Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
“There Is Indeed A Predestination”
However charitable, the churches do not pay close attention to what the Bible is saying. They often speak and behave as though they believe the words of Bill Wiese were scripture: You gotta correctly use your free will so you can stay out of Hell. They are never...
Ingmar Bergman: Stunted
After the release of Antonioni's Eclipse, some of Truffaut's stuff and, Heaven help us, Godard's movies, Ingmar Bergman decided to make a film that was weird. He made the soporific Persona (1967) with its weird opening montage and its weird bits and pieces. A...
Ibsen From The BBC And On DVD: “The Lady from the Sea”
Hendrick Ibsen's play The Lady from the Sea is about alienation from the self---in a woman named Ellida. Her own mind is resisting her marriage to her husband, Dr. Wangel, because she did not have "free will" upon accepting his years-ago proposal. But Wangel is a...
What Ricky Gervais Thinks
A British comedian and an atheist, Ricky Gervais remarked to a TV talk show host that if all the sacred books such as the Bible were to disappear, to perish, they would never be written again. By contrast, if all the science books that have been penned were to...
Savvy In London: The Young People’s Novel, “Don’t Kiss Him Goodbye”
"We locked eyes for a moment and felt the bond of sisterhood between two Christians who had hopes and dreams that seemed to have stalled right over the Bermuda Triangle." Not a bad descriptive sentence, this, from a born-again---and also talented---writer, Sandra...
Here Come The Crises
It is said that our wretched national debt will lead to a crisis for Social Security Disability by 2021. It is said that it will lead to a crisis for Social Security in general by 2030. If this is true, what will U.S. politicians do about it? I don't know. ...
A Girl For Hire: “Monsieur Hire”
A reclusive man (Michel Blanc) who constantly spies on his neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire), in the French film Monsieur Hire (1989), may have murdered a young woman. A police detective suspects he has. What we learn, however, is that he has fallen in love---an...
More On The Hereafter
Make no mistake about it: as I have said before, the rich man in the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16) represents the Jews of Judah. Judah the man, after whom the Israelite tribe was named, had five brothers, and Judah the tribe acquired great wealth,...
Nelly And Lou—Er, “Loulou”
In the 1980 French picture, Loulou, by Maurice Pialat, people drift (rather quickly) into intimacy and betrayal and pain as they lead dismayingly unconventional sex lives. Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) resists her unimaginative husband (Guy Marchand) and finds, or think...
