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Apr. 4th, 2010 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafI have had a terribly lazy afternoon, after a long evening last night and a fairly lengthy pair of services this morning (singing the Hallelujah Chorus at the parish Eucharist and regrettably dozing off during Fr Dean's sermon in Mattins - a fairly unusual Mattins, at that, as it was "Mattins with blessing of icon", and the icon was asperged and anointed with oil in a manner that may or may not have worked for the section of the congregation that prefers Mattins to I-can't-believe-it's-not-High-Mass*).
This afternoon I watched
The Eleventh Hour was frothy fun; I like the new Doctor and the new TARDIS interior; I like Amy Pond, too, although giving her a job as a kissogram strikes me as an odd choice for a children's programme (odd echoes of Madame de Pompadour, and she gets a similar introduction, meeting the Doctor as a child, though it's not played as a romance). A lot of nods to the past: people in comas talking as one is reminiscent of "The Empty Child"; we actually see Pat Troughton, Jon Pertwee, and Peter Davison - and possibly others I missed - in flashback; the hospital building is rather like the hospital in "Spearhead from Space", as is the fact that the Doctor nicks his clothes from said hospital. There's a new sense of energy. However, I do not like the new theme tune.
"Doubt" (Dir. John Patrick Shanley, from his own play, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams) was not frothy or fun, though it was somewhat topical, as it deals with a suspected case of child sexual abuse in a New York parish in 1964, which ends with the priest being promoted away to another parish. In fact we are never allowed to know whether Fr Flynn is a dangerous paedophile and his accuser, Sr Aloysius, a rigid but principled woman who is doing her best to defend her charges, or whether Fr Flynn is a compassionate and progressive priest who has fallen foul of Sr Aloysius's reactionary and suspicious nature. It is clear that Fr Flynn feels guilty about something, because his resignation is precipitated by Sr Aloysius' (fictitious) claim to have talked to a nun in his previous parish, which he left under an unspecified cloud. Given that the boy he's alleged to have abused seems, on his mother's cryptic comments, to be gay, my own reading of the story is that Fr Flynn is not a paedophile - but that he is gay, and that there was some kind of scandal connected to that in his previous parish; and that he might well have bee talking to the child (who is devastated when he resigns) about sexuality. And that, equally, Flynn knows that admitting to being gay is not liable to help his defence.
But it all remains - purposefully - unclear; a powerful and well-acted film, though there were some bits where they got Catholic practice at the time completely wrong (Taize chants? Breviaries in English?). Good soundtrack, too, though why they used a recording of Christ's Hospital at the end bemuses me.
*The fault did not lie with the sermon; I was rather cross that I did drop off.
This afternoon I watched
The Eleventh Hour was frothy fun; I like the new Doctor and the new TARDIS interior; I like Amy Pond, too, although giving her a job as a kissogram strikes me as an odd choice for a children's programme (odd echoes of Madame de Pompadour, and she gets a similar introduction, meeting the Doctor as a child, though it's not played as a romance). A lot of nods to the past: people in comas talking as one is reminiscent of "The Empty Child"; we actually see Pat Troughton, Jon Pertwee, and Peter Davison - and possibly others I missed - in flashback; the hospital building is rather like the hospital in "Spearhead from Space", as is the fact that the Doctor nicks his clothes from said hospital. There's a new sense of energy. However, I do not like the new theme tune.
"Doubt" (Dir. John Patrick Shanley, from his own play, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams) was not frothy or fun, though it was somewhat topical, as it deals with a suspected case of child sexual abuse in a New York parish in 1964, which ends with the priest being promoted away to another parish. In fact we are never allowed to know whether Fr Flynn is a dangerous paedophile and his accuser, Sr Aloysius, a rigid but principled woman who is doing her best to defend her charges, or whether Fr Flynn is a compassionate and progressive priest who has fallen foul of Sr Aloysius's reactionary and suspicious nature. It is clear that Fr Flynn feels guilty about something, because his resignation is precipitated by Sr Aloysius' (fictitious) claim to have talked to a nun in his previous parish, which he left under an unspecified cloud. Given that the boy he's alleged to have abused seems, on his mother's cryptic comments, to be gay, my own reading of the story is that Fr Flynn is not a paedophile - but that he is gay, and that there was some kind of scandal connected to that in his previous parish; and that he might well have bee talking to the child (who is devastated when he resigns) about sexuality. And that, equally, Flynn knows that admitting to being gay is not liable to help his defence.
But it all remains - purposefully - unclear; a powerful and well-acted film, though there were some bits where they got Catholic practice at the time completely wrong (Taize chants? Breviaries in English?). Good soundtrack, too, though why they used a recording of Christ's Hospital at the end bemuses me.
*The fault did not lie with the sermon; I was rather cross that I did drop off.