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resurgam40 posted:*Well, the movies, at least; if there are any overtly Christian messages in Space Ace or the Dragon's Lair series, I missed them. Given how often dragons were used as metaphors for paganism, I think we can come up with a Christian message there. And the linearity of the games is definitely Calvinist. 
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Apr 10, 2015 01:53
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Pththya-lyi posted:they go along with their professor's wishes because they are afraid of the consequences he can inflict on them (i.e. a bad grade and the "social death" that comes with being labeled an idiot.) This is one the stupidest things I've ever read.
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Apr 10, 2015 04:30
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Mordiceius posted:This is one the stupidest things I've ever read. I hope you're saying it's the movie logic that's stupid and not my interpretation!  Either way, I'd like you to elaborate, please.
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Apr 10, 2015 20:04
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You're not going to face a social death because you failed one class....unless your parents/friends are complete assholes in which case why does their opinion matter? Your social death is hyperbole
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Apr 10, 2015 20:08
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SocketWrench posted:You're not going to face a social death because you failed one class....unless your parents/friends are complete assholes in which case why does their opinion matter? Your social death is hyperbole IIRC, the kids in the movie seem awfully worried about something when they're all signing the paper saying "God is Dead" in the first act. What do you think they're worried about, if not bad grades and scorn?
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Apr 10, 2015 20:13
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Not to mention that even if the class was mostly atheist, if they still all thought the prof was an rear end in a top hat, then they weren't going to ostracize the kid for debating him, even if he lost.Pththya-lyi posted:IIRC, the kids in the movie seem awfully worried about something when they're all signing the paper saying "God is Dead" in the first act. What do you think they're worried about, if not bad grades and scorn? problem is, the movie never makes the consequences of failure clear. When it's murky like that, you can't sell the idea of actual stakes and tension. It would have worked if we had maybe seen a glimpse of someone from the previous semester failing the class, falling to their knees, and weeping "NOOOO I FAILED A COLLEGE COURSE, IT'S OVER, IT'S ALL OVER!!!!" EDIT: just to show I'm not all negative, this is a movie with explicitly Christian themes mentioned in all the press material (I think that Opus Dei may have provided some financing, in fact!) that I actually enjoyed and I feel functions as both an explicitly Christian film AND as a film that's compelling for atheists. Of course, Evangelicals would hate it by default because it endorses Catholicism, but there's no pleasing them. Of note, the film has two co-protagonists and one is a literal saint (as in, he was canonized following his death.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z17OEqbrOOQ I'll try to do a write-up for it after work. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 20:15
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I consider breaking up with a control freak that is mad at me for going to her third choice university so we can be together forever and ever to be a good thing, personally.
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Apr 10, 2015 20:26
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Pththya-lyi posted:I hope you're saying it's the movie logic that's stupid and not my interpretation! The movie logic is stupid as gently caress and thus the whole situation isn't believable. I haven't seen the movie, so I can only comment on what is being repeated about it, but the whole problem is a false problem since why can't the main character just go to the academic dean and be like "Yo, this professor is infringing on my religious rights." Boom. Problem solved. The end.
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Apr 10, 2015 22:45
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Mordiceius posted:The movie logic is stupid as gently caress and thus the whole situation isn't believable. I guess he is the only philosophy professor at the college, which would be stupid as hell.
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Apr 10, 2015 23:39
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wins.
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Mordiceius posted:The movie logic is stupid as gently caress and thus the whole situation isn't believable.
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Apr 11, 2015 00:01
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So here are some thoughts on There Be Dragons - I just downloaded it and rewatched some of the key scenes, and holy poo poo is this movie dripping in explicit Christian messages - people are constantly thanking God, discussing God's will, praying, and so forth. Even so, it holds up pretty well as an entertaining drama. I'll run down some highlights. The story is framed by scenes in the 70s as a journalist who had become estranged from his father discovers that his father was an associate of Josemaria Escriva while doing research for a piece on Escriva, who founded Opus Dei and was canonized. He contacts his father, who is dying in the hospital, which kicks off a series of flashbacks. Manolo and Josemaria are two boys who grow up as bffs and end up joining seminary together. While in seminary they have some scraps and get in trouble a few times.  Manolo eventually decides that the priesthood isn't for him and leaves seminary. Josemaria completes his schooling and becomes a priest. Josemaria is particularly interested in creating a program that integrates priests with non-priests, including women, for the purpose of performing social works. After some resistance, the church leadership allows him to proceed. The civil war breaks out and Manolo joins the Republicans, but only as a Fascist mole. He tries to gently caress the hot Republican women and generally acts like an asshat. Eventually Republicans start getting pretty hostile to the clergy (historically with good reason, since the Catholic church functioned as a way to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.) Josemaria's friends encourage him to hide his profession, but at first he declines. When his church gets overrun by an angry mob, he flees but is then threatened by some guys in the metro, whereupon he nervously defends his choice of profession at knifepoint.  Later his pals finally convince him to walk around in civvies and they try to flee Madrid. They spot an older priest getting executed in the street:   In the scene immediately afterward, Josemaria says he's going to pray for the slain priest and for his killers, but shortly afterward breaks down crying from fear. Since the fascists also dislike Josemaria due to his organizations and outspoken beliefs, blah blah, they want to kill him too. He and his pals decide to flee the country. Along the way they have various scary misadventures, and Josemaria, while hiding in an insane asylum, has a chat with a rape victim about what God actually means and if God really intervenes in the lives of mortals at all. All this time Manolo is doing dumb poo poo as an rear end in a top hat mole with the Republican army, winds up betraying all his friends, murdering dudes, and killing a woman he had the hots for but turned him down. he kidnaps her baby and pretends it's his. Shocker, actually the reporter from the framing story is actually the son of the woman Manolo was creeping on the whole movie! Manolo then rejoins the fascists. Josemaria rejoins his friends and is super duper into God and tells everybody so. As Josemaria is about to cross the border into France, Manolo is somehow in the right place at the right time and has the opportunity to snipe Josemaria from afar. However he suddenly has an attack of good conscience and decides to not be a dick this one time.  Back in "present day" the reporter guy is stunned to find out his father was actually a murderous douchenozzle, but somehow finds it within himself to forgive the rear end in a top hat. As Manolo starts to die, he finally asks God for forgiveness or something. OK, so the story isn't perfect, but you get all kinds of stuff actually at stake. Let's look at the plight of Josemaria. We know that the Republicans and their sympathizers are killing priests because there's a character who says so out loud. Then we see Josemaria threatened at knifepoint - he actually gets saved when the train pulls up and the engineer tells the people attacking him to get lost and then calls Josemaria a bougie swine. And then of course we see the execution in the street of some other priest. So the stakes are laid out extremely clearly - if Josemaria gets caught by the fascists OR the republics and they find out who he is, he's gonna be fuckin' DEAD. (So there's your first variety of death.) You also have Josemaria grappling with aspects of his faith, which is some nice stuff, considering he's an actual priest. He's also followed around by his friends, who look to him for spiritual guidance. he realizes that as fuckin' terrified as he is, he can't crack in front of them, to the point where he tells them to give their enemies an even-tempered forgiveness when it seems like even he's not sure if he can forgive them (explaining to his pals "they see us as part of a system that causes them pain".) So you got shades of the other varieties of death there too. And of course Manolo turns into a murderous dickbag and "loses his soul" so to speak, only to be redeemed in the main story by deciding to not murder his childhood friend on top of all the other murder he got up to, as well as in the frame story by confessing to his son and receiving his son's forgiveness. So it CAN be done, but maybe what this movie lacks that evangelicals truly crave is smug preaching to the choir and not difficult questions of "do I still have to forgive people who murder my friends"? Oh yeah, and Evangelicals would probably hate this one: Josemaria, to his friends posted:I'm not going to tell you what to think. God gave each of you a brain and reason and a conscience. Why? So you can come to conclusions on your own and take personal responsibility for them. But before rushing to act, before changing the world, first think about changing yourselves. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Apr 11, 2015 |
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Apr 11, 2015 00:50
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PassTheRemote posted:I guess he is the only philosophy professor at the college, which would be stupid as hell. Casimir Radon posted:Nobody involved went to college anywhere that wasn't a evangelical diploma mill, so there's tons of willful ignorance about how public universities work. These are people dumb enough to believe that Christians are oppressed in any capacity in the US. Ahh.... So what you're saying is that it's a bad movie filled with logical inconstancies.
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Apr 11, 2015 01:27
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^ i thought that was well established already with "Sign this denial or fail the class"Pththya-lyi posted:IIRC, the kids in the movie seem awfully worried about something when they're all signing the paper saying "God is Dead" in the first act. What do you think they're worried about, if not bad grades and scorn? Well, if they're religious, they're denying god, which is pure evil in the fundie mindset. SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Apr 11, 2015 |
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Apr 11, 2015 06:50
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Mordiceius posted:Ahh.... So what you're saying is that it's a bad movie filled with logical inconstancies. Even worse, the logical inconsistencies are intentional and exist to reinforce the evangelical persecution complex. They don't want to know how it really works, it's easier to see the world in this adversarial manner instead. The paradox at the heart of evangelical cinema is that it's effectively bad on purpose, but the purpose is ostensibly to spread the Good News. I don't believe it's actually possible to create a non-Biblical narrative that would both satisfy its target audience and appeal to a broader audience, no matter how well it was produced or acted.
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Apr 11, 2015 12:43
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McSpanky posted:Even worse, the logical inconsistencies are intentional and exist to reinforce the evangelical persecution complex. They don't want to know how it really works, it's easier to see the world in this adversarial manner instead. The reality is that Evangelicals have a very simplistic worldview, and that just doesn't make for great entertainment, especially when you're trying to deal with a film that's supposed to be a philosophical battle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc5s1ZKNmcc These are the argument scenes from God's Not Dead. They are almost totally unwatchable because there is no flow of ideas. The professor's role is there to basically be glib and just say "Yeah, that's nice, but come on! Seriously?" It would be like watching a Rocky movie where he goes up against kids or quadriplegics, or quadriplegic kids. You know the kid isn't going to be swayed by the professor's words. The professor is well spoken, but he's a complete idiot. Incapable of actual thought. And you know what - the audience sees this. But they don't care. Because these films aren't made to entertain or even evangelize. They're made to pump up the base. They're made to allow them to see their fantasy played out. They're the smart powerful ones and the other guys are the idiots. There's no introspection. The film was made because the filmmaker was concerned by how many Christians go to four-year colleges and yet, don't remain Christians upon leaving. And instead of really exploring why that is, instead, they just simply say "Well, they are made to!" They don't understand atheism (I'll argue that they also don't understand Christ or science or anything beyond simple English). How can you make a good film about a conflict between religion and atheism without understanding the core conflict? It's not that Christian messages are anathema to good films. There are plenty of great films with Christian messages and themes. Take Gran Torino. Catholicism plays a central role to that story. But it works so well because there are shades of grey. It's not just the good priest clashing with the mean old racist. There's some issues with the priest as well. It feels real because there's a real conflict that is representative of reality at it.
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Apr 12, 2015 15:58
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From what I'm getting, Catholics tend to be better at making films with explicitly Christian messages. Could that be because most Catholics in the US are relatively recent immigrants (like from last 100 years) and live on the East or West coasts and the evangelicals are all clustered in flyover country so it's more a rural vs. urban divide than anything inherent to the religions themselves? My boyfriend's mom is a third generation pole immigrant and his dad is Mexican so he's catholic as all get out but his family doesn't do much screeching about gays and atheists or whatever and his mom likes Bollywood films which don't even have a Christian subtext.
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Apr 12, 2015 16:49
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Another great Christian film: Andrei Tarkovsky's controversial Soviet epic Andrei Rublev
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Apr 12, 2015 17:27
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Xibanya posted:From what I'm getting, Catholics tend to be better at making films with explicitly Christian messages. Could that be because most Catholics in the US are relatively recent immigrants (like from last 100 years) and live on the East or West coasts and the evangelicals are all clustered in flyover country so it's more a rural vs. urban divide than anything inherent to the religions themselves? There's a bunch of things going on. Now, I will say this - Catholics are pretty varied. You got people like Rick Santorum, who basically are pretty much evangelicals, and then you also got people like Stephen Colbert. Both of them are devout Catholics, but they are also vastly different Catholics (I think a lot of people are surprised to hear that Colbert is an active Catholic). Hell, I heard the lead singer of Slayer is a Catholic. If you can sing lead for Slayer and be a Catholic, you can see how wide things go. First off, Catholicism has a pretty deep history of intellectualism. For example, you have people like Saint Thomas Aquinas, who even if you disagree with him, at least put a lot of thought into his discourses on morality and Catholicism. It's one of those things, if you're really going to dig in deep to Catholicism, you're probably going to encounter this element of the religion. Secondly, it feels like there's a bit more mysticism than there would be in Evangelical churches. There's a lot of talk about mystery. There are people who like the Latin mass because it feels more mystical to them. Thirdly, there is an emphasis on trying to be more integrated with the people. You can see it especially with this current pope, but that's a big thing in Catholicism. It's not supposed to be insular and closed off. There is this idea about engagement. Fourthly, Catholicism doesn't necessarily try to make everything about God. I went to a Catholic high school, and with the exception of our theology class, God was kept out of the classroom. We learned about evolution, to the point where we actually discussed the people around Darwin who were proposing similar ideas (yeah, it wasn't just Darwin coming in saying 'WE COME FROM MONKEYS,' there were other people reaching similar conclusions). We read books like Catcher in the Rye. There are denominations that will try to make everything about God. Like, the people in Jesus Camp, for example. Fifthly, Catholicism does not preach Bible literalism. I'm sure there are Catholics out there who feel that way, we're open to the idea that certain parts might be allegorical or didn't happen exactly the way it said it did. So, we don't get hung up on Genesis because we're willing to say "that's not how it actually happened." Sixth, you have the Jesuits. Need I say more about them? Seventh, there's more structure to the Catholic church. To be a priest, you have to have a certain level of education, you have to take certain vows, you answer to a Bishop. There's more control over the message, where if I wanted to start a Baptist church, I can just start one up. Which also controls some of the bullshit beliefs you see in other churches. I know some people will point to transubstantiation, but at least that's a more quiet "insanity." We're not holding poisonous snakes or babbling and saying that we're speaking in tongues. Finally, there's a lot of tolerance for struggling within the Catholic church. I remember I had this gung-ho theology teacher. He was as deep into Jesus as any person could be without being certifiably insane. He was discussing communion, and he said it's okay to take communion if you don't know if you believe. I think that final point is a big thing. It seems like a lot of Christian films depict a struggle as either you believe entirely or you just don't believe at all. There's no concept of wanting to believe but being troubled by what you see. Hell, the Simpsons handles Christian themes much better than explicitly Christian movies. If Ned Flanders can have a believable crisis of faith, then there's no excuse for what Kirk Cameron does.
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Apr 12, 2015 18:08
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Introspection and interrogation make for better movies than incoherent scriptural literalism.
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Apr 12, 2015 19:00
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I liked "The Prince of Egypt" and it had both!
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Apr 12, 2015 19:02
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The Prince of Egypt works because it takes the scriptural literalist view as a base premise and then reinterprets the story in a more interesting manner, rather than simply translating it directly to screen.
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Apr 12, 2015 19:10
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Xibanya posted:I liked "The Prince of Egypt" and it had both! I feel like biblical literalism is not as much of a problem if you're using it to get an interesting plot and setting for your movie rather than trying to justify the death penalty for mixing wool and flax. God's Not Dead is an example of chain-e-mail literalism in that sense, I guess.
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Apr 12, 2015 20:54
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Jack Gladney posted:I feel like biblical literalism is not as much of a problem if you're using it to get an interesting plot and setting for your movie rather than trying to justify the death penalty for mixing wool and flax. God's Not Dead is an example of chain-e-mail literalism in that sense, I guess. Yeah. I mean, telling the stories in the Bible isn't really literalism, at least in the sense that we mean it. Otherwise, we might as well accuse Walt Disney of fairy tale literalism when he made Seven Whites and the Snow Dwarfs.
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Apr 12, 2015 22:38
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The Prince of Egypt is far from biblically literalist. It's a hard secularized, post-Civil Rights take on the story and that is absolutely instrumental to the extent to which it's made palatable for a multicultural American audience.
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Apr 12, 2015 22:41
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I took it more to mean that the literalist mindset is indifferent to telling good stories, it's more about being right.
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Apr 12, 2015 22:41
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Cemetry Gator posted:Seven Whites and the Snow Dwarfs. I'm sorry, what? K. Waste posted:The Prince of Egypt is far from biblically literalist. It's a hard secularized, post-Civil Rights take on the story and that is absolutely instrumental to the extent to which it's made palatable for a multicultural American audience. What does post-Civil Rights have to do with it, as opposed to say, The Ten Commandments which is pre-Civil Rights era?
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Apr 13, 2015 02:47
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raditts posted:I'm sorry, what? That sounds like a decidedly pre-Civil-Rights-Era motion picture.
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Apr 13, 2015 02:50
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raditts posted:What does post-Civil Rights have to do with it, as opposed to say, The Ten Commandments which is pre-Civil Rights era? I can't really speak to The Ten Commandments and compare/contrast The Prince of Egypt. But the film on its own is pretty remarkable in just how precisely it captures this Civil Rights era interpretation of the Exodus myth as a progressive metaphor for slavery and its inherent sin. The only thing I've seen from The Ten Commandments is the trailer, which is pretty telling in and of itself, portraying the film as a classic epic and adventure story, but never once mentioning the Bible or commenting on its religious significance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LKUpWvnubU The Prince of Egypt, on the other hand, is much more dower. It begins with a sweeping musical number in which hills of oppressed men plead for deliverance, excising a wealth of content that actually invokes the natural moral and physical superiority of the Hebrews over other peoples, which is what the original tale is explaining. Because the Bible isn't either an archetypical sword-and-sandal movie or a tragic metaphor for the inherent objection of slavery - which Moses specifically invokes in the film. The Bible doesn't really have an opinion on slavery much brighter than, "Yeah, it's there, it's a thing that intersects with every aspect of advanced social life in a developing civilization."
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Apr 13, 2015 03:18
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K. Waste posted:I can't really speak to The Ten Commandments and compare/contrast The Prince of Egypt. But the film on its own is pretty remarkable in just how precisely it captures this Civil Rights era interpretation of the Exodus myth as a progressive metaphor for slavery and its inherent sin. The only thing I've seen from The Ten Commandments is the trailer, which is pretty telling in and of itself, portraying the film as a classic epic and adventure story, but never once mentioning the Bible or commenting on its religious significance. Considering you seem to be a connaisseur of Biblical / Christian films, I'm kind of surprised you haven't seen the one that comes on TV more consistently than any other. I haven't seen The Prince of Egypt in a while, is it really a general denunciation of slavery or a more specific "don't enslave my people?"
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Apr 13, 2015 04:41
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raditts posted:Considering you seem to be a connaisseur of Biblical / Christian films, I'm kind of surprised you haven't seen the one that comes on TV more consistently than any other. Moses literally says to Ramses that he's doing what he's doing, "Because no kingdom should be made on the backs of slaves." edit: the subtext is that he still doesn't really consider himself Hebrew
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Apr 13, 2015 05:07
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Ten commandments and Prince of Egypt are Jewish movies, and no one ever said the jews were bad at movies.
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Apr 13, 2015 05:10
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The Prince of Egypt opens with a title card assuring you that it has all sorts of secular, multicultural connotations, and that we shouldn't confuse it with the Book of Exodus, which you can read in a library. edit: Catholicism in film chat - M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake lays it on pretty thick. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Apr 13, 2015 |
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Apr 13, 2015 05:17
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The new Daredevil series is really really big on Catholicism and has a few of those stereotypical "character asks a holy man about religion" scenes.
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Apr 13, 2015 05:28
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computer parts posted:The new Daredevil series is really really big on Catholicism and has a few of those stereotypical "character asks a holy man about religion" scenes. That's why you religious film connoisseurs should watch There Be Dragons - it has a holy man asks a character about religion scene.
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Apr 13, 2015 06:12
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Xibanya posted:From what I'm getting, Catholics tend to be better at making films with explicitly Christian messages. Could that be because most Catholics in the US are relatively recent immigrants (like from last 100 years) and live on the East or West coasts and the evangelicals are all clustered in flyover country so it's more a rural vs. urban divide than anything inherent to the religions themselves? Eh, your general religious retards span over every branch of religion no matter what or where. for example while you have moderate catholics, you also have others that aren't like Andy Schafely (granted he's more catholic in title only) and other parts where catholics see the Virgin Mary in toast and jesus in a bathroom door, or a holy image on a sheet pan....
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Apr 13, 2015 10:18
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Fun Fact: God Is Not Dead was originally written from a more catholic POV but got watered down by evangelicals. Still poo poo, but it actually came form a different direction and experienced the Xian film equivalent of studio meddling.
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Apr 13, 2015 10:43
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That is a huge jump to go from "moderate Catholic POV" to "making one of your scenes a speech from one of the Duck Dynasty guys."
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Apr 13, 2015 13:57
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Cemetry Gator posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc5s1ZKNmcc What I thought was really interesting though is that at the end of the sham debate the kid heckles the professor into saying why he hates god, and the professor's answer is 'because he took everything from me'. It's obvious this guy is suffering and in pain, and it would be a good moment for our hero (who has made his point to anyone with a quarter of a brain) to back off and show some compassion or something, but instead he goes for the debate suplex.
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Apr 13, 2015 14:13
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Well, that's what the people this film was aimed at honestly believe. atheists are atheists because somewhere along the line a tragedy had struck and they blamed god for it. Just like the complaint that the professor is just some clueless boob. The people that the thing was geared for don't think atheists are capable of any thought, rationalization or morals because they reject the obvious. They're corrupted by satan to try and destroy Christianity and turn people away just because.
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Apr 13, 2015 17:13
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Hope nobody minds if I crosspost from GenChat about the previously mentioned M. Night Shyamalan film Wide Awake: Wide Awake would be a legitimately good film if its protagonist wasn't crafted to be as overly precocious as possible. There's not really any plot to the movie, because the whole conceit is that this little boy wants to go on a spiritual journey to find God, but literally can't because he's a little boy. This isn't a problem in and of itself, because I tend to actually enjoy episodic, coming-of-age, schoolboy stories, but A Separate Peace this is not. On the other hand, it's a great resource for those who want to see a side of American Catholicism that isn't contained in Abel Ferrara and Martin Scorsese movies. As a story about spiritual crisis, it's automatically more identifiable than God's Not Dead, which reframes the crisis of faith to a social persecution complex rather than the private doubts of the individual. It's also not nearly as sanitized. At the same time, it gets to the heart of something that I've talked about previously in this thread, which is that what tends to make spiritual films so impenetrable isn't necessarily the explicit ideological framework in and of itself, but the coupling of this framework with hackneyed and underdeveloped narratives that are conspicuously similar to mainstream commercial cinema that frames itself as 'apolitical' and 'secular.' In the case of Wide Awake, this hackneyed, underdeveloped narrative suffers from the above mentioned 'perfection' of the protagonist. Wide Awake doesn't really feel like a unique film about a crisis of faith from a Catholic perspective, anymore than God's Not Dead feels unique from Crash. Rather, each feels like a materialistically decadent, spiritually compromised version of their respective forms of Christianity. As a non-theist, even one with a Catholic upbringing, it's spiritually draining because God is rendered so minuscule compared to the thrust of saccharine entertainments. Tonally the film has way more in common than Troll 2 than you might expect, which is its saving grace. (Lol, get it, grace, Catholicism?) The key to Troll 2 is that despite being 'terribly written,' it actually does a very good job of depicting family disfunction in an honest, Simpsons-esque kind of way, combined with a Spielbergian attention to the physical and psychological vulnerability of a young child. Wide Awake has this, too, except it's message is pro-spiritualist as opposed to anti-spiritualist. It's much more reserved as well. The ghost granddad appears in flashbacks rather than as a literal character, and most of the weird poo poo comes out of the more mystical qualities of the Catholic faith, which Shyamalan, for better or worse, captures with great accuracy. In particular there's a scene where the boys are singing in Latin, but the protagonist just can't find the will to do it. So the priest, who had spoken to him previously about his seeking spiritual insight, passively announces to the kids that if they sing together, maybe their voices will lift to heaven so that God can hear them and answer back. He then winks specifically at the protagonist in this way that will never not be weird in the wake of the scandals surrounding the Church's silent condoning of sexual exploitation. The very next shot tracks by the rows of boys singing, with the protagonist singing his god damned heart out. So that's the quandary of the film - as eery and illogical as it seems (there's zero progression of the protagonist as a character, here, he goes right back to his 'crisis of faith' after this exuberant moment and desperate cry to God), having received a Catholic education all my life, it rings very true to precisely the ambivalence that comes with being young and wanting to be devout because of the therapeutic qualities of faith. But there's also other really weird poo poo like this scene where the boys visit the neighboring all-girls school to watch a procession of them all dressed in white and laying flowers at the feet of the Virgin Mary, only for one of the girls that the protagonist is smitten with to step out of line and give her flower to him. Again, in context, this is supposed to be dealing with the abstract qualities of faith and how one expresses it through a devotional act, where the young girl breaks from the structure of the day and instead expresses her devotion to God through giving to this soul in need. But the scene itself ends up being weighted with these weird sexual connotations that rivals just about anything in Troll 2. The boy characters consistently compare the young girls who they can literally see on the opposite side of a wrought iron fence at recess to the big-breasted women they see in swimsuit catalogs. The protagonist even tells this girl at a previous point that she looks prettier than the girls in these catalogs. So basically what we get is this almost paganistic image of a virgin servant of a virgin idol, all clad in white, rescuing the male protagonist from spiritual cynicism and moral downfall by giving him her 'devotional flower.'
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Apr 13, 2015 17:19
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