Tag Archives: movies

The Further Adventures of Lucius Vorenus & Titus Pullo

Netflix has at last delivered the first disk of Rome’s second season. I will admit it: I go into happy fanboy mode at the receipt of new episodes.

It’s like The Sopranos for Pagans. There are no really sympathetic characters, but you can’t take your eyes off them.

Especially Lindsay Duncan’s Servilia–perhaps because she resembles the former provost of my university, whom we used to refer to as the Dark Queen.

I asked my rhetoric class yesterday if any had seen it, and only one hand went up. (Just as well, perhaps. Our textbook talks about Cicero, but he doesn’t come off all that well in the series.)

Likewise, when I used a clip from The Sopranos to illustrate Machiavelli’s maxim for rulers that it is better to be feared than loved for a class of freshmen, many had never seen the show. Kids these days! I thought everyone but us got HBO. But getting it does not mean watching it, I realize.

Witchcraft on the Screen and on the Page

Pagan performance-studies scholar Jason Winslade is interviewed at the TheoFantastique blog on Witchcraft and the entertainment industry:

Let me first say that I have a hard time coming up with any examples of “real witchcraft” or “real magic” in television or films. As you rightly state in your blog, any portrayals of these phenomena are inevitably fantasy with fancy special effects and things flying around. Any practitioner will tell you that this does not happen. At least they do not in the waking world. (Of course, this begs the question what “real magic” actually is – ask 3 practitioners and you’ll get 5 answers. Certainly “real” magic, with the exception of ritual, is much more of an internal process, and thus doesn’t lend itself to special effects extravaganzas). Some programs may incorporate sound magickal philosophy and metaphysics but their application is ultimately fantastical.

TheoFantastique is written by John Morehead, who also writes Morehead’s Musings, where he has a special interest in Christian evangelism to new religious movements.

The Dark is Rising . . . on Film

In the heart of the English Fen County, Pluvialis is spitting . . .

. . . chips and blood. I am crackling with furious static. Any minute now, small pieces of paper, coins and pens are going to drag themselves across the tabletop, bent and pulled towards me by the immense, bending-the-laws-of-physics fury I’m experiencing right now.

She has been reading Jason Pitzl-Waters’
comments on the upcoming film version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising.

Let’s set it in America?
Let’s get rid of “all the Arthurian and Pagan stuff”?
Let’s give Will Stanton a twin brother, stolen by the dark?
The Rider a love interest?

Gallimaufry

Time to dump some hot links in the stew pot:

¶ Crikey! Ambulance Driver has done it again! The man’s a bloody bloggin’ gawd.

¶ I have always been fascinated by Ozti the iceman, whose body was found on an alpine pass between Austria and Italy. I think it was Konrad Spindler, an Austrian anthropologist, who suggested that Otzi was fleeing some kind of inter-clan or inter-village or inter-personal conflict when he died. That Otzi bled to death from wounds suggests that Spindler was right. This book probably applies“.

¶ So you are interested in Celtic Studies? Here is your starter kit. Or maybe you just want this .

¶ Everybody wants to belong somewhere!.

¶ Having recently visited the Mendocino coast, M. and I are now watching movies filmed there. Last night it was The Russians are Coming the Russians are Coming!, a classic Cold War comedy with Carl Reiner (not one of my favorites), a young Alan Arkin, and Eva Marie Saint as a typical early-1960s perky female lead.

Its message is the eternal comic one since Plautus’ day: “The grown-ups are silly, but love will conquer all.” Arkin and Theodore Bikel, as the commanders of a Russian submarine, gesticulate and scream at each other like comic-opera Italians, nothing like the careful professionals aboard the Red October.

Next, Johnny Belinda with Jane Wyman. Just think, in a parallel universe she was our First Lady during the 1980s.

The Wee ‘Oss in Cornwall and California

Folklorist Alan Lomax’s 1953 film of the Padstow, Cornwall, May Day festival, Oss Oss, Wee Oss! is now available on DVD, together with the Pagan hobby horse procession from Berkeley, California, and an updated film from Padstow in 2007.

Order before July 3 for free shipping.

You can also see small video clips from the original 1953 documentaryon the Web.

A nice touch: the two-sided DVD has both NTSC and PAL formats, so it can be watched anywhere.

Pan’s Labyrinth –More Gnostic than Pagan?

Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters has written a great deal about the film Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), praising it in words such as these:

I believe “Pan’s Labyrinth” presents a unique opportunity to discuss Pagan/polytheist theology in contrast to the dominant monotheisms. Unlike “The Da Vinci Code”, this film isn’t bogged down with questions about Christian heresy and Gnosticism and can be referenced without having to talk about our views on Mary Magdalen’s marital status. If this film continues to seep into public conversations about faith and religion, Pagan commentators should be ready to move beyond disclaimers regarding Ofelia’s actions and instead talk about what elements in the film accurately portray Pagan ideas and beliefs.

Living 25 miles from the nearest movie house, M. and I are big Netflix customers, and last night we finally saw the film now that it is out on DVD.

Neither of us would have called it a “Pagan” movie, faun or no faun. (I will skip the “faun movie” puns.)

To me it was far more Gnostic, although perhaps not so thoroughly Gnostic as The Matrix.

That Ofelia is a “lost princess” seems like yet another telling of the wanderings of Sophia (Wisdom) in the fallen world. Many people respond to that story of separation: “I am not from here. My parents are not my real parents. I belong in a better, purer place.” So Gnostic.

The “lost princess” is an archetypal story. It is why so many wanted to believe that young Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the murder of the Russian royal family in 1918 to wander lost and unrecognized for years. The story pulls us. As the Wikipedia article points out, Sophia is the original “damsel in distress.”

Gnosticism and Paganism have their points of contact, but they differ in their views of divinity and the material world. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the material world is clearly one to be escaped from (and with good reason) and the “real world” is somewhere else.

Gallimaufry

Leftovers tossed into a pot:

¶ From my friend Rowan in Colorado Springs: Ten Things to Do to Get Ready to Join a Coven. Nothing about candles or astral projection. Learn to cook, keep your word, have a life.

¶ Using the “Mary Magdalene as sacred prostitute” meme to sell sex aids, if you consider the site’s overall purpose. (See also Aphrodite pandemos.)

¶ M. and I watched The Last King of Scotland on DVD. Forest Whitaker owned the title role of Idi Amin Dada. He fully deserved the Oscar.

¶ I think that two of my nature-writing students have joined the cult of Charles Bowden.

¶ Weirdest Web search string of the month to bring someone here: sex in cotopaxi colorado. I hope he found some–Cotopaxi is pretty tiny–but is AOL Search the best way to start?

Keeping it real with Robin i’ the hood

A flashback to the 1980s: M. and I have been watching some episodes of Robin of Sherwood.

This was the “Pagan” Robin Hood, thanks to the appearance therein of Herne the Hunter, not to mention bits of ceremonial magick.

Back in 1983, the show was a cult favorite in several senses of the term.

Now, it makes me think “Sir Walter Scott (think Ivanhoe) meets Dennis Wheatley.” Or Hammer Studios in the Greenwood.

And then there is the issue of knitting. Dear reader, when you see characters wearing knitted “chain mail,” you know it’s a cheap production.

If you see male characters wearing knit tights, you might surmise that the director made his girlfriend the costume manager, because knitting was not even known in 12th-century England–not even by hand, let alone machine-knit.

In fact, if 12th-century male characters are wearing short tunics and tights, then the historical research for the film probably consisted of watching the 1922 version of Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., which seems to have set the fashion for most subsequent adaptations.

Welcome to Uhh-merica

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

Or maybe not. H.G. Wells put his own twist on it in his story “The Country of the Blind.”

The proverb’s questionable wisdom underlies Idiocracy, a comedy with a plot right out of the Golden Age of science-fiction.

Army Private Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), statistically average in every way, is volunteered for a hibernation experiment, but through bureaucratic snafus winds up 500 years in the future, where he is now the smartest man on the planet, in a society whose members are no longer able to keep things running and the crops growing — but what the hell, give ’em something to watch on the Violence Channel, and they are happy. (A prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph), part of the same experiment, seems more willing to adapt.)

It’s brutally funny. Watch, for instance, the degeneration of such familiar brand names as Costco, Carl’s Jr., and Fudrucker’s. (M. would say that they are plenty degenerate already.) And it’s also a sly plea for some kind of eugenics.

Waiting for Euro-porn

“Euro-porn” is my new cinematic category, although really, it’s just “Gothic” in the 18th-century sense dressed up.

The Da Vinci Code is Euro-porn, of course. It’s got ancient buildings like you won’t find in strip-mall America, secret Catholic societies, and layers of corruption that Karl Rove could only dream of.

Well, there is some of all that in New Mexico, but not so elegantly done.

While you are waiting, watch Brotherhood of the Wolf for a Gothic/Gothique mélange of secret Catholic societies, martial arts, shamanism, a whiff of incest, poison and daggers, lush scenery (Haute Pyrénées), heaving bosoms, galloping horses, Mohawks and French revolutionaries, sailing ships, swordplay, vengeance, corrupt aristocrats, architecture, and wolves. Lots of wolves. And it’s all in French.

And did I mention the sort of Hong Kong-style martial arts combat where the assassin attacking the hero from behind screams, so that the hero will hear him, whirl around, and dispatch him?

You can’t get much more Euro-pornographic than that.