The most challenging little film festival in the country!
If you can find a more challenging film festival for the head, the heart, and the soul anywhere in the country, tell me about it.
Festival director Mike Hertenstein has just unveiled the screening schedule for FLICKERINGS, the out-of-the-way film program that is part of the Cornerstone Festival.
I was there in 2003 and a time so rich and memorable that it feels like it happened yesterday. And Hertenstein's lineups of movies have improved each year.
I wish I could make it this year, but deadlines are prohibiting that. The lucky moviegoers will get to spend time with some of cinephiles I admire most, learning about some of the best movies you've never seen.
Get thee to the Cornerstone festival for music, food, and this sensational film program!
Smashing! "Live from Nowhere" is Over the Rhine at their live best.
Isn't it wonderful when a live audience knows how to be quiet?
It doesn't happen much anymore -- musicians casting such a spell over the audience that they can put down their instruments mid-song and let the vocalist's voice resonate without any violating whistles or noises from the crowd.
But it happens on Live from Nowhere, Volume One, the new live collection from Over the Rhine.
"This is our loungey Christmas show," says Karin, and then dedicates "Fever" to a couple on a date in the crowd. Christmas music has never been sexier.
Live from Nowhere, Volume One is the first collection of what Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist intend to make a series. Each year they'll put out a collection of outstanding live tracks. And that's good news for fans who consider their concerts to be as important as any other once-a-year event.
They're off to quite a start. Volume One features a jazzier, more relaxed version of the band than the gale-force rock combo of Changes Come, their last live record. And that's perfect considering the material they've chosen: a mix of bluesy OTR classics, covers, and songs from the recent Drunkard's Prayer.
One of my favorites, "Faithfully Dangerous," kicks things off beautifully, with Karen's voice in fine form, followed by a powerful rendition of "Spark" which is dedicated to John Lennon.
The performance of "Born" is arguably superior to the album version, but the turbo-boosted version of "Looking Forward" kicks the album version down the street and back again. Suddenly a song that hardly registered with me before is rocking my world.
Glowing with the same sincere glow as "Born," "White Horse" will serve as a warming Christmas lullaby on any cold winter's night.
Those who cherish the songs on Good Dog Bad Dog as much as I do will probably weep for joy at the dazzling, dreamy version of "Etcetera Whatever" that's included here.
What could be better than hearing this woman sing "Son of a Preacher Man" to her husband... who IS the son of a preacher man? Uma Thurman may have stolen the song with her Pulp Fiction dance scene, but Karin Bergquist has just stolen it back. And then she steals "Moondance," just to show off.
If there's a drawback to the record, well, Over the Rhine collectors already have "My Love is a Fever" on several collections and, well, here it is again. But I wouldn't really call that a drawback, not with a song that's as much fun as this one.
And it all wraps up with a sprightly, playful version of "Paper Moon."
Sort of.
Like Changes Come, this live record would make a perfect introduction to Over the Rhine for any family or friends in your life who have not yet discovered them.
But then again, we wouldn't want them to get more popular than they already are, right? I mean, the more people who know about them, the more competition there is for tickets to their shows.
Will I be seeing you at their Neumo's show in Seattle on May 7th?
Or at their performance in Santa Fe during the Glen Workshop?
GetReligion on "United 93."
Reviews of United 93 are starting to come in. GetReligion is commenting on the TIME article, and if you scroll down to the comments you'll see the links I posted there that refer you to Jeffrey Wells and David Poland.
I'll probably be linking to the best reviews pretty regularly, since I haven't yet made up my mind about whether I'll be seeing it and reviewing it.
At this point, I'm leaning toward avoiding the film. Not because I think it's an evil thing. I don't. But personally, I don't think I want to sit in a theater, with the smell of popcorn, and watch this on a big screen. I don't think I want to watch the parents who feel they have to show this to their small children in order to impress its importance upon them... because kids don't can't process this kind of thing very well, and it's likely to give them nightmares for years to come. (I know. A DC-8 crashed in Portland when I was a kid, very near my house, and I've had nightmares about planes crashing into my house ever since.) Just as I'm glad that Werner Herzog did not include the tape of the grizzly attack in his movie Grizzly Man, I don't need to see an up-close-and-personal depiction of what happened to be impressed by the Americans' courage or repulsed by the evil of the attackers. The wounds are still too fresh, and frankly, I want to keep about the business of healing rather than picking the scabs open again.
Terry Mattingly raises some very good questions about how these events will be portrayed. Has the director shied away from portraying the attackers declarations about Allah? Has he been faithful to the details of the 31-minute tape that was played for the jury in the Moussaoui trial this week?
"The True False Identity" and Author Photos
Today was a good day.
Today, I purchased five general admission floor tickets for the T Bone Burnett concert in Seattle, which will take place on Sunday, June 11.
And I listened to his new album for the third time.
And in what is promising to be a very, very good music year, it's going to be hard to beat this brilliant piece of work.
The True False Identity is dark, dark, dark, and enthralling. The man has been through the wringer, and you can feel it in every world-weary line.
The music, featuring Jim Keltner on drums and Mark Ribot on guitar (they'll both be in his touring band), reminds me a lot of Tom Waits' Bone Machine. It chills. It thrills. It shakes, rattles, and rolls.
My full review is coming soon.
Oh, and I also had my very first official "author photo" session today, with photographer Fritz Liedtke. In freezing gale force winds. On the beach. Not sure what they'll look like. But I imagine Fritz now has a whole archive of good blackmail material on me if he ever needs it.
It was nice to get out. I've been sitting here at the computer all day every day for a full week now working on this film book, and wow, I need a vacation.
Good thing I've got this T Bone music to cheer me up.
Looking Closer Classic: "Mystery and Message"
Not much to blog about today, as I've been sitting at home and at a top-secret Seattle coffee house all day working at condensing all of my thoughts about the wonder of movies into a book.
As I wrote, I kept recalling things that I learned from one man: an art photographer and English instructor named Michael Demkowicz. No one taught me more about art than "Mr. D."Read more
The Christian Faith of Pin-up Betty Page
The New York Daily News has a feature on the buzz-generating new film about the famous pinup girl Betty Page, starring Gretchen Mol.
And finally someone has noted whether or not The Notorious Betty Page deals with the fact that Page's Christian faith played, and continues to play, a major role in her life. (I linked to another article a few weeks ago that addressed Page's current professions of faith, but now we know that aspect of her life made it into the film.)
A life-long Baptist, Page has never disavowed her modeling career and has been pleased to be recognized even when evangelizing as a lay preacher. In a March 2006 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Page said, "Being in the nude isn't a disgrace unless you're being promiscuous about it." Yet her girlhood was extremely harsh: she was molested by her father and sexually assault by two strangers.
Neither Mol nor Harron share Page's faith, but they do express it in the film: "The church is where she turned in her darkest times," says Mol. "From the time she was a child, she felt this: When you're down, you can look to Jesus, and that's where she turned after she was raped. Not to her mother, not to a friend. She couldn't tell anybody. She could not make sense of what had happened."
If You Believe in The Gospel of Judas, I Have Some Magic Sandals to Sell You.
If you believe the stories you're reading in newspapers about the Gospel of Judas, let me buy you a subscription to The Weekly World News.
GetReligion joins the parade of bloggers pointing out the obvious for the masses who seem determined to flaunt their gullibility.
Here's where the fun starts:
Before I criticize the ridiculous ignorance of the media in covering this very old story, let me offer a critique of the church. If Christians knew anything about their history, if they knew anything about how the New Testament canon came to be formed, I doubt these stories would be met with more than a yawn.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Christians — and others — think the Bible was delivered to the church in present form upon Christ’s death and resurrection. In fact, the Gospels, which were written soon after Jesus’ time on earth, were fixed into the canon by the last quarter of the second century. Other books were included by 220 A.D. But there were many, many other books that were considered. And then there were some extremely heretical books that were never really considered. Various principles for inclusion were debated, but as a rule the books were tested against each other. So if the Apostles themselves said, for instance, that Jesus was betrayed by Judas, you would be hard-pressed to include a book written by a sect centuries later that said Judas was all good.
The thing is that for those who know their church history, Gnosticism is not news. It is a syncretistic movement with roots in pre-Christian times. It reached its zenith around the time the Judas Gospel was written. And it was based on the very non-Christian idea that its adherents possessed a secret message, bequeathed to a select few, that held the key to higher life.
For crying out loud, Irenaeus condemned the Judas writing in 180 AD in his book Against Heresies.
But if you're so eager to find something that debunks Christianity that you'll embrace any poorly researched claims that come along, I recommend you kick back for another viewing of The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Judas (Harvey Keitel) betrayed Jesus according to Jesus's instructions.
But at least THAT story's author admitted in the prologue of his fiction that his story was an imaginative embellishment of the true story, and not to be accepted as an alternate gospel.
Will "Charlotte's Web" Be Broken?
One of my worst film-adaptation nightmares looks like it's about ready to come true.
Charlotte's Web, one of my favorite children's books, was made into a fine animated film decades ago. But with the success of Babe, it became inevitable that the book would be turned into a live-action talking-animal movie.
I hoped and hoped they would do the job with dignity.
But alas, I've just seen a preview, and my worst fears are realized:
The trailer prominently displays a moment when a rat is running along a rail and is knocked off by the force of a noisy cow fart.
Yep.
They've brought Charlotte's Web that low.
Sure, it's only one moment from the preview. But it's a moment they're flaunting, and that does not bode well for the film.
I suspect that E.B. White would be even more disappointed than I am.
Radiohead update
A statement of the painfully obvious: Every day brings us a little closer to the new Radiohead album.
But you don't hear an update from Thom Yorke himself every day. So, for those fans who would rather fill the waiting time with cryptic comments rather than maddening silence, here you go.
Specials: GetReligion gets T Bone Burnett. D.C. gets Buechner.
A happy Saturday to you all.
It's a happy Saturday here as I watch and wait for T Bone Burnett tickets to go on sale. If any of you hear about the Seattle show's ticket information, please let me know!
MATTINGLY ON T-BONE BURNETT AND FAITH
It turns out that GetReligion's Terry Mattingly is a Burnett fan. He's just posted an interesting remembrance of how he introduced Burnett's music to a certain musician who became disillusioned with "Christian music"...
THEOLOGIANS HEART FREDERICK BUECHNER
Admirers of Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist and acclaimed Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner gathered at the Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday to honor the man the New York Times calls “the finest religious writer in America.”