Which of you would be willing to come to my house and hold hot coals to my feet until I write something?

AMDG

Justice and Mercy: True Grit and The Night of the Hunter

The 2010 version of True Grit may be the best new movie I've seen in the past twenty years. It's the first movie that I can remember watching twice in a week since I sat in a theater in 1965 and watched Help! two times in a row. Shortly after my first viewing of True Grit, I read an item posted on MereComments by James M. Kushiner about a review of the movie by Stanley Fish. One of the commenters, Nick Milne, suggested that The Night of the Hunter would be an excellent companion piece to the new movie, and he mentioned that it was one of the Coen Brothers favorite movies, so I immediately ordered Night of the Hunter from Netflix and found that, yes, they are very companionable--one almost might say made for each other.

The movies are filled with parallels and opposites. There's a murdered father; there's a murdered mother. There's a daughter that's hunting a murderer; there's a son who is running away from one. There are two boarding houses, one run by a woman who is so stingy that she charges Mattie for a flour sack to hold her gun, and another who lavishes her possessions and affections on any stray child that comes along. Both of the murders are marked: one has the words love and hate tattooed on his knuckles; one has a mark on his face. One child seeks vengeance; the other demands mercy.

And then there are the apples. The first time I watched True Grit I noticed a big, beautiful bowl of red apples sitting on a table in the boarding house where Mattie Ross is staying. The camera stayed on the bowl just long enough to convince me that they were supposed to be noticed. And, of course they are apples, which cannot help but convey a message of temptation. These are very tempting apples. When Mattie leaves the house, we see the bowl again. She takes some of the apples. She seems to be stealing them. Near the end of The Night of the Hunter (In some ways True Grit almost seems to be backward from Night of the Hunter.), we see a very similar bowl of apples, and the boy, John Harper, takes one, but he uses it in a very different way.

I don't want to spoil the movies for those of you who have yet to see them, so I won't say much more, except to note two other similarities that Nick Milne mentioned in his blog comment. He said that the song that the murderer, Harry Powell, sings all through The Night of the Hunter is the same hymn that provides the melody for almost the entire score of True Grit. Milne also wrote about,  "...the ethereal silhouetted horse-and-rider-at-twilight sequence[s]" in both movies.

Separately, each of these films is worth watching. Together, they are really fascinating. Just sitting here writing about them makes me want to watch them both again, back to back, and I would encourage you to do just that.

AMDG

Why Do You Look for the Living Among the Dead?

Christ is Risen!

A very happy Easter to you all. 

For some reason, as I get older and time seems to move so fast that I can't keep up with it at all, Lent gets to be longer and longer, and slower and slower. This year it has seemed interminable. But, that's all over now! We just returned from Easter Vigil where two of my students were received into the Church. I'm looking forward to a house full of family tomorrow, and a good night's sleep momentarily.

I hope to write something more fairly soon, but I just wanted to say hello before retiring. 

Oh, and I came across this picture while I was looking for the above. It's a day late, but I really like it, and I wasn't here then.

AMDG

Holy Week

Tomorrow through Thursday morning I am going to be here.

I'll be in the cabin on the left. I try to take a few days away a couple of times a year to pray and write and walk and be quiet. I try to talk to as few people as possible. That cabin doesn't look significantly different from my house except that it's smaller, but I don't have woods and a nice lake to walk around here, and there are a phone and two computers in my house to distract me.

I was going to schedule some posts to show up on the blog while I was gone, but then I thought that you could probably be doing something better than reading my blog during Holy Week, so I decided not to leave anything. I posted all my favorite pictures and readings for the Triduum here last year, so you can look at those if you like. They will be in reverse order.

I have had some really annoying spam get through to blog in the last couple of weeks, so I'm going to put on a captcha while I'm gone. 

I hope you all have a very blessed Holy Week and I'll be back sometime on Easter, probably, or maybe Easter Monday.

AMDG

More on Previous Post

After reading VA's comments on the post below, it occurred to me that I ought to look up the name of the church and not just the artist. This is the Church of the Saviour on (not in) Spilt Blood. The blood was that of Tsar Alexander II, not that of the Saviour, and the church was built as a memorial to him. It was vandalized during the revolution and after 27 years of restoration opened again in 1997. It hasn't been reconsecrated and functions now as a museum of mosaics. I have to say VA, that if you got to see this, you were really blessed. All this information comes from this Wikipedia article.

AMDG

Nikolai Kharlamov~The Holy Eucharist

I was looking around for a picture to use for my First Communion class--something they could color--and I came upon this and liked it so much that I thought I would share it with you.

I'm going to let it spill over the edge of the column because I want it to be as big as possible. If you click on it, you should be able to see a bigger version. I love the attitude of the apostles. All I can find out about the mosaic is that it is in the Church of the Saviour in the Spilt Blood (Can that in be right?) in St. Petersburg and that it's circa 1890. I tried to find out more about Kharlamov, but I can't. The only Nikolai Kharlamov I can find was a 20th century military leader. It's strange to think that all this beauty was created in Russia such a short time before the October Revolution.

AMDG