For the Love of Mike…

…someone break down and buy James White his Animaniacs DVDs already. In fact, just get him all three.

And maybe add a Tex Avery Droopy set while you’re at it.

The guy’s posted 414 YouTube videos on religion, he could use the laughs. To say nothing of YouTube needing the break from his constant uploading.

 

“Paranormal Activity” and Religious Ignorance

The thing that got me during the movie was the utter lack of anything religious in the movie. No one prays even in extreme situations, and the nonchalance the couple have when they narrow their night visitor’s identity to a ghost or a demon is unthinkable in a religious context. Even the slightest acquaintance with the Gospels accounts of the demonized shows people being used in very cruel ways:

Mar 1:26 NET. After throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him.

Mar 5:2-5 NET. Just as Jesus was getting out of the boat, a man with an unclean spirit came from the tombs and met him. (3) He lived among the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. (4) For his hands and feet had often been bound with chains and shackles, but he had torn the chains apart and broken the shackles in pieces. No one was strong enough to subdue him. (5) Each night and every day among the tombs and in the mountains, he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

Mar 9:17-18 NET. A member of the crowd said to him, “Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that makes him mute. (18) Whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they were not able to do so.”…Mar 9:21-22 NET. Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. (22) It has often thrown him into fire or water to destroy him. But if you are able to do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”

Yet no one suggests praying, calling a minister of any denomination, visiting any church, etc. I suppose I should take into account the story is set in California, but still….

The film’s protagonists show a cultural ignorance as well. The progression of events is highly like that in The Exorcist, where troubles start small and grow until huge.

Of course, part of the reason for this is the plot, which is doubtless based on the movie’s tiny budget, quoted between $11,000 and $15,000 in reviews I’ve read. That’s pocket change for almost any studio film, and a small budget even for very independent films. The film has four actors, one location, and an desire to make a virtue of it’s cheapness, ala Blair Witch Project. I thought it succeeded quite well. The acting isn’t great but it isn’t horrible, either, and the film’s most effective sequences are exactly what has been advertised, the nighttime static videocam footage of the bedroom with the open hallway in the background.

As I watched the film I was curious just how many people in the audiences viewing the film would be as similarly secular when faced with paranormal activity. I’ve often heard we are a post-Christian nation; this movie put that in perspective for me.

 

UPDATE: Eric at O God Come to My Assistance has a more indepth blogpost about the movie here that is well worth reading.

YES!!!!

Got my first hit on the search term “sex doll” courtesy of my tiny review of Lars and the Real Girl.

It’s the little things, you know.

And sorry if that wasn’t what you were looking for, web searcher….

Jim West’s Future Zombie Holocaust

The world’s number one biblioblogger, Jim West,  really wants his Dead Sea Scrolls Logos database. I quote from a comment in a recent post:

“I’ll wait for Logos. Even if I have to wait till I’m dead.”

Halloween approaching, I immediately imagined a new George Romero zombie film starring the undead Jim West, leading a zombie army in a lurching march from Tennessee to Bellingham, Washington to get his DSS Logos module.

Alas, Romero has already done a version of this film: Land of the Dead, so we won’t be seeing this particular film from him. Too bad, because Romero is known to be generally sympathetic to the zombies.

Now it must be said, I’ve yet to read Dr. West threaten a zombie apocalypse if he doesn’t have his way. On the other hand, I’ve yet to read his theological stance on the zombie apocalypse and it’s relationship to cats, either.

And yes, I’m intrigued to see his reaction to a post about himself that almost entirely cites Wikipedia, as well.

Useless Entertainment Roundup

So I finished reading Eight Lives Down(salty language alert!) and The Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament. Two thumbs up for both.

Seeing as we are studying Psalms this new quarter in Sunday School, I’ve taken up Emmanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible again. It doesn’t seem so scary as last time.

I’m still on my Japanese jidaigeki kick in DVDs, but I’m about to switch over to the two Ghost in the Shell tv series.The two newest American Doctor Who releases are about to reach my door. And I’m contemplating an episode a day of Discovery Channel’s A Haunting in preparation for Halloween.

Oh, and did I mention I hanker to listen to some Celtic fiddle again? Amazon MP3 has quite a selection.

Now, how will I find time to work and do Sunday School notes with all this going on?

Minimalist review of “Lars and the Real Girl”

Lars and the Real Girl is the most gentle, uplifting, family- friendly film ever to star a sex doll.

And if you’re lucky you might still find it in your local Walmart DVD dump bins for about half or less of what online retailers are selling it for. That’s where I got my copy.

Vacation Roundup

What did I do last week?

1. First and foremost I attended my grandmother’s 100th birthday party.

There were about seventy-five people in attendance and lots of cake and punch left over, mainly because it was all too sweet for my diabetic self to partake of.

2. I watched over thirty DVDs including the complete Zatoichi series (that’s 25 DVDs right there alone!)

The first twenty or so are quite entertaining, but the last few were made in the Seventies, and lost the light-hearted general audience feel in favor of grimmer, bloodier action plots. Zatoichi is something of a Japanese superman type, a blind masseur who turns into a superhuman swordsman upon being confronted with injustice and evil. Those first twenty or so films are great entertainment, world cinema classics, even.

3. I read one and one half books:

a.  I finished Hank Reihardt’s posthumous Book of Swords, which is a very good examination of the sword in history, especially European medieval swords.

b. I am seventy-five percent through Eight Lives Down, a very good memoir of a tour of duty as a bomb disposal technician in 2004 Iraq.

Chris Hunter’s memoir took a lot of the edge off my only movie of the week, The Hurt Locker, a limited run film that showed up at a local theater finally. It’s shot in documentary style and is a good if familiar tale of the effects of war on people. I felt it minimized the dangers of IEDs in order to make a broader point.

4. I did not do yardwork, as the rains came and soaked us. Yes, that really disappointed me.

5. I bought a new printer, the HP 4440 All in one, which is essentially the newer version of my previous printer, with faster printing and a handy ink catridge ink level indicator.

6. I slept a lot.

Favorite Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review

Courtesy of Rick Mansfield (ahem: NET Bible Review?)’s Twitter Feed:

“It would be the BEST MOVIE EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!– If  I were fourteen.”

Rick also likes TV’s “Burn Notice”, so he has pretty good entertainment taste, I think.

Me? I’m dying to see “The Hurt Locker”

From the Big Brown Truck

Recent UPS deliveries include:

The Letter of James, Anchor Bible Commentary, by Luke Timothy Johnson

The Letter of James, Pillar New Testament Commentary, by Douglas Moo

The Epistle of James, New International Greek Testament Commentary, by Peter Davids

So there’s the list of commentaries for the next round of Sunday School Notes, through August. I’ve gotten so used to Ben Witherington III’s commentaries I may go ahead and get his James volume, too.  I’ve very little clue about Psalms commentaries for the quarter afterward, as they are either unrecommended or multi-volume.

Also from the big brown truck are some Apostolic Fathers:

Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia Commentary, by William Schoedel

Shepherd of Hermas, Hermeneia Commentary, by Carolyn Osiek

I will likely order Kurt Neiderwimmer’s The Didache to polish off my Apostolic Fathers commentaries (I can’t get into Apostolic Tradition or 1 Enoch 1 that much).

And in DVDs I received

Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen

Doctor Who: The Rescue/The Romans

I will likely soon order The Call of Cthulhu, which mixes my interests in horror and silent film. Of course, there are also Criterion re-releases I’m thinking about upgrading as well, but DVDs, like books, are so many, and time/money so slight….

Thrillers- Silent Cinema Style 2: Doctor Mabuse the Gambler

German silent cinema in the 1920s was something of a Golden Age. Many of the genres we now take for granted were invented and made viable by the filmmakers in that time and place. Thrillers, horror films, fantasy epics, spy films, sci-fi epics, all have strong roots in Germany silent era. Indeed, most of these genres owe part of their future success to one filmmaker: Fritz Lang.

Lang was an avid reader and filmgoer who started writing scripts, only to decide “I can direct these better than the guys currently directing”. Unlike the rest of us who say this, in Lang’s case it was ABSOLUTELY true.

Doctor Mabuse started life not from the mind of Fritz Lang or his second wife/ collaborator Thea von Harbou, but as a serialized novel by one Norbert Jacques. Jacques was a writer of some note in his day, all but forgotten now. He looked at the ills of Germany after World War One, during the Weimar Republic, and wanted to write a social commentary. His problem was how best to express it in novel form. He struck upon the idea of borrowing from serial pulp fiction and invented a great criminal mastermind who, if not the cause of all that was wrong with Germany, was certainly the chief instigator in driving what was left of the country into the ground. He named this criminal mastermind “Doctor Mabuse”.

The novel that resulted was a runaway smash (ala DaVinci Code) and a movie adaptation was brokered almost before the ink on the released books was dry. Lang, von Harbou, and Jacques collaborated to make the screen version of Mabuse that was even more socially relevant and up to date. Not only did they do that, they made arguably the first of Lang’s masterpieces.

Doctor Mabuse is a criminal genius who operates in secrecy under multiple guises. The fim opens, in fact, showing Mabuse using photographic playing cards to choose his first disguise of the day.  In the first twenty minutes, we are treated to thrilling action as Mabuse’s men steal a commercial treaty from a train, stage a car wreck so Mabuse can read it, then proceed to use the treaty’s disappearance and reappearance as a means to make an illegal fortune by stock market manipulation. The overall sense is to see how fragile Germany is, and how totally in control Mabuse is.

From there the real plot begins, as we see Mabuse in ever more different guises laying a trap for a rich man’s son with  a huge loss at cards and a staged meeting with Mabuse’s seductress henchwoman. A state attorney gets involved in the case, seeking the source of complaints about cheating in gaming houses. Thus begins the battle between Mabuse and Wenk, the state attorney, a battle that includes hypnotism, ground-breaking special effects, car chases, obsessive love, abduction, psychological destruction, a gun battle at a barricaded house,  and the first example of what David Kalat (arguably the world biggest Mabuse geek) calls the Mabuse principle: Mabuse’s obssession with chaos always seems make him destroy himself in the end.

“Doctor Mabuse the Gambler”(1922) was what were called at the time “mammoth productions”. It is two movies of over two hours’ length telling the single story of Mabuse.  Lang joked he liked to corner the box office and get all the night’s money for himself.  The movie was a smash hit, and cemented Lang’s career. It also spelled the end of Norbert Jacques’ career, as he kept trying to profit from his creation of Mabuse but was edged out by the cinema Mabuse.

Lang went on to make two more films about Mabuse: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which was a shot at Nazism right when Nazism took over Germany, and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, his last film, which aimed at Cold War fears. Testament was an early sound picture and an even greater masterpiece than Gambler. Thousand Eyes created a Mabuse craze in Europe that saw several other Mabuse films made, of decreasing quality.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is a classic of silent film, a definite step up from the previous Les Vampires. Film technique had improved, the story is a single narrative rather than a collection of all but unrelated episodes, the sets are much more realistic, and the acting is much better, not so improvised or stagey as earlier silents.

This film was restored a few years ago into a near original length remastered print that can be bought in America from Kino Video, and others in Europe.  But to really “get” the film, and to hear a excellent academic-like commentary from Mabuse expert David Kalat, you might also buy the Image DVD, which has a shorter, less pretty version of the film.  As both a commentary and a Mabuse geek, I can tell you the Image DVD is a sound investment.

David Kalat is in fact something of a one man Mabuse industry in America. He contributes a commentary to the restored Criterion Testament of Doctor Mabuse, and a commentary each for Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and the remake of Testament of Dr. Mabuse, both released under his own All Day Entertainment label. Alas, many of All Day’s more interesting offerings are now sadly out of print. And if you really catch the Mabuse craze (I did! I did!) Kalat has a book out called The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse which discusses the whole series of twelve(!) films. It is also available cheaper from Kalat at the bottom of this All Day catalog.

Oh, and if you are really a completist (What?! More?!) then there is an inexpensive full frame dubbed rough-looking set of some of the Sixties Mabuse films available, the Dr. Mabuse Collection, in which Gert Froebe (Gold—finger!!) is the best thing.  And in infinitely better films and DVDs, Lang’s other early sound masterpiece, M , is a sort of tie-in to Mabuse, since it features the same Detective Lohmann, as Testament.  Criterion recently released the excellent remastered edition of that film I link to as well, also available elsewhere around the world.

Now go forth and catch the Fritz Lang and Dr. Mabuse bug. Melior!!