How to procrastinate in style

I've got an enormous paper to write for my French class. It's been looming for weeks, and all I've done is cart a few books back and forth with me from the Library to home again and again. Well, I have thought about it, but so far my paper on superego development and Sartre's existentialist autobiography remains unwritten.

At least I fill my free time with Netflix!



A film that didn't deserve many of its controversies. I actually liked much of it a great deal--the tormenting of Judas by a crowd of demonic children and a feminine Satan; his hanging by a rope found around the neck of a decayed donkey corpse (perhaps the Passover beast Christ rode a few days earlier?). A teardrop from heaven at Christ's death which results in the rending of the Temple. All of the somber performances and the sets. Pontius Pilate full of doubt and fear, the Garden of Gesthemene where Jesus implores God to "take this cup from me," as Satan teases him. Yeah, there are disturbing elements--for instance the non-scriptural amplifications of the nastiness of Christ's Jewish captors; the excessive and glorious violence; the near absence of forgiveness and love. But Christianity has been through this before. I look at this movie as a non-believer raised in churches where blood and punishment were the focus--I recognize this fascination. Many of my favorite aesthetic images are situated in the lamentable Christian grue of the Middle Ages/Dark Ages--the tortured souls carved into Romanesque and Gothic church archways; Grunewald's lavishly tormented Christ as portrayed in the Issenheim Retable is for me the summit of Christian art. Is there a danger that fundamentalists will be encouraged by Gibson's Passion? Certainly--but I think the Left Behind malarky is much more worrysome than this film, which I found by measure beautiful and ridiculous. I still prefer Scorcese's Last Temptation, but Gibson's Christ is equally devestated by his predestined role. This is not a lamb eager for the slaughter. Caviezel plays Jesus as a fearful, doubtful, unsure man suffering enormous torments in the belief that his death will change things. I hope Gibson makes a perfectly horrifying film about the Apocalypse. I'd be first in line!

Even more spirtually engaging, tho less aesthetically pleasing, was



I'm not sure what to say about this film, which Faulty Landscape recommended; I think it's fucking brilliant, and is perhaps as close as we'll get to seeing how humans probably lived for most of our history. The action in this portrayal of shamanistic revenge is so remote from my experience as to be alien, and yet this is a story I know in my bones--some archetypal elemental stirrings in the collective unconscious spoke to me during this marvelous little gem of a movie.