Change Your Image
AmyTee2
Reviews
The Creed: What Christians Profess, and Why It Ought to Matter (2011)
Fascinating Look at the Christian Creed
I've just watched this terrific documentary and enjoyed it immensely. I've attended various churches throughout my adult life and it's a wonder to me that I've never seen anything like it before. "The Creed: What Christians Profess.." takes a look at each article of the Nicene Creed and examines it with soul and great insight. The only thing that could have made the DVD more interesting for me would be a small study guide to accompany the film or just more film! -- perhaps extras with further discussion from each of the contributors. As a woman, for instance, I'd like to hear more about why, for some people, there is such an insistence on using the male pronoun for God. Why father? It was touched on by Frederica Matthews but I'd like to hear more. I'd also like to look more in depth at some of the Biblical terms in their original Greek-- which is often so layered and casts a deeper spiritual meaning than the contemporary English. All in all, I loved it and I hope they'll release a director's cut!
Little Children (2006)
sorely unimpressed
I had heard so much about this film -- such horrahs! Finally saw it last night and found it to be a one-note disappointment full of woefully miscast actors with the added bonus of scripted caricatures.
For god knows what reason, the director tossed in a narrator to tell me what to think just in case the actors he cast could not convey what he demanded I take away from his bland little film. As the film began I thought it was going to be a comedy, a satire. We see three "typical suburban" housewives, we're taught by the intrusive narrator... typical suburban housewives? What lazy shorthand twaddle. What is a typical urban house wife? Sitting apart from them -- this is meant to sledgehammer home the point -- "Sarah was not a typical suburban housewife?" Huh? Why, because she has a MFA? I've lived in cities all my life, and I would say that the "bridge and tunnel crowd", if you'll excuse the expression, comes in all stripes. Sarah is played by Kate Winslet. We are later told by the narrator that she's unattractive and boyish... Kate Winslet? Kate Winslet's husband, who is having a virtual affair with an internet porn star, is a nothing character. He is there for no other reason that to make Winslet's character sympathetic in her adultery. Patrick Wilson who plays the unemployed ex-jock is positively pallid -- he is so bland and lifeless that we wonder what his wife, a documentary film maker played by Jennifer Connelly is doing with him. Apparently, as I read later, Connelly is meant to convey a brittle nature, cold and cunning but in this film she seems fragile -- a quality virtually always conveyed by Connelly. She seems to adore her son, she's affectionate, her son adores her. But apparently I was supposed to see her as distant and unable to be loving with her son in contrast to her instant empathy with the children in her documentary.
Then a man who exposed himself to a minor gets out of jail and moves to town. This rallies those suburbanites in fear. He, we are told by other characters, is a child molester. He too becomes an instant stereo type -- all child-molesters are piggy-eyed, pock-faced mini-monsters with zero social skills who live with their mommies. For crying out loud! What makes child molesters scary is they have no distinguishing characteristics. In real life, we find out the youth pastor is a child molester, or our accountant, or our brother-in-law.
The whole thing rang utterly false.