Sold-out Silence: Manhattan Monk Movie Mania!

This weekend I went back to see INTO GREAT SILENCE a second time at the one venue it is currently playing, NYC’s Film Forum Theater.

I went with my 12-year-old daughter Sarah, who watched Papa’s two-minute plug for the film on EWTN’s "Life on the Rock" this past Thursday, and wanted to see it.

The screening was sold out.

Luckily I had bought tickets online, or we wouldn’t have got in. After an hour getting to the theater, turning around and going home would have been no fun. There weren’t two seats to be had together; I had to ask another patron if he would change seats so that I could sit with Sarah. (She loved the film, BTW.)

Apparently, that sold-out screening was indicative of a strong opening weekend; a contact at Zeitgeist tells me the film did very well in NYC (I don’t have numbers yet). So, this is good news for all of you who are hoping that the film will come to a theater near you, since art-house theater owners look to the NY opening of a film like this when deciding whether to book the film.

A number of readers have asked what they can do if the movie isn’t currently scheduled to play near them. Answer: Contact your local art-house/alternative theater owner(s) and ask them to book the film! The more interested patrons theater owners hear from, the more likely they are to book the film. And if it does come anywhere near you, make sure people who would enjoy it know about it.

Of course if you truly live in the sticks where there isn’t an art-house theater for three hours, you’re probably out of luck, but then you already knew that anyway.

P.S. Chicago-area readers: Note that the Music Box Theatre has moved up the film’s week-long run by a week, from a start date of April 6 to a start date of March 30!

WHERE AND WHEN (slightly updated!)

Into Great Silence

SDG here, making a rare foray from guest-blogging limbo to highlight a film you MUST SEE if you live anywhere near anywhere that it’s going to be playing.

My REVIEW of INTO GREAT SILENCE

My INTERVIEW with filmmaker Philip Gröning

WHERE AND WHEN to see it (if you’re lucky)

Regular readers of Jimmy’s blog know that I have virtually never used my sporadic guest blogging simply to recommend a film. I have Decent Films for that.

Into Great Silence is a rare exception that rule — and many others.

I’ve been grateful for any number of cinematic experiences in my life, and found many movies to be inspiring, challenging, thought-provoking, what have you. I can’t fully articulate how Into Great Silence affected me, except to say that it was a transforming experience, in that I find very, very few films to be. I walked the dozen or so blocks from the screening room to my parking garage in another world — not just imaginatively immersed in the world of the film, but enveloped in a silence in my own heart.

Fittingly, its opening comes a week after Ash Wednesday. It makes for ideal Lenten viewing; I’ll probably add the DVD to my annual Lenten practice. (Don’t miss it in theaters just because the DVD is coming! My interview piece talks about why.)

Improbably, the film has been a hit in post-Christian, aggressively secular Europe, where it has played to packed theaters in a number of countries. Go figure. The US is supposed to be more religious than Europe; how will it play here?

REVIEW | INTERVIEW | WHERE AND WHEN

A Public Service Announcement

SDG here with an important public service announcement:

Please Note:

  1. Prophecy is a nounnot a verb. It is pronounced "prof-e-see" — not "prof-e-sigh."

  2. Prophesy is a verbnot a noun. It is pronounced "prof-e-sigh" — not "prof-e-see."

  3. Prophesize, also spelled prophecize, is not a word. Do not pronounce it.

Thank you.

(P.S. Feel free to note additional public service announcement in the combox.)

Advent: What do you do?

SDG here to thank everyone who commented on my earlier "Advent, Pre-16 and The Nativity Story" thread.

The discussion (still ongoing!) on The Nativity Story has been particularly interesting — but I don’t want the subject of Advent and Christmas to get lost either. (That’s what I get for cramming too much subject matter into one post… a symptom of posting as infrequently as I do.)

Some readers did comment on practices and customs in their homes (and thank you to those who did!), but I’m hoping there’s more Adventy goodness out there in JA.org reader-land.

What goes on in your home during the weeks of Advent? Do you an Advent wreath? Do you set up a creche? Decorate your house? How and when?

What, if anything, do you do to keep Advent different from Christmas? If you have kids, how do you involve them?

I know one common custom with creches is to set up the whole creche except for the Christ child at the center, and then to place the Christ child in the creche on Christmas eve.

I’ve also heard of a custom involving the Magi figures, in which they are originally placed somewhere at a significant distance from the creche, and are periodically moved closer to the creche, and finally arrive on Christmas eve. Anyone do anything like that?

Do you listen to music during Advent? During Christmas? What are your favorite CDs (or MP3s or whatever)?

Please share your thoughts in the combox!

Advent, Pre-16 and The Nativity Story

SDG here, inspired by Jimmy’s fascinating post about purple in Advent to offer a few brief thoughts about Advent, including some 30-year-old observations about Christmas commercialism from Pre-16, and a plug for The Nativity Story — as well as (ahem) my coverage of it at Decent Films.

Every year at this time, of course, countless Christian families struggle with the annual pre-Christmas hype, which now seems to begin shortly after Halloween, and is in full swing by Thanksgiving. The notion of Advent as a distinct season of preparation, of recapitulating Israel’s long anticipation of her Messiah, seems lost amid a hectic welter of consumerism and commercialism.

As a result, lots of people are "Christmased out" long before the 25th. Forget about the Octave of Christmas — let alone the traditional 12 days — let’s just bring on New Year’s and get the whole "holiday season" over and done with for another year.

Of course there’s also the annual anti-commercialism backlash (for all the good it does), and the "Keep Christ is Christmas" campaign. At the same time, it may be worth noting that the evils of Christmas consumerism may have been slightly exaggerated.

For a couple of years now, a 1977 essay by then-Cardinal Ratzinger on Christmas commercialism has been getting some attention, probably because of his ascension to the Chair of Peter. Last year it was cited here, then this year it cropped up in the paper I write for, the National Catholic Register ("Have a B16 Christmas"). The official Yankee cap tip, though, goes to Wheat and Weeds for printing the following excerpt in full:

Nowadays a theologian or preacher is all but expected to heap more or less sarcastic criticism on our popular way of celebrating Christmas and, thus, to contrast impressively the sentimentality of our celebration with the reality of the first Christmas. Christmas, we are told, has been commercialized irredeemably and has degenerated into a senseless marketing frenzy; its religiosity has become tacky.

Of course, such criticism is largely justified, even though it might too readily forget that, behind the facade of business and sentimentality, the yearning for something purer and greater is not entirely extinguished; indeed, that the sentimental framework often provides the protecting shield behind which hides a noble and genuine sentiment that is simply reluctant to expose itself to the gaze of the other.

The hectic commercialism is repugnant to us, and rightly so: for it is indeed utterly out of place as a commemoration of the hushed mystery of Bethlehem, of the mystery of the God who for us made himself a beggar (2 Corinthians 8:9). And yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other? And does not the notion of giving transport us directly into the core of the mystery that is Christmas?

In the offertory prayer of the Christmas Vigil liturgy, we ask God for the grace to receive with joy his everlasting gifts that come to us in the celebration of Christ’s birth. Thus the concept of gift-giving is squarely anchored in this liturgy of the Church and, at the same time, we are made aware of the primal mode of all giving at Christmas: that God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind, that he turned himself over to us.

The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Even those who do not believe him to be God incarnate will have to admit that he has enriched and gifted the inner existence of generations upon generations.

So there you have it. Maybe you don’t have to feel guilty every time you set your foot in a mall or order another package from Amazon.com. OTOH, there are probably better things you can be doing as well, so…

With five kids, Suzanne and I are always looking for ways to make Advent more special and, well, more Adventy. I’m definitely looking forward to checking out the book Jimmy mentioned, The Catholic Home, to see how we might expand or enhance our family practices.

FWIW, here are a few quick notes about Advent in our house. If you have any suggestions you’d like to share, by all means note ’em in the combox!

As part of our effort to minimize the pre-Christmas hype and accent the distinctive nature of Advent, we wait until the third week of Advent — the week of the pink candle on the Advent wreath, the week of special joy at reaching the halfway mark — to trim the tree and hang lights on the house. (Actually, depending on the weather, we might hang lights earlier, but we don’t light them until the third week.)

We do an annual Jesse tree with OT and NT readings for every day of Advent. (Not the one in this example, but it gives you the idea.)

While it doesn’t directly relate to the meaning of the season, of course as Christmas approaches we watch It’s a Wonderful Life. Last year we watched The March of the Wooden Soldiers, and probably will again. Perhaps this year we’ll watch some version of A Christmas Carol too (I like ’em all).

And, starting this year, I believe we’ll have a new Advent tradition: watching THE NATIVITY STORY (opening in theaters today), the first major Hollywood movie that focuses on the real real meaning of Christmas since, well, practically ever. Hopefully we’ll catch in in theaters this weekend; next year we’ll watch it on DVD.

GET THE STORY.

Read more. Read even more.

Jack-o-Maul

SDG again with more Halloween pumpkin guest-blogging — this time real photos of an actual pumpkin that I (SDG, not Jimmy) decorated at a company picnic this year.

It’s not exactly a jack-o-lantern, because it’s not carved and therefore you couldn’t put a candle in it. So I called it "Jack-o-Maul" (as opposed to "Maul-o-lantern" or "Darth-o-lantern").

Some specifications:

  • Horns/Nose: carved carrots (affixed with toothpicks)
  • Face paint: Sharpies (black & red)
  • Teeth/Whites of eyes: Wite-out
  • Eyes: Grape halves, straight pins
  • Arms: Mr. Potato Head
  • Lightsaber: Tinker Toys

GET A CLOSER LOOK.

The Jack-o-lantern From Hell

SDG here with some Halloween jack-o-lantern art guest-blogging.

Every year at Halloween I (SDG, not Jimmy) carve a jack-o-lantern. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s just… strange.

We take pictures every year, but when I went to look for the pictures for what I consider my most interesting jack-o-lantern to date, I was disappointed to find that they seem to be missing.

However, all is not lost. Inspired by Jimmy’s earlier post about virtual jack-o-lantern carving, I’ve done a quick virtual mockup of my best memory of what the jack-o-lantern looked like.

Again, this is not a photo, just a down-and-dirty Photoshop mockup, but I did really carve this design (more or less; I’m sure it’s not exactly the same), about seven or eight years ago.

I called it "The Hierarchy of Hell," because the inspiration was C. S. Lewis’s imaginative depiction of hell in The Screwtape Letters as a society in which everyone seeks to devour everyone else.

"The Hierarchy of Hell" depicts four concentric heads, each devouring and/or being devoured by others.

After carving "The Hierarchy of Hell," I discovered that my jack-o-lantern had an unexpected but eerily fitting "performance art" aspect: As the pumpkin began to shrivel and decompose, the #2 head slowly began to withdraw into the maw of the largest head, while the mouth of the largest head slowly began to "close" on the other heads!

By the time I finally went to throw the thing away, it had collapsed into a mouldering heap — and when I went to pick it up, it fell apart completely — and there on the ground where the base of the pumpkin had been was the clearly recognizable ruins of the three inner faces, long since fallen back against the floor of the pumpkin, grimacing up at me.

I have to tell you, I felt I had come a lot closer to portraying the reality of hell than I ever meant to!

P.S. I’ll follow up this post with another with some real photos of a pumpkin I decorated (as opposed to carved) at a company picnic this year.

What’s This? Mark II

Hipponetta
SDG here with a personalized follow-up to JIMMY’S "WHAT’S THIS?" POST, which highlighted the Photoshop "cloning" technique on display HERE. (Tip of the Yankee cap to the reader who also pointed out THIS SIMILAR SITE.)

Being somewhat proficient (though hardly an expert) at this kind of Photoshopping, I was inspired to take a shot at creating a similar hybrid myself.

Incidentally, since I’m not aware of anyone having undertaken to name this particular breed of hybrid before now, I hereby dub my creature a "hipponetta." (No, it’s not part hippopotamus; "hippo" is Greek for "horse" — "hippopotamus" means "river horse" — and "netta" is Greek for "duck." The same use of "hippo" is found in "hippogriff," a mythical cross between a horse and the similarly mythical griffin.)

Anyway, while I’m pleased with the results, I’m aware that my image is far from a perfect illusion. The main problem is that the "found" images I started with — taken from MorgueFile.com, an excellent website for royalty-free images — weren’t perfect matches to begin with, and couldn’t entirely be reconciled. My hybrid image is really an impossible mishmash of two different perspectives as well as different animal parts, and it only works to the extent that you don’t notice or don’t pay attention.

What I’m most pleased with is the way I was able to apply the texture of the duck’s chest and neck feathers to the shape, features and highlighting of the horse’s chest and neck. I’d never tried anything like that before, and I think it came out pretty well.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, and in a way even the imperfections make it more so, at least to me.

GET A BETTER LOOK AT THE HIPPONETTA.

REVISIT THOSE OTHER TWO SITES.

Devil Not Just In The Details

A couple of weeks ago, Jimmy blogged  on an article in the Daily Mail reporting on a Vatican Radio interview with Fr. Gabriele Amorth.

A few days later, content from that Daily Mail article cropped up in an incredibly garbled form in a Sydney Morning Herald article by one Linda Morris, credited as "Religious Affairs Writer."

I don’t know how you get to be "Religious Affairs Writer" for the Sydney Morning Herald, but based on this piece, if I lived in Sydney, I’d consider getting my religion news from a more reliable source. Like the National Enquirer.

Here’s how the article starts out:

Devil in the detail: Vatican exorcises Harry Potter

THE Vatican has never been a fan of Harry Potter, but its chief exorcist has gone one step further and condemned J. K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard as downright evil.

"Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil," says Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s "caster-out of demons".

The books contained numerous positive references to the satanic art, falsely drawing a distinction between black and white magic, he told the Daily Mail in London. In the same interview, Father Amorth said he was convinced that Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were possessed by the devil.

Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence.

Now… how many problems can YOU spot in those few short paragraphs?

  1. Source problems. The article claims to be reporting on an interview with Fr. Amorth given to "the Daily Mail in London." False. In fact, that article was reporting on an interview given with Vatican Radio. Fr. Amorth was apparently not interviewed by the Daily Mail.

  2. Furthermore, even in the Daily Mail piece the Harry Potter business is only tacked on the end as something that Fr. Amorth has said "in the past." So even the Daily Mail wasn’t reporting on recent comments made by Fr. Amorth. The Daily Mail doesn’t even source the "past comments" in question — and then the current story linked above misattributes the Daily Mail‘s unsourced comments to a non-existent interview with the Daily Mail itself — specifically stating that the comments were given "in the same interview," which they weren’t! Just goes to show how carefully the reporter read the piece she was regurgitating.

  3. The article calls Fr. Amorth the "chief exorcist" of "the Vatican" as well as "the Pope’s ‘caster-out of demons’" (the latter phrase apparently lifted straight from the Daily Mail story). Jimmy has already pointed out the problems with these assertions.

  4. Given that (as Jimmy points out in the above link) Fr. Amorth is a priest of the diocese of Rome rather than an official of Vatican City, the various references to "the Vatican" are even more misleading than such media statements typically are.

  5. "Last year the Pope, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, described Harry Potter as a potentially corrupting influence." Since Cardinal Ratzinger was elected to the Roman See in mid-April, that would put the alleged comments within the first 3½ months of 2005. In fact, though, this statement represents a garbled report about a letter Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in March of 2003 — two years before he is supposed to have made the comments in question. Again, Jimmy has the clarification. Suffice to say, it is not at all clear that Ratzinger ever described Harry Potter as a "potentially corrupting influence," either last year or in 2003.

  6. The article paraphrases Fr. Amorth as saying that "The books contained [sic; the books still exist!] numerous positive references to the satanic art." As phrased, this suggests that Fr. Amorth attributed to Rowling positive references to "the satanic art" as such, when in fact satanism is perhaps never mentioned in any of the HP books. The paraphrase in the original article is slightly more convincing: "Rowling’s books contain innumerable positive references to magic, ‘the satanic art’." That makes more sense: The books refer positively to magic, which Fr. Amorth calls "the satanic art." That’s different from saying that the books "contain numerous positive references to the satanic art."

"Devil in the details," indeed!

I have to say, I’m sick to death of the news media reporting that "the Vatican" has done this or that every time someone sneezes in Italian.

This piece, though, is even more egregious than usual. Did the reporter even bother to read her source piece twice — let alone actually check a single fact?

Sydney residents, demand more from your local media!