Fictive Family

I just watched a sweet film starting the marvelous Joan Plowright entitled Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. It is about an elderly woman who moves to London where her grandson also lives. She encounters a young man, a writer, and they become friends. The other residents think he is her grandson and since her own grandson never visits she allows the misunderstanding to continue. It is really about the way in which fictive family, that is family that is established by the participants rather than by birth, adoption, or marriage, can be much more profound than the family we have from circumstance. As someone with a large fictive family I quite delighted in the film.

Silence

I haven't had much time, or maybe better said, much inclination to blog lately. Robbie has been having another really bad bout of congestive heart failure and I've not been getting much sleep lately. I thought Saturday night that maybe the time had come to put him down but then he bounced back. We went into see his vet yesterday - she's fantastic - and she had done some research and found we still have a few treatment options. So we upped his meds and we're monitoring him and hoping to get him stabilized again. She said he might see 2009 but realistically I'm hoping he sees Easter. If he makes it to then then we'll aim for Pentecost. He's chewing his rawhide right now quite oblivious to the anxiety he causes me.

When I'm not anxiously watching over him I'm trying to get everything started for the new term. We start our annual spring lecture series in a few weeks and I have to get my head around my talk. And then there is the Newfie supper we are organizing in the parish. Gotta love it! So life is full right now.

One quick film review - friends and I watched The Cemetery Club Sunday and it was very odd. This wasn't the American film from the early '90s about a group of widows meeting at the graves of their dead husbands. This is a new Israeli documentary about a group of seniors who meet weekly for discussion and community at the Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem. At first it seemed so disjointed and all over the place that I was inclined to turn it off but after a bit we got sucked in to the story of two sisters-in-law who have been friends since before the war. One of the women was a lawyer and much of the focus in on her. Her story is an unhappy one despite significant honours in large part because it seems that growing up in the ghetto and then surviving the camps has left her emotionally really damaged. She is very self-absorbed and her sister-in-law takes the brunt of it. It was in the end a very difficult film to watch. As an older friend said to me recently after discussing Robbie's old age health issues, 'growing old is not fun.'

I Am Legend

On Monday a friend and I went and saw I Am Legend. It is a very good film, gripping, moving, disturbing, thought provoking. But if you love dogs it is also very difficult to watch in places. Over at the Journey Home Paul has some very interesting comments about the film. Will Smith connects the story of a scientist who is living alone in NY following a plague with the story of Job. There is a lot to seen in the movie including some discussion of the justice of God. I recommend it highly although the violence may be really distressing.

On a totally different note Little Mosque on the Prairie episodes are now available on itunes!

Bad and Good Movies

Superbad is just that, super bad. It got great reviews, 'it has heart,' 'it is crude but funny.' Well I watched 15 mins and never got to funny, just crude and decided life is too short and turned it off. The Simpsons movie on the other hand is funny...Spiderpig, spiderpig does what ever a spider can...

Golden Compass

I went and saw The Golden Compass a couple of nights ago with a friend. As an escapist movie at the end of a very busy few weeks it was fun. There's all sorts of controversy around the movie and the novel it is based on because the author Pullman is an atheist and the bad guys in his novels are 'the Church', renamed 'the magisterium' in the movie.

I think that it is unfortunately that one Roman Catholic school board has responded to the books by banning them and in doing so have acted exactly as Pullman expects. For the most part I suspect that most readers won't realize that Pullman has a (anti)theological point of view. I have a friend who has taught The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for years and only recently realized that the novel is a Christian allegory.

So I don't think Christians should boycott the movie - see it and talk about it. But pay close attention to what is said about freedom. The underlying message is that freedom is more important than anything else and freedom for Pullman means freedom from any authority, constraint or tradition. At several points in the movie the words, 'freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...' ran through my mind. It is questionable whether such freedom is possible never mind desirable.

At the same time, the suggestion that our souls walk beside us as daemons in animal form was really appealing to me...especially as Robbie struggles with another bout of congestive heart failure.

Lurking Mother

Okay, my mother is one of the lurkers who won't comment. But she caught the ? after Gail Bowen - I'll fix that - she is definitely Canadian. Not only Canadian - she's from Saskatchewan and her detective votes NDP. Gotta love it. Mom suggested Shirley Rousseau Murphy whose detective is a cat. Not my thing but then I like the really dark, dark mysteries. But for those of you who like fey... Thanks for the suggestion Mom!

Speaking of dark I have a few more to add to my list:
Laura Lippman (American, hardboiled PI)
Laurie R. King (American, some police procedural - one with a religious studies prof as the detective - she does Sherlock Holmes ones too but I don't read those)
Tess Gerritsen (American forensic)

Now to a movie recommendation. I just got home from seeing The Lives of Others. What a film! I was blown away by it. It is a German film set in East Berlin in 1985. The main characters are a playwright and his actress girlfriend and a Stasi officer assigned to watch them. There are so many twists you can't believe it but they don't feel contrived. And then when you think the movie is over it keeps going and some more of the threads are brought together for an even bigger punch. It is a really interesting film about what it is to be good and about the choices people make.

I was living in Germany when the wall came down and went to Prague a few months later. This film and another great German film, Good-bye Lenin, bring back a lot of memories of what it was like living in Europe during those years. This is really worth seeing.

Amazing Grace

I went to see Amazing Grace tonight with three friends. Two of us really liked this story of William Wilberforce's campaign to abolish the slave trade, while the other two didn't.

It is a flawed film. There is no chronology - the film jumps back and forth and sideways and for no real reason. It is often very confusing and it is difficult to make out how the legislative campaign developed. Yet there are so many powerful moments and emotions that I loved it anyway. At the end when the pipers played Amazing Grace I was wiping the tears away. The scenes with Wilberforce and John Newton, writer of the hymn and former slave trader, were the most poignant.

In the same way I thought the film Romero was flawed but very moving. There is power in the stories of these saints that transcends the limitations of weak film making.

Evening Reading

I've been spending evenings watching some wild movies and reading some great books. The other evening I read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. I love her books - they have such an interesting rhythm. She writes:

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Barbara Brown Taylor said something similar at our clergy conference a few years ago. She said you should always preach with the idea that someone in the congregation has less than six months to live and you don't want to waste their time.

One of the films I've watched this week is Y tu mamá también . I don't know if I knew that I had only a short while to live that I would want to go on a road trip with two sex crazed teenagers and try to teach them how to be better lovers but it was an interesting movie. Okay, so I'm stretching for a connection here. But the film is worth seeing if you can handle the sex and language (I give this warning because I got blasted once for recommending a movie in a sermon and not clarifying that it had rough language).

Don't know what I'll watch tonight. It is summer time and I haven't watched the Godfather trilogy yet. It is usually my ritual to welcome summer. That and Mr. Baseball, Field of Dreams, and Bull Durham. I'll let you know.