This week I’ve been working out how to make a snood, a type of hair net worn by long-haired ladies for centuries but particularly useful on the American frontier and for reenactors who need to hide their short hair. Especially when working with super-fine cotton yarn, I have to be very careful and precise about placing my stitches and deciding on the sequence of rows in order to make the netting come out right. My mother’s been trying for a year to find a pattern on the Internet that works, but so far she’s gotten nothing but messes.
I bring this up because as I’ve mentioned in the past, C. S. Lewis argues in his essay “On Stories” that a story is like a net used to catch something else that isn’t necessarily defined by the structural elements of the story. What that ‘something else’ is can vary greatly, of course, and can have an effect on the form, but unless the net is well made, it won’t catch anything at all. Similarly, he argues in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” that it’s almost impossible to start with a particular idea for a moral and build the story around it; for the story to be any good, the story itself has to come first, and the moral will generally make itself known in the end product.
The former is the trap into which many filmmakers fall when they set out to make a film to promote a particular ideology, whatever that ideology might be, and end up making a major mess. The latter is the approach that’s needed—and is, incidentally, the approach advocated in Taliesin Nexus’ workshops from the first session on. A well-crafted story will attract viewers and provoke discussions better than preachiness. And that is where Sony’s newest faith-based film, , shines. The film works precisely because it takes a well-known story, that of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and presents it afresh through outsider POV without crossing the line into preachiness. (more…)
Time for a stupid question, is there anybody out there who hasn’t watched Deadpool? Well, is there anyone out there other than my dad, who didn’t watch it? Even he intended to see it, until he learned it was not in fact the sixth installment of the Dirty Harry franchise. So is there anyone who actually knows how to use the internet, that didn’t see it? I didn’t think so.
The Revolving Door of Avengers Mansion