Second Breakfast

We watched Ladies in Lavender last night, a beautiful film starring Maggie Smith and Judi Densch, who are of course two of the most fabulous British actresses now gracing the stage or screen (Tilda Swinton is almost as fabulous as well, especially if you’ve seen Orlando). I could watch Mags and Judi cleaning their teeth and it would probably be fantastic and nuanced.

This film is about two elderly sisters living in a coastal village in Cornwall in the southwest of England in the period “between the Wars”. Into their careful and harmonious lives comes Andrea, a handsome young Polish man who appears washed up on the shore after a storm. The sisters nurse Andrea back to health, teaching him English as his broken ankle heals. Andrea’s presence wakes long-buried passions in Ursula, Judi Densch’s chracter, and disturbs the fragile peace of their lives. Andrea is also a talented violinist, and Olga, a beautiful young Russian tourist, offers him an opportunity to make a new life for himself. As these lives come together one knows that heartache will be inevitable.

The acting in this film is beautiful and understated. Densch and Smith are longtime friends, so their relationship as sisters is immediately believeable. David Warner and Miriam Margoyles (Dorcas) provide some excellent balance to the film as well, and Dorcas in particular provides some great comic relief to the otherwise rather somber tone to the story. The locations are also gorgeous. Definitely worth seeing if you’re at all a fan of these two great actresses.

We saw March of the Penguins last night at the Michigan Theater. Despite my misgivings (and the poor quality of the print and sound), it was a marvelous film.

At dinner beforehand, one esteemed literary friend grimaced slightly when I mentioned we were going to see the film, and opined that “it would be a great 30 minute special on the Discovery channel, but two hours is a lot of penguins”. Even with the gravitas of a Morgan Freeman voiceover, I wasn’t sure if a film documenting the lives of a bunch of waddling birds on the ice would be compelling. It is definitely compelling, and the narrative that Freeman voices provides enough of a hook to keep the film from being too abstract.

What I found interesting was the audience’s reactions to the story. There was a lot of laughter at the predictably “cute” moments in the film, and tears at the very sad, which seems to hang on the intentional and heavy amount of anthropomorphizing of the birds. The main thrust of the story is the extraordinary lengths that these animals must go through in order to mate and raise young. Each half of the breeding pair will spend many weeks without food, the males having to protect the egg during the harshest months of the Antarctic winter while the female feeds and later returns to feed the now-hatched chick. So when one mother’s chick dies of exposure, the narrator tells us “the loss is unbearable”, and indeed we hear the female bird cry in a lost, forlorn sort of way. Or was it a “lost, forlorn” cry? I don’t want to argue whether or not animals have feelings — they certainly seem that they do, but I find it dangerous to rely completely on interpreting the rest of creation entirely through the lens of human emotion. It either leads to arrogance (they don’t have feelings, so why does it matter), or silly, stupid sentimentality (oh, those bears are so cute! RAWR!….I don’t feel so good).

Regardless, this film is worth the hype. You’ll be glad to step out into the humid, August air after having watched these poor male birds stand about in -100F weather while protecting a single egg with their feet.

Rented “Constantine” last night. Was hoping for a fun, flashy popcorn movie with a cool gothy theme (demons and angels, impending armageddon, and so on). Instead we were treated to a boring barrage of oversimplified Catholic theology and pointless plot twists that weren’t particularly twisty but very plodding.

So there’s this guy, John Constantine, who can see stuff that other people can’t. Turns out there are semi-angels and -daemons that walk among us (”half-breeds”), and God and Satan are embarked on a detente game of influence with our souls as the prize. There’s rules to the game, and Constantine has established himself as the enforcer for those daemons who cross the line. Apparently he tried to kill himself because of his terrible visions (imagine seeing the undead on the bus every morning), and was dead for a couple of minutes before he was revived. But because he “took a life” (his own, although he’s not dead, so wrap your brain around that logic), he’s damned to hell for all eternity. Constantine hopes that if he does enough good stuff (i.e. blow bad guys back into the Pit where they came from) he’ll earn enough Elysian brownie points to put himself back in the good graces of the Almighty.

As you can imagine, the folks down below aren’t a big fan of John’s, and as Lou (wait for it….Lou….Lou….Lucifer!) points out to John when he pays him a visit: “We’ve got a whole theme park waiting for you, John”. And John’s got lung cancer, after smoking a pack a day since he was fifteen. Blah blah blah…we can all see where this is going.

Oh yeah, someone also happened to find the “Spear of Destiny” (the one that the Roman soldier pierced Jesus’ side with), wrapped in a Nazi flag in an abandoned church in Mexico, and the now-posessed guy is walking north on his way to Los Angeles (could the movie be set anywhere else than the City of Angels? No, of course not.) When he gets there, something bad is gonna happen.

All of this makes me say “Thank God I’m not a Catholic”. Not that this represents except in the most debased ways the teachings of the Catholic faith as I understand it, but I’m sure that for a lot of folks who see and read this kind of stuff they think “that’s why I hate religion…all of these arbitrary rules about who goes to heaven and hell”. The focus on hell and punishment that a lot of folks seem to go on about is truly macabre and sadomasochistic, but that seems to be the emphasis, if not the point of their religion. Our proper response to God is fear and trembling, because if we don’t mind our P’s and Q’s the Old Man in the sky is gonna send us down to the Old Man in the Ground, where we’ll be “torn apart again and again for all eternity” as the movie reminds us.

Where is the mercy of God in all of this? Where is the God that identifies so strongly with us that he suffered and still suffers with us? Where is the possibility of transformation, of repentance (that is, “metanoia”, or literally, to think again), of grace?

I’d say avoid this movie. There’s little in the way of entertainment here, and a lot to dislike.