"I'll see you at the movies"

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes (James 4:13-14).

16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, 17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ 18 And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Lk 12:16-21).

On Tuesday, Roger Ebert had many plans for his future. Great plans for the life ahead of him. He had it all worked out:

I must slow down now, which is why I'm taking what I like to call "a leave of presence."What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

And I continue to cooperate with the talented filmmaker Steve James on the bio-documentary he, Steve Zaillian and Martin Scorsese are making about my life.

At this point in my life, in addition to writing about movies, I may write about what it's like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you. It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital. So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.

I'll also be able to review classics for my "Great Movies" collection, which has produced three books and could justify a fourth.

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/04/a_leave_of_presense.html

Two days later, he was dead.

Every one of us is just a stroke, blood clot, aneurism, pulmonary embolism, homicide, heart attack, traffic accident, natural disaster away from a looming, forking eternity.

For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them (Eccl 9:12).

36 “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. 37 For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man (Mt 24:36-39).

“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3 For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, 4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5 As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 Then all those virgins rose and trimmed their lamps. 8 And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise answered, saying, ‘Since there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ 10 And while they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. 11 Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12 But he answered, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ 13 Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour (Mt 25:1-13).

“I have no mouth and I must scream”

I am borrowing a title from a well-known science fiction writer, and applying it to this very real life setting. It seems appropriate:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121114/REVIEWS/121119991

To someone who was raised and educated in the Catholic school system, as I was, a film like this inspires shock and outrage. "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God" documents that child sexual abuse has been epidemic in the church for at least 1,000 years, and in the 19th century, the Vatican first formed an official policy of keeping it secret….

…[A]s I was watching this film I heard a name that was familiar to me, and found that chilling. William E. Cousins was our bishop of the Diocese of Peoria from 1952 to 1958, and then after being made Archbishop of Milwaukee, was reportedly part of the cover-up of the first publicly known charge of sexual abuse against an American priest.

There's no reason to believe he was guilty of abuse himself, but this documentary argues that the entire hierarchy was fully aware of abusive priests and followed the church's ironclad global policy of secrecy.

That first public case involved the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, who was a priest at the St. John's School for the Deaf in Wisconsin. Between 1950 and 1974, he abused young students and enlisted older ones to help him. When a group of his victims, now grown, tried to inform the church about what had been done to them, they were ignored, told to forget about it or assured that it would be taken care of.

Three Milwaukee archbishops were informed of Murphy's behavior, and one of them was Cousins. I read in an article by Laurie Goodstein and David Callender in the New York Times: "Arthur Budzinski and Gary Smith, two more victims of Father Murphy, said in an interview last week that they remember seeing Archbishop Cousins yell, and Father Murphy staring at the floor. The deaf men and their advocates were told that Father Murphy, the school's director and top fund-raiser, was too valuable to be let go, so he would be given only administrative duties."

Murphy remained a priest until his death, and continued to receive assignments and have access to children.

What makes his particular case so painful is that his deaf victims found it difficult to communicate their protests. Police and states attorneys said it was the church's business. Lawsuits were dismissed. Many of the parents of the victims couldn't speak American Sign Language, and the deafness of the school's students made it commonplace for Murphy to visit them at night, moving unheard among the boys in their dormitory…

… We learn of the Servants of the Paraclete, who treat wayward priests and whose founder once declared "there is no cure for pedophilia." He suggested to the Vatican than an island be purchased to isolate these priests from the general population. This purchase was negated, and many of them remain in service today. Given the grievousness of their sins, one wonders why the church continues to shelter them. Might it not be more appropriate to excommunicate them, and refer them to the attention of the civil authorities?

HT: Steve

Hollywood's highway to Hell

So what am I saying? "The Raid: Redemption" failed as a generic success because it simplified its plot too much? Not really. It is a generic success. And yet my heart sank and I asked myself: Is this all they want? Are audiences satisfied with ceaseless violence, just so long as they can praise it for being "well choreographed?" Is there no appreciation for human dimension, meaning, and morality? Westerns were the first Hollywood morality plays, and it was always clear who was good and who was bad. Now it doesn't matter so much, and the cops and robbers in "The Raid" agree with Red Sanders: "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."

 

Another quote from my review: "There's obviously an audience for the film, probably a large one. They are content, even eager, to sit in a theater and watch one action figure after another pound and blast one another to death. Have you noticed how cats and dogs will look at a TV screen on which there are things jumping around? It is to that level of the brain's reptilian complex that the film appeals."

 

I can't take this much longer. I can't function like a butcher's scale. Is it enough to spend two hours determining if a film "achieves its generic purpose?" Shouldn't it do more than that? Perhaps provide some humor, humanity, romance, suspense, beauty, strategy, poetry. Not all of those qualities, but at least several of them. "The Raid" didn't even supply a single good-looking publicity still.

 

I've seen some incredibly brutal South Korean films recently, like "The Chaser," that contain enough violence to stun any fan of "The Raid" but also have the advantage of being very good films, with intriguing characters, puzzling plots, and ingenious situations. I watched spellbound. "The Raid: Redemption" is dead in the water. The butcher slams the raw slab on his scale and asks, "How many are you feeding?"

 

These thoughts, some readers inform me, are a function of my age. I'm too old to appreciate a movie like this any longer.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/03/hollywoods_highway_to_hell.html

Roger Ebert is a lapsed Catholic turned atheist. It doesn’t occur to him that the very thing he finds repellent about this film, and its natural constituency, is the logical and inexorable outworking of a secularized society. That’s the residual scum after you drain away Christianity. 

"This is the dawning of the Age of Credulity"

Pwned.