November 30th, 2006
This is an article by Robert Novak on Bella, a little indie film by three Mexican (and Catholic) filmmakers. The movie is, says Novak, “no propaganda film but a dramatic depiction of choices facing an unmarried pregnant woman.”
Sounds like one to look for…if it can get distribution, and if the indie movie houses around [...]
October 30th, 2006
The Prestige is a smart and stylish mind game. Directed by Christopher Nolan, best known for the ingenious narrative gambit of Memento (the story’s told backwards) and for the psychological complexity he brought to the Batman franchise with the Bale-starring Batman Begins, the Prestige is an enjoyable brain-bender – smarter than your average popcorn flick, [...]
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
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Those were the days [the nineteenth century] of the great schism between the artist and Catholicism when it seemed that art and sanctity must be forever separated. One thinks of the convert J.K. Huysmans standing among the crowd of pious pilgrims at Lourdes, his soul harassed by the observation that, although Mary had chased the devil from the rocks of the shrine and the hearts of the pilgrims, he was still there blaspheming her and her Son by the ‘hideous’ architecture of the place. He distinctly hears the devil say to Mary: ‘I shall dog your footsteps, and wherever you stop, there I shall establish myself; you may have at Lourdes all the priests you please, but art, which is the only worth-while thing on earth after sanctity, not only will you not have, but I shall so effect that it will unceasingly insult you by the prolonged blasphemy of its uglinesss….All that represents you and your Son will be grotesque…’
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Kelly Hatzenbihler on 