Sat down the other night to watch the 2021 American drama Mass. I went in expecting it to be an emotionally intense experience, and it certainly was. My wife and I have a healthy film appetite; we probably get through a few a week, and although we see many good movies together, they rarely prompt in me a desire to write, to respond. But this one did.
First for the necessary provisos. I am going to be responding broadly to the film…
‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?’ Job 38:4,7
This film takes some stamina. It is long, dense with metaphor, lacking a conventional narrative arc, and somewhat mystifying. Its themes encompass life, the universe, and everything. The film literally spans all time, from the beginning of the universe to now. And, its message is unapologetically spiritual…
Read MoreCalvary is a modern-day re-telling of the Christian Gospel. A dark cerebral comedy which tackles the hard questions of guilt, sacrifice, forgiveness, and life’s meaning. The film closely mirrors the liturgical structure of Holy Week, the week in the church’s calendar which directly precedes Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. The protagonist of Calvary is a clear thinking, well intentioned priest, overseeing a parish of degenerates in a rural, isolated portion of Ireland…
Read More‘The Price for your glory is their suffering’
Scorsese’s new epic masterpiece is theologically rich, aesthetically captivating, and emotionally raw. Based upon Endo’s 1966 historical fiction by the same name, Silence is a film about Portuguese priests facing persecution in 17th century Japan. This deep spiritual movie could not be more at odds with Scorsese’s previous work, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which portrayed the seedy, facile world of stock market fraud. Though antithetical, both films none-the-less point their audiences in similar directions, towards valuing the considered, devotional, moral life…
Read MoreThis movie is about hubris, obsession, and the search for answers, the search which like Icarus can lead us to fly too close to the sun, to throw cation to the wind. The protagonist Max Cohen is a number theorist in search of the ultimate numerical code. Plagued with migraines, and leading a life punctuated with bouts of mania, he searches for a code in which will unravel the universe of numbers that represents the global economy…
Read More‘Her’ is a film about a man who falls in love with his operating system. Not Windows, Mac OS or even Linux, but a new talking operating system with artificial intelligence called Samantha (played by Scarlett Johansson). The film is set in the not too distant future, during the technological revolution futurologists term the ‘Technological Singularity’: the point at which emergent artificial superintelligence suddenly causes a runaway up-turn in technological growth…
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