe me.



Such details never seem to occur to Americans - not even our politicians - as being relevant. I mean, the likes of Huckabee and maybe even Romney probably can talk good game about Joshua, the Canaanites, and the Book of Daniel's supposed lurid relevance to Israel and Iraq and crap like that, but the intervening 2600 years is lost on them.


And I hate them for it. This is one of the main sins I am struggling with. My fury over their pusillanimous warmongering bigoted stupidity burns and distorts me, even now.

I seriously need to get away from it all somehow. Maybe I should go to Algeria, too.


I'll close by noting that the Wikipedia article I link to above states that the final tragedy in the film, though it was claimed to have been committed by Islamic rebels, may in fact been actually committed by Algerian intelligence and military forces..


There's no hint of that in the film, but the story is so full of normal, sane and humane Muslims that it is still very clear that this film is not making any propaganda points about Islam.


Which is to me - someone who has lived a few years among the Believers in Turkey and Egypt, and traveled throughout the Middle East, was very comforting. I'm sick of propaganda by fools who know nothing about Islam or Muslims splashing their lurid fantastical fears in the media.


This film, on the contrary, ends with a beautiful voice over meditation that is apparently from the abbot's actual letters or journal, about how whatever happens no one is to blame Islam or Muslims for their fate. That they had come in peace to live there, and had been welcomed by the people with love.


And that is about all there is to say. Pray for us, Father.



---

Film Review: Source Code

Review: Source Code. Liked it. Thumbs up, B+. 4 Stars out of 5.




This is like the Matrix crossed with the Bourne movies, but better, in that the "matrixy" aspect of this film doesn't suck, and is actually almost coherent and mildly intriguing, as opposed to merely unspooling into puerile stupidity like the Matrix trilogy does.

(I saw only one and a half of those three films, by the way. Mildly enjoyed the first one, but then fell asleep in the theater during the second, an honor I think is only shared by that Vanilla Ice film that came out back in 1991 - I saw it in Izmir, and fell asleep after 15 minutes.. )

The basic plot of the film is this: they've developed technology called the "source code" that allows us to project the mind of someone with similar biological parameters back upon "the halo" left in time of that person's consciousness for eight minutes before their death.

Or something like that.

If you accept this conceit, and are able to suspend disbelief that much, the rest of film is pretty straight forward.

Jake Gyllenhaal's character is sent back to inhabit the mind of a man on a train about to be destroyed by a terrorist bombing. In the beginning he doesn't understand what is happening to him, and is repeatedly blown up, each time to again be re-sent into that same eight minute time frame to investigate and discover who left the bomb, and what his plans for future mayhem are.. He's a detective feeding information to his handlers who control the "source code" and who interrogate him at the end of each of his subsequent missions into the code.

Like Jason Bourne, he's an almost clean slate within the immediate narrative arc. He knows his name, remembers that he's a captain in the Army who last he can remember was in Afghanistan flying helicopters.. He has no idea how he ended up in the situation he's in, getting sent back repeatedly onto this train.

Each time he gets set into the source code, he is in the same moment, but is able to use knowledge acquired in previous sorties to delve deeper into the situation, and further understand what is happening. He not only figures out what is happening on the train, but also starts to piece together the larger context, and understand things about himself he didn't know before.

Storytelling 101. Nicely done.

Jake's character's mind is able to retain memories of his previous experiences in the "source code" and in this the narrative emerges.

There's a nice twist at the end of the movie that I did not expect, that knocks it all up a level and makes the entire plot even a little more interesting.


In sum, this film, like the Matrix, is a gnostic fantasy, in which the material world is reduced to a numerical "matrix," the "source code." In this the mind is more real than matter, and in fact the mind eventually escapes matter altogether, becoming an angelic intelligence. The self is also reduced to consciousness, to thought and memory, and is in a perfect Cartesian fashion ontologically and existentially alienated from the body, which is finally understood to be a passing illusion like all other matter.

The real is knowledge and numbers. The "code" or "program." The material is a passing and imperfect illusion to be manipulated by the mind through accumulated knowledge and understanding.

The fact that each time he reenters the source code he has only eight minutes of halo to work with before the source code resets, is of course a numerological trope.

The shape of the number 8 is itself the infinity sign. The snake eating itself, time folding back in itself. The Resurrection of Christ occurs on the first day of the week, which is to say the day after the end of the beginning, the renewal after death.. The seventh day consummates time in rest, which is death, but is recapitulated in the the first of the new week which is also eighth day. There were also eight people on Noah's Ark, when God "reset" creation. I think there is much more esoteric meaning to that number, but can't be bothered to delve into that now.

If you stop the film at the beginning of the preview clip I post here above on the part around the 20 second mark where his watch is shown, you'll notice that he "comes to" at 8:40 am. Forty is 8 times 5. 5 is death. Friday (the day of the Crucifixion) is the Christian fifth or Jewish sixth day. Christ bore five wounds (each hand, each foot, the spear in his side. My blog thematically commemorates his head being left alone, and only crowned with thorns..)


His release comes at 8:48 am. 8 6 times 8.


It also occurs to me that Jake's character's name "Captain Stevens" which may possibly be a reference to the proto-martyr St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr whose feast is the day after Christmas. The man whose body he inhabits is named Sean, which is a Gaelic corruption of the French Jean or English John, which comes from the Hebrew "God is Gracious," and is of course the name of the "Forerunner" John the Baptist who baptizes with water (symbolizing death and rebirth) as well as John the Apostle, the only apostle who did not run away during the Crucifixion, but who stayed at the foot of the Cross. The Apostle John is also the only one of the apostles to die a natural death, the only one not to be finally martyred..

Furthermore, the girl Captain Stevens wants to "save" is named "Christina.."

(Christina being played by the very foxy Michelle Monaghan.. Note also that Vera Farmiga, playing the air force officer running the source code computer is also beautiful as always..)

The bomb is a release in fire, pentecostal (by 10 by 5) or something like that..


All of these details may take on a certain symbolic resonance after you've seen the film.


I'm a neophyte at all of this, fill in the punchlines for me, please.


My point is that the filmmaker's clearly a clever fellow, and I appreciate that.



So, the entire film is mildly entertaining, as well as another testament to our cultural fascination with computers and faith in progress.


Worth seeing, in other words.



---