THE B-LIST: QUESTIONABLE MUSICAL MOMENTS #10 – THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

Remember when made for TV movies were good? Okay, maybe not good, but you know, enjoyable in a cheesy kind of way? Or at least watchable? I know, it’s been a long while, but there really was such a time in days of yore. And just in case you can’t remember those fabled days, maybe this little ditty from the made for television magnum opus The Midnight Hour will jog your memory. (And before you ask, yes, that’s Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge busting a move. Sort of.)

“I’m dead, you’re dying, everybody should try it, get dead!” You know, that sentiment kind of reminds me of that old question you occasionally hear from aggressive atheists (usually on message boards where they almost inevitably believe you’ve never heard it before), “If you REALLY believe in heaven, why aren’t you in hurry to die and get there already?” I guess it’s supposed to be one of those oh-so-hip gotcha questions that’s meant to  leave a person gaped mouth and speechless, their beliefs exposed as a fraud, their faith crumbling away into dust.

Alas, I’m afraid to inform our secular friends, there are a number of good reasons we Christians don’t just do the non-believers of the world a favor and drop dead. Here’s just a few.

First off, we’re kind of busy at the moment working out our own salvation with fear and trembling. You see, just because we walk into a church every Sunday, that doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed a spot in heaven. Even St. Paul, who wrote thirteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, noted in 1 Corinthians 4:4 that “I am not conscious of anything against me, but I do not thereby stand acquitted; the one who judges me is the Lord.” So if Paul’s resume didn’t guarantee him a get out of jail free card, I’m pretty sure the rest of us would appreciate as much time as possible to get our acts together so we have a decent shot of actually making it into the heaven we believe in.

Next, besides the monumental task of whipping our own souls into shape, we also have quite a list of duties Jesus left for us to attend to in addition to all the normal day to day stuff like raising a family and going to work. While there’s no comprehensive lists of what those duties are, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy are a pretty good primer. The seven corporal works of mercy are: To feed the hungry; To give drink to the thirsty; To clothe the naked; To harbour the harbourless; To visit the sick; To ransom the captive; To bury the dead. The seven spiritual works of mercy are: To instruct the ignorant; To counsel the doubtful; To admonish sinners; To bear wrongs patiently; To forgive offences willingly; To comfort the afflicted; To pray for the living and the dead. That’s quite a bit to do, and you kind of have to be alive to do it all.

And finally, this life was given to us by God, and as the Catechism reminds us, “We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.”

So, sorry secularists, as much as some of you might wish all of us religious types would just voluntarily kick the bucket, I’m afraid we just can’t do that. We’ve just got too dang much to take care of in the short time we’ve been alloted. Nice try though.

OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN!

Forgive me. What with all the little calamities that I’ve been plagued with over the past half year (look’em up in the archives, I won’t bore you with a recap), I once again completely forgot that I had promised one of my readers a review. This time around, it’s Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, that tragic tale of “the super-octane girls who are old at twenty. If they get to be twenty.” I might have forgotten it forever if a recent post by Simcha Fisher at the National Catholic Register hadn’t started a small argument in the comboxes about movies one should or shouldn’t watch, which in turn jogged my memory about this one. So, since a promise is a promise, I’m going to get this review done in the next week or two, although it’s likely to be one that would have been better NEVER than LATE. Anyway, here’s a reprint of the original Coming Attraction post to remind everyone what’s coming up.

In case there’s still some of you out there who weren’t aware, I take requests for reviews, many of which come in the form of challenges. Of course, that can result in something of a mixed bag. Requests have brought us everything from Santa Claus Conquers The Martians to Satisfaction to I Spit On Your Grave. That’s a pretty wide range of (questionable?) tastes. But even so, there’s still lots of different kinds of movies out there I’ve never touched on. So it was no surprise a few weeks back when an email arrived suggesting that perhaps I was playing it safe and avoiding some of the darker corners of the cult movie universe, that maybe it was time I dealt with… Russ Meyer.

Fair enough, but which one of his movies to review? Obviously, about 80% of Meyer’s oeuvre is automatically disqualified for being nothing more than soft porn. I got some standards, after all. So after going through the list, I narrowed it down to three. Now while Mudhoney contains every theme typically associated with Meyer, there’s really not much to it, so I passed. Trashmeister John Waters called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! the best movie ever made, and it is the very definition of a cult movie, but after watching it again, I actually found it pretty tame compared to the rest of the director’s output and I don’t think that’s what the requester was going for. So that pretty much left me with Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, the first collaboration between Russ and Roger Ebert.

It goes without saying this is one review that won’t be for the kiddies. Wish me luck.