Good Friday: Were you there?

Song: "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord"
Song by: Tatiana (I Thirst)-album
Movie Scenes: "The Passion of the Christ"
Directed by: Mel Gibson
20th Century Fox Film






Related
Forsaken
Good Friday
God Does Not Wait
Movie Review: The Passion of the Christ

Constantine the Great

From the History Teachers at Music for History Lovers


Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus was born on February 22nd possibly in 272, a capable Emperor though a far from a model human being. Famous for his victory at Milvian Badge after a vision of a cross predicting “in this sign you shall conquer”. He issued the Edict of Milan decreeing tolerance of Christians and Pagans alike thus ending the horrific Diocletian persecutions of Christianity. However Paganism remained the official religion until the last part of 4th century and even then a statue of the a Roman Goddess graced the Roman Senate for years. He renamed the city of Byzantium as Constantinople and make it the capitol of the Eastern part of the Empire. He called the First Council of Nicaea which rejected Arianism after which he supported the Arian party and near his death he was baptized by an Arian bishop.


Constantine is blamed by someone or other for every thing wrong or perceived to be wrong from 50 AD to 500 AD, a feat he could only have accomplished with a Star Trek type transporter/time machine.

I WANT ONE!.

The Saga Begins.

Weird Al Yankovic is known for his satirical songs, today he gets a twofer, Star Wars and Miss Amreican Pie. Enjoy!





HT: Tito Edwards at the The American Catholic with a nice write up on Weird Al.

Movie Review: Avatar

It seems you cannot have a blog these days without commenting on James Cameron's epic motion picture Avatar. The special effects are tremendous and worth more than the price of the ticket.


The plot is a pretty straight forward a politically oppressed group on the planet Pandora, “the Na'vi”, defeat the human oppressors, with a boy meets girl sub-theme, and some religious evangelization. A common plot line, a little better executed than most movies with this plot line. The trailer gives a pretty good overview of the plot:




CFV 426 - Avatar/Pocahontas Mashup FINAL VERSION from Randy Szuch on Vimeo.
HT: Creative Minority Report

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In many ways the film is an unintended commentary on how to make a persuasive film.

1.) Cameron has a Pantheist religious worldview and effectively works it into the plot quietly, more by showing than telling. This is done well enough to subtly influence the audience unless they are paying attention.
2.) He also has political message whose impact is reduced by cardboard characters for the bad guys, and a heavy handed approach so that you don’t miss the point. Since the point is so obvious it pretty much immunizes viewers who are not already true belivers.

A lesson for future filmmakers on how to it.

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While a tribe living in one with nature is a nice picture, on earth that is the most grueling from of poverty; never more than a few days food on hand, no certainty of getting more, high infant mortality, low life expectency, no more possessions than can be carried on one’s back, at the mercy of extreme weather, and predators both animal and human. In reality is anything but idyllic.

The updated “natives with righteous indignation and spears defeat machine guns in a frontal assault” plot device is great cinema; but in reality it would just pile up dead bodies for no purpose no matter how righteous the cause. He should have included a “these are professional actors - do not try at home” disclaimer.

The first human effort to work with the Na'vi is personified by Doctor Grace Augustine, the Director of the Avatar program. She presents an updated White Mans Burden approach to dealing with the Navi.

Take up the Human Peoples burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your children to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

But of course the corporate people at home get impatient and send representatives to take a more direct plunder and pillage approach. This sets up the plot. While the soft imperialism of the Avatar program is not as bad as the hard imperialism, I don’t really care for either.

-------------------

The movie also intends to comment on our relations with nature.

From Biology On Line
Ecosystem
Definition
noun, plural: ecosystems
A system that includes all living organisms (biotic factors) in an area as well as its physical environment (abiotic factors) functioning together as a unit.
Supplement
An ecosystem is made up of plants, animals, microorganisms, soil, rocks, minerals, water sources and the local atmosphere interacting with one another.

Environment
Definition
noun, plural: environments
(1) The external conditions, resources, stimuli etc. with which an organism interacts.
(2) The external surroundings including all of the biotitic and abiotic factors that surround and affect the survival and development of an organism or population.
(3) The totality of the surrounding conditions and elements in an individual.

Pandora is an Ecosystem. The human base is an environmental (external) intrusion that is effecting the ecosystem.
/Satiremode=ON.Poor misunderstood Colonel Miles Quaritch,
he's just trying to protect the environment..
/Satiremode=OFF.

Despite the common usage,
1) Generally one does not protect environments - one protects an ecosystems from undesirable environmental effects.
2) There is no such thing as The Environment, an environment is always relative to it’s ecosystem.
(I know, I know, these are pet peeves and I will never win.)

See the movie for the fantastic special effects, remember everything else is an excuse for the special effects.



The real trailer.

Happy New Years

January First: The Solemnity of the Mother of God.






From “Sister Act”. Whoopi is great, to bad she didn’t take the lyrics to heart.

Related:
Mary Did You Know

The Ascension of Our Lord

About 2500 to 3000 years ago,

the King of Judah has died,

all Judah is in Jerusalem for the coronation of the new king.

Several large choirs are assembled.

It begins:

Narrating Choir: Why do the nations conspire,
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and his anointed, saying,

Kings of the Earth: “Let us burst their bonds asunder,
and cast their cords from us."

Narrating Choir: He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the LORD has them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,

The Lord: I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill."

The New King: I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me,

The Lord: You are my son, today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."

Narrating Choir: Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned,
O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
with trembling
kiss his feet, lest he be angry,
and you perish in the way;

for his wrath is quickly kindled
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

The Second Psalm, is a psalm for the coronation of the new king. On the Feast of the Ascension we celebrate Jesus, a king of the line of Melchizedek and David the King of Judah and of all Glory retuning to Heaven, as Choirs of Angels sing, to sit at the right hand of the Father.

The nations and peoples still plot and conspire in vain, but God laughs at them, He has put his only Son on the Throne and

Blessed are all who Take Refuge in him.

Frank Capra: It's a Wonderful Life??

Frank Capra, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most challenging—maybe even disturbing—of all filmmakers. He asks us to accept things about which we have grave doubts—not because they’re nice or inspirational or comforting or helpful—but because they’re true.




Rod Bennett in the January 2007 edition of the online magazine GodSpy gives us The Gospel according to Frank Capra. He starts by asking the question - how can the story of George Bailey be called It’s a Wonderful Live?

At Christmastime in the year 1974, when I was 14 years old, I saw an old black & white movie on television called It's A Wonderful Life. It was a very cold sunny afternoon as I remember; I was home from school on two weeks of Christmas vacation. I had been randomly turning the TV dial and just happened to get interested in a scene—about ten minutes into the picture, as it turns out—in which a young boy had just saved a drunken druggist from accidentally poisoning a sick child. At the first commercial break, the "Armchair Theatre" announcer told me the title.

Wracked as I was at the time with all the usual terrors and traumas of being fourteen years old, I wasn't at all sure that it was, in fact, a wonderful life here on Planet Earth. But I watched the movie anyway. And the longer that old picture went on the more the sound of that title (which had seemed at first so pat and sugary) began to change in my doubtful ears. It's A Wonderful Life. Standing there so unashamed in the face of everything going on all around it, that simplistic, illogical phrase began to sound... I don't know... defiant; like a challenge being flung at me or even an attack.

I had no way of knowing at the time that this was supposed to be a corny old Christmas "feel-good" movie. It began to make me feel pretty bad, in fact. Certainly I saw that It's A Wonderful Life is full of wonderful things: charm and humor and unforgettable characters that have since become like a second family to me. But the longer the movie went on, the bleaker and blacker things got. George Bailey, the hero (played by James Stewart), the dreamer who was going to see the world and lasso the moon, struggles to get out of the dead end job that keeps him chained to the hick town where he was born. It soon becomes obvious, to us and to him, that he never will get out of it. And yet, somehow, with every commercial break, that announcer kept repeating It's A Wonderful Life. I myself had dreams very like George Bailey's: dreams of accomplishment, dreams of romance.

But the plain reality was that I was failing in school, my first real romance was ten years away, and I was lonely, alienated, and ugly with that unique ugliness only possible to fourteen year olds. And yet with every commercial break, over and over at eight-minute intervals, the "Armchair Theatre" man insisted It's A Wonderful Life. Before long, George Bailey (because of a meaningless accident—his lovable, doddering old uncle has destroyed his business by absentmindedly losing a packet of money) stands on a frigid overpass ready to drown his whole thwarted, aborted dream in an icy black river and we're not so sure we blame him. I stood there with him—my own dreams seemed (and sometimes still seem) just as hopeless. And still the man says It's A Wonderful Life.

I guess the repeated words of that corny title—proved surely to be a lie by the very story to which they had somehow been tacked—made me feel a little like Nero must have felt, listening in disbelief to the joyful hymns the martyrs sang as he fed them to the lions.

And then the final act of the movie began.

Snip

If one had only Capra's reputation to go by, without knowing the man or seeing the films, I suppose that one might come to create a mental portrait of him as some smiling white-haired sentimentalist, perhaps a retired Congregationalist minister, with his eyes full of easy stars and possessing a fondness for quoting Norman Vincent Peale. In reality, Frank Capra was not only a hard-nosed, up-from-poverty immigrant with a rather acidic sense of humor (the biggest laughs in his films are cynical cracks from jaded sophisticates mocking the callow Capra hero), he was actually an intellectual—almost a rationalist. He was certainly every inch the Cal Tech Chemical Engineer of his school years. In fact, in Capra's unique background I've found what has been, for me, the whole key to the mystery of his films and their strange fate at the hands of the critics.

snip

This is why Frank Capra, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most challenging of all filmmakers and in some ways the most disturbing. Most "serious films"—the "hard-hitting" "uncompromising" films—ask us only to accept, for example, that poverty is bad, relationships are hard, that politics is corrupt. In short, their "challenge" consists precisely in asking us to accept ideas that we already accept anyway, even if we struggle to know just what to do about them. In these comedies, Capra asks us to accept that the old-fashioned American ideals are still good, that David really can whip Goliath, that our prayers do not go unheard, that the meek shall inherit the earth. In other words, he asks us to accept things about which we have grave, grave doubts. And he is uncompromising in his asking: he doesn't ask us to accept these propositions as nice or inspirational or comforting or helpful—he asks us to accept them as true. That, my friend, is a challenging filmmaker. That is serious, avant-garde cinema, if you will.

Read the whole article

Passion

This is Holy Saturday, the saddest day of the Liturgical year; Christ has died, but is not raised. The Apostles, their leader crucified, at least one a traitor, scattered and hiding make their way back to the Upper Room. A tragedy too deep to understand the Savior’s words promising the Resurrection, that will come later, now is the loss of dreams and hope.

Thus it is a good day to comment on Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Even though there is a Resurrection scene it leaves us emotionally on Holy Saturday.

The story is easy to lose in the violence. Satan is confronting the Messiah, and throws all in his possession to defeat God’s Anointed and bring mankind totally into the void of evil. Violence upon violence is thrown to defeat Jesus by pain, despair, and hopelessness and finally death. The actions of the crowds and soldiers become more and more inchoate and violent. Satan is smirking more and more as the end comes near. Despite this some good remains, Mary Jesus’ mother, and Mary Magdalene, Veronica, Simon the Cyrine and ultimately the Centurion. But the violence goes on. - - - Finally Satan's victory, Jesus dies. - - - But wait - the tear of God washes clean. The temple veil is torn. The curses of the old law have been fulfilled. We see Satan cry in protest as he realizes he is defeated. On the third day, though the Apostles and disciples have yet to realize it, Christ will be Risen.


It is sometime said that the movie is an episode, not a story, and it should include more of the life of Christ, that this one episode does not give the full context. A reasonable comment from those who are not part of the Church. But I think that it is only an episode, the central episode, is how it should be seen. For in the Church the story of Christ is told throughout the year and the story of the Crucifixion is told in Lent and especially on Good Friday. In the Church the rest of the story of Jesus gives context to Good Friday, but even more importantly Good Friday and Easter give context to the rest the story.


The importance of this movie is not in Mr. Gibson’s heroic struggle to get it produced, or in the record box office that rewarded his efforts. The importance is that every year, even when the rest of the world has forgotten about it, in theaters, church basements, on home video, late night cable the Christian Church will be brought back to the Central story of the Christian faith. The rest of year, the story of Jesus no matter how well or poorly told will be presented in the context of the Crucifixion and Resurrection to reaffirm our faith, build our hope, and light the charity of Christ in our hearts.


While the movie described by some as a means of evangelization, I think it is more for the Catacombs, so that no matter how the Church may be scattered, until God in His grace restores her or Jesus comes again, the story of what Jesus did for us will be told with strength and clarity. For

Though Christ has died

On Easter Christ is raised

And Christ will come again!