“Do we wish to seek our life except in God?” – Calvin
'A Thousand Christmas Candles Now Are Lighted'
Sissel singing a beautiful Swedish Christmas hymn from her first big breakthrough album in Norway. Gives me goosebumps still.
A blessed Christmas to one and all.
Film review: “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
The main takeaway that I take away from watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, second in Peter Jackson’s very fat movie adaptation of a fairly thin book, is that I have no interest in buying the DVDs. I want to see the movies in theaters, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t find in my heart any desire to buy them and watch them again.
The main reason, I think, is that there’s too much Peter Jackson here. The mix works out to about 50% Tolkien’s story, 50% Jackson’s special effects indulgences. He promised us a Hobbit fleshed out with material from the Silmarillion and other Tolkienian sources. But in fact most of the added stuff is just fluff – improbable chases, a Rube Goldberg strategem for fighting the dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, and wonderful to see in itself), and an entirely implausible romantic subplot. Also a fighting female elf, unknown in the original material.
As with the first film, it’s visually wonderful. Glorious, beautiful, dazzling. But I kept getting pulled out of the story by Jackson’s self-indulgences. I don’t think he trusts the material. In the classic moviemakers’ tradition, he wants to do the story the immense favor of improving it in his own image.
I kept wanting to tell him to sit down, shut up, and let Tolkien talk.
My movie companion thought it was better than the first one. He may be right. But I continue to feel that great opportunities were lost here.
Cautions for frightening scenes and fantasy violence. OK for kids above, oh, eight, I’d say.
Oh yes, I wanted to mention that the wise old dwarf Balin is played by Ken Stott, who played Inspector Rebus in the second Rebus TV series, reviewed here.
Where Are the Catholic Writers Today?
Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image and Slant Books, writes about the idea that strong Catholic writers can’t be found today. He is responded to a piece by Dana Gioia, which lists many Catholics in letters from several years ago, but none working today. Wolfe disagrees:
To take just one example, in arguing that few contemporary writers take on the fundamental question of belief versus unbelief, Elie dismisses Alice McDermott’s fiction as being merely about Irish Catholic New Yorkers from the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an oddly literal and obtuse reading of, say, Charming Billy
. True, the novel is set in that earlier time period, but the novel is told from the point of view of a younger woman—a disaffected, lapsed Catholic—whose exploration of her Uncle Billy’s life slowly and quietly brings her back to faith. Billy the alcoholic protagonist is a mess, and yet he is a loving soul, a kind of saint—a man of boundless faith in spite of his woundedness.
Then, in an unexpectedly poignant turn of events, the novelist Oscar Hijuelos wrote to the Times in response to Elie, citing his own novel, Mr. Ives’ Christmas
, just days before his sudden death of a heart attack. Like Charming Billy, Mr. Ives’ Christmas is another whispered tale of a wounded saint, a man of deep Catholic faith whose seminarian son is senselessly murdered. These novels by McDermott and Hijuelos are meditations on sainthood in the same vein as Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but instead of a protagonist as priest hunted by totalitarian thugs, they show us New Yorkers as unlikely saints: an advertising executive and a worker for Con Edison.
"Mitt hjerte altid vanker"
I have been dilatory in my responsibility to provide you with Sissel Christmas videos on this blog. Here is the greatest singer in the world in concert in Iceland, doing what I believe is her favorite song, a Swedish Christmas hymn called “Mitt Hjerte Altid Vanker” (My Heart Always Wanders).
Behind "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
A bit of the story behind “Do You Hear What I Hear?” It involves warfare and missiles in Cuba.
Discouragement for Writers
Nick Harrison offers these wonderful quotes and testimonies to discourage the writer in your family. Rejection. Loneliness. Struggle.
Merry Christmas.
Holiday Shopping with a Smile
Libby’s famous smile flickers when she sees another woman smile from the opposite escalator with a wide, toothy grimace.
“A face only a mother would love,” she mutters, striding over to the next mall store with extended sales. She smiles at the cashier. He grins back, his ears vanishing behind a wall of gleaming teeth.
Forgetting everything now, she hurries back into a suddenly manic throng, passing from leer to leer as other shoppers direct her to the fire-lit house built with toys. Waifs grab her hands and pull her to an enormous, red man with a wide, open mouth.
(Written for Loren Eaton’s 2013 Advent Ghost Storytelling Fest)
The wrath of Erling
Art by Jeremiah Humphries
Artist Jeremiah Humphries has done it again. Here’s an illustration of a scene from Erling’s Word, the first part of The Year of the Warrior.
Thanks, Jeremiah.
How to Publish a History Book
Professor Thomas Kidd walks through publishing his next book, a biography on George Whitefield. He says, “There are already excellent biographies on Whitefield, written both from explicitly Christian/pastoral perspectives, and from more academic/scholarly perspectives. I thought perhaps I could bridge those two approaches, as a professional historian and an evangelical Christian. Whitefield’s 300th birthday is coming up in December 2014, so the timing seemed right.”