Just watched: There Will Be Blood (2007), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. In an epic cage match between capitalist rapacity and religious charlatanry, who wins? Duh. Do we need to ask?
As much a pleasure it is to watch Daniel Day-Lewis do anything, including his all-time-great villain work here, I found myself unable to fully get over his impersonation of Hugo Weaving doing an American accent. And the sheer relentlessness of his character’s misanthropy, with neither origin story nor heroic counterweight, left me with no one to root for and thus no love for this movie. Plus, Jonny Greenwood’s score is distracting.
Like Kane in the last century, surely we’ve been misled to regard this film as one of the greatest of the 21st. It’s not even one of the greatest films I’ve seen about greed this century. (No Country for Old Men rightly beat it at the 2008 Academy Awards.) Give me Rian Johnson for savvier filmic critique of avarice or religion.
I don’t normally write negative reviews—what’s the point?—but the overpraise for this one almost demands it. I think maybe people just love them a good, scenery-chewing milkshake monologue. (Please do count me among them.)
Just watched: Charade (1963). Having thesetwo all-time most charming American film icons together on the same silver screen would likely have been enough to qualify this thriller-comedy-romance as a classic. Yet here they have at their disposal not only their own abundant charisma and sense of timing, but also a smart script, Henry Mancini, the City of Lights, and Givenchy. Not to mention directorial sparklemeister (né dancer, then choreographer) Stanley Donen, whose feel for space and staging shows up in every shot. Top-five classic Hollywood magic stuff. A parable of courtship as spycraft and of the trust pitfalls of love.
Just rewatched (with Sully, who hadn’t seen it yet): The Shawshank Redemption (1994), written and directed by Frank Darabont and based on a short story by Stephen King. Excellent, chockablock with virtue (moral, thespian, and filmic) and vice (mostly moral), yet misses being a must-see because it crawls through a river of shit and comes out clean. Darabont directing is like Rubin producing: Unambiguous, transparent, safe. Like Capra with cusswords.
[edit, 3/25/26]:
Today, the part of this movie that gets me most is the following lines from Brooks’ letter:
I can’t believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they’re everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.
Rage, rage against the dying of The Life. Or rage against The Machine. Or something like that.
Love has a speed. It’s a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice it or not, at three miles per hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks (Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God).
Just watched When Harry Met Sally (1989), written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. With the exception of the old sub-subgenre of the elite screwball comedies and with very honorable mention to the equally old but not as screwy The Shop Around the Corner, romcom is not my genre. But this is the best of its late-20th-century breed, at least that I’ve seen. It’s a screenwriter’striumph. Yet I am left wondering: Can a man and a woman be just close friends?
Just watched In the Mood for Love (2000), written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. An exquisite Hong Kong pas de deux and series of color-coded pseudo tableaux vivants depicting the sad, halting victory of moral vanity over smoldering desire.
Just watched Get Out (2017), written and directed by Jordan Peele. Well-written, expertly cast, Hitchcockian contrivance as feature-length parable about being Black in a White world. Is it naïve to think it could be a revelation to some? Probably, but the movie did, I think, succeed in helping cultivate my own capacity for sympathy. An astounding directorial debut.
Just re-watched: The Truman Show (1998) written by Andrew Niccol and directed by Peter Weir. Film studies classes and media studies classes could (and hopefully do) have field days with this movie that would benefit humanity. I, for lack of time to sit, think, and write well along those lines, will offer this single intertextual connection along a more theological-anthropological line: “…so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death…and free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives“ (Hebrews 2:14-15).
I’ll throw in a sociological intertext, too: “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must…” (Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring).
Bonus: I knew Philip Glass scored some of the movie. But I hadn’t noticed until this viewing is the first time I noticed he’s in it!
Just watched: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) by Lotte Reiniger. It’s the oldest surviving feature-length animated film. Come for the historical interest and the opportunity to behold an impressive, highly original silhouette animation technique. Stay for the surprising way, despite the poverty of the plot, that the shapes of these silhouettes and the herky-jerky yet magical way they move resonate with and reflect at some semi-conscious level the way you you live, move, and have your being.
Just finished reading: “Beyond Words: On the role of silence in film and faith” (2025) by Arthur Aghajanian, whose main idea is that filmmakers can use and sometimes—but not often enough—do use silence to draw viewers in to spiritual experience.
Forgiveness is dismissal, as of a debt or a sin. There are two kinds of forgiveness:
internal-states-oriented forgiveness, and
relationship-oriented forgiveness.
Let’s take the protagonist of Secret Sunshine as our illustration. [spoiler alert] She can dismiss her son’s killer’s sin as reason for anger or rumination as soon as her anger and rumination is spent. She should try to reach the end of her anger and rumination, although these things do often take time. This is the sense in which love keeps no record of wrongs. This is the sense in which we say forgiveness frees us.
She ought not, however, dismiss her son’s killer’s sin as reason for distancing herself from her son’s killer or for wishing her son’s killer to be incarcerated until such time as that killer has made amends, requested forgiveness, and otherwise shown ample evidence of complete repentance. If she forgives him before those preconditions are met, then she is foolish and shortsighted, risking his further harm to herself, harm to others, and the killer’s moral deformation.
God can extend such forgiveness on some occasions because He is unassailable. And sometimes He does. But even He, for the sake of the other moral hazards, usually does not. We are to confess our sin against Him, point gratefully to the Cross as our amends, request forgiveness, and bear fruit in keeping with repentance.
Relationship-oriented forgiveness is still something we should want. Deeply. If we love our enemies, how can we not?
In the internal states sense, I have forgiven my father his shortcomings as a man and father. In the relationship sense, his sin no longer poses any moral hazard to me or to anyone else, so reconciliation is possible to the degree that his character allows.
Just watched: La Haine (1995) written & directed by Matthieu Kassovitz. A memorably stylized, scalding French portrait of three young fictional residents of the Parisian projects. A perfect film. In conversation with Do The Right Thing (1989). A borderline must-see for the sake of humanity. Borderline and not a shoe-in probably because I’m classist and racist. 🍿
Just watched: A Fish Called Wanda (1988), written and directed by Charles Crichton and John Cleese. It took some time for me to warm up to the humor (or maybe it was the humor itself that took some time to warm up). But once warm, the (admittedly rather broad) comedy came in buckets. All three leads whose lines were written for laughs do it excellently: Cleese does sympathetic pathetic very believably. Kline played a “live-action Daffy Duck”: Annoying at first, then annoying and hilarious. And he won an Oscar for it. Palin manages to play a severe stutterer without, as it seemed to me anyway, playing the stutter itself for laughs. (The stutter does serve as a small plot device sometimes, and it does enable at least one very funny scene in which it is a miracle Cleese and Palin don’t bust out laughing. But mostly it serves to develop sympathy for the character. If the stutter is ever the butt of a joke, it’s a mean joke told by another character and makes you like Palin’s character more.) Curtis does very well, too; I’m just not sure how to describe her character.
An interesting comedy/tragedy pairing with The Killing, which just so happened to be the previous movie we watched.🍿
Just watched: The Killing (1956) adapted for screen and directed by Stanley Kubrick. A perfectly shot and richly instructive fable. (And I mean that fable part: My internal landscape has these character-constructs in it.) Tense the entirety of its short runtime. With dialogue whose clever audacity made me laugh out loud several times. Film noir bettered only by Touch of Evil and The Night of the Hunter. Its unconventional narrative structure is often praised for its ingenuity, but I think its primarily serves to (successfully) help the viewer understand the plot. (Plots are often hard to follow in film noir. See the otherwise excellent Out of the Past.) I can’t tell you my favorite part without spoiling it. 🍿
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Just watched: The Last Stop In Yuma County (2023) written and directed by Francis Gallupi. Two and a half time shorter than Greed (1924) and three times as fun, with nods to the Coen brothers and Tarantino, in that order. Lots of craftsmanship to admire. Worthwhile, but only as a brain break.
“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
Why does my heart resist listening to music alone? For the same reason it resists watching audiovisual entertainment and reading books alone: It’s alone. It’s one thing when I’m by myself anyway, but if people are around, what the heck!?
The one thing I’ll say about The Magnificent Seven (2016): I cried a little—touched and pleased—that the three heroes who remained alive at the end of the film were the black man, the Latino, and the Native American. That’s a good change.
How do I want something but not grow anxious at its delay, interruption, or incompletion? This question came to me in the form of “The trick is to want things without becoming anxious when I don’t get them” as soon as I got out of bed this morning. It’s this anxiety that has been producing grumpiness recently. Here’s how:
patience,
attentiveness,
gratitude, and
love for others.
EDIT (12/28): There’s one other thing I’ll need: refusal to watch television or movies designed for entertainment. (I’m looking at you, Hawkeye.) Try though I might to think otherwise, I view it as a waste of time. I have for twenty years. There’ll be no changing it.