RIP Dom De Luise

Not known for the subtlety of his performances, nor of course does it matter, Dom De Luise played a significant part in my childhood movie experiences, on the basis of performances in two films which, if I watched them today may or may not hold up to critical enquiry.

‘Cannonball Run’ (1 + 2) provided a summer’s worth of repeated video rentals for my friends and I when I was ten years old; we didn’t know who Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, never mind Jack Elam, even were. But we enjoyed fast cars and silly jokes. Dom De Luise was behind most of the latter; and the summer of 1985 wouldn’t have been the same in my house without him.

Francis Ford Coppola: Makes Family Like Opera

The first three minutes of Coppola's new film 'Tetro' are on line.  They look gorgeous.  It's his first original screenplay since 'The Conversation' thirty-five years ago; and only his second film as director in over a decade.  Most people know him for the 'Godfather' saga and 'Apocalypse Now' - but there's a great deal more to his work than gangsters and Vietnam.

To name just four:

'The Conversation' - paranoid America develops bad habits because it's afraid.

'One from the Heart' - a 1940s-style musical with a cynical Reaganite heart.

'Peggy Sue Got Married' - a film about whether or not regret for the past can be transformed into hope in an instant.

And his return to directing, 'Youth without Youth', seemed to be offering something almost unique in English-language cinema: an old guy, looking back, thinking about the nature of life and art, and saying whatever he wants to say, even if he's not sure that he means it.

'Tetro' is about family life in Argentina; that's all we know so far, other than the fact that Coppola has declined a gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival because he wants the film to be seen as a small drama rather than risk being overwhelmed by the glitz of a red carpet paparazzi session.

Coppola never made a film without serious regard to trying to understand what makes human beings tick; how love binds and can tear; how money can liberate or the love of it can wreck lives; how a person can have power over everything in the world except their own soul.   Coppola's an experimenter, an entrepreneur, a ringmaster, a wine-maker, a cook; he's been bankrupt once or twice; some of the films don't work; some of them are masterpieces without which a whole third of cinema history would look very different.  'Tetro' opens on the 11th June.

Religious Torture: A Hidden Story

You may already know that Pew Forum research published last week suggests that white U.S. evangelicals are more likely to support the use of torture on at least some occasions than the population in general.  It's worth noting that 49% of the general population agree; and 52% of white evangelicals (or 54% of weekly church attenders) versus 49% of the general population says as much about America as it does about Christians.  The country is divided in two.  (And the sample size for the research is regrettably too small for wider analysis of different populations.) The surprise that some are expressing at the statistics reminds me of the scene in 'Casablanca' when Captain Renard pronounces himself 'shocked, shocked' at the prevalance of gambling at Rick's Cafe  - for the dominant forms of U.S. evangelicalism over the past three decades would never have claimed to denounce torture - indeed, long-standing authority figures such as Hal Lindsey have often called for violent action to be taken against their perceived enemies.  (Right now, Lindsey is advocating a pre-emptive, and possibly nuclear, strike against Iran.)  A relevant question going forward might focus on how the civil religion of the United States vaccilates between the maintenance of 'Fortress America' on the one hand (even President Obama used the rhetoric of threatening enemies in his inaugural address) and the tradition of open-handed support for the vulnerable, and a mature public conversation about how to be engaged in an interdependent relationship with the rest of the world on the other (to quote the President again: 'It's time to put away childish things').  Just how can that conversation become the country's settled mind rather than vulnerable to the whims of whatever anger management issues talk radio hosts aren't dealing with on any given day?

The language of challenging Christian support for violence and empire has made a recent comeback in the work of Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, Rita Brock and others, building on the immense contribution of thinkers like Rene Girard and Walter Wink.   Writers like these, and many like-minded communities, are offering a different kind of U.S. American Christian practice.  The paradox is that non-violent subversion of Empire doesn't lend itself easily to Huffington Post headlines.  But instead of the hand-wringing about how much of the Christian church is no different from the culture at large, perhaps the following might be worth some reflection:

There's a better story hidden within the statistics published last week - the 48% of white U.S. evangelicals who don't support the use of torture perhaps need to find better ways to tell it.

Some good further analysis over at Get Religion.

The Death of an Old Monk; the Birth of a New Monasticism

CNN tells the story here of Father Theodore Heck, who died earlier this week, just a month before the 80th anniversary of his ordination.  The death of an old man who has lived well (and Father Heck's friends speak highly of him) is, as Robert Altman's characters say in the film of  'A Prairie Home Companion', not a tragedy, but a cause for gratitude and reflection on the meaning of what makes us human. Father Heck has the face of a good man, like many who have weathered life in monasteries.  The image CNN uses evokes those in Philip Groning's astonishing documentary 'Into Great Silence', crinkled with age, centred with eyes that show no sign of stress.

Of course, I never met Father Heck, but I'm struck by something his Archabbot, John DuVall said:

"Every year, he would take up a subject and read about it," DuVall said. "When he was 99, he decided he should learn Spanish, and when he was 100, he took up the computer."

Some of us know that there's a resurgence of monastic practices in surprising places these days - from community houses in urban North Carolina, to the discipline of writing in solitude and sharing the work in community in New Zealand.  I'm inspired - and sometimes feel caught between - both.  Different perspectives on 'new monasticism' abound - some people are living in community and sharing their lives with each other, hoping to serve their neighborhood needs; this feels like a re-invention of the work of St Francis.  But there were other ways of being monastic in the past too - St Columba is only one of many monks whose work and life appeared to depend on whether or not there was a boat nearby so that he could get to the next stop on his 6th century version of the student backpacking 'I want to find myself' tour.  It seems to me that, when handled with intentionality, for wanderers like me, our contemporary forms of interaction (mostly virtual) and physical space-taking (often transient, for me at least) have the potential to be in the tradition of medieval monks as much as those of us who are staying rooted in one place.

I say 'handled with intentionality' because it's easy to let the world go by without noticing it; I have used internet tools for spiritual exploration as if they were chocolate bars - I consume them too quickly, unthinking; reading some 'religious' websites has become akin to glancing at the supermarket tabloid rack - gleaning gossip about embarrassing stories, or the sales ranks of books written by friends, or searching for the latest reason to get annoyed with people's spectacularly strange theology.  This is not good for me; some people might call it spiritual masturbation.  And they'd be right.

But, of course, I've found that there are ways to experience spirituality in virtual space that really do enhance my life.  I'm connected to friends and fellow travellers; we don't see each other in the flesh a great deal, but we learn from each other by what we blog; I've discovered books and music that have guided me, and I hope to make a small contribution to the watching of lesser-known films by my own writing and shared podcast; Twitter has already apparently saved a life and helped start a revolution.

So, in short - if old monastics could be either cloistered in monasteries or active from them, or could find their way by travelling across the world, sharing with new and old communities as they went, then I hope there's space in the New Monastic movement for those of us who haven't yet found a space to be physically rooted, who can't negotiate their lives without a sense of open spaces, who know that they would be impoverished without the privilege of having travelled far.  I grew up as an unusual religious hybrid -I guess you could have called me a 'progressive fundamentalist'; by my mid-twenties I was burned out on puritanism and evangelical zeal.  I am not sure I would have kept asking questions about spirituality had I not found myself meeting people on the same journey in Aotearoa/New Zealand, or Jerusalem/Al-Quds, or Pretoria/Tshwane.

Itchy feet monasticism, perhaps, but a form of monasticism all the same.

And so, as this week ends, I'm drawn to brother Theodore, and his energy to keep expanding his horizons, even as his body, presumably, began to offer more challenges of its own.  I made a half-hearted attempt at learning Spanish last year, at 33, and gave up quickly; he learned the language when he was 99.  I'm inspired to make a declaration of intent: new monasticism should not only make space for those of us who find ourselves blowing in the wind of globalisation and virtual space, but if I want a place at this table, I should be prepared to, at the very least, try to make space for something entirely new, every year for the rest of my life.

So at the risk of inverting the spirit of inquiry I'm hoping to offer, entonces, con humilidad, disfruta el fin de semana.

A brief observation on 'Observe and Report'

This film is either a serious satire on the encroachment of violence into everyday American life, the absurd over-reactions of the authorities to any infraction of their vision of the American Dream, the push-pull anaesthetising and goading of a generation through the over-diagnosis of mental health problems and the transformation of community retail into malls-as-mildly-sanitised-police-states, or it's one of the most offensive, unempathetic, and irresponsible films ever made.