Richard Matheson, Religion and What Dreams May Come

I have read several books by Richard Matheson and seen lots of movies and TV shows based on his stories or scripts. He is known primarily as a writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is probably best known as the author of I Am Legend (which has been adapted for the screen four times).

Richard Matheson

I first noticed his name because it appeared on 16 episodes of The Twilight Zone, a show that I loved as a child - and still enjoy watching.

In 1971, he adapted one of his short stories as a screenplay for Steven Spielberg's first television film Duel. (A film worth watching as very early Spielberg and for Matheson's writing.)

In 1978, Matheson wanted to move away from the horror genre. He said "I was determined to fight against this image. Dammit, I never wrote 'real' horror to begin with! To me, horror connotes blood and guts, while terror is a much more subtle art, a matter of stirring up primal fears. But, by the mid-seventies, I had tired of playing the fright game. Scaring the hell out of people no longer appealed to me."

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
- Hamlet

Matheson stated in an interview, "I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I've written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death – the finest tribute any writer could receive."

In the novel, Chris is a man who dies and goes to Heaven but later descends into Hell to rescue his wife.  In the introduction, Matheson says that the characters are the only fictional component of the novel and almost everything else is based on research. Unlike most novels, it has a lengthy bibliography.

The novel probes ideas about what happens after we die.

I wrote about the novel and the movie version on another blog, but I revisited the book recently as an audiobook and this time the religious connections seemed clearer to me.

It reminds me of the film Groundhog Day which I have also written about elsewhere which is a film that has been adopted by some Buddhists as being their own story.

Matheson says there is not any direct religious influence. Matheson was raised a Christian Scientist but developed his own eclectic belief system. He said that "I have been fascinated about parapsychology, metaphysics and the supernatural ever since I was a teenager. The concepts in the book are derived from my wide range of reading."

He does admit that of his influences was Harold W. Percival, an adherent of Theosophy, a belief system with a strong Eastern and Hindu influence (and worthy of its own article here one day).

Some Hindus say that Matheson's novel presents beliefs that are found in their teachings. He seems to feel that reincarnation is somewhat voluntary - at least more so than the way it appears in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism.

You could also look back to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice where the husband also journeys to the underworld to retrieve his wife.

As Matheson's bibliography makes clear, he was reading in many areas from the 18th-century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg to near-death experiences in studies by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody.

The accounts that Matheson found most frightening were those recounted by revived suicides.  I suppose his bibliography has many sources that don't fall into mainstream religions.

In the novel, Chris finds Heaven incomplete without his wife Annie. When Annie commits suicide due to grief over Chris's death, he realizes that they will be separated forever. Chris risks his soul to save Annie and prevent an eternity of despair for both of them.

The novel was adapted for film in 1998  starring Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Annabella Sciorra. The film, What Dreams May Come, follows the novel pretty faithfully and has gorgeous cinematography.  It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

                                    Trailer for What Dreams May Come (film)

Putting Gatsby on the Screen

One of the Great American Novels on my list and other lists is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

It has been made into several films. The most recent I recall is the Baz Lurhmann glam version with Leonardo DiCaprio. The earlier one I saw was with Robert Redford as Gatsby. There is an earlier one with Alan Ladd that I have not seen.

Recently I came across something about the 1926 film version. That is just a year and a half after the novel itself.

The first actor to portray Jay Gatsby on the silver screen was Warner Baxter, who would become the highest-paid star in Hollywood a decade later. Daisy Buchanan was Lois Wilson, a beauty queen turned all-American silent-era starlet (who would later turn director). Narrator Nick Carraway was Neil Hamilton, whom television audiences of the 1960s would come to know as Batman‘s Commissioner Gordon. A young, pre-Thin Man William Powell was George Wilson. 

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald saw the film. “We saw The Great Gatsby in the movies,” Zelda wrote to their daughter Scottie. “It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.” 

I guess I will never see that film. Only its trailer survives today. As with about 75% of the silent films that were made, the prints and negatives have self-destructed.

The novel has entered the public domain, so you are free to make your own version. 

Somehow, at least as of this writing, the Redford Gatsby is available free on YouTube

Get to Know Your Rabbit

Get to Know Your Rabbit is a 1972 American comedy film written by Jordan Crittenden and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars Tommy Smothers, Orson Welles, John Astin, Katherine Ross and a gaggle of other recognizable players of the period.

It is a strange film that certainly never received much attention. I read about it years ago and was finally able to see it on a big screen in college.

Smothers and Welles

Corporate executive Donald Beeman (Smothers) is fed up with corporate America where he has been successful. He has a beautiful girlfriend and a great apartment - but something is missing. 

He quite impulsively quits his job and decides to hit the road as a very unlikely tap-dancing magician. He has been studying with Mr. Delasandro (Welles). Delasandro is impressed by Donald's sincere desire to learn but tells him it is very important to "get to know your rabbit" which is bestowed upon him when he graduates the program.

His former boss Mr. Turnbull (Astin) is determined to convince him to return to his office job, but Donald won't go back. When Turnbull shows up out of work and seemingly lost and homeless, Donald feels bad, and as he heads out on the road he makes Turnbull his manager so that he will have something to do.

Most of the film is about his adventures on the road where he is actually successful as a magician. He meets at one nightclub Katherine Ross' character, billed only as "Terrific-looking girl" (which I wholeheartedly endorsed when I first saw the film). He loves his act and volunteers to come on stage for his escape sack trick. The trick fails but they end up wrapped up together and despite her date's objections and chase, they escape to Donald's hotel, where they talk all night and then make love.

On a postcard to Turnbull, Donald writes that is is finally "living life at gut level." This inspires who has regained his business attitude to put out an ad for Tap Dancing Magician, Inc., "a seventeen-day drop-out plan for tired executives." 

SPOILER ALERT (but not really) The company becomes a huge success going global. When Donald returns he finds himself in charge and the icon for many execs who have taken the magician course (no longer offered by Delasandro) and taken their 17-day escape from the corporate rat race.

Donald finds himself feeling the same way he did when he originally quit his job. Can he escape again?

Tommy Smothers was known as half of The Smothers Brothers musical duo and as co-host of their own TV variety show.  Orson Welles was a filmmaker who couldn't get funding to make the films he wanted to make despite having made Citizen Kane and a few other great and now classic films. He was also an avid magician. John Astin will always be remembered as Gomez, the patriarch of TV's The Addams Family. Katherine Ross had already made The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The last scene of the film shows Ross sitting in the back seat of a bus, a reference to the final shot of The Graduate.

Director Brian De Palma had made the 1968 underground comedy Greetings and Hi, Mom! which were both successful little films and well-reviewed. Get to Know Your Rabbit was a third comedy for him and it was considered to be absurdist satire. Crittenden's screenplay is filled with oddball characters and bizarre situations. But satire is tough and not everyone gets it.

Tommy Smothers was not confident in De Palma's direction but that may have been more about his own limited acting experience. According to De Palma, Smothers so disliked the film that he disappeared for several shooting days and refused to return for retakes.

Warner Brothers was not satisfied with De Palma's cut of the film. It was taken from him and recut with additional footage by Peter Nelson (credited onscreen as executive producer). Despite that, the studio still held onto the film for several years and when it was released it had very little promotion and quickly disappeared from theaters. De Palma refused to work for a major studio again for several years and then turned, quite successfully, to themes of suspense and obsession starting with his film Sisters. 

The film was certainly not an Oscar contender but it was the 1973 Nominee for a WGA Award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen for Jordan Crittenden. 

It is an uneven, odd, perhaps cult, film, but I like it. It shows up sometimes on the TCM channel and is also available on Amazon Prime but I recently rewatched it on YouTube (see link below).

Is There Any Truthful Cinema?

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, Lumière Brothers, 1896      Truth?

When I was studying film, we had several class discussions (arguments?) about what is called "cinéma vérité." The term means "truthful cinema" and is a style of documentary filmmaking. 

When the French Lumiére brothers invented the first movie camera in 1895 that could hold fifty feet of film stock, they filmed things such as a train pulling up to a station. No script, no editing, no sound, a real-life situation. 

In classes, we would also talk about "direct cinema" which is concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and the audience become unaware of the camera's presence.

Sometimes this style is known as being in an "observational mode", or "a fly on the wall."

Cinéma vérité was a1960s experiment developed by French ethnologist and filmmaker, Jean Rouch.  In those films, the filmmaker actively participates in the film as a subjective observer where necessary. How many names are attached to this style? I also heard the terms observational and participatory filming.

Any time there is an awareness of a camera filming a scene, the truth starts to erode. Think of when you point your phone camera at friends. Beginning filmmakers discover quickly that framing a shot, selecting an angle, and a point of view immediately alter what might be considered the truth before them.

So is a cinema of truth possible? Vérité filmmaker Dan Kraus has said, “no documentary can ever show you the truth, because there are multiple truths, but vérité can at least relay the truth as seen by a single observer…” 

Much of this came into being during the early 1960s when documentary cinema was mostly highly edited rather than portrayals of real events. Technology also changed and so changed filming styles. Smaller and lighter cameras (16mm rather than 35mm) that also required less lighting, and portable sync sound allowed filmmakers to be unobtrusive flies on the wall. Later, video would shift things again.

Albert and David Maysles were probably the best-known Americans working in direct cinema. Instead of planning a scene, the brothers let the story unfold organically as the camera rolled. They saw the documentarian as an objective, invisible observer, and not as a director or participant. That separates it from cinema vérité and so they are viewed as two alternative methods of documentary filmmaking.

The Curious Case of an Animated 1001 Nights

Woodcut illustration from A Thousand and One Nights by Friedrich Gross, 1830

A friend told me about A Thousand and One Nights a Japanese 1969 adult anime feature film directed by Eiichi Yamamoto. The film was a hit in Japan but given limited screenings in America in 1970. As an X-rated animated film, it did not seem to appeal to an American audience in 1969.

The dubbed version of the film is now very rare, and has never been released on home video, and may be considered lost.

An English-dubbed version was cut to 100 minutes. The film predates the more successful release of Fritz the Cat, the first American X-rated animated film, by three years.

Having read the classic anonymous Tales from the Thousand and One Nights in college, I can only imagine what the filmmakers might have depicted based on some of the more erotic scenes.

This is NOT Disney’s story of Aladdin. In fact, Aladdin is not part of the original Arabic text. Still, it is one of the best-known tales in One Thousand and One Nights (AKA The Arabian Nights) though it was added to the collection in the 18th century by the Frenchman Antoine Galland, who acquired the tale from a Syrian Maronite storyteller named Hanna Diyab. "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" is one of the best known and most retold of all fairy tales.

Has anyone seen the film or know where it’s available? I can't find it, but I did find the original Japanese trailer for the film which I originally tried to post on my Tumblr site - but it was blocked. It's curious because I would hardly consider the trailer to be X-rated and I know that Tumblr still has far more X-rated and clearly pornographic images. That is despite their admirable attempts to clean up their image. Their algorithms for doing so really suck.

Animating Edgar Allan Poe

United Productions of America (UPA) was a film studio started by three former Disney employees in the 1950s. UPA studio was active from the 1940s through the 1970s. Beginning with industrial and World War II training films, UPA eventually produced theatrical shorts for Columbia Pictures, notably the Mr. Magoo series. In an attempt to take animation in new directions, they made a strange adaptation in 1953 of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

At that time, it was considered "adult" in nature and it was the first animated film in the U.K. to receive an “X” rating. At the time that rating meant "suitable for those aged 16 and over." UPA didn't intend the film for children but it was still strange for a short "cartoon."

The film was designed by Paul Julian and shows the influence of Salvador Dali surrealism and German expressionism. It was narrated by James Mason.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” was voted the 24th greatest cartoon of all time, in a 1994 survey of 1000 animation professionals. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

The Simpsons love to do takes on literature. Edgar Allan Poe is a favorite and in season one there is an episode “The Tell-Tale Head” and in the 1990 “Treehouse of Horror,” they did Poe’s “The Raven” pretty faithfully with the narration by Darth Vader himself, James Earl Jones.

Room 237

Some people really get into a film. Remember that "fan" comes from "fanatic."  Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining is one of those films.

It is based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Stephen King. Fans of the film had come up with a lot of theories about aspects of the film, and in 2012 a film about the film was released. That documentary is Room 237 directed by Rodney Ascher.

The documentary addresses interpretations about the meanings of the film and includes footage from The Shining and other Kubrick films. Of course, there are interviews with Kubrick enthusiasts.

The doc's title refers to a room in the haunted hotel featured in The Shining, which a character is warned never to enter.

The film is very subjective, but a film that is almost 40 years old and continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery as it moves through a cinematic maze full of detours and dead ends.

Kubrick theorists had been theorizing before The Shining. There has long been a rumor that after directing 2001: A Space Odyssey, NASA had Kubrick direct the footage NASA used for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The conspiracy theorists believed that there is evidence in the moon landing footage of front projection and other things that prove it was a fake Moon landing. In The Shining, the character Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater. And 237 isn't just a room but also a reference to the mean distance of the Earth to the Moon.


In an October 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Stephen King said that he had seen the film and that he "watched about half of it and got impatient with it and turned it off." King, who has often said he didn't like Kubrick's adaptation of his novel, also didn't like the documentary. He had no patience for the "academic bullshit" from academics in the documentary who he thought were "reaching for things that weren't there."

I don't find the theories convincing (and I'm not a big fan of that particular Kubrick fan), but I do find the documentary itself an interesting look at how people really get into a movie.

And not everyone agrees with King about the Kubrick film or about the documentary.

http://www.room237movie.com

The Last Picture Show

They say no one wants to come to picture shows no more. 

Set between WWII and the Korean War, Peter Bogdanovich's film The Last Picture Show is about the end of an era in a small Texas town.

Though it wasn't my era, I could identify with this coming of age story and the film as Film meant a lot to me when it came out in 1971.

The story centers on Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and his friend Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges)and the cast includes Cybill Shepherd in her film debut, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid and John Hillerman.

It was one of the first films to have used a contemporary popular music soundtrack, and for aesthetic and technical reasons it was shot in black and white, which was unusual for that time. But it feels right.

The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and four nominations for acting: Ben Johnson and Jeff Bridges for Best Supporting Actor, and Ellen Burstyn and Cloris Leachman for Best Supporting Actress. It won two: Johnson and Leachman.


I have never read the book the film is based upon. The Last Picture Show (1966) was written by Larry McMurtry. He is the author of 29 novels.

I suspect he is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. That book was a television miniseries. That was a format that foreshadowed the limited series that are now common on places like Netflix. I loved that series and it sent me to the book. Of course, the novel and TV film are totally different experiences. In this case, both were good ones.

So, I should go back after almost 50 years and read the book of The Last Picture Show. I guess like a lot of people, I'm always a bit afraid to read a book after seeing the film version, or see the film when I have loved the book version. I don't want one to ruin the other. Most times that is what happens. It is great when one complements the other.

One of those complementary occurrences is the novel and film of The World According to Garp. I love the book. I love the movie.

Seeing The Last Picture Show film the year I graduated high school and started college made it mean a lot more. I'm not sure what this old man will think about the story now. I suppose I may identify more with Sam and the older characters and it will be a new story.






Watch a clip with critical commentary at Critics' Picks: 'The Last Picture Show' - The New York Times:

Ready Player One

It is 2045 and reality sucks for teenage Wade Watts. Life - if it is life - is much better when he is in the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. This is the start of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline . Wade is obsessed with studying and solving the puzzles hidden within the OASIS which are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Solving those puzzles promises power and wealth.

It is not all fun and games. Right at the first clue, we find that there are players willing to kill to win. That means operating both in virtual reality and the everyday reality that wade has been avoiding.

The novel Ready Player One has been popular since it was published in 2011 as Cline's first novel.

The novel is now a film by Steven Spielberg. It seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation.

OASIS, is a very expansive virtual reality universe that lends itself to film. The creator of OASIS is the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday, played by Mark Rylance.

When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS. This contest takes hold of the world and the protagonist Wade, played by Tye Sheridan. 

The film opens March 29.

Art of the Cinema

 Reposted from Weekends in Paradelle

Art imitates life and sometimes life imitates art and sometimes films imitate art.

Filmmaker Vugar Efendi put together a compilation of shots from films along with the paintings that inspired them.

You may have seen filmmakers pay homage to older films by imitating shots - the original Star Wars film has shots that echo a number of other films including John Ford's The Searchers and the Stranger Things series on Netflix has lots of tributes to films from the 1980s that the filmmakers watch and loved.

Paintings may be less obvious. Not everyone would pick up on Jean-Luc Godard filming a shot based on a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It is an old tradition. One referenced in Efendi's supercut is from the 1927 silent film Metropolis.

L'empire des lumières influenced William Friedkin's The Exorcist, and La Robe du soir is alluded to in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight while Architecture au clair de Lune slips into Peter Weir's The Truman Show. Some instances are unexpected: Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy used in in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Sometimes the reference is not exact but a scene feels like it is "in the style of"a painter - such as the look of the Bates's home in Hitchcock's Psycho looking like a house from an Edward Hopper painting - but without the color or sunlight. (Wim Wenders used a much more literal recreation of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks in his film The End of Violence.)

I first saw these videos mentioned on the Slate website, but the three-part video has been posted in other places too.

Here are the pairings so that you can check you "art of the cinema" knowledge.

Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point  is a 1970 American drama film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni about the 1960s counterculture of the United States. Some of the film's most iconic scenes were shot on location at Zabriskie Point in California.

The film was the second of three English-language films that Antonioni did for MGM, but the first shot in the U.S. He had done the successful film Blowup in 1966 a mildly-successful film, The Passenger in 1975. He was best known for his 1959 film L'Avventura.

The film was an overwhelming commercial flop and got almost totally bad reviews. But, like many films, its reputation has improved with age. I saw it when it was released and thought it was nonsensical, but it had interesting cinematography which gets a big boost from the actual desert setting.

The film is available on DVD but rarely shows up at festivals and I've never seen it listed on TV. Does this give it some cult status?

It is an indictment of the American society of the time. One of the two protagonists is Mark. he is a college student who spends more time at protest rallies than isn classes. He carries a gn and tat gets him misidentified as the shooter in a cop killing. He runs away, stealing a small airplane. He meets up with Daria in the california desert and they have sex, travel a bit and pretty much do not much.

I don't know what my take would be on the film if I watched it again today. Have you seen it recently? Give us a mini-review in the comments section.

The Open Theatre of Joe Chaikin as the Lovemakers in Death Valley

I did some digging online and turned up that Harrison Ford has an uncredited role as one of the arrested student demonstrators being held inside a Los Angeles police station.

Co-stars Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette actually did fall in love during production and moved together to the experimental Fort Hill Community. Later, Daria was married to Dennis Hopper for four years. Mark teamed up with three other members of the Fort Hill Community and pulled off a bank robbery in 1973, using a gun without bullets. He went to prison and died there "accidentally."



Zabriskie Point was released a year after Easy Rider and the two are sometimes compared to each other.  Both show the "generation gap" of that decade. They are visually different films with a hippie vibe and eclectic soundtracks. Some critics say that Antonioni took the final scene of Dennis Hopper’s film and decided to make it into a feature film.

Zabriskie Point may have been chosen as a location because it is literally America's lowest point. Antonioni was very critical of the United States and the film certainly shows that.

The film is split between the phony, capitalistic big city, and the bare but beautiful desert.

I can't really recommend the film's music which is sometimes considered to be a "lost" soundtrack. On Amazon you can only get third-party/used versions. If you can get to listen to it - perhaps a borrowed copy and some psychedelics would be preferable -  you'll find some bizarre stuff.  It features The Pink Floyd (with the article "The" intact), The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and Patti Page.

You can find most of these tracks on their original sources, but there are some tracks that were composed specifically for the film. Director Antonioni was attracted to Floyd's Ummagumma album, particularly the track "Careful with That Axe, Eugene."  I'll post a Spotify for it below, but here is a track list from the 2-CD version that restored the lost tracks.

Disc: 1
1. Heart Beat, Pig Meat - The Pink Floyd
2. Brother Mary - The Kaleidoscope
3. Dark Star (Excerpt) - The Grateful Dead
4. Crumbling Land - The Pink Floyd
5. Tennesee Waltz - Patti Page
6. Sugar Babe - The Youngbloods
7. Love Scene - Jerry Garcia
8. I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again - Roscoe Holcomb
9. Mickey's Tune - The Kaleidoscope
10. Dance Of Death - John Fahey
11. Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up - The Pink Floyd

Disc: 2
1. Love Scene Improvisations-Version 1 - Jerry Garcia
2. Love Scene-Version 2 - Jerry Garcia
3. Love Scene-Version 3 - Jerry Garcia
4. Love Scene-Version 4 - Jerry Garcia
5. Country Song - The Pink Floyd
6. Unknown Song - The Pink Floyd
7. Love Scene-Version 6 - The Pink Floyd
8. Love Scene-Version 4 - The Pink Floyd

The actual location of Zabriskie Point is located east of Death Valley in in California. It has some surreal erosional landscape and is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago, which is long before Death Valley came into existence.

It was named for Christian Brevoort Zabriskie who was a vice president of the Pacific Coast Borax Company which mined borax from that area.

Here is a some trivia about the place.
Philosopher Michel Foucault took an acid trip at Zabriskie Point in 1975 and said it was the greatest experience of his life.
It is shown on the cover of U2's album The Joshua Tree.
It was the location used to represent the surface of Mars in the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

A Zealot and His Wife

I have had a long interest that is more historical than religious about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I heard Reza Aslan interviewed about his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and I knew it was a story I'd want to read.

Aslan first did a bachelor’s degree is in religious studies with a minor was in biblical Greek. He then did graduate work at Harvard University in world religions, and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in the sociology of religions. He also has an MFA from the University of Iowa.


In this story from 2000 years ago, we follow an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker who walked across Galilee and gathered around him followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.”

He is a revolutionary. His movement threatened the established order. Like others of his time, he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

What first caught my interest in Aslan's interview was that his disillusionment with the Bible stories grew as he studied them because of the inconsistencies of the stories told in the gospels, both those we know "officially" and others including the gnostic gospels.

The book puts Jesus back into his era. This first-century Palestine was filled with many Jewish prophets, preachers, would-be messiahs, miracle workers and magicians. It was the age of zealotry, which was a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews.

The entire story is filled with contradictions. Jesus was a man of peace who told his followers to arm themselves with swords. He gave public displays of exorcisms and healings, but told his disciples to keep his identity a secret.

But the early Christian church portrayed Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary.

In another book, No god but God , Reza Aslan explains Islam. That is a topic that is also ancient but certainly is highly topical now. 

My reading of his books and further online searching led me to discover stories of "Jesus’s Wife." Though it sounds like a chapter from The Da Vinci Code, Aslan also discusses in Zealot  the women who followed Jesus.

Was Jesus Christ married to one of them? A scrap of manuscript suggests that he had a wife.

“The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus  (Karen L. King / Harvard / AP)

It is a 1300-year-old scrap of papyrus that has the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” It is written in the ancient language of Coptic.

When the Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented the papyrus in 2012 at a conference in Rome, it caused a lot of interest and controversy. And the controversey seems to still be ongoing.

No manuscripts before had mentioned Jesus being married. The scrap of writing suggested that the complete manuscript might describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his “wife” was “worthy” of also being a disciple.

Was that woman Mary Magdalene? Aslan says that for a Jewish man of that time not to be married when he was in his thiries would have been very unusual. Jesus’ marriage would have been arranged by his parents, probably between his 16th and 30th birthdays. In rabbinic literature the age of twenty is given as the upper limit of marriage, and it was especially important for aspiring teachers and religious leaders.

portion of da Vinci's Last Supper

In The Da Vinci Code book and movie, the suggestion that sets the book in motion is that da Vinci painted the truth and showed Jesus next to his wife, Mary Magdalene. A character in the book says "The individual had flowing red hair, delicate folded hands, and the hint of a bosom.  It was, without a doubt … female."  Art historians have pointed out that da Vinci had painted other masculine biblical characters with a feminine appearance. In Saint John the Baptist , St. John the Baptist, who was described in writings as quite masculine in appearance, is painted quite feminine with long flowing hair and delicate hands.  So, is that Mary Magdalene at the right hand of Jesus, or a feminized John the Apostle? Obviously, da Vinci was not a witness to any "last supper" and if he did insert Mary, then where is the twelfth apostle that was described as being there? “And when the hour had come, He sat down, and the twelve apostles with Him.” (Luke 22:14)

Aslan doesn't really say that Jesus was married. Of course, many Christians refute Aslan's other claims. I saw articles online that claim his book is a Muslim view of Jesus. Conservative Christians also hated the recent Noah film for inserting what they saw as a a message about climate change. They were outraged by Martin Scorsese depicting Jesus as having sexual fantasies about Mary Magdalene in 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

To humanize Jesus is to take him away from being a messiah or son of God. If, as Aslan posits, Jesus was married, was not a "virgin birth," that he was a Zealot who did not want to start a religion and that Jesus did not conceive of himself as partly divine - then we have some problems with the religions that believe those things to all be true.

A Destitute King With No Country

I had a dream last night about Orson Welles, who I have written about here several times before. In the dream, he was doing a magic trick. He asked me to give him a coin. I placed a quarter in his gloved hand. He closed his hand and then opened it to reveal a key. He said, "This is what you were looking for, isn't it?"

I went downstairs, made my coffee and went online and did a search on his name. I thought that perhaps this was the day he was born or had died. It is not either of those. I searched on "Orson Welles magician" and it brought up links to the documentary about him by that name. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a film I had not seen. I had tried last year unsuccessfully to find it on some streaming services.

But there it was, on YouTube, for free - perhaps not legally, but I watched it this morning. If it is still available and you have an interest, watch the version below (but go full screen).

And there is a brief scene in the film that is pretty much my dream. Somehow, that bit of film was in my head, and now I have rediscovered it.

If the embedded video isn't working, the film is available for purchase.
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles and many of his films as actor and director that are referenced in the documentary.

Letting in a Vampire

I'm taking a free online course about Scandinavian cinema. I love movies, but I don't know much about cinema from that part of the world. I know Ingmar Bergman, Lasse Hallstrom and Lars Von Trier - but that's because they get shown in America.

A new one for me is Let the Right One In (Swedish: Låt den rätte komma in) from 2008. Directed by Tomas Alfredson’s and based on John Ajvide Linqvist’s novel of the same name, it was the first serious Swedish vampire film.

My wife was the vampire fan (Anne Rice novels and all that) not me, but I really liked this film. (My wife did not. She thought it was too gory.)

It is the odd genre of horror-romance (if such a genre exists). It is set in a a suburb of Stockholm. A lonely and slight Oskar meets another 12-year-old girl named Eli. She turns out to be a vampire. The setting is cold. Ali is cold to the touch, but becomes Oskar's friend and protector from the bullies at his school.

It is also a tale of adolescence angst and isolation. The filmmaker is not much concerned with all the trappings of vampire conventions that are apparently part of the novel. Eli does only come out at night, can be killed by sunlight, needs fresh blood, and has super-strength so that she can leap like flying and kill adults.




I also watched the American remake which is very, very close cinematically to the original with some variations on the story (perhaps from the novel). The remake is titled Let Me In. It was released in is a 2010 and is an American-British production. It was written and directed by Matt Reeves and starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Elias Koteas, and Richard Jenkins. The setting is a snowy Los Alamos, New Mexico in the early 1980s.



The remake is probably more graphic than the original but not as much as many modern horror films.  The frail boy (Owen in this version) connects with Abby and will become her companion now that Thomas (who seemed like father but was not) is dead. She will protect him. He will grow older. She will not.

Why let me in or let the right one in? The idea seems to be that a vampire can't enter a home without permission from the owner. That's not vampire tradition, but times change even if vampires don't change.

Matt Reeves is known for a number of films including Cloverfield, Point Break and two of the new Planet of the Apes films. The film generally got good reviews, though some critics felt it was so similar to the original that it didn't get need to be made. I saw the same kinds of reviews for the American remake of the Steig Larson trilogy about the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. There's room in the world for both versions, but do watch the Swedish originals.

Orson Welles: Charlatan Extraordinaire

Who was Orson Welles? He was an actor, director on radio, the stage and in films. He became a celebrity, a favorite of TV talk shows. He became known as a trouble maker on sets. He was difficult, so that no one would give him money to make films. He made poor films, did commercials and narrated things in order to pay the bills. He was a magician. By his own admission, like all actors, he was a charlatan.

A charlatan is hardly a compliment to lay upon oneself. They are a swindler, someone practicing quackery, deception, a confidence trick, usually to get money but also to achieve fame. Welles did all that to make films.

The word is French. Once, a charlatan was a seller of medicines who might have used music and magic to attract a crowd. Not unlike filmmakers.

Welles radio drama, The War of the Worlds, was certainly a grand deception that worked so well that it got him the chance to make Citizen Kane at the age of 23. That would be the only film of which Welles had full creative control

His much less known film, F for Fake, is certainly a charlatan at work. The subject is fakery, art and authorship. It was his final directorial project. In it,  Welles tells the story of the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory and also the story of a hoax-biographer Philip Irving,

I think for Welles, this film was not quite a documentary. It was intentionally fiction, fact about fictions, and filled with film tricks.

It was also self-referential. Francois Truffaut said that he believed Welles made the film as a “reposte” because of the controversy created by the overrated film critic Pauline Kael who wrote that Welles had not written a single line of Citizen Kane. This was later shown to be untrue.




The Film Institute at Montclair State University held an event on "Welles at 100" in 2015 and has posted a few short videos about Welles.





One topic discussed then was how the charlatan side of Welles emerged.




In the video below, Welles shares his views on cinema and movie-making with French film school students. He applauds actors as the most important element. He praises the French for allowing for a director to be the true author of a film, but he is no fan of the director being the most important person on the set. He compares them to orchestra conductors and stage directors - in both cases the orchestra and acting company can perform quite well without a director once the pre-work has been done. Prepare and then get out of the way.


 


Like Herman Melville with Moby Dick (Welles would have been a great Ahab. Instead, he only played Father Mapple. See more about that here.) Welles will always be best known for Citizen Kane.
When I taught film courses and showed that film I was careful not to say it was "the greatest film ever made." It gets that title sometimes and it certainly is great, but a) I hate best-of, and greatest lists of anything, and b) that's the worst intro you could give to students about any film.

It was a critical success and a box office disappointment. The latter is due to William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire boycott and outright attempts to kill the film. Yes, the film is largely based on Hearst, but that is hardly the point of the film.

Welles wanted his first film to be about people who are "larger than life," He was thinking Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli scale. One of his influences was supposedly Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan'' which is a novel supposedly also based on Hearst's life. Welles' ex-wife Virginia was part of Hearst's social circle and Hearst was a friend of his father.

Welles claimed that he took from Bible the idea of using different points of view on the man and "witnesses" testifying, sometimes contradicting, about Kane's character.'

In Citizen Welles, a biography by Frank Brady, I loved reading about young Orson as film apprentice screening John Ford's Stagecoach  forty times trying to learn cinematic techniques.

Not unlike others, from Napoleon to Bob Dylan, Orson Welles was a very good con artist who proved adept at self-promotion and self-invention.

The magician in him said that ''everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors.''

That was true of his best and worst work.

Welles' film work made me think more about the technical aspects and possibilities of cinema. He also made me think about how we perceive the world in the light and shadows of a flickering projector and outside in the sunlight, shadows and moonlight where thing often don't appear as they are in what we call reality.

Welles editing F is for Fake

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WORTH WATCHING


     

Father Mapple, Captain Ahab and Orson Welles

Orson Welles played Father Mapple in John Huston's film version of Moby Dick. He gives the sermon on Jonah and the whale that Ishmael and his Christian shipmates hear before sailing. Welles would have made a great Ahab.




Welles planned to do something on his own with Melville's Moby Dick. He started and never finished filming some scenes in 1971.

The footage is Welles reading from the book shot against a blue screen with some basic inserted footage that made it look like he was at sea.

At the time, he was actually filming The Other Side of the Wind, another more ambitious film that was also left unfinished.



It is unclear what Welles planned to do with the Moby Dick readings.

When Orson Welles died in 1985, all of his unfinished films were left to his long-term companion and mistress Oja Kodar. She turned many of them over to the Munich Film Museum for preservation and restoration. In 1999, the Munich Film Museum edited together the rushes of Moby Dick into a 22-minute cut, but we don't know what Welles planned to do with that footage - certainly not just him reading a book on film.

A 16mm Education

My elementary school days were the 1960s and back then seeing a film in class was a big deal. Those 16mm educational films often left a bigger impression on me than the books and lessons. A decade or so later and I was the teacher in the classroom and I became very good at threading those old 16mm projectors that often ate up the film.

Television as an educational tool was pretty rare. I recall my fellow students sitting on the floor of the gym in 1962 to watch one small television set as John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.

A bit more than a decade later I was threading one of those 16mm projectors as a teacher to show my students films. Some teachers took advantage of using films a bit too often. We called them "plans in a can" and they were popular emergency plans in case you were absent without warning or on a day before vacation.

I was pretty frugal in my use of films, but I also taught a course on film and video production, so I think I had legitimate reasons to show films. Before there were home video players, 16mm films were the only way to do it.

The Sony Betamax hit the U.S. in 1975, and my school bought a VHS videocassette recorder (VCR) in 1977 when it was edging out the Betamax for the home video market. That VCR was something I used more and more, though my students were still shooting their own video on reel-to-reel VTRs (videotape recorders).

Sony changed that with their 1983 Betamovie cassette camcorder. My school bought a full size VHS camcorder and so did I. My first home movies of my newborn son were recorded with a video camera plugged into a VHS deck.

But I have very fond and surprisingly vivid memories of those old 15mm films that I saw as a kid in school.

Many of them have emerged online. I assume that many of these films have had their copyright lapse, or maybe the companies that produced them have gone out of business or just don't care about their use any more.

I recall this film on "Lunchroom Manners" as one I saw in school. I also recall Pee Wee Herman using part of it in one of his shows. Watching "Mr. Bungle" in school settings today reminds me of my own school and the kids look like a lot I did then and my fellow students. Since I have no film and video of my own early days, these are like home movies.



I can imagine teachers in the late 1940s and 1950s showing in a health class films like the 1951  "Going Steady." (It doesn't portray going steady as a good idea.) And I'm not sure how teenagers in 1949 would have viewed the tips in Dating Do's and Don'ts. These were made by Coronet Instructional Films, which produced hundreds of films for the school market.

Public domain films from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive and Archive.org can be a real trip down memory lane for people who came of age in the 1940s through the 1970s.

But the films I saw in school that left the biggest impression on me were the ones about science. Many of them were well made and from Hollywood producers and studios. I vividly recall "Our Mr. Sun," a film directed by Frank Capra who is best known for It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and many others.



That film launched the Bell System Science series. My father worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey then, so I thought then that he might have had some vague connection to these films (he didn't). It was the time time of the space race with Russia and an early version of STEM education that we all needed to know more about science. My father was determined I would be the first in the family to attend college and really wanted me to become an engineer.

With animation and live action, "Our Mr. Sun" was really well-made for the time. Capra had been producing documentaries for the Army during WWII such as the Why We Fight series and this documentary side business continued after the war. I know I saw that film multiple times in school, but this Technicolor beauty was originally telecast in 1956 and 1957 to 9 million homes and then some 600 16mm prints were distributed to schools and community organizations through the Bell Telephone System film libraries.

Another film I recall was on the atom. I grew up in that "atomic age" when the fear of nuclear war was very real. The film I recall was produced by Walt Disney Educational Media. Walt Disney began hosting his own television show for ABC in 1954. In exchange for a weekly hour-long Disney television program, ABC was funding some of the construction of Disneyland. The show was originally named Disneyland but went through later incarnations as Walt Disney Presents, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, The Wonderful World of Disney etc. All in all it ran for an amazing 54 years.

The "Our Friend the Atom" was a pro-nuclear energy film but it did compare atomic energy to a genie in a bottle, both of which are capable of doing good and evil.



Not all the films were about hard science and another one I recall must have had some impact on my decision to go into the humanities and major in English. Another from the Bell Science series produced by Frank Capra was "Alphabet Conspiracy" which was the story of the science of language and linguistics. The premise was a plot to destroy the alphabet and all language and it featured the very odd Hans Conried.

The growth of television after WWII scared many parents and educators. Kids were watching a lot of TV and, like film and comic books before it, the fear was that it would rot their minds. The same cry was heard with videogames, the Internet and now with smartphones, which contain all those formats.

I wrote my Master's thesis on the influence of television on children in regard to violence and isolation. There is no doubt that all this media influenced several generations, but I'm not sure that it rotted any brains. I suspect it inspired many kids.

Groundhogs and Existentialism

It ever there was a film designed to be watched over again, it would be this film.

I even reread and I am remixing this post (from the Weekends in Paradelle blog) for all of you who think of this film - seen or unseen - as "just another Bill Murray/Harold Ramis comedy."

I'm firmly in the camp that believes Groundhog Day is far more profound than you would think at first viewing. I don't know that the filmmakers' intended all of that, but it's there.

A. O. Scott in The NY Times did a re-review of this existential comedy (watch his video review) and that was enough to send me to the shelf to watch it again.

I am not crazy in my belief that's there's more here than meets the viewing eye. Do a search on "Groundhog Day" and add something like philosophy, Buddhism, Zen, etc. and you'll get plenty of hits of others who feel the same way.

Harold Ramis (director and co-writer) has said that he gets mail from Jesuit priests, rabbis and Buddhists, and they all find meaning in the film , and use it in sermons, talks and classes. In Buddhism classes, it is often used to illustrate the cycle of continual rebirth.

If you haven't seen the film, here's some background: Bill Murray plays a self-centered, cranky TV meteorologist named Phil who gets sent to to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities. He is joined by his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott). He does a going-through-the-motions report. When they try to drive back to Pittsburgh, they are stopped by a blizzard (which he had predicted would miss the area) that shuts down the highways and they are forced to stay in town an extra day.

Phil wakes up at 6 AM to the clock-radio playing Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" and discovers that it is February 2 all over again. The day runs the same as it did before, but no one else seems to be aware of the time loop. And it happens again the next time he wakes up - and the next time and so on (38 times by my count).

He realizes that he can use this to his advantage and begins to learn more about the townsfolk. He 's hardly noble. He seduces women, steals money, drives drunk and tries to put the moves on Rita (that last one fails).

But this power he has eventually bores and depresses him. He tries to break the cycle and files mean TV reports, abuses residents, kidnaps Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog. Finally, he attempts suicide, but still ends up waking up to the clock radio playing Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe."

Each time I re-watch Groundhog Day, I think about another aspect of it. I keep thinking that some day I am going to teach this film in a course.

One scene has Phil dead in the morgue. Rita and Larry are there to identify his body. Is any of these retakes on the day affecting the others? They don't seem to remember the alternates takes, but...

A few years ago, I watched it and it led me to explore other movies and writings that play with time loops. There are a lot of them.

One day Phil is in the bowling alley. He asks two guys drinking with him, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” One guy replies, “That about sums it up for me.”

Are some of us leading a kind of Groundhog Day existence for real?

Other writers online have gotten far more serious in their explorations of the film than me.

This is from thesacredpage.com

Once Phil realizes that in his Nietzschean quagmire there are no consequences to his actions, he also experiences modern philosophy’s liberation from any sense of eternal justice. “I am not going to play by their rules any longer,” he gleefully announces. His reaction epitomizes Glaucon’s argument in Plato’s Republic. Remove the fear of punishment, Glaucon argued, and the righteous will behave no differently than the wicked.

and from groundhogdaythemovie.com comes some discussions about the film like this:

I asked what the Reb thought was the turning point in the film. After watching it for the ninth or tenth time specifically to find where the third act begins, I concluded that it begins 4/5 of the way into the 103 minute film, at about the 80 minute mark. Phil is throwing cards into the hat, and Rita points out that the eternally repeating day doesn't have to be a curse.

Reb Anderson disagreed. He thought the turning point came later, when Phil found he was unable to save the old man's life. Only here, he said, did Phil realize "It's not me, it is the universe, I am just the vessel."

Why did the writers use February 2, Groundhog Day, as the setting? I think because it's such a nothing "holiday." It has no religious connections, no cards, no gifts and very little tradition. And yet, it's not just an ordinary day. The first time I saw the film (wow, almost 17 years ago), I thought that he would relive the day for 6 more weeks of winter. Later, I thought about the day and decided there was something about the end of winter, spring and rebirth going on in the story.

In this piece from 2003, the author suggests that we consider the film as a tale of self-improvement which

...emphasizes the need to look inside oneself and realize that the only satisfaction in life comes from turning outward and concerning oneself with others rather than concentrating solely on one's own wants and desires. The phrase also has become a shorthand illustration for the concept of spiritual transcendence. As such, the film has become a favorite of Buddhists because they see its themes of selflessness and rebirth as a reflection of their own spiritual messages. It has also, in the Catholic tradition, been seen as a representation of Purgatory. It has even been dubbed by some religious leaders as the "most spiritual film of our time."

Want to have a viewing group (which I would prefer to a reading group these days) and show the film? Check out the discussion questions on this philosophy site. http://www.philfilms.utm.edu/1/groundhog.htm

The original idea for the story was supposed to have come from the book The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) by Friedrich Nietzsche. In that book, Nietzsche gives a description of a man who is living the same day over and over again.

The writer of the original script, Danny Rubin, said that one of the inspirational moments in the creation of the story came after reading Interview With the Vampire which got him thinking about what it would be like to live forever. Rubin and Ramis have both said that they avoided exploring the really dark side of Phil's time looping in which he could done some horrible things without consequence, like murder.

I have to add that the film is also funny and sweet. Funny is no surprise. Murray and Ramis teamed up for the film Stripes which is a great, silly comedy that I also love, and that has no philosophy or religious themes at all.

The sweetness is all Hollywood. Phil does learn lessons. He befriends many of the townsfolk that he had mocked. He uses his knowledge to try to save lives and help people. And he finally knows how to treat Rita. His final TV report is a beauty that puts everyone in tears. The next morning he wakes and finds the loop broken.

Now, what will he do with his new life?

When the clock clicks over to 6 AM for you in the morning, what kind of day are you planning to make it?