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.
The pitch clock has worked: Baseball has become enjoyable to watch! ⚾️
“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.”
A remarkable exchange between characters in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning:
Ethan Hunt: I swear your life will always matter more to me than my own.
Grace: You don’t even know me.
Ethan Hunt: What difference does that make?
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 greatest delicacies taste of nothing when one dines alone.”
— Hanshiro Tsugumo in Harakiri (1962), written by Shinobu Hashimoto
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.
Carla’s comment about the killer “taking away [the] power“ of our main character in Secret Sunshine is illuminating for how things may have shifted since the days of Jesus: It used to be that the Pharisees could lord unforgiven-ness over people as a means of power, hence the importance of Jesus forgiving sins and—gasp!—authorizing scruffy Galileans, et al to do the same. But now, we’ve taken the requirement to forgive and turned it into an instrument for the maintenance of power. Ugh!
I ought not heed any internal pressure to read books. If I want to read, then I’ll read. Besides, I watch plenty of movies.
It’s time to add a seventh option to our grading of the films we see:
- must-see for the sake of humanity
- must-see for entertainment or aesthetic value
- especially worthwhile
- worthwhile
- only technically worthwhile
- not worthwhile
- avoid
The films I would put into this new classification are:
And I’m sure there are more. I’ll have to revisit.
I feel a certain reorientation in my reading life these past two days, and it has to do with love. If I am to do everything in love, then I am to:
- choose what to read in love, that is, in thanksgiving that there are so many good books from which to choose,
- choose what to read for love, that is, thinking of the books’ relative capacity to facilitate or express my love for God and love for others—by which I mean specific others around me, not just books that will answer questions raised by what other people on the Internet are thinking about,
- read savoringly, because to do so any other way is a waste of time that benefits no one, including myself, unless I’m reading purely for information, and is therefore unloving. Reading for understanding, entertainment, or aesthetics doesn’t even happen if I don’t read savoringly.
- read only at times when I can read savoringly, a constraint which will have the added benefit of making my responsiveness to the actual world around me much better and thus my actual total quantity and quality of love in any given day.
Also, when I switch to reading articles, I should be selective enough with my Instapaper queue that I find it easy to pay close attention to each article I do read and I get through it all in a timely manner. Basically a miniature version of the above rules.
With movies, it is easier:
- I love God while watching movies because I watch them in thanksgiving.
- I love Carla while watching movies because she wanted time to watch movies together to be a part of our life. We wouldn’t be watching movies together if I didn’t like her.
- Movies are shared activities, if passive ones. They are much easier therefore to meet the “to the enjoyment of relationship with” portion of my definition of love.
Thank you, Ethan, for requesting employee input ahead of annual reviews. Thank you, Éa, for being up for me walking the mile and a half to school today after you had a bellyache that kept you off the school bus. Thank you, Carla, for being someone to admire, you doula, preschool teacher, mom, councilwoman, and tumbler. Thank you, God, for making the problem of evil and the problem of unanswered prayer seem small today. Thank you, Bones, for delicious bread and fun times. Thank you, Frank Capra, for making It’s A Wonderful Life, which we plan to watch this Friday on Blu-ray. Thank you, Sony, for developing the Blu-ray format.
Carla and I watched Transcendence (2014) last night as per Instructions. It probably couldn’t have been more perfect taken as a message from God: People think Him less than human and misconstrue intentions. But, as Paul Bettany’s character Max says at the end of the film, ”He created this garden for the same reason he did everything. So they could be together”—the “they” being us. His intentions are purely loving and beneficent, even if His methods are foreign to us.
And that’s just the core of what you can take from it. It can get much richer than that.
I saw an IMDb post entitled, “Humanity Lucks Out With A Benevolant AI God, And They End Him?!?” Isn’t that just what we’re doing with God?
I am grateful for the brief moments of fun Sullivan and I had at the edge of Struble Lake today playing with the Harbor Freight “Neptune” RC boat that Dad had bought a year or two ago. I should emphasize brief moments the remote control started smoking and stinking through the inverter switch ports after about one trip out and back by each of us. But that was most of the fun! For the sake of continuing relationship, I should remember to ask Dad about the results of his postmortem on the remote.
I am grateful for the folks at PBS Kids, who air such entertaining, sweet-hearted children’s programming as Curious George and Wild Kratts, both of which enjoyed alongside Kathy and Uncle Mike while sitting at the kitchen table at Dad’s house today.
I am grateful for the moment of clarify I had reading Romans 14 this evening: If I let Paul’s use of the word “doubt” (diakrino) in vv. 22-23 interpret James use of the same word in James 1:5-8, then it is clear that Boyd’s thesis about “doubt” not being synonymous with uncertainty is true.
Actually, reading all of Romans 14, which touches on ritually-based vegetarianism and people following their own consciences, was exciting.
I am grateful for the light resolution I made while on my evening walk tonight that I can thank God for everything good and usually thank someone else for everything, too—a resolution I put into practice by thanking Christian Carion for making Joyeux Noël, which we watched with the Rookes last night.
I am grateful for Carla, whose beauty and diligence inspire me.
This is how I feel.
If, when I’m old, you were to ask me to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I predict I’d tell you it was I day I think—I hope—I turned a corner in my character. You see, since screening the finale of the second season of Gatiss & Moffatt’s Sherlock this past Saturday, entitled “The Reichenbach Fall” (and probably a good bit before then), I had been obsessing over the show: obsessing about its plot, obsessing about its characters, obsessing about its actors, and obsessing about its writers. I was obsessing about my decision to stop watching it because of my obsession.
I needed to be rescued from all this.
And it’s more than Sherlock: In recent months, I have spent far too much time and attention setting up operating systems, selecting an iPhone case, and other such minutiae. I prioritize trivialities. And it robs me of life (and steals from DiamondBack).
We have overcome perfectionism. We have overcome stoniness. We have overcome self-distraction at work. We have overcome religious doubt. (All of the above are still works in progress, but they are works well on their way with clear paths to completion.) Perhaps now we can take on obsessiveness and the resulting misprioritization.
Deliberation, yes: You do that about problems and decisions. Cogitation, yes: You do that about profundities. Obsession, no: You do that, by definition, with things you ought not to. And I know what it feels like.
If you’re going to obsess about anything, do it about giving yourself for the benefit of other people.
You can almost see the Sherlock characters’ eyes: I’m doing this only because the writers are making me.
Titillation and puzzlement and not virtues of fiction, Sherlock.
I don’t want to watch any more Sherlock. The show has reached comic-book levels of convolution after just two seasons that simultaneously fascinate and bore me at the same time. The boredom alone is reason enough to discontinue watching, and the fascination is distracting in the same way every other superhero franchise is.
Convolution ≠ intrigue.
If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I’d tell you that it was the day Sullivan and Éa enjoyed their first feature-length film: the delightful-in-concept-and-execution Monsters, Inc. We watched it at the Peters’ house after church because Josh and his new girlfriend Esther were watching it. They kids sat on our laps most of the time. Carla provided some commentary and educational questions for the kids along the way to help them process.
I woke up Sunday morning with Max von Sydow’s name in my head and an inkling that this name might be a hint from God. All I remembered upon waking was that he was an actor or a director. On Wikipedia that morning I discovered he played the knight in The Seventh Seal, Jesus in The Greatest Story Every Told, the villian in Minority Report, and Karl-Oskar in Troell’s 1971 film adaptation of Moberg’s The Emigrants. I read no further in the Wikipedia entry because I felt the reason I was to be thinking about von Sydow was contained in this opening paragraph’s list of his most notable movies.
I wasn’t sure at first what God might be getting at and asked Him to clarify which film was of interest to Him. It became clear upon further reflection: It was The Emigrants. Carla has recently enjoyed three of the four novels in that series and often talks of how she wishes I could read the books she reads so we could share in them. And I had just the other night and several recent nights before asked God to restore the love between us and help me to love Carla well. Watching the film adaptation of these novels that Carla so appreciated with her would be a away to proactively, creatively love her.
So I set to finding a copy. All I found were a few VHS copies in a libraries across the Commonwealth. But later that morning I opened one of the blue desk/TV stand drawers looking for software for Éa’s new keyboard and found along with the CD-ROM I sought a pair of DVD-Rs that Greta had given us for Christmas that contained The Emigrants and The New Land!
Could Greta have mentioned von Sydow’s name upon presenting the gift to us a few weeks ago and my subconscious mind surfaced it on its own, either in self-answer to my prayer or totally randomly? Yes. Do nonetheless I believe that it was the Holy Spirit giving Carla and me—especially me—a little gift in answer to my prayers about loving Carla and about Him talking to me and making Himself more real to me? Yes.
