The Blogging Principle

What is it? you may ask; the simple inverse relation that the more happens, the less time there is to write about it and the more compressed everything becomes in less frequent posts. This becomes manifestly evident as midterm examinations approach ominously and craziness continues as usual in Boston.

So, in today's news...

Today (observed yesterday) is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, commemorating the Battle of Lepanto in which the Turks were miraculously defeated. Hooray!

There are two new Doctors of the Church as of today: St. Hildegard of Bingen and St. John of Avila. Now that you know, you can look them up if you are interested in knowing more about them. St. Hildegard in particular is outstanding for many reasons, not the least of which is she is the only Saint to have her revelations declared to be of universal significance (as opposed to personal revelations) since the canon of Scripture was closed.

On the local front...

I promised a film review of Restless Heart, the new drama about the life and times of St. Augustine that I attended last weekend. (Spoiler alert: Augustine becomes a Christian).

The story is good; you can't go wrong with the lives of the Saints unless it is totally misinterpreted or altered, so no problem there. My criticism for the writing is that they tried to cover his entire life in 120 minutes and so many details were glossed over, particularly in his conversion. If you have read The Confessions, you know how richly he describes his experience, and I thought that would make an excellent film segment especially since the conflict he suffers is thoroughly modern and relatable to the post-modern and angst- ridden, but while there was a portrayal of his experience under the fig tree there was little/nothing of internal conflict portrayed. (I was later told that the original film was actually in Italian and more than 3 hours long by a classmate who saw it, so much was edited out from the English version for some reason).

As far as the acting, the principle parts were fairly good but there was something to be desired in the presentation overall; it struck me that they were doing more telling than showing conflict and drama.

As for everything else, I was confused by the use of CGI; there was a scene of migrating storks that was just distractingly fake, so I'm not sure why they could not have just found some stock footage of storks to solve that problem. Then, towards the end of the film, Hippo fell to a horde of 50-100 Vandals, so they really could have used some computer wizardry there to make the invasion a little more credible. The sound mixing also left something to be desired; the soundtrack was much too loud at some points to the extent of overpowering the dialogue.

Rating: 3/5 stars

The most exciting news is last: I had lunch with Jim Caviezel today! I guess he has been in Boston several times before and attended mass at St. Francis Chapel (which is staffed by the OMVs as you doubtless recall from previous posts). Today, he was visiting his friend Andy LaVallee in Boston. Andy is a benefactor of the Oblates who donates goods from his bakery generously and attends mass at the Shrine every Sunday. Andy was taking Jim to the Patriots game today and invited a couple of the Oblate priests to go, so they cam to mass this morning and joined us for lunch in the refectory afterward. Jim was interested in all the seminarians and asked each of us for a brief account of our vocation story. We also got to hear from him about his life, his call to be an actor, personal and professional struggles, and anecdotes from filming The Passion, his other films, and Medjugorje.