Not Funny

A definitive answer to any Big Questions you might have: Lightning kills 5 Mexican children in prayer

Movie Night

Sometimes NetFlix deals you a bad hand. If you don't watch your queue carefully, you can end of with a batch of what I call "mood movies." These are movies that you must be emotionally prepared in order to watch. Tonight, Kendra and I ended up with House of Sand and Fog and Saved. Great, I thought. A movie about tense American-Iranian relations or a movie about Christian zealots. We might as well watch the news.

House of Sand and Fog is devastating. It concerns an Iranian-American family in desperate circumstances that moves into a house from which a recovering alcoholic has been evicted. If that sounds like a downer, it is. And it gets worse. There is no right or wrong in this story—the father of the family (Ben Kingsley) is devoted to his wife and son but posesses a dangerous hubris, and the now-homeless woman (Jennifer Connelly) is undone by an unjust system and her own carelessness. The movie is beautifully shot, and the acting is excellent. Ben Kingsley is always fascinating to watch (see Sexy Beast), and Jennifer Connelly makes her character both exasperating and sympathetic. Just make sure you don't start watching this film with a cheer deficit.

After that heavy cinematic meal, we needed some sorbet to cleanse our palettes. Saved is funny, but it skewers some pretty easy targets: the kind of status-hungry "Christians" who think that humility, charity, and poverty are merely "suggested guidelines". The kids in this movie attend a fundamentalist high school where the social hierarchy is based on perceived righteousness. The movie is actually pretty gentle in its satire; it's basically a teen comedy about mean-spirited cool kids and the outcasts. The adults are feckless, the head mean girl is irredeemably hatable, the losers are lovable, and the tables are turned in the end. It even has a denouement at the prom. It's easy as an adult to laugh at these hypocritical teens, but I can't help but think that there are some unfortunate kids out there who wouldn't see the humor.

One ominous note tied these very different movies together for me. In House of Sand and Fog, the Ben Kingsley character is a former Colonel for the Shah of Iran. At his daughter's wedding, he decries the fundamentalist Ayatollahs who have torn the heart from his beloved homeland. He has brought his family to America to escape persecution.

Interesting choice.