It's been years since I've flown a kite, but this book makes me want to do it again. And try something. When I think of it, I've heard of this before, but I've never done it myself. That is, sending runners up the string. The goofy character in this book is always doing it, starting with paper then testing progressively heavier objects. Sounds like fun.
Wikipedia, helpful as it is, isn't always accurate. According to that site, this movie is about a "mysterious woman who turns out to be a ghost possessed by a witch." I can tell you that without spoiling anything because it's completely wrong. It's wrong even given the filmmakers' contradictory attitude toward the woman in the story. It's an apologist's description, an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. On the other hand, this stuck out to me because, for the most part, Wikipedia is pretty good about this sort of thing.
I know of only two artistic works titled, simply, "She." Both are good. The other is this terrific song, by the Monkees.
I'll bet there's something out there on the dark web that I would like to see. I can't say what it might be, but I figure there's got to be something. And I tried, once, to access it. The trouble is, you have to know what you're looking for and you have to know where to find it. Failing both prerequisites, I don't suppose I ever had a chance.
At one point in this film, Joan is asked, "Who are you to even think you can know the difference between good and evil?" What, I wonder, is that supposed to mean, either from a secular or a religious viewpoint? If it isn't just bad writing (which I personally suspect), it can only be another indication of the filmmakers' determination to paint Joan as insane: only a person who is literally insane could be expected not to be able to tell the difference.
Lest we think what happened to Joan is a thing of the past, here's a story dated today about an accused "witch" being burned at the stake. Though the reasoning was different, it's also fascinating to note that, like what was done to Joan, the villagers repeatedly burned the woman's body.
It's hard to imagine a nun ever becoming a saint, or a monk. Sainthood relies (right?) on work in the outside world, among fellow human beings. One of the things I think so many stories like this one get wrong is the way they paint "saintly" characters as so absorbed by God that they become islands in the sea of humanity. In this movie, Joan delivers a soliloquy in which she speaks of all the things a life in prison would not offer her, and it's all wind and lambs and sunlight -- nothing really about other people. Comes off as self-absorbed at best, and more probably simply selfish.
The authors try hard in this book to paint a more modern portrait of women, but they betray themselves constantly. One early scene has Dr. Seward a helpless witness to the inhuman torture of an innocent girl. So what does Seward do? He bloodies his hand with his knife because, he thinks, if he can't save the girl, he can at least share her pain. More subtly, they describe Bathory's strength as ten times that of a man. Since we get no description of Dracula's strength, we must defer to Stoker, who more than once put his strength at twice that. All the women are inordinately beautiful and alluring, of course, and though Mina refers to Bathory's sexual preference as unnatural, she discovers in one scene that all cats are grey in the dark.
The story of the Titanic comes with its own X-File. In 1898 -- sixteen years before the Titanic disaster -- Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. Lord talks about it in the brief forward to his book. The novel was about an Atlantic liner called the Titan that collides with an iceberg on a cold April night. If that weren't enough, the Titan, like the Titanic, was described as "unsinkable." Also like the Titanic, the Titan carried lifeboats for fewer than half of its human cargo.
Having recently reviewed Dracula, it's interesting to note that Richard Chase, on whom this film is loosely based, and who was institutionalized for a time prior to committing the murders he was eventually tried for, took to drinking the blood of birds he caught outside the window of his hospital room, becoming very much like a real-life Renfield. Except that he wasn't worried about a vampire count living next door; he was concerned about Nazis and UFOs.
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
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