Film Journal 2024: Cottontail
Directed by Patrick Dickinson

A simple but powerful examination of family, mostly told through the lens of a solitary aging man who, in the aftermath of losing his wife, stands in danger of losing his son.

The father-son dynamic is a significant part of the  culturally rooted narrative, navigating social expectations, honor-shame systems, family responsibilities. But even then, it is also a universal story about grief, loss, estrangement and forgiveness, all which carry this potent sense of intimacy, empathy and awareness.

The fact that it taps into such real emotions without ever becoming sentimental or forced is a testament to the sensitive hand behind the camera and the embodied performances in front of it.

Film Journal 2024: The Devil’s Bath
Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

And I thought Goodnight Mommy took things to the next level. I mean it did, but this dark, harrowing follow up after the less acclaimed The Lodge is truly oppressive.

Which might not sound appealing, but as a viewing experience it is unsettling in the best kind of way. It’s horror in the sense of atmosphere and tone, while underneath it is a gorgeous period piece and historical drama rich in the kind of tragedy one might expect from a community soaked in superstitions, social hierarchies and corrupted religious powers. Of the sort that would make Eggers thrilled.

There are multiple layered themes at play that all get embodied in the character if a tortured wife, played to perfection by Anja Plaschg, who is forced to wrestle with the demons that surround her, a battle that never seems hers to win, especially as we watch her gradual decent into despair, grief and madness. It’s a character arc that leaves its mark, especially with that jaw dropping final 20 minutes. The interconnected themes of suicide, sin, confession, forgiveness, and salvation are especially poignant.

Reading Journal 2024
Brooklyn
Author: Colm Tóibín

Fell in love with the movie, got drawn to the book a while ago before it got lost in my ever growing TBR list. This years release of a sequel, Long Island, inspired me to pick it up.

Loved a good deal about this book, especially its strong sense of place. It was interesting reading the thematic push and pull of the film, the element that had captured me most fully, back into the minds of these characters. As is common to these types of stories we get a lot of descriptive taking place inside the mind of the characters, in this case Ellis. In some ways it redirects the on-screen journey, such as the poetic rendering of a life defined by these competing allegiances to place and person tha we find in the film, to something more internal, which taken together form an appeal to the transcendent, most notably aware in the adaptation, as it seeks after something that can help define and determine the nature of the decisions in question in this story.

The book narrows in more specifically on the uncertainty of these decisions and choices in the moment. The book doesn’t take the same license in imagining a grander story as the film does, but such an interpretive move is embedded in the text all the same, capturing the rich character journey of someone caught between space and time amidst those competing allegiances and concerns, with both central figures in Ellis’ life representing Ireland and America, belonging and becoming. In this sense it’s not ultimately about the decisions and choices, but rather finding and locating the transcendent value that runs underneath.

Long Island
Colm Tóibín

I’m still parsing out how I feel about this sequel, which is probably a sign of the books overall strength as a literary work. It feels very different from Brooklyn, and yet it is designed to mirror that story in very specific ways at the same time, just from a different perspective.

Whereas Brooklyn spends time establishing its characters and its sense of place, Long Island hits the ground running. If Brooklyn imagined a grander narrative behind the particular tensions Ellis is navigating, tensions that demand certain decisions and choices to be made, Long Island dials much more firmly in on functional reality of her life as it is. In the first few pages we are plunged into a point of crisis regarding the choices she made in Brooklyn, and informed of a planned trip back to Ireland that, as the text makes clear, she now wants to utilize as a means of reflecting on all her past choices and potential regrets. In a very real sense this sequel is playing the events in Brooklyn backwards, just with years of assumed experiences now in tow. This forces her to wrestle with similar tensions, just with different questions and awareness this time around.

One of the things I’m still dwelling on in my assessment of this sequel is the way it defines the world around Ellis in concrete ways, especially when it comes to the people who occupy it. Whereas part of what made Brooklyn compelling was that all the characters were nuanced and complex, certain characters and realities here are not complex at all. It is easy to know exactly how the book wants us to feel about certain elements of the existing tension, which might actually undercut the tension altogether.

What gives me pause though is that I think what the author was doing was using the familiar construct of the first book as a mirror, but one that is meant to point us to a fresh tension, not the same one. It wants to make concrete statements about certain characters so that we might turn our attention to different ones. Along with this, the book flips Brooklyn around by switching who it is we spend the majority of our time with in terms of the two central love intersts of the first book.

I felt this, even as I also resisted some of that intentional shifting in the stories focus. There are other characters that emerge here in more defined ways, and that makes the focus of the story different. Add to this the fact that it is a different character this time around carrying that tension between life in Ireland and life in America, thus allowing Ellis’ own wrestling to push further into the realm of these other dynamics. Its subtle, and I missed experiencing much of that in the moment thanks to being locked in to the story from Brooklyn, but I do think that affords this a unique quality as a sequel. All the more so when you get to the unresolved ending (trigger warnings for those whom are bothered by that).

Overall I liked this. It is more simple, its an easy and breezy read, its more narrowed, but in that I think it brings some thought provoking aspects to the larger story that make it even more interesting, especially if it keeps moving forward (it feels like it will).

Film Journal 2024: Fly Me To The Moon
Directed by Greg Berlanti

Of the two films dealing with the subject of space that released this week (the other one being Space Cadet) only one of them lands the shuttle, and that would be this charming and creative crowd pleaser. If Space Cadet came dangerously close to making a mockery out of the entire NASA enterprise, the most brilliant aspect of Fly Me to the Moon, a film that also fuses equal parts comedy, parody, and serious drama/themes, is the way it uses the whole advertising agent tasked with selling the space race to a nation plagued by world conflicts and war and political divide, to quietly sell us as viewers on the idea as well. This is a love letter to the idea of space exploration as a great unifier, even as it also functions as a clever riff on the “fake moon landing” conspiracies and, in its most simplest form, a charming and hugely entertaining rom-com built off the chemistry of its two effortlessly charismatic leads (Johannson and Tatum).

The screenplay also pops with an energy befitting the tension filled fictional take on the lead up to Apollo 11, as does the soundtrack and the period setting.

I will say, as a Canadian I feel like even though I’m only an hour from the southern border, I’m also occupying a different reality that feels worlds away from this sort of overt patriotism, no matter how much it wants to sell this as “America fighting on behalf of the world.” But that certainly doesn’t leave me immune to the sentiments this is trying to evoke on an emotional level, and part of what this film does super well is balanced the bigger stakes of getting these men to the moon with the intimacy of the interpersonal drama on the ground. That I can connect to, and it is really this element that forms the lens for zooming further out to bigger realities and bigger questions, including one of the dominant themes regarding the nature of truth and lies.

As Johannsons character notes at one point, no one can believe the truth and it would still be true, and everyone can believe a lie and it would still be a lie. And yet the real point of concern cuts through this, asking whether there is something that matters more than an appeal to simple factual truth. This question is posed in light of Johannsons character using manipulation and lies to make the dream of space become a reality, suggesting that it is the power of illusion that gives people meaning and that even lies can serve a greater value. This film dares to push that further yet, paralleling the simple nature of relationships and the value of endeavors like space exploration as it wonders about the tension that exists between illusion and conviction. Does it matter that people believe the moon landing was real or fake, or does it matter that it happened? Does it matter that facts are true or that feelings and outcomes are true? What is the driving force of either our lives or our greater human pursuits in this sense?

These are strong and important philosophical observations, and I think the films willingness to leave room for one to experience both a lack or resolution and a clear resolution, depending on how we view the larger story from our personal vantage point, helps to elevate this to another level.

“I will not go up in your midst, because you are a stiff-necked people, and I might destroy you on the way.”
– Exodus 33:3

“Due to Israel’s sin with the golden calf, the earlier promise of Gods presence to guide Israel on her way, once the very expression of his blessing, has now become the instrument of his judgment. But that God would consent to withdraw his presence is also an ironic expression of his long-suffering grace. Given the “stiff-necked” nature of the nation, Gods withdrawal of his presence from Israel’s midst is not only part of his judgment upon the people for their sin (32:34), but also a necessary act of divine mercy which makes it possible for Israel to continue on as a people.”
– Scott Hafemann

“From this point forward, Israel would only encounter God’s glory through a veil- whether that be the one covering Moses’ face, the one in the tabernacle, or (Paul argues by extension in 2 Cor 3:14-15) the “letter” or written “Moses”. The progression in 2 Cor 3 from Moses the lawgiver to “Moses” as a metonymy for the “letter” or written Torah allows Paul to focus his critique on the mediated nature of the “old covenant” (3:14) without criticizing the Torah itself.”
– Jason A. Staples (Paul and the Ressurection of Israel)

Let this poor heart be your mountain
be your mountain
the mountain where you dwell, O Lord
Yes, let this poor heart be your mountain
be your mountain
the mountain where you dwell, O Lord
and let this hunger become a pathway
become a pathway
that brings you here to me, O Lord
Yes, let this hunger become a pathway
become a pathway
that brings you here to me, O Lord

Fire, fall down
Thunder, surround
Glory, come down
Fire, fall down
Thunder, surround
Glory, come down

Let this longing become a love song
become a love song
that you teach my heart to sing, O Lord
Yes, let this longing become a love song
become a love song
that you teach my heart to sing, O Lord
Let this desire become a fire
become a fire
burning deep and bright in me, O Lord
Yes, let this desire become a fire
become a fire
burning deep and bright in me, O Lord
– Brother Isaiah (Holy Hunger)

Just as i came to read the above passages in Staples book, I found myself simultaneously asking God to teach me what it means to reconcile the veiling with the ensuing revelation of the unveiling of God in Jesus in the Judeo-Christian story, and this song by Brother Isaiah came on my spotify shuffle.

Let this poor heart
Let this longing
Let this desire

I wonder about the ways in which conservative Christians, driven to protect all of the things they see as necessary to claiming Gods presence in our lives and in this world, and progressive Christians, driven to do away with the many things they believe get in the way of seeing Gods presence in our lives and in this world, can equally find themselves standing apart from the story of Torah by way of making it either an enemy or an antiquated evil, a reflection of things that our conservative or progressive ideolgies have superseded in their grasp on the truth

I say this as someone who has stood in both of these polarized camps and operated in the same tendencies. I say this as someone who also found myself once intrinsically stuck without a real way to anchor Gods presence in my life and in this world. As someone for whom “the story” had ceased being told and could no longer be told because of the ways the new waged this necessary war against the old. I found myself unable to get back to Jesus, either through those conservative trenches or that progressive battlefield.

Some time ago I came to this realization through a time of crying out to god to “show” or unveil that seemingly absent glory once again- to be drawn back to (or simply to) the “story” of God is to be drawn into a story that speaks first and most completely to the whole of creation. Without this creation-new creation story there is no revelation or unveiling.

It is through this story that we arrive then at the story of Israel, the people through whom God would reveal this glory in its fullness. Thus, how we see the story of Israel becomes our lens for seeing the story of creation-new creation, and subsequently how we see ourselves in relationship to creation. What god does in the veiling becomes an equal judgment of the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death that reign over creation, and a divine mercy for this movement towards new creation, or what the scriptures call the story of salvation.

What do we find in this story when it is allowed it to speak?
– we find the freedom to see the imagery of the garden (dwelling with God) and the wilderness (gods removal of his presence) as both a judgment and a grace note, both of which find their resolution in the giving of the spirit to once again dwell in the whole of the creation
– we find the condemnation not of Gods good creation, or the other, but of the Powers of Sin and Death
– we find the freedom to see death and suffering as fundamentally opposed to life and transformation
– we find the freedom to lay claim to the fulfilled promise that God not only will make all things new through the establishing of his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, but has made all things new through the establishing of the kingdom in the here and now. As Staples puts it, “when Paul refers to the “curse of the Torah,” he is referring to death… the blessing, on the other hand, is equated with life… Unfortinately, modern readers frequently overlook that for Paul, like his Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, death is not solely an individual problem but a corporate one.”
– we find the freedom to locate evil as the antithesis of love, finding in the story of the veiling a fundamental problem of idolatry, not moral failings. If Gods life defining and life giving presence cannot coexist with Sin and Death, then the unveiling must come with the removal of these things, which is exactly what the ancients understood the blood (which was life not death, a grace gift not a necessary killing) to do- it has the power, in the face of that which opposes god (Death) to remove the pollution of Sin and Death from the creation space precisely because it is where life resides, a life that, through the ritual practice of gift giving sacrifice (of which death and killing do not belong) resides with god through the fire, or the burning.
– we find the freedom to hope and to wonder in a world still burdened under the reality of Sin and Death. In the story of Torah righteousness is not moral perfection but resurrection reality. It continually points to that which we can claim as truth in the unveiling (jesus and the spirit) even as we wait in anticipation for its completion- a transformed creation space.

Be a mountain
Be a love song
Become a fire

Because the unveiling of gods presence has happened for the sake of gods good creation.

Film Journal 2024: The Devils Bath
Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

And I thought Goodnight Mommy took things to the next level. I mean it did, but this dark, harrowing follow up after the less acclaimed The Lodge is truly oppressive.

Which might not sound appealing, but as a viewing experience it is unsettling in the best kind of way. It’s horror in the sense of atmosphere and tone, while underneath it is a gorgeous period piece and historical drama rich in the kind of tragedy one might expect from a community soaked in superstitions, social hierarchies and corrupted religious powers. Of the sort that would make Eggers thrilled.

There are multiple layered themes at play that all get embodied in the character if a tortured wife, played to perfection by Anja Plaschg, who is forced to wrestle with the demons that surround her, a battle that never seems hers to win, especially as we watch her gradual decent into despair, grief and madness. It’s a character arc that leaves its mark, especially with that jaw dropping final 20 minutes. The interconnected themes of suicide, sin, confession, forgiveness, and salvation are especially poignant.

Film Journal 2024: Despicable Me 4

Full disclosure- I’ve been an apologist for this franchise since it started. I loved the idea of the tortured villain in the first film left trying to measure up to standards that label him a failure. The second film found its proper chemistry by balancing the act of bringing the now iconic minions further to the forefront while still keeping Gru at its center. The story there also found its natural progression in the whole villain turned good guy motif.

While I also appreciated the Minions film, a half step down in my ratings from the 4/5 I gave the first two films, and which came as a bit of a surprise with its heart felt premise (who knew you could mine such character development from the loveable comic relief), it would be fair to say the third film followed the law of diminishing returns (3/5). My biggest critique of that film, besides the beats starting to feel a bit repetitive, was one of the worst on screen villains in recent memory.

This fourth film actually reverses that trajectory towards diminishing returns, not by giving us a more memorable villain, rather by making the villain secondary to the real story and concern. Once again, as we found in the first and second films, we find Gru learning from a strong group of female characters, including his daughters and the addition of a charming and likeable next door neighbor. This is paired with the male villain, a fellow student from Grus past, providing a way into Grus troubled relationship with his only son.

Nothing here lives up to the first two films in my mind, straddling a line between fine and enjoyable. There are some decent running gags, but no true laugh out loud moments, and some welcome time spent with what becomes different groupings within the film just building those relationships. It also has a tight running time, which allows it to feel like it never overplays its welcome.

However, I will say, the final 20 minutes makes a valiant effort to come close, offering that moral/life lesson the franchise is known for, concluding the different threads with an emphasis on the family, and even providing a few touching moments that almost earned a tear.

I don’t imagine this franchise is dying out any time soon, but if i was able to imagine a final entry I might dare to imagine it using this upward trajectory to really bring things back full circle as a way of capturing Grus development through the family that has now come to define his moral center. There is potential there for some nice commentary to emerge both through the father-son relationship as well as the different women in his life, perhaps making Gru the central villain once again, subservient to the necessary transformation of course.

One can hope.

Film Journal 2024: The Listener
Directed by Steve Buscemi

“We’re programmed to hate the idea that we’re programmed.”

That line has been sticking with me like few others this year. Perhaps the best descriptive of what it feels to live in the tension of attend8ng for reality while at the same time finding the freedom to live within it. For anyone who’s experienced this existential crisis,it can become an all consuming, mental, physical, psychological challenge.to wade through.

We find the language of this crisis fully formulsted in the context of one of the films final callers. Whereas the help line employee has spent the night trying to help people through their personal points of crisis with her words and her verbal presence, the final caller throws all of these words into question by forcing them to attend for reality. How is it that we attend for the illusion of this thing we called life. How do we reconcile the fact that our experiences of this life are essentially dependent on acts of manipulation. As the final caller surmises, we have this inate need to feel like we are the author of our stories, and to feel otherwise is to experience feelings of oppression. The problem is, reality tells us we are not. Thus we find ourselves managing this apparent discord even as we remain unaware or wilfully ignorant about what this discord is.

In a climatic moment, our final caller poses a challenge to the worker to give a rational argument for why someone should not commit suicide, readily anticipating and cutting down the inevitable answers as irrational. I remember distinctly sitting down with an association of mine and giving them the same challenge once upon a time. I noted that there is no rational reason to not to end my life, especially when reality tells me that suffering far outweighs the pleasures of living, not to mention the purely ethical question, should we want to breach that, spilling out into the stark fact that no matter what I do my life will, objectively speaking, do more harm than good simply by me existing. The only way to truly get around my awareness of this was to choose to live in ignorance of this, and to bind myself to truths that were in fact illusions and manipulations of reality. It just felt like something has to give in that equation- either my conception of reality or my living.

This film definitely tapped into all of that old wrestling in a very real way. I loved the simplicity of its premise and the way it uses it to dig down deep into those vulnerable spaces. There’s a subtle progression to the phone calls, even though they are each occupying their own space with different conversations with different people at the same time. It mounts to this space where everything is ultimately thrown into question, and where the language being used to speak to points of crisis is turned back on the worker.

Blue skies on one side, grey skies on the other.

There is a rather clever and brilliant move on the part of the Director to keep the narrative from gettimg locked into any hard and fast conclusions, regardless of how deep and dark and vulnerable it gets. There is no hand holding here that pretends to offer false answers. As it is noted, whenever someone says “there is always beauty and meaning we can find”, or “you mean something to me”, what this is in fact saying is that there is no meaning in a rational sense of the word. This is the language of human nature, grasping as it it designed to do at meaning making constructs. We are designed to fight against what reality ultimately is and says about this world, who we are, and our place in it. And the world, or nature, is designed to push back.

If I can be clear and transparent, I once thought this way. I was this caller caught in the throes of this battle between the world and my ability to survive it. Confronted by the truths that surfaced through my desperate search for some objective truth that could help explain how I was feeling, I was left with no way to reconcile my allegiances to the illusion with my observations about reality. While my journey ultimately brought me to a place where my conception of reality had to give, it did so with a sense unease and fear. Thus I often find myself analyzing and experiencing the world through wearing different sets of shoes. I find it necessary to reason from those differing assumptions and to allow the reasoning to take me where it will within those given parameters. And thus what this film evokes, and where my journey once found me, is as true as the fact that I am still living and would ultimately find myself working from a different set of assumptions. They are both part of me and my story. Which is why I find films like this, even though they go to dark places, helpful and rewarding and even cathartic. It reminds me that my questions and struggles are ones that find good company, even if they find equal resistance on all sides of the philopshical and religious/non-religious fence.

Reading Journal 2024: The Wild Robot
Author: Peter Brown

Every once in a while you come across a book that makes you sad for the fact that you didn’t have a chance to read it much, much earlier in life. Bringing together the sensibilities of E.B. White and Gary Paulson, Brown imagines a story that connects their shared interest in both philosophy and nature with a sci-fi premise- what would happen if we took a robot with the capability of learning through participation in (and in relationship to) its environment, and placed it in the wild? What would it become? How would it adapt? What can it tell us about nature? About humanity?

It reaches much broader yet- what could it tell us about life? Death? Family? Love? Friendship? Our humanity?

What’s really astute and powerful about the way Brown draws this story out in his imagination is that he builds into this a connection to the cycles and developments of the natural world, including its landscape. This is deeply visual prose. As it moves through the seasons, it also moves through the land, as well as the growth and development of the robot in concert with the land and its inhabitants. The robot is observing a world he doesn’t quite fit into and understand, while at the same time she is in some sense part of it and contributing to it. The more the robot grows and adapts and develops, the more it finds itself living in a distinct relationship with this world, subverting and transcending that wildness as it seeks to reconcile a fundamental and functioning conscious awareness with the tensions it finds in the wild. This also leads to questions regarding awareness of it’s own identity as a robot. Who am I if not a wild creature?

As a young child, I think I would have really resonated with this book in the same way I did Paulsens works and E.B. White, both formative voices in my life. Reading it now transported me back to those moments, allowing me to engage impossible questions and dare myself to broaden my imagination in the face of what were probably struggles with existential concern and deeply rooted fears that reached beyond my years as a young child. Even then I was fascinated by the notion that there seemed to be a disconnect between the world I could see and experience and the world I longed for, the one that threw me into crisis and the one I could imagine and hope for. A world of nature and of spirit, however lost I felt inbeteeen these two seemingly irreconcilable forces.

The tag line for the book is, “can a robot survive in the wilderness”. At least part of the books intent is to probe the question to us: can we survive in the wilderness that is our lives, and what might that look like from the perspective of our humanity?

No question too big or too small, no person too big or too small. Set in the right story with the right words and the right characters, such questions and observations will always hold power and relevance to the places and spaces we occupy in the present.

.

Film Journal 2024: The Present
Directed by Christian Ditter

A cute, breezy, honest family film about a group of siblings who try to keep their parents from splitting up with the aid of a family heirloom that can effectively turn back time (a grandfather clock).

There was room here to slow down the pace and narrow in on its central theme, which is the failure of the family to take notice of the distance they have all created with one another in the present. The message still rings clear and true however, with the necessary lessons being something they have to find and work through together.

Nice little indie that can work the young and old of the household.