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Sean Freese (4 KP) rated The Witch (2015) in Movies
Jun 25, 2020
THE VVITCH
The full title is, The Witch: A New England Folktale. Like Grimm’s fairytales, American folklore has taken revisions over the centuries to become a palatable collection of juvenile life lessons. Anyone who has read the original versions of these stories knows how brutal, horrifying, and far removed they are from our current values. As much as I would not condone reading original classic witch tales to a small child, they do contain much deeper implications and ideas than the simple “Don’t tell lies” that are gleaned from modern revisions. What’s fascinating about The Witch is how familiar the setting and story is, without a single cliché or moment of prediction to speak of. The evil that was feared in 17th Century Puritan America has been so eclipsed by the human horrors of The Salem Witch Trials, that we have forgotten what it was to fear a witch.
We know these characters only by their Christian names. William removes his family from their Colonial settlement due to an incompatibility of faith. The colony of Puritans isn’t Christian enough. With his wife, Katherine, William takes his 4 children into the wilds of the Northeast. Airs of The Crucible envelope the setting. Common pronouns are replaced with “thines” and “thous”. Dialogue is delivered as if quoted from Shakespeare or the Bible itself. In the past, this oral dynamic has always sounded ardently rehearsed. Somehow, it’s natural here. Considering William’s rigorous faith, you might expect him to be an overbearingly shrewd father. He is in fact a loving and good man of his time; often a pushover. Katherine is the more fearsome parent, with a shrill voice and gaunt pointed face. While they do live in hardship, this is a good family. Once Fall deadens the colors and greys the skies, things begin to take a disturbing turn.
Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play the parents without an exaggeration of the material. Remarkable still are the actors portraying their children. Harvey Scrimshaw plays William’s 10-year-old son, Caleb, as natural as can be imagined. The dramatic beats of a horror movie come with taxing climactic moments and Scrimshaw acts beyond his years. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the eldest daughter Thomasin; a doe-eyed blonde beauty who plays the most relatable character of the flock. The dynamic between Caleb and Thompsin has notes of innocent sexual tension. Their secluded life leaves a great deal of new feelings that can’t be addressed due to their customs. These feelings lead to foreign temptations that are preyed upon by the timeless evil beyond the trees.
The greatest achievement of this film is how faithful it is to its setting and story, while keeping enough behind the veil to become engrossing. The tale feels as old as any, drawing from universal fears and motivations. How it draws you in, keeping you tied to the victims and their perspective while keeping the evil at arm’s length, shows a discipline of craft that greatly compliments the material. Much like vampires, witches have been trivialized and diluted by film into something superficially attractive and entertainingly evil. As with Noseferatu, seeing a witch living a damnable existence of ugliness is much more appropriate. If they’re ever beautiful, they won’t be for long.
The full title is, The Witch: A New England Folktale. Like Grimm’s fairytales, American folklore has taken revisions over the centuries to become a palatable collection of juvenile life lessons. Anyone who has read the original versions of these stories knows how brutal, horrifying, and far removed they are from our current values. As much as I would not condone reading original classic witch tales to a small child, they do contain much deeper implications and ideas than the simple “Don’t tell lies” that are gleaned from modern revisions. What’s fascinating about The Witch is how familiar the setting and story is, without a single cliché or moment of prediction to speak of. The evil that was feared in 17th Century Puritan America has been so eclipsed by the human horrors of The Salem Witch Trials, that we have forgotten what it was to fear a witch.
We know these characters only by their Christian names. William removes his family from their Colonial settlement due to an incompatibility of faith. The colony of Puritans isn’t Christian enough. With his wife, Katherine, William takes his 4 children into the wilds of the Northeast. Airs of The Crucible envelope the setting. Common pronouns are replaced with “thines” and “thous”. Dialogue is delivered as if quoted from Shakespeare or the Bible itself. In the past, this oral dynamic has always sounded ardently rehearsed. Somehow, it’s natural here. Considering William’s rigorous faith, you might expect him to be an overbearingly shrewd father. He is in fact a loving and good man of his time; often a pushover. Katherine is the more fearsome parent, with a shrill voice and gaunt pointed face. While they do live in hardship, this is a good family. Once Fall deadens the colors and greys the skies, things begin to take a disturbing turn.
Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play the parents without an exaggeration of the material. Remarkable still are the actors portraying their children. Harvey Scrimshaw plays William’s 10-year-old son, Caleb, as natural as can be imagined. The dramatic beats of a horror movie come with taxing climactic moments and Scrimshaw acts beyond his years. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the eldest daughter Thomasin; a doe-eyed blonde beauty who plays the most relatable character of the flock. The dynamic between Caleb and Thompsin has notes of innocent sexual tension. Their secluded life leaves a great deal of new feelings that can’t be addressed due to their customs. These feelings lead to foreign temptations that are preyed upon by the timeless evil beyond the trees.
The greatest achievement of this film is how faithful it is to its setting and story, while keeping enough behind the veil to become engrossing. The tale feels as old as any, drawing from universal fears and motivations. How it draws you in, keeping you tied to the victims and their perspective while keeping the evil at arm’s length, shows a discipline of craft that greatly compliments the material. Much like vampires, witches have been trivialized and diluted by film into something superficially attractive and entertainingly evil. As with Noseferatu, seeing a witch living a damnable existence of ugliness is much more appropriate. If they’re ever beautiful, they won’t be for long.
Haley Mathiot (9 KP) rated Start Here: Doing Hard Things Right Where You Are in Books
Apr 27, 2018
I found Start Here to be very inspirational. The Harris’ get down to the point quickly and concisely.
Start Here is a light easy read, but then how can a Christian living book be light? They talk about pride and sin and giving glory to God, they talk about peer pressure and stress and fears and the Father of Lies. But they also encourage teenagers to get out of the box that our society has put them in. It’s light and easy in that it’s an easily understood page-turner.
The Harris’ first book, Do Hard Things, was about encouraging teens to do just that—to do hard things—for God. In Start Here, they talk about how to go about doing those hard things, what to do when you encounter fear, press, or peer pressure, and answer all the tough questions.
One of the points that they make is that your hard thing may not be to sail around the world at age sixteen or to make a movie or to start a nonprofit organization or anything else big. Your hard thing might be what some people consider a small thing, and it may be something that nobody even knows about. But God wants you to do that hard thing because in the long run, it changes your heart for the better. At the back of Start Here is a list of 100 things that people have contributed too, and I want to share a few with you:
Sold all the clothes I didn’t need and gave the money to charity
worked up to 100 pushups in four weeks
saved my first kiss for my wedding day
read a book out loud to my younger siblings
let my brother win an argument
Babysat for a single mom who could not pay me much
Set a budget and stuck with it.
Maybe these people aren’t going to be front page news… but their hard things are pretty important.
Start Here will encourage, inspire, and help you through whatever it is that God has for you, whether you know about it right now or not. Consider it a handbook, and use it side by side with your main instruction manual (The Bible).
Recommendation: Ages 11+ Adults do hard things, too! They also will benefit from this book.
(book provided for review by publisher)
Start Here is a light easy read, but then how can a Christian living book be light? They talk about pride and sin and giving glory to God, they talk about peer pressure and stress and fears and the Father of Lies. But they also encourage teenagers to get out of the box that our society has put them in. It’s light and easy in that it’s an easily understood page-turner.
The Harris’ first book, Do Hard Things, was about encouraging teens to do just that—to do hard things—for God. In Start Here, they talk about how to go about doing those hard things, what to do when you encounter fear, press, or peer pressure, and answer all the tough questions.
One of the points that they make is that your hard thing may not be to sail around the world at age sixteen or to make a movie or to start a nonprofit organization or anything else big. Your hard thing might be what some people consider a small thing, and it may be something that nobody even knows about. But God wants you to do that hard thing because in the long run, it changes your heart for the better. At the back of Start Here is a list of 100 things that people have contributed too, and I want to share a few with you:
Sold all the clothes I didn’t need and gave the money to charity
worked up to 100 pushups in four weeks
saved my first kiss for my wedding day
read a book out loud to my younger siblings
let my brother win an argument
Babysat for a single mom who could not pay me much
Set a budget and stuck with it.
Maybe these people aren’t going to be front page news… but their hard things are pretty important.
Start Here will encourage, inspire, and help you through whatever it is that God has for you, whether you know about it right now or not. Consider it a handbook, and use it side by side with your main instruction manual (The Bible).
Recommendation: Ages 11+ Adults do hard things, too! They also will benefit from this book.
(book provided for review by publisher)
JT (287 KP) rated Out of the Furnace (2013) in Movies
Mar 10, 2020
Cast for so long in the trademark cowl of Batman and posing around Gotham City as the slightly disturbed and flamboyant billionaire Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale is back deep in his gritty acting roots.
Bale plays Pennsylvania steel mill worker Russell, a man living a simplistic hard working way of life. His brother on the other hand, Rodney (Casey Affleck), is back from a tour in Iraq. He’s visibly scared and not in the least bit interested in anymore manual labour. Inciting that the country owes him a something for his sacrifice he gets into debt gambling and desperate for cash to pay off his short fall he takes bare knuckle fist fights organised by loan shark friend John Petty Willem Dafoe.
Things move from bad to worse in a surprise addition to the plot, which sees Russell endure some time behind bars and in the process loses his sick father as well as seeing girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana) fall into the arms of local cop Forest Whitaker. When Russell steps outside of prison for the first time he has yet another problem facing him, in the form of local drug kingpin and all round nasty, Harlan DeGroat brilliantly played by Woody Harrelson.
DeGroat is not one to be crossed as even the local police keep their distance but Rodney heads straight into the lion’s den when he accepts a fight and then is propositioned to take a dive during it; something that he is not willing to do.
The relationship between the brothers is enthralling and totally believable. Both Bale and Affleck give controlled and sharp performances feeding off each other as the tension between them rises. The film attempts to broach the subject of the working classes, while at the same time portraying the life of the retired marine who has come back home full of nightmares and is left forgotten only to crumble into himself.
It’s a strong cast, with Harrelson’s villain commanding the screen with gusto while the likes of Saldana, Defoe and Sam Shepard play mere bit parts. But with this much talent on show not everyone can feature front and centre. The film’s setting is a perfect post-industrial stomping ground for battles both in the illegal ring and out of it, while a moody soundtrack is a perfect accompaniment to the narrative that is moving and rough around the edges.
Bale plays Pennsylvania steel mill worker Russell, a man living a simplistic hard working way of life. His brother on the other hand, Rodney (Casey Affleck), is back from a tour in Iraq. He’s visibly scared and not in the least bit interested in anymore manual labour. Inciting that the country owes him a something for his sacrifice he gets into debt gambling and desperate for cash to pay off his short fall he takes bare knuckle fist fights organised by loan shark friend John Petty Willem Dafoe.
Things move from bad to worse in a surprise addition to the plot, which sees Russell endure some time behind bars and in the process loses his sick father as well as seeing girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana) fall into the arms of local cop Forest Whitaker. When Russell steps outside of prison for the first time he has yet another problem facing him, in the form of local drug kingpin and all round nasty, Harlan DeGroat brilliantly played by Woody Harrelson.
DeGroat is not one to be crossed as even the local police keep their distance but Rodney heads straight into the lion’s den when he accepts a fight and then is propositioned to take a dive during it; something that he is not willing to do.
The relationship between the brothers is enthralling and totally believable. Both Bale and Affleck give controlled and sharp performances feeding off each other as the tension between them rises. The film attempts to broach the subject of the working classes, while at the same time portraying the life of the retired marine who has come back home full of nightmares and is left forgotten only to crumble into himself.
It’s a strong cast, with Harrelson’s villain commanding the screen with gusto while the likes of Saldana, Defoe and Sam Shepard play mere bit parts. But with this much talent on show not everyone can feature front and centre. The film’s setting is a perfect post-industrial stomping ground for battles both in the illegal ring and out of it, while a moody soundtrack is a perfect accompaniment to the narrative that is moving and rough around the edges.
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