Tag Archives: movies
The Bad-Christian Affirmation
Today you go in boats and you cast your nets and you catch fish for the market. Tomorrow you will go by foot and cast the net of your words and your deeds and you will gather people for the kingdom of God. Today you mend nets. Tomorrow you will mend hearts and bodies. Today you scrape and scheme and struggle to have something you can sell. Tomorrow you will scrape and scheme and struggle to have something to give away.
Outside In
In other words, there’s a reversal: the character who looks like he’s on top of the world is really not, not in the ways that matter, anyway. And the character who looks like she’s on the bottom, on the outside, is really at the top in the ways that matter.
Now it may or may not surprise you to know that this reversal is a very Christian thing. It’s something that happens over and over again in the Bible and the history of the church. It happens a lot especially in the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.
Chicago Diarist: Life is Brief, Young Maidens; Fall in Love
I wish very much that I had gone to that festival screening of Ikiru (today’s lesson: go see people you admire when they speak publicly, especially about something you really care about). I wish that I’d ever seen Roger Ebert in the flesh, many years as we shared this city. But at the same time I know it doesn’t much matter in the scheme of things. The words and the movies matter, to the critic and his reader anyway, much more than the momentary flash of bodily presence. “My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris,” he wrote in that 2011 essay.
The Everyday Uncanny
In recent years I’ve been easing my way back into scary fiction and the less gruesome sort of horror films. I am strictly a dilettante here; I can highly recommend Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House if you want a book, and recent films like It Follows, The Babadook, Let the Right One In, […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 