Back from Minnesota/Into the Mystic

Hi everyone - I'm back from Minnesota and the Christianity21 event.

It was great - good conversation with fascinating people from diverse backgrounds.  Great room for the main sessions too.  The radical nature of the speakers' slate - all female speakers - was handled in such a manner as to make it transcend the old arguments - this is the way it should be, a precedent has now been set, and hopefully there's no going back.  It was a genuine privilege to hear to so many fascinating people doing more than fascinating things.

I was particularly compelled by thoughts of the relationship between spirituality and the earthiness of our lives; questions of how ethnic and other sociological boundaries serve and fail to serve the attempt to build community; and the ongoing conversation about theology and sexuality.  It was a pleasure to see old friends - Jay, Mark, Denise, Shane, Tony, Doug, Spencer, Tim (in no particular order, dear friends - I love you all equally, even if I forgot to name you here :)); meet people I've read or only connected to virtually in the past - Phyllis, Steve, Alyce, Nadia and talk about the remarkable diversity of experiences we're thinking and living through.  Perhaps the most striking thing was how everyone spoke in a context of action and not just talking - while language may be all we have, we're talking about what we're actually trying to do.  As a recent export to this country, for myself it was a time of feeling welcomed among fellow travellers, all of us trying to figure out how to live in the light of a vision of God and humanity that won't let us go.  I had to leave early, and with some regret because I was enjoying myself so much.  But it was meant to be.  Trust me.

When I got home yesterday afternoon I had a quick nap before we headed out to a magnificent surprise.  Brian Blade, one of the world's finest jazz drummers, had organised a legacy concert for his father, the magnanimous and dominant presence of Pastor Brady Blade, from Shreveport Louisiana, to be recorded in concert with a 35 member choir, and a band including some of the most remarkable musicians I've seen assembled in one place.  We were in a smallish room - an old AME church in Durham now deconsecrated and the home of the Hayti Heritage Center, up close to the stage, a few paces away from the elegant choir, Pastor Blade and Brian, and among others, Buddy Miller, and Daniel Lanois, who to my ears can do no musical wrong, on either side of the production desk.  For two hours, the choir and band lifted me out of the melancholic and anxiety-ridden mood I've been in for a few weeks.  I was overwhelmed by the sheer force of honest, loving voices; by the humility of musicians who could be playing much larger venues for much larger fees deciding out of communal loyalty, respect for the elder statesman, and dedication to the music; by the astonishment of Miss Ada Small, a 79 year old three time cancer survivor who plays the piano like Nina Simone and sings like nobody's business about the struggle to get through the day in a way that leaves you wondering if it's possible that all that stuff about God's presence in the world, and care for humanity, and the endlessness of hope amid despair might just be the truest truth in the universe.

People who know me might suggest that my emotions are close to the surface, and I've no argument with that.  If I'm honest, the shadow side of that kind of psycho-spiritual terrain is that feeling happiness so deeply can sometimes go hand in hand with knowing too much about depression.  I haven't written much about this before because I don't want to be self-indulgent, or to tell you things that end up being more about my own ego than the possibilities of conversation that result in mutual benefit.  But I was so dumbfounded by what happened last night at the Hayti that it would seem to disrespect it if I kept it to myself.  Having said that, it's impossible to find a way to write about it that does it justice.  So I'll just say this, on a Monday morning, at the beginning of a week that will bring who knows what to any of us:  in the presence of people at the height of their musical powers, under the ministry of a man who appeared to be the co-mingling of a Sufi sage and a football coach, listening to a band that included a man whose sounds have been echoing in my brain for half my life, from his work producing 'One' and Dylan's 'Time out of Mind', to his solo album 'Acadie', film work, and more*, I felt more awake, more loved, more willing to see life as a gift than I have been able to do for a very long time, and perhaps ever.  There are times when artists experiencing grace permit you to join them in it.  There are times when something transcendent happens in musical performance.  There are times when something even better happens.  For five bucks in the Hayti I got to fall in love.

* And if I were in LA this Thursday night, I know where I'd end up.

Quotation of the Day

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.: This just reemphasizes how this president has moved the United States from a foreign policy of strong national defense to one based on multinational cooperation. That is the kind of change that the Nobel committee believes in. This, apparently, is a criticism of Obama receiving the  Peace Prize.

Escapism Film Festival Next Weekend: You're Invited

I'm happy to announce that through my secret identity as a film critic and co-host of The Film Talk, next weekend I'll be at the Escapism Film Fest in Durham, North Carolina.

If you're a regular listener to the show or reader of this blog, you'll know that my love of cinema was catalysed at the impressionable age of 4, when my dad took my brother and I to see the darkest film ever released by Disney, 'The Black Hole'.  I was utterly captivated by the scope of the images - the spaceship might just be the biggest spaceship in the movies; for some reason the old character actors already seemed familiar, even though it was the first time I ever saw them; and I knew there was something dramatic going on, even if I couldn't quite understand the metaphysical proposals that result in [SPOILER AHOY] the mad evil scientist played by Maximillian Schell becoming possessed by the spirit (and the body) of his hench-robot, the imaginatively named 'Maximillian'.  The script's not up to much, but the whole thing looks magnificent; thirty years after I first saw 'The Black Hole', it has an irreplaceably special place in my heart, along with the adventures of Marty McFly, Clark Kent, the pirate-treasure seekers of Astoria, Oregon, and the other cinematic fantasy figures whom I connected with first by seeing them on screen, and spent much of the years 1983-1989 trying to recapture by listening to the soundtrack albums.

So thank God that the Carolina Theatre in Durham is screening these and other pictures of memory next weekend, in its glorious old and cavernous in all the best ways large screen, along with so many of the films that shaped me as a child that I can assume the programmers at the theatre were reading my diary.  Jett and I will be covering the Escapism Film Festivalin person - and if you're anywhere nearby, please join us for the opportunity to see Superman, Back to the Future, Dr Strangelove, The Goonies, Return to Oz, and the camp classic with Topol's second greatest screen performance 'Flash Gordon'.  Please join us if you can.

The Movie of the Year 2009: Climaxes

I hate missing the ending, so as a conclusion to my interim reflections on the year so far, let's get to the climaxes.  (Trying my best to avoid spoilers, but read the following at your own risk):

THE MOVIE OF THE YEAR CLIMAXES

Moon: When Sam emulates Dave Bowman’s ultimate trip, but instead of experiencing terror, he’s whopping and hollering like a child on a rollercoaster; the most delightful homage to Kubrick I think I’ve seen.

The moment when Ric O’Barry interrupts a lie by wearing a television in ‘The Cove’.

The last section of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which appears to be pushing the audience to face what we might prefer to ignore: that when we watch violence as entertainment, we may be complicit in its real world analogue.  (This section begins with an extraordinary image of a woman in a red dress [of the kind that Rita Hayworth used to be sewn into], smoking a cigarette, framed against the window of a cinema projector; the fact that said window seems to have been imported from the Emperor’s decompression chamber in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, and that the music that accompanies the scene was written by David Bowie and Giorgio Moroder thirty-eight years after the events depicted in the film took place in Tarantino’s imagination only serves to heighten the sense of both the universality of the film’s point, and the fact that ‘Inglourious Basterds’ might be the most aesthetically rich and philosophically profound film released so far this year.)

The climax of ‘Mary and Max’, the astonishing Sundance opener that regrettably still doesn’t have a US release date; one of the most honest unbroken vision of how life ends, and life goes on that I’ve seen in a movie.

The ‘Gojira’ exclamation by Steve 'Lips' Kudlow at the end of ‘Anvil’ – the only heavy metal documentary that will make you cry (let me grant the fact that I'm not an expert on heavy metal documentaries); with admiration for the titanic struggle of these guys to do what they do best, and the vicarious pleasure one takes from imagining that the life of a film blogger might one day be as exciting as playing for free to an audience of 12 in a Prague basement club.

The very last image of ‘The Hurt Locker’ – revealing violence-inspired adrenaline as an addiction that will not be ended without the wisdom of old men like Clint.

END CREDITS

Speaking of Clint, you'd have to go far to get a more enveloping and meaningful end credits sequence than the one that has him singing over the embers of ‘Gran Torino’; an actor getting to control his swan song at the end of a film that reconciles the past violence of his iconic characters with the need for someone to end it.

The coruscating static camera throughout the end credits of ‘In the Loop’, observing the business-as-usual scene in the UK civil service, bureaucrats wandering in a formal haze, as if they haven’t just legitimized a war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people, dilute the moral credibility of their own nation, and make the world less safe than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Having said all this, the best experience I had in a cinema was my once every three or four-yearly revisitation of 'Lawrence of Arabia', whose 'funny sense of fun' gets more disturbing each time I see it; my virginal encounter with 'Andrei Rublev', whose scene of medieval town-sacking is one of about seven hundred reasons why Jett's weekly statement about it might be unarguable.  But, as far as elevated aesthetic experiences go, none of these matched the sense of delirium I had last week in the presence of the Sun Ra Arkestra, their heavy horns pounding out the kind of sound you might expect to greet you in jazz heaven.  Having said that, I'm going to see a movie at a festival at the end of next week that happens to be the first film I ever saw, and one that I haven't seen on a cinema screen since 1979.  I don't know if the 'The Black Hole' holds up as a coherent movie; but I'm hoping that the part of me that was captivated by cinema as a four year old kid thirty years ago gets to live again for a night.  And if you're in or near North Carolina, you should join me.  If you do, you'll get to see this:

And why on earth would you want to miss that?

The Movie of the Year 2009: Moments

And so we continue cutting together the patchwork of the year's best film, today's chapter culled together from the richest moments I've seen on screen in 2009 (there will be more, of course):

MOMENTS

Every part of ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ when the narrating voices contradict each other.

When Andreotti in 'Il Divo' returns to his home village to hand out gifts like a satanic Santa, arms moving from the elbows, eyes unblinking; the lines between generosity and bribery so subtly blurred in a film that seems to turn one man’s life into a comprehensive social history of post-war Italy.

Pretty much anything in ‘Tetro’ – the most physically beautiful film of 2009; the scene at the hospital community, any time Klaus Maria Brandauer appears; and especially the delirious section when a critic called 'Alone' pronounces her judgement on the world.

The converstion between Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann in 'Funny People' in which they re-affirm their love for each other; he’s never been more believable.

The woman who stumbles into shot when Krystof Zanussi is being interviewed in ‘Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky’; like a refugee from a Fellini set. Dmitry Trakovsky’s genius is to keep filming – he knows that’s what Tarkovsky would do too.  Here's a picture of Dmitry - a good friend of The Film Talk and an excellent director.

The choreographed dance in (500) Days of Summer; wherein a man dances to celebrate something that he thinks is miraculous, without realizing his partner rates it much lower.

And...Solo searching for William’s other taxi in the Winston-Salem night; Bahrani utterly avoids the cliché of a chase scene; to the point where the ‘coincidence’ of finding the other car appears nothing less than exactly what would happen in real life... The breakfast provided for the prison officer in ‘Hunger’, capturing the harsh and broken reality of northern Irish life through the 70s and 80s, and making a character who otherwise might be automatised into a recognizably human figure... Joaquin Phoenix and Elias Koteas saying everything and nothing while Gwyneth Paltrow leaves the table in the restaurant scene in ‘Two Lovers’.  Only one of them belongs there... The party in ‘Humpday’ – there’s something about it that makes me want to go there; there’s something about it that makes me want to stay in bed... Eddie Adams walking to his office as the linking sections of ‘An Unlikely Weapon’ – an artist damaged by what he saw, trying to make sense of it and give something back...

Your thoughts?