Film Journal 2024: Fancy Dance
Directed by Erica Tremblay

As the story unfolds in Fancy Damce it starts to gradually find its rhythm and its voice, slowly cutting through the general set up to narrow in on the simplicity of its road trip motif. The more this film simplifies its focus the better it becomes, partly because the plot is probably the weakest part of this script, and also because the performances, beginning with Gladstones sheer strength of presence, are the films biggest strength.

The ending is also really satisfying, which is where you really do get to feel and experience what this film is all about- the connection between strength of family and strength of culture against great adversity.

Reading Journal 2024: Once a Queen
Author: Sarah Arthur

Reminiscent of Lewis, George Macdonald and Madeleine L’Engle, just with a modern twist.

Follows parallel stories, each occupying different sides of a door, one telling the tale of a magical world of Queens and stags the other a story of the real world, mundane happenings of a fourteen year old American girl named Eva who comes to England over a summer to stay with her relatives. A central mystery surrounding the history and secrets of Eva’s family binds both stories together, and as they push forward, one beginning with a cosmic origins the other with the uncovering of family origins and childhood experiences, the line between truth and fiction becomes blurred and the questions of whether and how the two storyline might overlap and be connected become more prevalent.

Loved the English setting, the sense of mystery, the blending of fantasy with magical realism. The book tackles some substantive subject matter, using the relationship between granddaughter and grandmother to anchor the emotional arc in a mix of intimate/personal and broader more spiritual/philosophical/cosmic concern. It also has a memorable cast of characters surrounding the central relationship, making the story entertaining and meaningful. Fills that niche that is classical myth telling (as opposed to the more modern definitions) built around childhood wonder and aged reflection, helping to break open our sense if truth and reality from life’s shackles.

Film Journal 2024: Wild Goat Surf
Directed by Caitlyn Sponheimer

An impressive debut, made all the more worthwhile given its distinct flavor of Canadiana, set along the coastal area of British Columbia. It’s a coming of age film that explores the challenges of growing up in the face of adversity- single parent family, grief, being an outsider. As such it navigates the relationship between rebellion and belonging. The fusion of skater and surfer becomes more of an allegory than a functional motif, narrowing in on the relationships that become the films driving force. The whole thing has a subtle but undeniable beauty behind it, including some understated cinematography. Gives it all a real raw and storied nature.

Looking forward to what comes next for the Director, and pleasantly surprised to discover this to rank among the best of 2024 thus far.

Film Journal 2024: I Am: Celine Dion
Directed by Irene Taylor

Did not expect this. Really well made. Touching, vulnerable, revealing. And that’s coming from someone who’s only real knowledge of Dion is her most popular songs.

It is from the Director of Leave No Trace, so I guess the quality shouldn’t be that surprising.

Film Journal 2024: Thelma
Directed by Josh Margolin

The premise is inspired, taking a classic espionage/spy motif and laying it over top of a simple drama about a 90 plus year old woman (played with undeniable and equally inspired charm and charisma by June Squibb) who becomes the victim of a scam and sets out to get her money back. Part of the inspired nature of this premise is the fact that it is advertised as an action packed movie, but ultimately plays to the speed of its primary target audience. I appreciated its willingness to commit to this level, right down to the quirky, unconventional dialogue and characterization. Thelma’s kids and her grandson are genuinely odd presences, filled with disjointed and often non-sensicle dialogue, and it feels like we are seeing them through Thelmas eyes, for whom the whole world has become strange and unfamiliar.

The film is ultimately about the idea of aging and what that is for both the aged person and the people in their lives who care for them. Here it proves to have a lot of heart as well. If it takes some risks tonally, it absolutely lands the emotional connection. A great smaller gem that I hope gets some love and support

Film Journal 2024: The Bikeriders
Directed by Jeff Nichols 

I haven’t read the book, but I noticed a few think pieces detailing the films decision to make the female voice the narrator of the film as being one of the central differences between the adaptation and the male dominated story of the source material. Although I can’t rightly make the contrast, I can say that Comer’s complex persona was without a doubt a highlight and strength of the story.

The Bikeriders, a fictional take on a real life biker gang that became the seedbed for familiar entities like Hells Angels, actually caught me off guard with its studied and patient character study. More than a character study in fact, it’s also an examination of a culture, or a cultural and societal formation. That is not what I expected from the trailers, which sold it as a tonal exercise and aesthetically driven cinematic experience. I really resonated with what I ultimately got from this film, which uses Comer’s character, a largely outsider persona who embodies the different tensions inherent within this group of misfits looking for somewhere to belong beyond the constraints of the system that has determined their positions in the world, as a window into their emotional, social and personal psyches. Where there exists emotional repression, Comers embattled character carries the emotion. Where there exists irrationality and resistance to reason, she becomes the voice of reason on their behalf. Where there exists family discord, she models a familial spirit and commitment. All while being lost and embattled herself.

What makes this narrative choice so profound is that it never clouds the bikers from our view, rather it brings them into view with far more clarity and precision. The natural arc of the film occupies the different flavors and sensibilities of the gangs gradual development, allowing the third act to feel like a very different kind of film than the first section or the second. We move from opportunistic to optimism to defeat and complex resolution, anchoring the story in this movement from construction to disillusion and deconstruction, all the while propping up this societal structure as a microcosm of the universal human experience.

It also has one of the more arresting lines for me thematically of 2024, where Johnny, trying to capture the emotional stakes of everything that has been going on, reflects that “you cam try and give everything you have to something and it’s still going to do what it’s going to do.” The fact that this applies to one’s life is what gives this another layer, and it has been sticking with me ever since as I keep thinking about this film.

I never thought a film about bikers could play so broadly, but it’s an impressive feat that really speaks to the quality of its filmmaking and its performances.

Was listening to a talk by Father Andrew Stephen Damick this morning. He suggested, and the following is my own summation, that there are three important things to remember when it comes to navigating differences in beliefs and worldview:
1. Recognizing that its possible that someone actually understands what you are saying and your point of view and still doesn’t agree.

One familiar motif when it comes to discussing beliefs/convictions/worldview is that if someone disagrees it means they don’t understand. This can often be the case. However, things spiral out of control when we assume that the only way a person can understand is if they agree, and this happens all the time, often with both parties equally guilty of doing the same thing

2. Everyone’s beliefs and convictions, or the arguments they are making (which can be ones they ultimately disagree with), necessarily function within the specific boundaries of their given assumptions.

So often what happens in discussions is people believe they are operating without bias and are the only truly objective one in the conversation. Similarly, they treat their argument as though it is able to function apart from their given assumptions in a truly empirical and reasoned fashion. The end result is often propping up a fallacy that then uses their conclusions as an argument for their given assumptions. Not only that, but arguments are used to address a point of view that is operating according to a very different set of assumptions with a very different set of questions, leading to a never ending set of logical fallacies that confuse the necessary limitations of a given argument.

3. We all have a worldview, and we all have beliefs/convictions/biases, and empiricism and reason and logic  do not operate apart from these things. They can only function well in relationship to these things. They are in fact subservient to them, and necessarily so.

Empiricism, reason, logic, they do not function in a bubble. These are benign things apart from interpretation and an interpreter. Functional realities cannot and do not speak on their own. One of the great tragedies of modernism is that it convinced us that they do.

The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
Author: Stefanos Geroulanos

There were a few times when I found my mind wandering back to David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. A better book that deals with some of the same ideas, albeit Geroulanos narrows in far more explicitly on the question of our demonstrative obsession with the question of human origins.

I really liked the idea being explored, less fond of its approach. Given the way the chapters are structured, moving in a linear fashion through the different points of history as it tracks the development of our obsession with prehistory and human origins, the later chapters lose some of their force and their power once the pattern of this obsession has been established. I already understood how this established itself in the Holocaust, for example, long before we get there.

Thus I found the earlier chapters the most interesting and the most compelling with one small caveat. At one point the author suggests that our obsession with human origins is actually fundamentally about the present and wrapped up in the language of our present. So there is this sense in which the closer the book gets to where we live today, the more it makes sense of its general conceit. You can feel some of what the author is arguing sort of proofing itself in the process of understanding how even my interest in the earlier chapters and their emphasis on the earlier history is interpreted by and shaped by the world I am living in now. As the author says, prehistory ultimately says nothing in and of itself. It cannot speak on it’s own. We arrange it, and them (Neanderthals for example) in our present to say what we need them to say and in “whatever postion we need them to take.”

The first chapter, titled The Human Epic, sets the stage by noting that prehistory is ultimately about our need to tell a story. “The story of human origins tells us who we are, how we came to dominate this planet and each other, how we invented religion and then discarded it in favor of the gods of progress and technology. It supposedly reveals a million little things about human life, like why we desire and whom, how our emotions work, or how we love and care for others.”

And yet, all “these grandiose claims prompt far more questions than they answer.” No matter how many “impressive names” we give to this story, which is ultimately a “story of us”, the only real truth that it can speak is that it is a story about “the triumph of modern knowledge”, or the fundamental narrative of progress. As the author puts it, “the story of human origins offers as good an answer as any we have to the fundamental question: what, after all, is the human.” And why do we tell this story? Because the narrative of progress demands it in order to be upheld, and without the narrative of progress we have no way of making sense of humanity’s arrival on the scene (let alone anything that might supersede it). Thus it is not about the facts of our origin, which can never really be known, it is about justifying our actions in the present. “The deep past so exceeds our grasp… (and) matters so much to who we are” at the same time.

Here then we come to the authors most direct claim- “thinking about human origins has been one of the most generative intellectual endeavors in modern history. It has also been  one of the most ruinous.” What does he mean by this? He argues that at it’s most readily observable crisis point we lack a good defintion of humanity, but this wasn’t always the case. Modernitity and its appeal to the story of science and progress, born as it was from the soil of the 18th century and its hyper focus on our story of origins, has simply clouded it from our view.

So what then is the ruinous in this authors view, and what is the good defintion of humanity that he wants to recover? He’s a lot clearer on the former than he is the latter. At the outset he says that “this is a book about science and speculation, about the space where each loses itself in the other, the great gray zone where rigorous research meets with righteous belief.” That grey zone becomes the boiling pot where “human impulses” can take root, creating the ruinous. That impulse, for the author, is born from an inherent need to “convince ourselves” that we are something in comparison to the distant other (or in alignment with a more pure distant other). For the author, the better story is the present, a present that is telling it’s own story about “compound beings, webs of meaning, and cyborgs.” A story in which what we do now is what defines us, not some unknown past and non-existent and undefinable future with no real and actual aim. Here he puts forth an argument for a strident capital H humanism not built on the past but a “skepticism” regarding our answers and our doubts that can operate in service of “a better theory for tomorrow.”

That last phrasing is important to me, as it becomes the grounds upon which I note an inconsistency in his reasoning. The author never takes the time to actually establish and justify a better story for humanity. He assumes a bunch of the ruinous outcomes to be bad, but he never actually does the work to establish why. If progress is built on the necesssdy ruins of the past, what argument are you going to give to the people of the present, the ones who are the apparent products of this ruinous past to say it is wrong? How do you tackle the problem that the modern West creates, a formation that dominates the bulk of this book, when you also want to uphold it as a portrait of a better world than what it left behind in the dirt? The author makes seemingly contrary claims all along the way, trying to build a case that the world is not better on one hand, and saying that it is on the other. And, this is simply my opinion, but I think this is the case because he doesn’t commit enough to his own premise for it to actually say what it needs to say. As you can catch in that last line, he is still committed to a narrative of progress and Humanism. When he says,”There is no grander story than humanity’s emergence out of nature,” it is both tongue in cheek but also honest to his own viewpoint. However he reaches for meaning, it begins and ends with humanity. Stripping us of our need to locate that in our deep history of human origins doesn’t really change the problem.

What is however evident though, and I think this where I found the book most helpful, is his ability to expose human penchants, in a particular worldview, for inventions and illusions to give us meaning, progresses penchant for selective ruination as the necessary driving force of a better future, and the permeating of an invented story in even what we might deem the best of our progress (science, feminism, LBTGQ+ rights, democracy). If nothing else, coming to terms with this reality and recognizing the problematic foundations we are building on today, in many ways which stand in stark and often desperate contradiction to nature itself, if not outright ignorance of the real story nature is telling, should humble us. Especially when it comes to revealing how it is that we come to speak in terms of good and bad. I think the author here, in stripping away the western myths (using his definition of myth), is right on a number of fronts. I just don’t think he is able to find a better story, nor convincingly argue why the one the world seemingly naturally follows is not the best one. And this is just me, but I think one of the reasons this is the case is because he assumes religion to be an invention of the past that is necessarily left in the ruins using the very same reasoning and assumptions he is trying to deconstruct. His basic conclusion is, we all tell our own stories built from our own present, but the problem with this is that when someone is confronted by the basic idea that there is no true aim, or when that present legitimately sucks for a person or persons, or when the lessons of the past require those ruins by their nature, ect ect  you need a better story. So where do you find it?

Reading Journal 2024: Imagined Places: Journeys Into Literary America
Author: Michael Pearson

Hardly an exhaustive list, but as a literary roadtrip, anchored by a boots on the ground itinerary, it’s a highly entertaining jaunt through the pages of a handful of America’s most well known voices.

It is essentially tying person to place, looking at their stories through the lens of the spaces that shaped them and inspired them. In rhe same way it allows us to experience these places too by way of armchair travel- Frost’s Vermont, Hemingway’s Florida, O’Connor’s Georgia, Faulkner’s Mississippi, Twain’s Missouri, and Steinbeck’s California.

Here is a brief post that I made about one portion/idea that really stood out for me and inspired me personally:

In his book titled Imagined Places: Journey’s into Literary America, Micheal Pearson talks about how people have two basic conceptions of place- the place in which we can live, and the place in which our imaginations are drawn precisely because of the ways in which the place we imagine contrasts with the place in which we live. For Micheal Pearson we need both:

“Everybody has their ideal landscape and an antithetical landscape as well, a place that the person is drawn toward. It’s a place, he feels, that fascinates and startles with the difference from our own home ground. There’s a positive and a negative pole.”

For me, it is prairie and ocean/river. Living technically 10 blocks from the Red River is a microcosm of living 3,000 kilometers from the ocean. The 70 km drive from Winnipeg to Lake Winnipeg a slightly bigger microcosm. All manifest this basic tension in their own way. One roots us, one draws us, and inbetween these places we find perspective

Reading Journal 2024: You Like It Darker
Author: Stephen King

A new collection of short stories from the master of horror. Always a worthwhile investment. The collection is made up of a mix of new and previously published works, although it was all new to me, anchored by a multi-chapter mini novel (also subsequently the best of the bunch) in the middle.

What struck me about this collection is the way it weaved through the different stylings of his illustrious career, moving fluidly between classic feeling and sounding stories (Fifth Steps) to fresh visions (Red Screen), familiar takes (The Dreamers) and even a follow up to Cujo (Rattlesnakes). There is scenario driven horror and psychological horror, but perhaps most striking is how subtly he weaves some understated supernatural elements into the mix. It might be a reach, but I honestly felt like it was designed to function as a cohesive whole, and even as a reflective piece that is wrestling with some of the bigger questions of life and death and the unknown mysteries of both. My second favorite, The Answer Man becomes a poetic climax to the overall journey in this regard.

Overall very impressed with this one. It’s an easy read too, and definitely one that will be good to have around to return to from time to time.