Conversation between a Christian and a Hollywood producer:
Christian: “How come you never have any sympathetic Christian characters in your movies?”
Producer: “What do you mean? We have lots of sympathetic Christian characters in our films.”
Christian: “Name one.”
Producer: “Well, there was Sister Angelica in _______________.”
Christian: “Sister Angelica became an atheist in that film.”
Producer: “That’s what I’m saying! Sympathetic! What could be more sympathetic than that?”
Thanks to Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard for alerting us to the fact that Madeleine L’Engle, the influential fantasist, has passed away.
I’ve never read any of Ms. L’Engle’s books, since I missed them as a kid, and as an adult I made the mistake of finding out about her theology, which made me chary of them. But she is much beloved of many readers, including many Christian readers. So R.I.P.
Uff da, as we Norwegians say. I got home from work tonight, parked my car in the garage, lowered the garage door, and—snap!—the thing suddenly gave way and dropped like my spirits will, once I see the bill I’m going to get tomorrow. Can’t get the door open again, needless to say, and there is no side door. So I called a 24-hour garage door service place, and they’ll send a guy out tomorrow morning.
Hopefully my car will be free in time for me to drive up to Montevideo (we have a town called Montevideo in Minnesota, believe it or not) for the wedding I’m supposed to attend tomorrow.
Of course if they can’t get it out in time, that will give me an excuse not to attend. Which, all in all, I’d prefer. Hate weddings. But my aunt from California will be there, and her health is failing, and it may be the last chance I get to see her, so I promised I’d be there.
If I have a car I can get to.
That’s all the original material I’ve got tonight. I borrowed the following meme from Grim’s Hall:
1. Name a movie you’ve seen more than 10 times.
The Outlaw Josie Wales, as I mentioned a few days ago. Probably The Three Musketeers (the Richard Lester version). I don’t think I’ve seen any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy ten times yet, but it must be getting close.
2. Name a movie you’ve seen multiple times in the theater.
Same answer.
3. Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie.
Sam Elliot. Can’t think of anyone else. Robert Duvall, maybe. There was a time when Clint Eastwood would have been at the top of the list, but that time is long past.
4. Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie.
Sean Penn. George Clooney. Angelina Jolie. Dabney Coleman. (And if you think there’s a political subtext to most of those choices, you’re perceptive.)
5. Name a movie that you can and do quote from.
The Outlaw Josie Wales. Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
6. Name a movie musical, to which you know all the lyrics to all of the songs.
Camelot, because I was in it once (played Mordred, if you insist on knowing).
7. Name a movie with which you’ve been known to sing along.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
8. Name a movie you would recommend everyone see.
Local Hero (though I can’t guarantee everyone will like it).
9. Name a movie you own.
You mean the DVD? Not a lot. Josie Wales. Once Upon a Time in the West. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Lord of the Rings, extended edition. The Vikings with K. Douglas and T. Curtis…
10. Name an actor that launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops.
Can’t think of one.
11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in? If so, what?
Several. I’m old enough. The first movie I ever saw was in a drive-in—Around the World in 80 Days with David Niven. My family saw it on a visit to my uncle and his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.
12. Ever made out in a movie?
What is this “making out” of which you speak?
13. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven’t yet gotten around to it.
Amazing Grace.
14. Ever walked out of a movie?
Not that I recall.
15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater.
I must have teared up at some point in The Return of the King. Not sure, though.
16. Popcorn?
With butter.
17. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)?
Almost never anymore.
18. What’s the last movie you saw in the theater?
I think it was Stranger Than Fiction, which is pathetic (my movie attendance, not the movie).
19. What’s your favorite/preferred genre of movie?
Action, I guess. I like a good fantasy, but there are so few.
20. What’s the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?
The Ten Commandments. My parents warned us not to tell our grandmother, who didn’t approve of movies.
21. What movie do you wish you had never seen?
Beowulf and Grendel.
22. What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?
Magnolia, maybe.
23. What is the scariest movie you’ve seen?
I guess it was the original Alien.
24. What is the funniest movie you’ve seen?
The movie I remember laughing at most was The Return of the Pink Panther.
Movies fascinate me. I’m interested in what’s playing, what’s being made, who’s making them, who’s in them, and what they’re about.
I just can’t be bothered to go out and see them anymore.
Michael Medved says 3:10 to Yuma is a great traditional western, though. Maybe I’ll see that. Depends on how much the garage door people soak me for.
Wait. IMDB doesn’t list Sam Elliot as a cast member.
Isn’t there a law against that?
I’m going to stay away from the blog for the next several days, so be sure to tell all your online friends it will be safe to read Brandywine Books for a while. Start up a campaign, if you like. Send out the emails, saying, “Phil’s gone now, so go read his blog.” Of course, you can always say people should read Lars’ great blog, but now you have another reason to promote it.
Before I go, let me leave you with a snippet of fiction I wrote. I want to call it short short story, but it’s so brief it may not qualify even for that. Perhaps it’s a blog short. Anyway, have fun while I’m gone.
The Reason I Came
When they invited him to make himself at home, were they planning to treat him like the furniture? He wandered through rooms, receiving muttered acknowledgements from his hosts, who were busy paying bills, cleaning counters, and talking on phones. Maybe welcome was not their native tongue.
He found his nephew’s door ajar, inside the boy just waking up. He closed the door behind him and crossed the room to pick up a familiar book.
“Shall we read more about Robin Hood and his men?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the boy yawned, “I was just thinking about them.”
“That must be the reason I came,” he replied.
No, really–every situation, such as “Ten Poems to Read When You Get Stuffed in Your Locker.”
This is cool. I’m reading JXIIH’s novel, The Dark River, the sequel to The Traveler, and just finished a part describing free runners in London. “Ever hear of the Vast Machine?” one of the London characters asks. “It’s the computer systen that watches us with scanner programs and surveillance cameras. The Free Runners refuse to be part of the Vast Machine. We run above it all.”
Now I see an article on an actual free runner climbing walls and jumping between buildings. “Free running,” reports Brendan O’Neill, “or ‘le parkour,’ its original French name, is all about overcoming obstacles.” Sadly, these men and women give themselves to overcoming constructed obstacles when real, harder obstacles abound, but I don’t really blame them. I do the same thing in a quieter way.
“In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation. It exists on the lowest scale, and, in the art of fiction, belongs as much to the producer of “railway novels” as to Balzac, Thackeray or Tolstoy; yet it almost always marks the great creative artist. Whatever a man has it in him to do really well he usually keeps on doing with an indestructible persistency.”
Goodness, that’s something to pray after. Mark Bertrand comments on this quote from Edith Wharton.
First of all, a Philistine update. I think we can all agree that it’s a sad commentary on our times that so little attention gets paid to the Philistines anymore.
This item from Mirabilis reinforces, I think, my contention that the Samson story in the Book of Judges was not intended to provide a role model for us all (see my previous post about him here, which generated some controversy in Comments). Archaeologists have learned, according to this article, that the Philistines were regular consumers of pork and dog meat.
We already know that Samson broke his Nazirite vows by touching the carcass of a lion. It now appears probable that during all those Philistine banquets he intended, he ate pork and dog meat.
Like a knife in his mother’s heart, I’ll bet.
My view of Samson is that he’s an example of a guy who was given great gifts by God, but wasted them on his own passions and pleasures. A cautionary tale, a typological picture of Israel, but not a story for emulation.
Speaking of misusing your gifts, I found a very weird story from Poland by way of the New Zealand Herald. Ever wonder whether the people who come up with those grisly scenarios in the crime thrillers might not be a little twisted themselves, a little corrupted in their souls?
Apparently, at least one of them was. (Hat tip: World Views.)
So think twice before you attend your next book signing.
I know for a fact that every time a pagan deity materializes or the space-time continuum is violated in my neighborhood, the police put me under surveillance.
Terry Teachout advises us on “what to do when an artist is discovered to have dirty moral laundry.” He offers five points to remember.
Does it really count as a book review when you explain why you tossed the book aside less than half way through? Because that’s what I did with Jeffery Deaver’s The Vanished Man.
I was not disappointed with the author’s skill. He writes a good story, creates a tight plot. His characters are well realized.
No, I just didn’t like the points he was trying to make, and I didn’t want to waste any more time on them.
The Vanished Man is a well-crafted thriller with a clever premise. What if a master magician became a serial killer? What if he felt compelled to re-create the feats of famous escape artists like Houdini, except that he stages them with innocent victims, leaving them no avenue of escape? And what if he were skilled in quick changes, illusion and lock-picking, so that even when the police have him surrounded, he can slip away from them?
That’s the promising scenario of The Vanished Man.
But Deaver lost me as a reader. I doubt if he cares. He clearly despises people like me, and wouldn’t want us for readers.
For instance, I’m a sexist pig. I don’t believe women (in general) make as good policemen as men. I believe men have both an obligation and a psychological need to protect women, and that putting women in harm’s way debases both them and the men.
In Deaver’s world, about half the cops are women, and any suggestion that a guy thinks even for a moment that women don’t make equally effective cops proves that he’s a Neanderthal.
There’s a conservative Protestant pastor in the novel, and at the beginning he seems to be portrayed pretty sympathetically. This immediately made me suspicious, and I was right to be. A little further in, we learn that the pastor is a child molester, and that he’s in New York City to perform a political assassination on behalf of a right-wing militia group.
That was when I lost interest.
Nobody pays me to read these books, and I don’t have unlimited time left in my life. I’m not going to spend that time reading fiction that insults me.
No doubt some people feel the same about my books.
Fair enough.