“The best new films you’ve never heard of tell the stories of working-class women—a real estate agent and a factory worker—with scenes of ethical crises and life-changing decisions as compelling as higher profile films like American Sniper.”
Jeffrey Overstreet writes about the movies Something, Anything and Two Days, One Night. I haven’t seen the second one, but I’m sure it’s moving.
Rod Dreher has written a personal reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy in a book called How Dante Can Save Your Life. Readers are posting mixed reviews, partly, it seems, because they don’t understand the depth of the subject matter. Dreher quotes a review and offers some reflection on the family matters he revealed in his book:
Given his life experiences, it would have been easy for Dreher to paint himself as a victim and blame everyone else for his woes. But neither God nor Dante allows him to do so. Rather, as he descends the levels of the inferno and then ascends the cornices of purgatory alongside the Florentine poet, he comes face to face with his own propensity to make golden calves out of his family and his tradition: in a word, southern ancestral worship. Yes, his father and sister must bear some guilt, but Dreher alone allows himself to become bound to these false idols.
He says, “For me, Dante’s understanding of sin not as lawbreaking but as a damaged form of love was important to understanding my crisis situation, and how to break out of it.”
Terry Teachout reflects on some writing advice from Ira Glass that has passed around the Internet for years. Here’s a part of it, if you’ve seen it before. “But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.”
The bottom line is to write through the discouraging junk until you gain the skill to write with the excellence your taste has always wanted.
Teachout says he didn’t have problem as such, because he didn’t start writing creatively until he had spent many years writing professionally.
All this leads me to believe that Ira Glass’ observations about the relationship between taste and creative inhibition are the answer to the question of why so few drama critics try to write plays. If you’re a competent critic, then you’re painfully conscious of the yawning gap between “good” and “pretty good.” That knowledge can’t help but be inhibiting—especially when you earn your living by sitting in public judgment on the creative work of other writers. . . .
For the moral of my story is that while it’s important to be realistic, both about your own abilities and, more generally, the larger prospects for success in the world of art, it can be just as important not to let yourself be overwhelmed by that realism.
Filmmaker Franck gives us two and half minutes of beauty in this video of two boys in the French Alps. When you’re ready to take a break from your work, stand up, breath deeply a couple times, and watch this.
More photos of the French Alps can be seen here.
For your delectation and inspiration, here’s Sissel Kyrkjebø, the pride of Bergen, doing a fine arrangement of “Amazing Grace” at the wedding of one of her band members. This is essentially the same arrangement, by Andrae Crouch, she did on her “Innerst i Sjelen” album. This recording lacks the quality of the studio version, but the live performance in a Norwegian church has charms of its own. Have a good weekend.
“If we say we believe God is sovereign, but spend our days wringing our hands and fretting, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.
If we say we believe God is love, but spend our days berating ourselves and others, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.”
Lore Ferguson has a brief devotional on this theme at a new website for gospel-oriented readers and leaders, ForTheChurch, at ftc.co.
Three MIT students decided to punk a computer science conference that published less-than-thoroughly vetted articles by speaking from completely bogus research. They developed a program that allowed them to produce random, “nonsensical computer-science papers, complete with realistic-looking graphs, figures, and citations.”
By drawing attention to “predatory publishers,” the students accomplished their goal, but their program went on to do far more. Their website still gets many visitors and the team receives emails from researchers who have used SCIgen to successfully submit papers to different conferences.
“Our initial intention was simply to get back at these people who were spamming us and to maybe make people more cognizant of these practices,” says [Jeremy] Stribling. “We accomplished our goal way better than we expected to.”
This is one of the ways more content is not better. Perhaps the publishers in question here are so far out of their league to begin with, they wouldn’t recognize legitimate research if they took the time to read it. On the other hand, maybe this is a sign that some scientific fields have advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from magic, and how do you analyze magic?
For the Bard’s birthday, “ten plays, quickly resolved through texts.”
DUDE DONT DO IT!
Should two chimpanzees have rights as “persons” under U.S. law? Rod Dreher doesn’t think so, but he does recommend that should the chimps be freed from their human oppressors, they should apply to teach at an American university.
The trailer for the new movie, Little Boy, worries me. I can’t tell if it’s setting up a story that cautions an audience willing to believe that faith can be measured in specific acts and feelings or panders to such an audience. This review doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it does imply that the faith of the boy relates to the dropping of the bomb by the same name. Maybe if they had released the film on August 6 for the 75th anniversary of the leveling of Hiroshima, we would have all gotten the connection.
Heh.
I gather the movie is heavy-handed enough to need more explanation–still some people need things spelled out, you know.
Tony Woodlief, author of the concept “Dreadfully Wholesome,” linked to an old article of his, in which he describes common sins of the Christian writer: neat resolutions, one-dimentional characters, sentamentality, and cleanness. On this last point, he says, “In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.”
The point, of course, is not to mix a little filth into our current shallow stories. Little Boy is PG-13, I believe, because it shows some of the horrors of war and uses some contextual bigotry. It may even have smoking! That’s a letter grade drop all on its own. The point, though, is to think honestly and depict reality appropriately.
A strong example of this is the recent movie, Something, Anything. I saw it on Netflix Instant a few weeks ago at a friend’s recommendation. Justin Chang summaries it nicely as having a “dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, between the pleasures of a comfortably middle-class existence and the rewards of an introspective, examined one.” This is not a heavy-handed movie at all. In fact, there’s a touching scene in the middle that clearly shows the disconnect between two main characters. Viewers might overlook that scene because one says anything, but that appears to be the tension point between them. The husband picks up his wife’s journal, exposing him to her struggling cry to God, but he just puts it back down and walks out of the room. He doesn’t know how to talk about that.
If you watch Something, Anything, let’s talk about it here. It’s beautiful, quiet film without common sins listed above.