The Ark and The Dove

Into Great Silence

“Pretty dark” is how he recalls the religious milieu of his boyhood..."This bright side of Christianity is something that I had never really understood before, so I was very grateful to do that.”

--Philip  Gröning on his experience making the film at the Carthusian monastery.

Stephen Greydanus has his review of Into Great Silence up - it is very interesting and contains a lot of information I wouldn't have otherwise known about the movie (that he prefers the English version of the title is about the most trivial of these things).

Die Grosse Stille

Saw it last night.  Wow, it was really something.  Do go see it if you can.

Don't go in expecting a normal documentary - the title is very apt.  Such silence in a movie theater was perhaps a bit unnerving at first, but letting the action (and the silence) have its own sound was a good directorial decision.  If the film had the typical things you expect from a documentary, like a voiceover by a narrator, soundtrack, etc., these things would have the detrimental effect of giving a certain detachment and distance.  In fact, Groening's omission of such interferences and distractions allows you to enter into the life of the monastery in a very direct, unmediated, and engrossing way.

Here's the Washington Post's editorial review.  Photos are from the movie's official website (hier auf Deutsch). 

Notes on language -

Death Star Attack Conspiracy Theory

Just to see what Peter says -

"Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an inside job?"

We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder. 

Like many Americans, I was fed this story when I was growing up. But as I watched the video, I began to realize that all was not as it seemed. And the more I questioned the official story, the deeper into the rabbit hole I went...  Read On

The Grail

I just watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with the guys.  This was actually the first time I saw the whole thing.

Some things I was thinking about it:

One, anyone who knows about how the Grail works knows you don't find it just by looking for it.

Marcus Grody - he gets bonus points because he might be the only one in the whole movie actually to pray explicitly.

Getting to drink from the Holy Grail.  That'd be pretty great.  But what makes the Grail the Grail?  The Precious Blood, obviously.  We get the Precious Blood at every Mass.  And from it, eternal life - not just diuturnal worldly life like the characters in the movie were hoping for.

Die Grosse Stille

I'll let Stephen Greydanus do the talking - he's seen it.

Let's go see it.

Labyrinth

This is for Peter's post on Pan's Labyrinth (which I've already buried).

On the self-sacrifice: I think you are noticing the difference between the natural and the supernatural virtue of sacrifice for another.

As St. Paul puts it, "Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.   But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

For the obedience, I have this idea I'm mulling over that Legal Positivism breeds anarchists.  I'll elaborate later.

Die Grosse Stille

It starts playing March 23 in the E Street Cinema in DC.

Bizarre yet predictable film cliches

No doubt you have heard of the famous Inverse Ninja Law, which states that in a movie or other work of fiction, the effectiveness of a group of villains attacking the hero is approximately inversely proportional to the number of said villains.

Well, I have a strange anecdote about the discovery of another such cinematic cliche law which we have taken to calling the "Inverse Clothing Law."  I am not the first to notice it, but I may be the first to formulate it mathematically.  Note to the easily offended: this post is only as immodest as your imagination makes it.

Some friends of mine were sitting around watching a kung fu movie on tv when I came in to the sitting room.  On the screen, the characters were engaged in a martial arts tournament.  As I sat down, a man and a woman prepared to face off.  One of my friends declared, "Well, she's going to lose," as if this should be totally obvious to everyone.  When I inquired how he knew, he replied that he could tell because she was wearing too much clothing to be able to win.  I was confused, because she had on a traditional costume designed for martial arts, such as this one.  He informed me that I was thinking about it the wrong way.  Sure enough, her opponent defeated her with the greatest of ease.  Soon after came a match of a man vs. a woman, but this time the woman was wearing kung fu-suit pants and a sports bra as her top.  I was informed that she had a reasonable chance of winning.  And sure enough, she emerged victorious in a close match.  My friends explained that for women (not men) in martial arts movies, the less clothing they are wearing, the stronger of an opponent they will be.  So then I observed with some sarcasm that if a woman engaged in martial arts wearing nothing at all, then clearly she would be unbeatable.  No, my friends replied, if she was wearing nothing at all, she would be very vulnerable and completely ineffective in combat.  So, I came back, it's not really the less clothing she has, it's some other function of clothing area.  They conceded that this was the case. 

So (this is the way that physicists think about things, by the way, at least really nerdy ones) I sketched for them on a napkin the relation between Amount of Clothing A and Martial Arts Effectiveness M.  As clothing amount approaches infinity, martial arts ability approaches zero.  Judging from the ineffectiveness of the woman in the kung-fu suit, the effectiveness M does not really attain a significant level unless the clothing amount A is quite small, at which point the marginal increase in M for a given decrease in A is large, so long as A does not actually reach zero.  And, I was informed, in the vast majority of movies and video games, the women most proficient in martial arts will be very scantily clad.  The function this suggested looked rather like an inverse, f(x) = 1/x:

It then occurred to me that this theory could be further refined.  The 1/x graph seems to be a good rule of thumb, but it does not seem to predict M very well in situations where A is very small.  To wit, in real life, A cannot arbitrarily approach zero, because there will come a point when making A any smaller will at least partially uncover something that should be covered up, causing the vulnerability factor to come into play.  Also, when A is very small, removing even a thread, mathematically speaking, could cause M to increase dramatically, whereas it is more probable that each woman's fighting ability maxes out somewhere. Therefore M has some maximum value which corresponds to a particular (low) value of A.  A good candidate for this function might be the following:

As you can see, as you approach 0 from the right, M increases more and more until it reaches a maximum value at A-nought and then falls off sharply, reaching zero at A=0.  The constants a, b, and c remain to be determined by an experiment which for reasons of prudence I would be highly unlikely to conduct.  Also, although I had to assign one of them to the x axis, it has not been determined which is the independent variable, or if both things are caused by a third thing.

Now, what this has to say about how women are portrayed in the movies is another thing.  A good friend of mine has mused on this curious law over at his blog Theology of the Body in DC.

"People called Romanes they go the house?"

We had a little debate about Monty Python's Life of Brian a while ago on this site, but one thing that's not up for debate is how great this portion of the movie is - the Latin lesson.

Die Grosse Stille

The English Dominican Studentate blog has a review of the new silent documentary film about the Carthusians.  They really like it.  Which means I will probably like it.  I think if I can find a theater that's playing it I will go see it.