Months of Free Movies: A Look Back

Last summer I was kicked out of a movie theater I'd been attending without incident for ten years. Sudden objection: I walk with a cane and carry a backpack (always have). Cane could be a weapon. Backpack could contain weapons.

I whined on Facebook and friends encouraged me to complain to corporate headquarters. Vivian was especially supportive. She told me to demand a year of free movies.

I did complain to corporate headquarters and I was offered several months of free movies. That period is coming to a close. Here's an assessment: given how much money is involved, and how many talented people there are out there, it's surprising how many bad movies get made.

Best Movie Seen: "Captain Philips"

Runner-up: "Monument Men"

Worst Movie Seen: "Her"

Biggest Disappointment: "Son of God"

Movie I Wished I'd Never Seen AND Wish I Could Imprison and Legally Punish the Filmmakers: "Prisoners." What a tortured, pretentious crapfest.

Movie that would have been much better had they not gone for tri-continental sweep, historical import, and truthy pronouncements about Art with a capital A and just tightened the focus and made it a character study of a bitchy woman and her charming chauffeur: "Saving Mr. Banks."

Movie I would not see not only with a free ticket; movie they could not pay me to see: "Gravity."

Most forgettable: "Pompeii," "Elysium," "Lone Survivor"

Most overrated and biggest Schadenfreude when it ended up empty handed at the Oscars, but offers most Amy Adams sideboobage "American Hustle"

Movie I would be least likely to see without a free ticket: "The Conjuring."

Movies I would probably have seen had it not been for the snowstorm, and, then, the snowstorm, and, oh look, another snowstorm: "Frozen," "Anchorman Two," "August Osage County."

Biggest, most nagging question: Where are the women? Where is the twenty-first century "All About Eve" or "Now Voyager"?

International Woman's Day: Child Bride Magazine

Thank you to Catapult. Source

"The Crooked Mirror" by Louise Steinman. Review of a New Book that touches on Christian-Jewish Relations

There's a new book out, "The Crooked Mirror" by Louise Steinman, published by Beacon Press.

It's about Polish-Jewish relations, but by extension it's about Christian-Jewish relations, too.

The book is just so awful.

Review below.

Louise Steinman's "The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation" has been praised as "appealing to wide audiences," and "unblinking, scrupulous and enduring." Richard Rodriguez called "Crooked Mirror" "the most extraordinary travel book I have ever read" about a "nightmare" country, "dark, haunted" Poland, into which "miracle" working Steinman breaks "shattering light."

In fact "The Crooked Mirror" is the self-indulgent, impressionistic travel diary of a New Age, dilettante Holocaust tourist. The book consists of brief, unorganized anecdotes. In one, a Lakota healer burns sweet grass and waves an eagle feather over Auschwitz visitors. In another, an impoverished Polish peasant listens to Radio Maryja. These anecdotes are meant to give us enough ammo to conclude who our protagonists and antagonists are. With the sketchiest of information, we presume to gain the authority to elevate the healer as a good guy, and condemn the old woman.

"Crooked Mirror"'s literary style is basic, its discipline absent, its arrogance depressing. Steinman's tic is putting two parts of speech at the end of sentences and separating them with a comma. The Jews she knew hated Poland more than Germany, "a fact I never questioned as odd, misplaced." Or, "why would you expect your neighbors to shoot you, take your house?" Or "she begged her father, her aunts." Or "he questioned her urgently, gently." Or "We baffled him with our reactions, our decisions." Or "my overcoat was forgiving, pliant." Steinman's tic is distracting, annoying. Where is the editor, the proofreader?

Steinman visits Treblinka and tries to say something of note about that piece of earthly Hell, but Treblinka receives fewer words than tedious descriptions of the dreams of Steinman's travel companion, Cheryl Holtzman.

During a layover in Paris, Steinman visits La Bibliotheque Polonaise – the Polish library. In this chapter she says a few things about Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, and then a bit about the gingko trees in Krakow, Polish words for trees, and how fashionably dressed and made-up the library's chief curator is. At the end of this chapter I had to ask myself, "Why did I just read that?"

Steinman asks rhetorical questions, for example, "Why does one person reject" stereotypes, and why does another accept them? She responds to her own rhetorical question: "Breathe in why. Breathe out why. So simple. So difficult." The chapter, and the book's attempt to plumb the serious questions it raises, end right there.

Steinman purports to be addressing how the Holocaust could happen, and why Polish Catholics responded as they did. Scholars have addressed these questions. Michael C. Steinlauf provides historical context and psychological insight. Jan Tomasz Gross cites economic motivations. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz writes about real tensions caused by high-profile Jewish Communists who did torture and murder Home Army veterans. Edna Bonacich and Amy Chua advance universally-applicable theories that explain atrocity as far afield as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Africa – not just acts committed by Polish Catholics. It behooves any ethical author and publisher taking on this topic to engage previous scholarship. Steinman and Beacon Press do not.

Nature abhors a vacuum. In this empty space where scholarship should be, Steinman reveals her "answer" to the big questions in a series of anecdotes. For the most part, older, poorer more rural and more Catholic Poles are "provincial" "Neanderthals" who hate Jews. Younger, better educated, more sartorially elegant Poles who have devoted their lives to recreating Poland's lost Jewish culture through tours, publications and artwork are good Poles.

Steinman and Beacon Press hand a free pass to the reader. Do you, reader, need to know any serious facts about Poland before making up your mind about any of these issues? Nah, not really. Just interpret the dream you had last night.

Breathtaking in its arrogance and solipsism, "Crooked Mirror" reports that Steinman and her travel companion Cheryl "imagined convening some grand international conference" for Jews and Poles. Later she and Cheryl powwow with "four sincere Polish university students. It was a start." "It was a start"? There have been numerous international conferences dedicated to Polish-Jewish relations. Steinman's and Cheryl's chat was not "a start" at anything.

Steinman appears never to have learned even conversational Polish – but that's okay; she speaks hot-tub. Steinman encounters an elderly Polish woman. This woman wears "threadbare" and "frayed" clothing. Her hands are "stained" with dirt. Her greenhouse is "rotting." Her lawn furniture is "overturned." Her blanket is "rumpled." Her hand is a "claw." This Polish peasant crone is listening to the "infamous Radio Maryja," an "anti-Semitic station." Steinman concludes that the old woman is an anti-Semite and "xenophobic."

Those who know Poland know that Radio Maryja does broadcast anti-Semitic material, but the station also broadcasts genuinely loving material. I have met deeply good people who listen to Radio Maryja. Not all its listeners are anti-Semites, any more than all NPR listeners are effete, brie-eating anti-Zionists. I suspect that had this old woman been more elegantly dressed – perhaps in garments by Hugo Boss, the Nazis' couturier – Steinman would not have judged her so harshly. Indeed Steinman, while writing about Poland but never capturing its appearance except to describe it in clichéd ways as dreary or grim, never misses a chance to report who is wearing a leather jacket.

Cheryl dresses "beguilingly" with "great fashion sense." Cheryl is an American woman who lives in the South of France and enjoys the beach. She makes everyone around her indulge her whims to march, unannounced, almost into strangers' laps at their workplaces, withdraw into pouts, stop a car suddenly, run down a public road, and scream, or to detail yet another one of her dreams. Cheryl's carte blanche to be difficult: she inherited grief from her survivor father.

The reader is to be less indulgent of August Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk, a Pole, was captured by Nazis at age 19 when attempting to join the resistance. He was imprisoned in Auschwitz for eighteen months. He was tortured. Kowalczyk described an SS man casually reading the newspaper, his pet dog at his feet, during this torture. Kowalczyk escaped. In retribution for his escape, Nazis gassed three hundred Poles.

The only thing in Kowalczyk's talk that raised a reaction from his listeners – one was "stricken" – was his perhaps casual comment that "Jews were resigned." Listeners to Kowalczyk's talk protested – just that comment. That was perhaps all they heard of this Polish man's description of his own crucifixion in Auschwitz. One must question a value system that allows Cheryl her constant indulgence of her own pain, though she was born in the US and lives in the South of France, and denies to a man like August Kowalczyk his heroism and his pain because he is Polish.

Steinman reports anecdotes as unquestioned fact. Scholarship shows that this is a mistake. People alter first-person accounts. Anecdotes may or may not be representational. A responsible storyteller addressing the Holocaust will compare first-person accounts with accepted scholarship. Steinman's readers will take these stories as true and representational. That is unfortunate on so important a topic.

Steinman Orientalizes. Because she does not speak Polish or Ukrainian, or possess much knowledge of the cultures she visits, Poles and Ukrainians come across as wacky exotics. They paint murals, sing songs, love or hate Jews, and kiss hands. Poles exist exclusively as "Neanderthals" who hate Jews or good goys who love Jews and devote their lives to them. There are no Poles who live their lives without their relationship to Jews being their primary feature.

I cannot imagine Beacon Press publishing such an Orientalizing text about Jews and the Holocaust. Would they publish a book about a tourist who spent several weeks in Israel and never bothered to learn conversational Hebrew, or penetrate Israeli culture? No. Then by what set of rules is this book's paradigm acceptable? Poles remain objects in this text – things about which Steinman speaks. They do not speak, or live, for themselves.

For Me, Lent is About Addition, Not Subtraction; The Meaning of "Forty Days"

Sarah Korf Flick.com 

For me, Lent has always been about addition rather than subtraction.

I have never fasted during Lent. I have never given up candy. I have never given up a bad habit like swearing or gambling.

When I go without food, I am prone to migraines. My dyslexia and other cognitive challenges worsen so that I find it hard to do my work – writing and teaching.

I try to limit swearing, and I don't gamble, all year round.

I find that when I give up a desirable indulgence like candy, that abstinence endows the candy with new power. The candy suddenly vibrates with the allure of the forbidden; it holds my always tenuous focus for ransom. I'd rather eat a bite of chocolate than not eat a bite of chocolate and obsess all day about the chocolate I miss so badly.

What I do during Lent is I add activities.

I try to pray the rosary every day. This Lent I resolve to be scrupulous about that, and not just try, but really get it done.

I also resolve to say the Stations of the Cross every day.

I love the Stations of the Cross, even though they are a prayer I find so moving I always cry.

I LOVE finding variations of the Stations of the Cross on the web.

I've done this before during lent. Close to the end of the day, in the evening, I find a new variation: the gay Stations of the Cross, the environmental Stations of the Cross, the women's ordination Stations of the Cross…

This morning I was scouring the web trying to find a distribution of ashes I could attend. I could not find any and I felt pissed off. I walked to work and as I was about to enter the campus library to meet with my class, I ran into a priest. He handed me a flier and invited me to mass and ash distribution which would occur just as I was getting out of mass. The meeting felt providential.

One of my students had ashes on her forehead. She is African American. I am always touched by African American Catholics, because I am so mindful of the church's resolute rejection of racism.

When too many liberal Protestants were tempted by Scientific Racism, and when millions of atheists and neo-Pagans gave into Scientific Racism wholeheartedly, committing crimes from the installation of a human being, Ota Benga, in the Bronx Zoo as an animal display, right up to Nazism, Catholicism relied on centuries of teaching, going back to Bartolome de las Casas, Sublimus Dei and Francisco de Vitoria, that spelled out Catholicism's utter rejection of racism. I think of Saint Katharine Drexel an American woman who was at the forefront of efforts to educate African-Americans and Native Americans.

I arrived late in mass. I was surprised to see a couple of people I know on campus. I had assumed one, from her last name and the contents of our many emails,to be Jewish. I had assumed another to be a conventional academic Marxist. So much for my assumptions.

I wondered how heavy father's hand was on the ashes. I knew I would not know till I got home and could look in the mirror. When I did arrive home, I was stunned. My forehead is the canvas for a very large, dark cross. No mistaking my affiliation today. I made sure to go after class. I would not report to class with a cross on my forehead. When students ask my religious beliefs, I tell them I will tell them after the semester is over. Proselytizing is not part of my job, and I am scrupulous about not doing so.

I hope for a good Lent. I wish a good Lent to you, as well.

Here's a little trivia item for you. In folklore studies I was taught by scholars Alan Dundes and Amin Sweeney that forty in Middle Eastern cultures doesn't mean forty literally; rather, it means "a lot of." Thus, in Southeast Asian Shadow Play, influenced by Islam, a Middle Eastern religion, heroes shoot arrows through forty palm trees (a lot of palm trees) and collect forty jars of mosquito hearts in order to gain magical power. Thus Lent is forty days, but not really – count them. There are more than forty days in Lent. 

"Son of God" 2014 Sloppy, Dull, Not Recommended.

"Son of God" is the kind of movie I'd go out of my way to warn people NOT to see. It lacks narrative coherence, drive, and a point of view. It is visually unappealing. I was with a friend so I could not walk out of this movie; had I attended alone, I think I would have. I found it physically painful to sit through this entire film. I nodded off more than once.

The film took forever to get started, going through Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses, and it took forever to end. Most lives of Christ select one gospel's passion narrative to recreate. For example, in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks only three brief sentences. This film had Jesus speaking endlessly from the cross and were this not so painful it would have been funny. The movie stumbles onward after Jesus' Resurrection and his Ascension into Heaven. St John mopes on an island waiting for death and has a vision of Jesus there. That this limping, pointless coda was tacked on after the obvious climaxes of the Resurrection and the Ascension is evidence of the filmmakers' ineptitude.

The film's best feature is Diogo Morgado as Jesus. He is charismatic and appropriately mysterious. You get the sense that there is more there than meets the eye. The rest of the cast is also fine. Adrian Schiller is especially good as Caiaphas the High Priest, depicted as Jesus' nemesis.

For me the biggest problem with the film was the lack of narrative drive. I had no sense that I was watching a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. There is no tension, no coherence, from one scene to the next. A viewer has to come to this movie with some background on Jesus' life. Anyone without that background would be watching an incoherent muddle.

There is no point of view. Who is telling this story? Why? Again, point of view is random and fluctuating and this adds to the film's lack of a spinal column.

The film appears to have been shot with hand-held cameras. There is little variation. The constant close-ups with shaky cameras get very, very monotonous. "Son of God" is 138 minutes long. Watching randomly tossed together scenes, almost all shot with handheld cameras, was a soporific experience.

"Son of God" is ugly and inauthentic. Jesus was a Jew and he lived his entire life in a Jewish country. Jesus and his followers should have been played by Jews or people who look Jewish. The actors playing Jesus, Peter, John, Mary the mother of Jesus, are not Jewish and don't look Jewish. For the most part the actors look like models in a Benetton ad: white liberals' idea of multiculti. There are extras who could be African or Asian. But Israel isn't a Benetton ad. 

Producer Roma Downey should not have cast herself as Mary, the mother of Jesus. Roma Downey is a Hollywood actress in her fifties, and she looks like it. Her face shows evidence of Botox and other products and procedures. She doesn't fit in a film full of filthy faces untouched by modern surgical procedures. For some reason, the filmmakers decided to make everyone filthy. I have lived in traditional, pre-modern villages and people in such settings don't walk around with dirt caked on their faces. They do groom their hair. Jerusalem is plunked down in the middle of a lifeless, moonscape desert. As any resident or pilgrim can tell you, it does rain, and there is green, in Jerusalem.

In the Huffington Post, Abe Foxman of the ADL argues that "Son of God" is without anti-Semitism. I'd have to disagree. Paul Marc Davis, an actor playing a hostile Pharisee, does look Jewish and he is dressed in Jewish garb. Touches like this impressed me as treading unnecessarily close to anti-Semitism. Another such touch: Caiaphas manipulates the crowds who voted for Pilate to release Barabbas instead of Jesus. This is not recorded in the Gospels. The film depicts Nicodemus praying Kaddish over Jesus. This may have been a conciliatory touch.

If you are looking for a cinematic life of Christ, there are many better options. George Stevens' "The Greatest Story Ever Told" is gorgeous, if slow. Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" is undeniably powerful, but disturbingly violent. The PBS miniseries "From Jesus to Christ" is fascinating.

Visiting Paterson, NJ

I'm teaching a class for future teachers.

Many -- though by no means all -- of the students in our class are suburban and are white.

We visit an urban school. Today we visited a school in downtown Paterson, New Jersey.

As I walked to the school this morning I saw the neighborhood through my visiting students' eyes: the garbage strewn all over the street. This morning I passed black bananas strewn on a five foot high pile of dirty sidewalk snow. Why bananas? Why not.

I saw bricked up windows in downtown Paterson. I saw a hollowed out man, stubble, clothes falling off, clothes that were in any case inadequate to the freezing temperatures and snow, disoriented, muttering to himself, rolling his eyes at me. I saw signs in Spanish and Arabic. Very few in English.

Inside this school was vibrant life. The teachers and staff are deeply dedicated to resurrecting this school -- it had to be taken over by the state, it was failing so badly. Since restructuring and sending a few "gangstas" to special institutions, test scores are soaring. The walls are lined with plaques commemorating previous high-profile graduates from this 87 year old school.

Our tour guide was a teacher, dedicated and charming.

I imagined that I could see on my students' faces that they were deciding that this inner city high school was not so bad, after all. Maybe Paterson, for all its difference, is not a foreign country.

Our tour was a long one. One of my students pulled an empty water bottle out of his backpack and approached a water fountain and began to fill it.

"DON'T DRINK THE WATER!!!" Our tour guide, suddenly panicked, shouted out.

My students looked at each other and laughed nervously.

I am reminded that a couple of times a year here in Paterson I receive notification, in English, Spanish, and Arabic telling me that the local water supply has unacceptable levels of lead, feces, and cryptosporidium.

***

There are two thousand students at the school we visited. I asked. Not one of them is classified as "white." Three miles away, there is another high school that is almost all white. 

The Lego Movie: Irritatingly Frenetic and Ugly to Look At

"The Lego Movie" is irritatingly frenetic, smug, and so ugly to look at it hurt my eyes. Its message is a mess of predigested secular or Pagan takeoffs on the Judeo-Christian tradition, not direct takeoffs, but borrowings of borrowings. "Jokes" come fast and furious. They come so fast you don't have time to assess whether they are funny or not. Example: Liam Neeson voices a police officer, and he sings a few seconds of "Danny Boy." This is supposed to be funny because Liam Neeson is Irish. It's a joke! Get it huh huh? Get how clever it is? You don't have to think about that, because another joke is coming down the chute.

There's something really smug and divorced from the audience about all this joking. I can just see the writers slapping themselves on the back, congratulating themselves, "Gosh, aren't we clever?"

Morgan Freeman, whom I used to like but who has become predictably ubiquitous in his unending God roles, plays the part of God, or close enough in this secular/Pagan/superhero super derivative mash-up. He tells Emmet (truth in Hebrew; not sure if there is any intended connection) that he, Emmet, is the Messiah. Only the film uses the word "Special." Same thing. Eventually the moral of the film is revealed: if you believe in yourself, you are the Messiah, the most intelligent, powerful, interesting person on the planet. Wow, that will make for healthy and happy kids. Not. Luckily the film is incoherent enough that many kids won't even realize that that is the film's message.

In this heavy-handed movie, there's a heavy-handed, live action coda that breaks with all that has gone before. The message of the coda: suit-wearing, rules-following, heterosexual white American businessmen are the biggest menace to the planet, and we should all be more anarchic, creative and narcissistic. Wow, that's a message that Hollywood has never sent before.

Nothing that happens in the action onscreen matters. It's one long chase, with Lego characters turning themselves into whatever they want at will, and flying freely. Since they can do this – turn themselves into weapons or escape vehicles – it doesn't really seem to matter that they are occasionally captured by a character named "Bad Cop" – problems with authority much? – tortured, and threatened with genocide. Yes, really. There are torture scenes in a movie meant for preschoolers. I found the torture scenes hard to watch, not because they were moving, but because they were weird and out of place. I sat there thinking, what kind of mind puts torture scenes like this in a movie for little kids?

I found the movie so ugly it was hard to look at. You are, after all, looking at computer-generated pieces of plastic. There is no sun, no light, no texture, no authentic color. Just – pieces of plastic. The perfect metaphor for this film.