Happy Late Night, Sweet Baby,
I like your photo from this morning, and I see you are still on the road at Lake Superior, or actually in this case, you are not on the road but in the lake........ :)
That is really far out, and a little weird, the way you are standing on rock which is just under the surface of the water but which also drops off like a big plate. The rock resembles sandstone, and I don't know if it is or not, but it reminds me of what I wrote about walking the trail at Corriganville a week or two ago - that because the sandstone boulders at the park had once been at the bottom of the ocean, that I was walking on the bottom too!
Geology is fascinating, and what makes it so - for me anyway - is that you can see, to this day!, artifacts of the way the world was millions and millions of years ago.
I hope you are having a great time on your trip, and keep posting if you can.
Tonight's movie was "The Witch". This movie could have been soooo much better than it was. Oh man, it had such a great look, excellent earthy colored cinematography, good acting all around with strict adherence to 17th century English language and manner of speaking. They made a point to create an atmosphere in this film, and on all the technical and dramatic levels, it was great.
The problem.......a big sigh is appropriate here, because this seems to be the problem so often now.....the problem was a thin story, so thin that not much happens, and I don't mean that in a "minimalist art film" way. In a minimalist art film, not much can happen and you can still have a great film because of everything that is implied, and because of so many other factors that do not figure into a normal dramatic movie.
"The Witch" had 92 minutes to work with, plenty of time to build tension, build plot, build mystery around The Witch, and just to make the story move, with various details that could have been developed. But alas, none of that happens, and so you have a movie that could have been great, but instead is merely okay.
It's worth a buck from Redbox or Netflix, just because of the period look and dialogue which are first rate.
But people!.......oh, film people I beseech you to write and develop stories, and learn how to pace them properly in your films! My goodness, Hollywood was founded and became great all because of great stories. Stories were the basis of a good film, before there were special effects and tricky camera work.
It's just like with music. You've gotta have a song. In music, it doesn't matter how good you can play if you don't have the songs. And that is becoming a big problem with films, too. You have gotta have a story, and a plausible ending, if you are making a conventional dramatic structure movie.
So that's my Cinematic Tirade for tonight, even though "The Witch" was not a bad film at all. Just that it could have been really, really good, had it had a story.
Starting tomorrow afternoon, I will be off work for Memorial Day weekend, until Monday afternoon. So a couple sleep-ins are in order, though I will still be going to church on Sunday. And I will be going to the annual Greek Festival at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church (aka "The Greek Church") at some point over the weekend. I go every year, and you might have seen pics that I've posted in years past. But this year will be most interesting and instructive for me to take the guided tour of the church itself, because this time - though I've taken the tour before - this time I have just finished reading Dr. Farrell's book about the early church, and I have learned about Monophysitism and heresies such as Nestorianism, and many other subtopics of what is called Christology. The Eastern Orthodox (i.e. Greek & Russian) version of the original Catholic Church professes to adhere to the earliest undiluted principles of Christianity, and this time, having read the book, it will be interesting to go on the tour knowing some of the Orthodox Saints and the subject matter.
Mostly, from what I read, the schism in the Church is due to minor philosophical details about the nature of Christ (i.e. was He part human, etc.), and it's very detailed in the initial dialectical arguments from 1600 years ago. And it's also something I would not have imagined myself studying, had you asked me twenty years ago.
That's all for tonight, my Darling. I Love You & hope you are having fun. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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