DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 18, 2024

Watership Down (1987) After their warren is demolished to make way for condominiums, a group of rabbits led by the stalwart Hazel and his soothsaying brother Fiver make their way across the countryside in search of a new sanctuary. Dogs, hawks, men, and even competing bunnies complicate the journey. Full of mythology, politics, and more than it's fair share of violent bloody death, this landmark in childhood traumatization won't be for everyone, but for those with whom it resonates, it will always linger. Bonus emotional ordeal: trying not to choke up when Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes starts playing.

TIL: Literalists have a rough time with Leviticus 11 where it talks about rabbits chewing their cud because, of course, rabbits do no such thing. Rabbits do, however, chew on their own cecotrope, a type of soft greasy feces that aids in secondary digestion. Given the visual similarity between chewing cud and gnawing on rabbit pellets, not to mention the general grossness of an animal eating its own poop, it's forgivable for the author to have lumped rabbits in with cud chewers to be avoided for sanitary reasons. Besides, with the language barrier inherent in translating the original scripts, who knows if cud is even the exact interpretation.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: Putting pencil to thoughts on my daily Scripture readings.

DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 14, 2024

Divinity (2023) The plot? Let's try. A billionaire peddles his father's serum which grants immortality at the price of sterility, resulting in a hedonistic civilization built around passionless orgies. Two extraterrestrials (angels?) arrive to right things but get caught up in drama with a hooker. Meanwhile, a secret cult of women try to bring back babies. This in your face experimental and purposely cryptic sci-fi saga sits squarely in the "not for everybody" category, but if overtly weird black and white art films inspired by anime is to your tastes, you'll have a blast with this.

TIL: For those who have replaced religion with politics, scientism, or whatever, the film's underlying premise that the natural order of things is to grow old and pass the world to the children when the time comes will likely feel like a slap in the face. It shouldn't, though. As Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD, Senior Ethicist at The National Catholic Bioethics Center, reminds us, a truly authentic human experience is a combination of longing for the infinite (God) while having to embrace and grow through the limitations inherent in having a finite body. You can't obtain the former by trying to bypass the latter.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: Still scribbling down thoughts on my daily Scripture readings.

DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 10, 2024

Never Say Never Again. (1986) SPECTRE sends Largo to steal a couple of nuclear warheads causing James Bond and his usual bevy of beauties to swim into action. If that sounds like Thunderball, it is, as some legal mumbo jumbo allowed producer/writer Kevin McClory to retain filming rights to the original novel. To make it seem more like a legitimate Bond flick, Warner Brothers lured Sean Connery back to give the role of Agent 007 one more go. The results are okay, especially if you like a lot of in-movie jokes about Bond's age or watching him throw his own urine in someone's face. What? It happens.

TIL: Okay, look, Connery was only 52 when he signed up for Never Say Never Again, but I guess that's elderly by super spy standards. Being 007 is probably hard on the knees. Heck, when I hit 52, everything was hard on the knees. Still, as Pope Francis noted, longevity is a blessing and that the elderly have a place in God’s saving plan. Maybe not stopping madmen with nuclear bombs, mind you, but as the Pontiff put it, as an "indispensable link in educating children and young people in the faith... [and as] actors in a pastoral evangelizing ministry, privileged witnesses of God’s faithful love”.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: More scatterbrained scribbles based on my daily Scripture readings.

DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 5, 2024

Demons (1985) A disparate group of ticket holders must come together to fend for their lives when demonic spirits from the horror movie they are watching begin to inhabit audience members. With the exits barred and no refunds available, it's either become one of the possessed or become a pile of guts on the already sticky theater floor. Fundamentally a zombie flick, but elevated by producer Dario Argento and director Lamberto Bava, who bring with them an overabundance of style and all the neon bulbs Italy had on hand in the mid 80's.

TIL: While the Church doesn't teach that demons will pop out of the silver screen and possess you, she is naturally concerned about the effects cinema can have on a person's soul. Pope Pius XI wrote, “There does not exist today a means of influencing the masses more potent than the cinema… [it] teaches the majority of men more effectively than abstract reasoning." That's why he recommended learning about the techniques and conventions of film-craft, so you can recognize when you're being manipulated by a movie in an unhealthy way.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: Dashing out more doodles on my daily Scripture readings.

DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 1, 2024

 

Blood Beach (1980) Something is sucking people down into the sands near Santa Monica Pier, leaving behind only the occasional body part as evidence of its attacks. The police, led by John Saxon (hurrah), seem stumped in their attempts to locate the creature, so Harry of the harbor patrol decides to get personally involved. An unremarkable but enjoyable creature feature that's mostly remembered these days for it's classic tagline riffing on Jaws 2, "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water - you can't get to it."

TIL: Settled in 1769 and incorporated in 1886, Santa Monica is named for (duh) Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo. Married off to a pagan with a short fuse, the young Monica nevertheless stuck to her Christian beliefs. The result? All three of her children, though initially forbidden by their father to be baptized, would end up entering the religious life, with Augustine, of course, becoming one of the central figures in both Christian history and Western philosophy in general. Good mothers matter.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: Still writing down my ramblings on my daily Scripture readings.

DAILY CALL SHEET: SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

 

Shivers (1975) Believing the world has become far too reliant on intellect, a crazed scientist living inside a ritzy high-rise apartment complex unleashes slug-like parasites that turns anyone infected by them into an insatiable sex maniac. One doctor fights to keep his head while all those about him are losing theirs, but can he hold out long enough to stop the epidemic from spreading outside the building? This debut from the master of body horror is, whether he meant it to be or not, about as unsubtle an allegory on the perils of the Sexual Revolution as one can get. That's fine, though, as nobody really comes to early Cronenberg looking for nuance anyway.

TIL: Thanks to penicillin and the pill, the Sexual Revolution was in full swing by the time Pope Paul VI released Humanae Vitae. In that 1968 encyclical, the Pontiff warned that the so-called freedoms promised by that cultural movement would actually result in widespread divorce, the destruction of the nuclear family, the collapse of traditional marriage, an unprecedented increase in abortions, and ultimately, the overall devaluing of human life. Most of the world laughed... at the time.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: More thoughts on my daily Scripture readings as filtered through my suspect sensibilities.

DAILY CALL SHEET: SEPTEMBER 22, 2024

The Mummy’s Hand (1940) A pair of down-on-their-luck archaeologists discover the coveted resting place of Princess Ananka, but must confront her tomb's bandaged bodyguard to claim it. Even though Boris Karloff played the crusty title character in the 1932 original, chances are when you think of The Mummy, it's the shambling enswathed Kharis, who makes his first appearance here, that comes to mind. While hardly the apex of the classic Universal monster flicks, the movie's likable leads, a sort of proto-Abbott and Costello, and the brisk running time, barely over an hour, help it all go down easy.

TIL: There's not a lot of mummies in Scripture, but the most notable is probably the preserved corpse of Joseph, which was embalmed, sunk into the Nile River, and eventually retrieved by Moses. In fact, along with the Ark of the Covenant, the Israelites carried Joseph's remains with them the entire time they wandered the desert. Why? Many Talmudic scholars believe it's because Joseph, who rose from slavery to be the de facto ruler of Egypt, represented the ideal of the successful faithful Jew in exile, and his body was afforded honor so the people wouldn't forget his example as they searched for a home.

I HAVE SOME NOTES: Continuing to take note of little details that popped out during my daily Scripture readings.