Dim Rooms

This post is a week late in coming: Last Friday, coincidentally on the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars movie, we finally premiered the long-coming short film "Dim Rooms" that I have been working on as writer and director for over 2 years (ridiculously). The Premiere was held at a small, cozy and very longstanding old style cinema, the "Sun". One of the film's actors, Don Bridges was kind enough to sit for a Q & A at the end of the screening and talk about his long and very interesting career as an actor working alongside the likes of Hugo Weaving, Russel Crowe and Guy Pierce among others. Even more awesome was the fact that, despite growing up right next to and becoming enamored with the cinema at the "Sun" Don had never seen himself in a movie there until now. It was a really exciting night for me and I hope to announce the film's screening in some festivals very soon.

Out of Nothing

In Uganda, a country torn by war and unhappiness, street artists are turning potholes into works of art. I couldn't resist the beauty of this metaphor.

Explorer

Rain in Cracks

Like rain blown through a screen
you sprayed into my house
riding turning winds,
beady and spread,
as slippery as thin,

and asked me nothing.
Didn't you know

like patient cracks in walls
I have sat and worried,
have bullied and picked
an atom's edge
to break and spread the rift?

So ask me nothing.
Surely you know

the livid storm outside
will seep along hair lines,
fractures stretched to us,
brittle and wet,
and splay us with a gust.

Believing

Recently, I was talking to a teenager interested in Christianity. He wanted to believe but was scared to make the step - to give up all the things a believer in Christ must. I was struck by how crucial it is for all of us to open our eyes at some time in our life and see that everything we accept, religioius or not, about the world we accept on faith. That we must stand at the cross between Frost's two roads in the wood, look down them as long as we need and then choose one and reject the other. Whatever we choose we are only moving from a blind faith into a seeing one.

What amazes me, is how many people, religious or not, are so incapable of seeing this. They take what is theirs on faith as being true in and of itself. But living is believing and believing is a frightening, uncertain, risky thing. Unless your eyes are shut.

The "Rational Response Squad" and their "Blasphemy Challenge" have shown me recently how much of the "enlightened", anti-religious community go on believing and trusting and living by faith without, apparently, knowing it. Check out this critique and discussion of the film "The God Who Wasn't There" (denying the Historic Jesus and villifying Christianity) - it's amazing to me to see that the response on behalf of the Atheist communtiy is so much more emotional and defenselessly dogmatic than the Christian one.

As John's gospel tells us over and over in different ways, "unless you believe you will never believe."

John

There have been so many cinematic renderings of the life and death of Christ that pointing out one more hardly seems to matter. But I have recently discovered "The Gospel of John" and been deeply moved by its adherence to a difficult text, its excellent cinematography, superb acting and thought provoking, sometimes risky dramatic interpretations. The other films by this company have been less than inspiring but the work of Henry Ian Cusick (of "Lost" fame) as Jesus and Philip saville in the director's chair combine to bring a storytelling flair and surprising humanity to this word-for-word translation (thankfully, all the "he/she said"s have been left out). It is great to see the Bible being approached not only with respect but with attention to its literary brilliance.

Europe and America Part II

I kept asking myself as I looked at the ancient rock that had once formed this or that architectural wonder of ancient Greece what stupidity would have possessed the Goths, the Romans, the Turks (who, in the 16th century used the Parthenon as a store-house for dynamite and managed, by that decision to accidentally explode it during a thunderstorm) to destroy such legacies of human accomplishment and beauty. It was heartbreaking to see how many ancient buildings in Greece had had to be restored in order for us to even get a sense of what they once looked like. The whole scene of ruin reminded me (in a very anachronistic way) of the tragedy of the cultural revolution in China. In any case, whatever disease caused such aesthetic atrocities, I had to remind myself, our species isn't cured of yet: even today the monuments of a 3 thousand year old civilization are, to many Athenians, little more than another place to tag.