Anniversary

Filed Under away from home, love | Leave a Comment

Today is the one year anniversary of meeting my donut husband. Yay! Unfortunately he is in Lappeenranta still, while I’m in Helsinki, but he should be here later tonight.

Since we can’t go out to dinner, I’m ordering room service!

(photo by HSA: lifesaver in Finland, 2006)

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Dec

5

Prager’s Response to Ellison Controversy

Filed Under politics | 4 Comments

I wrote a brief letter in response to Prager’s column. My letter said that I disagreed with his argument, pointed out that his initial column had inaccuracies, and asked who determines what is traditionally American behavior? Not once did I use profanity or resort to name calling. I got a mass response email today. Wow. Just wow. In response, I now have to insult him (a little bit) by borrowing a line from Jake Gittes: “You’re dumber than you think I think you are.”

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Dec

4

The Fountain, and A General Complaint

Filed Under movies | 2 Comments

Something terrible must be infecting the popular critics of today to make them call The Fountain “out there.” What movies have these people been watching?

I went to see The Fountain with expectations of something bizarre and phony. Instead, it is a metaphysical love story/rumination on mortality that stretches the imagination in the way that a film like Hero did. It’s a bit of dream-like fantasy mixed so well with familiar reality that our general understanding of human existence seems up for question. This was not a conventional Hollywood movie, but neither was it an Ashes of Time or Last Year in Marienbad, two movies which made a lot of really intelligent people think, “This is brilliant, but someone tell me what the hell is going on!”

On the contrary, The Fountain was very accessible, and Hugh Jackman delivered a very difficult performance (never have I seen a male character cry so much, and in so many scenes). Maybe the problem is that the film did not give any definitive answers. It’s a looping, potentially infinite, time-traveling type of movie - and that is one of its strengths. But for critics - presumably educated people - to be “confused” by this makes me wonder about the state of film criticism and education today. It doesn’t matter to me if a person doesn’t like the movie, but how on earth can you not understand what is happening on the screen (Leslie Felperin of Variety says it is “incoherent”)? There were similar complaints about Syriana - some people had a hard time “figuring out” who was who and what was happening when they were watching the movie. I went to see it, thinking I needed to be wide awake and paying strict attention lest I be completely lost. Not so much. I only went to high school for one year and I had no problem following the story. Did I know the whole plot within the first fiften minutes? No, but that’s not a requisite for good films.

Well, some critics did seem to appreciate The Fountain. One reviewer, Gabriel Shanks, of ModFab wrote, “I’m happy to report that Aronofsky’s labor of love is as gorgeous and emotionally cathartic as you’ve heard; it is also as overwrought, trite and overbaked. Whether you can accept the naivete of the premise is up to you; this is a film of images and thought, not plot. What is astonishing, however, is its singleminded certainty of its own virtue — you have to look back to Malick or Kubrick to find an American filmmaker offering up such a challenging vision to a mainstream audience without apology.”

I feel about The Fountain the way I did about Gangs of New York. A lot of people hated GoNY because of its over-the-top-ness. I agree that it was messy and a little out of control, but it was also so sincere and passionate that sitting in the theater watching it on a giant screen filled me with some hope for the creative process. We cannot always achieve perfection, but something must be said for breaking free of the box-office-calculating/tested-to-death-by-
audiences style of film-making. The Fountain struck me as more restrained than GoNY, but it’s a powerful story that demonstrates a genuine talent.

And its theme was meaningful to me. A movie it reminded me of (also mentioned in Shanks’ review) was Soderbergh’s Solaris. There is something really exquisite about Solaris, though it also received mixed/bad reviews (often described as “dull” - have any of them watched an Antonioni film?). Maybe it’s that it has the intimate feel of a movie that was made by a director who was able to make the film he wanted.

In a nutshell, I’m disappointed by a lot of critics. Maybe their brains are made numb by being forced to review movies like Dumb & Dumber. I take in a goofy comedy or romance once in a while, but I’m not going to waste my time repeatedly writing about them and trying to measure their artistic quality. This is like a food critic having to write about every hot dog and bag of chips they eat. No mortal mind would be able to endure this without injury.

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Dec

4

Bad Floors in Lappeenranta

Filed Under away from home, sadness, uu culture | 1 Comment

I’m in Finland, but yesterday I didn’t go out much. I left the hotel for a few hours to have tea in a coffee shop, visit a bookstore, and meander.

Unlike the day before, it was quite cloudy. It wasn’t too cold - the weather was very much like Portland in the winter: misty drizzle, ten degrees above freezing, and days that never quite open their eyes.

Earlier in the day I’d read Rev. Clyde’s latest blog entry and learned a little more about his wife’s situation. She is not doing well. I feel love for Rev. Marjorie even though I’ve never met her. And I am sorry for Rev. Clyde, who I am so fond of. I told my DH the news right away; expressing frustration that this could be happening. He said, “Well, you know, God’s a jerk.”

This didn’t make me feel any better. Not like when I was a kid and, if one of the little ones fell down and started crying, my mother would hold them and say, “Bad floor!” and slap the floor. Little kids loved this. They would stop crying and copy her, “Bad floor. Bad floor!” They would smack the floor a few times, laugh, and go back to playing.

During my afternoon walk I found the Sankarihautausmaa, or Soldier’s Cemetery, in the center of town. There are two thousand dead soldiers buried there, from the Winter and Continuation Wars. As a kid I loved visiting cemeteries, looking at the tombs and making up lives for the names etched in stone. Yesterday, however, was a wholly different experience. There was nothing whimsical or imaginary about death. After reading some dozen markers and seeing that all of the men were between 22 and 35 years old, I started crying. Isn’t it enough that illness and accidents strike - we have to resort to killing each other, too? What is this? The Finns lost nearly 30,000 soldiers trying to fend off the Russians. Finland today is a country of only five million people. The Russian dead from this four month war was between 300 and 400 thousand soldiers. All sacrificed for greed and someone else’s quest for power. We all have to die, but who would volunteer to do so for these reasons?

It was a little bit melancholy for me, yesterday afternoon. Somewhere in the middle of it, it became apparent that I needed to do something. Once, in the company of friends, the DH asked us, “Do you believe you can change the world?” The question deeply flustered me. My answer was somewhere along the lines of, “Well, sure … in some small way.” His next question was, “If you knew you could change the world, would you do it?” Our unanimous answer was, “Of course!” Then he told us that Ghandi knew he could change the world, and “I believe this is why he lived as he did.”

(photo by HSA: Top half of Lappee Church in Lappeenranta, Finland. 2006)

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Dec

3

Ellison Controversy & Religion in General

Filed Under politics, religion | 5 Comments

Smijer at Tete-a-Tete and Tariq Nelson - two bloggers I read - have recently written about the controversy over Congressman-elect Keith Ellison’s request to take his oath on the Qur’an instead of the Bible.

Columnist Dennis Prager wrote a controversial and inaccurate commentary, stating that Ellison was practicing a dangerous “multicultural activism” that will inspire Muslim extremists everywhere to cheer on America’s demise.

What’s most disappointing about Prager’s article is the comments in response to it. People are so ignorant that it is mind-boggling. One person theorizes that Ellison’s campaign was funded by Islamic terrorist organizations; another said he hangs out with gangs; another states that if his wife is Christian, she is clearly not a real Christian as no real Christian woman would marry a Muslim man - the same person says that the Qur’an says you can kill infidels so Ellison is going to kill his wife. And these were only in the first 50 of the 1100+ comments.

I shouldn’t read things like that, I know. It only succeeds in raising my blood pressure, and increasing my disappointment in people. I want to have faith in others, I really do. I want to believe that we, as human beings, are capable of living in some modicum of peace and justice, but people seem to cherish their hatred as if it were a comfort.

The DH says that you can always tell what the extreme religious right is up to because they will accuse their “enemies” of it first. So when they accuse Muslims of wanting to turn the United States into a theocracy, they are really speaking of their own intentions. H

I’ve engaged in enough religious debate to know that some people truly do believe they are part of a religious movement that is going to change the world. That eventually everyone in the world will be subject to their religion’s will.

I’ve talked to people who, if not members of AlQaeda, wanted to be, and I’ve talked to people who think the Bible is God’s affirmation of the white man’s superiority over all others (and after the race war, we will all know it!). I’ve talked to Jews who really do believe they are the chosen people and therefore don’t have time to meddle with the rest of us, and atheists who say the only way we’ll have peace on earth is to kill all the religious people!

Over and over, I’ve tried to tell myself that these people were just a minority. I don’t know, though. Right now I’m thinking the human capacity to despise and abuse is about equal to our ability to love and respect.

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