It’s up on my other blog.
I am moving movies
I know there are about three of you out there who still read this blog. I feel for you.
I’m moving movie reviews over to Basket of Kisses. The first review in the new place is True Grit.
I am keeping Property of a Lady open for Pagan, spiritual, and personal musings, and event announcements (speaking engagements, etc.). I imagine that will remain infrequent.
Thanks for your patience.
Monday Movie Reviews: The Kids Are All Right and Laurel Canyon
I saw High Art a couple of years ago, and I was blown away by it. So after I saw The Kids Are All Right I decided to look up Lisa Cholodenko and see what else she’d done; I was surprised to realize she was responsible for High Art as well. Since I liked two out of two Cholodenko movies I’d seen, I added Laurel Canyon to my Netflix.
The Kids Are All Right (2010) 10/10
Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Benning) are a long-standing couple with two teenagers. When the kids decide to seek out the sperm donor who “fathered” them (Mark Ruffalo) the family structure is shaken.
I have found God
By “God,” I mean the old-fashioned God of the Torah and the Christian Bible, the God of my childhood. And by “found” I mean, I know who he is. Which, even if I don’t believe in Him, is still pretty cool.
If you think about the God of your childhood, most of you will agree that he is unquestionably male, but in a non-threatening way. Masculine but not…butch. Probably celibate, even.
In appearance, I think dignified gray hair is a must, and He is certainly tall, with excellent posture. His voice is deep and mellifluous, authoritative and yet comforting.
The attitude, though, is all-important. God is smart, of course, but more importantly, God is kind. He sure and commanding. He loves all of those in his care equally, loving us when we succeed and when we fail. Even when we squabble among one another, even when we are disrespectful to Him, He loves us.
Like a good parent, God doesn’t take sides, is proud of and respectful towards His children, gives us the room to make our own mistakes, but attempts to correct us before we go too far.
In short, God is » Read more..
Drumming the Names
Something like twenty-five years ago, I read Always Coming Home by my favorite author, Ursula LeGuinn. The people in this future-fantasy have a rich ritual life, including a ritual for the dead called Burning the Names. Names of the dead were “burned” in a community fire and grief was released.
From that, I adapted a ritual we call Drumming the Names. After the circle is cast, we start a slow, quiet rhythm. People begin calling out the names of their beloved dead, and everyone chants the name with them, to the beat. Often, the mourner will recite many versions of a name (a full name and “Grandma,” for example), while the first name offered is repeated. So you’ll hear “Nana” chanted over and over by your group while you say “Nana Jean. Jean Lipp. Nana,” and so on.
It’s pretty frickin beautiful. From the first time we did the ritual, we felt like it was an ancient tradition; like we’d inherited it from long ago.
Although LeGuinn described her Burning ritual as starting light and building, over many hours, to the names most painful to release, my experience is the opposite. We start with the big ones, the ones most pressing on our minds and hearts. Gradually, we include more and more names; ancestors, heroes, famous people, public tragedies (the Six Million, the 9/11 victims, the Haiti victims). As the circle becomes crowded with the dead (Gerald Gardner, Gene Roddenberry, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), it often becomes joyous. The drumming picks up, people dance, and we celebrate with our dead.
(In a smaller group, it will often simply quiet and fade, and not get to that ecstatic place, and that’s wonderful too, but I do love the ecstasy.)
A bunch of years ago—maybe 1994?—around there anyway, Isaac and I were invited up to the Center for Symbolic Studies for Samhain. Real Magic did a concert, and then Isaac and I led the ritual, which included the Drumming of the Names.
It seemed like there were two hundred people jammed into the room. The drumming became ecstatic. The names floated and danced around us; it was like a wave of noise and rhythm and memory and music. I remember we stood at the altar, holding hands, kind of witnessing it, and I turned to Isaac and I said “Someday they’ll drum our names.”
And so we did. On Saturday, we drummed Isaac’s name.
Blessed be.
Departed Pagan Elders
Green Egg has a list on their home page.
The Wild Hunt offers a list of notable Pagan dead for this year, as well as links to other significant deaths of 2010.
Blessed Samhain.
Dueling Movie Reviews: RED versus Salt
Over recent weeks, I’ve seen two movies with striking similarities, so I’m reviewing them both at once. This also helps to catch up on my enormous movie review backlog.
Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. Rather than allow herself to be taken into custody, she goes rogue, exhibiting superhero-level abilities in the process. An excellent supporting cast includes Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
RED (technically, it’s “Red,” but the title is revealed to be an acronym), stars Bruce Willis as a retired CIA agent marked for assassination. Fighting back, he assembles a rogue team, exhibiting almost superhero-level abilities in the process. The astounding supporting cast includes Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, and Karl Urban.
So, you can see why I’d place these two movies side-by-side.
Be specific
I hate vague, meaningless movie titles. Inception, Defiance, Out of Sight, Conviction. I don’t want a movie title that makes me ask, “Is that the one about….or is it the other, similarly-titled one about something else?”
A great title is specific and particular and probably can’t get past focus groups. A great title identifies the movie; for good or ill, you won’t be mistaking it for another movie (except for that time I went to the video store for Edward Scissorhands and came home with Ed Wood).
Proper nouns really work in movie titles. Saving Private Ryan. Schindler’s List. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? The Outlaw Josey Wales. Erin Brockovich is a great title because you definitely don’t mix it up with anything else, but of course, Hollywood thinks women are icky, so Betty Anne Waters gets renamed Conviction. Which might be the movie about dreams with Leonardo DiCaprio, or it might be the movie about adultery with Diane Lane. Or some other movie.
I would much rather see a marquee with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford than Life As We Know It, or You Again, or As Good As Dead. With the first one, I see a filmmaker and production company with the courage to stand behind their film. With the others, I see producers afraid of nouns. If you’re afraid of nouns, you probably aren’t making a very ballsy movie.
Monday Movie Review: The Town
The Town (2010) 8/10
For Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), Jim Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), and their friends, bank robbery is the family business. They live in the Charlestown section of Boston, a center for bank and armored car robbery. Now Doug wants out. He’s falling for Claire (Rebecca Hall) and the FBI is looking into his last robbery. But getting out isn’t going to be easy. Directed by Ben Affleck.
The Town makes an art of gritty, but it still looks good. Maybe I should say Affleck can’t make up his mind, but instead I feel like he recognizes the fine line between realistic and annoying. There’s certainly a trend towards documentary-style, hand-held, muted colors, and the like, to broadcast to the audience, “Hey, we’re authentic!” Yeah, sure. What Affleck does is cut in little bits of grittier filming, blended with a more conventional look, and it works. It’s important, because it’s the kind of movie where people say “the city is a character,” and so you do have to feel the locations. There’s a strong sense here of alleys, bars, shops, crappy apartments, gentrification—the whole way in which a city lives, breaths, and grows.
» Read more..
Disposable
I ate lunch in a cafe, and when I cleared my tray, I saw a sign on the garbage bin: “Do not put trays in the garbage. They are not disposable.”
Okay, but technically they are. I mean, you can dispose of them. If you couldn’t, then you wouldn’t need a sign.
