The Secret Thread: Literature & Spiritual Life: LIFE INTERVENES

Monday, March 05, 2007

LIFE INTERVENES

Our thousands of readers have likely noticed by now the scarcity of posts and updates on The Secret Thread recently. Well, all I can do is sum it up in this simple, two-word phrase: life intervenes! Personally, I’ve been mired down in a number of major projects at my work that have prevented me from ringing in lately… and with Mutt, forget about it! He’s attempting to do what I stumbled through in the summer of 2005: switch jobs, buy a house and relocate an entire family with children, all at the same time! (And just to make it even more fun, when I was doing it we decided to throw in the delivery of a brand new baby and the selling of our old house in there as well.) That right there is enough to drive any man insane. It brings to mind this famous passage (famous at least to the founders of this blog anyway) from Stephen Wright’s tour de force novel Going Native – a description we’ve always thought was gut-bustingly hilarious of a man (owner of a small-time motel) trying to juggle too many competing responsibilities and thoughts at one time:

The basic problem, as ever, was holding it all together in his head -- the guests, the employees, the paperwork, the family -- as if he were this ludicrous white-faced buffoon balancing on a bulbous red nose a towering superstructure of tables and chairs while being pelted by gaily colored tennis balls and rich cream pies as a barking seal attempted to scale the teetering for the set of bicycle horns at its peak to peck out with glistening mammalian snout, for the edification and entertainment of the adoring upturned mob, a recognizable rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel."

Whoo boy… cracks me up every time! Anyway, we’ve basically both been totally snowballed with work and family responsibilities and have had trouble keeping up… but soon I will be posting again and kick-starting the engines. The reading and film-viewing has continued on unabated of course (as the side column has shown), and to paraphrase Dylan Thomas paraphrasing an Irish folk tale, “we’d be damned fools if it didn’t.”

We shall return soon… never fear! Can anyone else hear the collective sigh of relief of thousands of blog readers across the country??

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Duke Altum's Recommended Films

Monsters (2010) – As many have already said, calling Monsters a movie about an alien occupation of Earth seems to do this fascinating, original film a disservice. Certainly the fact that huge, bioluminescent squid-like extraterrestrials are running amok through the jungles of Central America is an important (and entertaining) element of the plot, but anyone coming into this one looking for non-stop, Aliens-style action or special effects eye candy a la the concurrent alien invasion flick Skyline is going to be sorely disappointed. Instead, what you have with Monsters is an intriguing and meditative hybrid of road movie, post-apocalyptic thriller and surprisingly believable human drama. Director Gareth Edwards wrote, edited and created special effects for the film on his own, which gave him the freedom to make exactly the kind of movie he wanted to make - that is, a love story that just happens to feature alien life forms ominously howling and lurking in the background (this approach, by the way, gives the film its pervasive suspense and intensity, as you are as in the dark as the characters are about when the next encounter with a pissed-off, tentacled alien might occur). The many scenes of unscripted, natural banter between the lead actors as they trek across the "infected zone" and get to know one another help you, crucially, to identify with them enough to care by the final act - which provides an unexpected, subtle twist that gives the entire story added poignancy and irony. I am sure that a great many viewers of this unusual film will come out feeling somewhere between perplexed and downright cheated, and Edwards does provide so little backstory about the aliens and what they might be up to that one may well wonder why they were in the movie at all (and, justifiably, why the film was ever called "Monsters"). But I found that their mysterious, vaguely menacing presence gave the entire story a kind of haunted and other-wordly atmosphere that reminded me a bit of the best bits of James Cameron's The Abyss. I guess you could say that early encounters with new life forms - like those with potential lovers - can be both exhilarating and weirdly disconcerting at the same time.