Film review "The Heartbreak Kid"

The prospect of a two and a half hour ferry journey from Scotland to Northern Ireland is always made more pleasant because you can relax in the on board cinema and chill out completely with a full length feature film. But you have no choice of the film and on yesterdays crossing a film was shown that the best thing you could say about it was “it passed the time”. “The Heartbreak Kid was so awful that I wondered how it was ever funded.

Perhaps it is just the American sense of humour (or should I say humor) that was so crude, crass and obvious that made me squirm. Anyway the film was supposed to be a “rom com”. But it was totally immoral, somewhat pornographic and based on a man who had a series of totally dysfunctional relationships and destroyed many other peoples lives in the process. Strange to say I hardly found any of it funny at all. It was a tragedy of relationships.

There was no character in the film that you could warm to – except perhaps Marilyn but then she was portrayed as a somewhat naive bit of romantic interest. Marilyn's family were fairly normal and likable but were portrayed as stereotypical red necks – ie rather stupid and boring and trapped in their own little world. The main character, his best friend, and his father were all fairly un-likable numpties. The wife was an air-headed sex maniac, though to be fair she had a deeper side to her character: she had recovered from cocaine addiction and was left with a permanent handicap as a result. But the only impact of this “depth” was as the butt of jokes and she was mostly portrayed as a pathetic foil to the main characters fantasies. Some of the actors in the film I'm told were quite well known but they must have been pretty desperate to take on this script.

Perhaps as a documentary of social realism of dysfunctional lives where serial monogamy is the norm and selfishness is the dominant emotion controlling life choices this was an accurate portrayal but it was not a comedy. It was the sort of thing I would have switched off after ten minutes at home but on a ship with nothing else to do (having left my book in the car deck! ) there was nothing to do but savour the embarrassing awfulness of it all. I was left at the end with the feeling of two hours of my life having been wasted!

Turmoil

May you live in interesting times was an ancient Chinese curse.
I don't know about a curse but things are definitely interesting at the moment. I am the sort of person who likes to have things sorted out and there is at present a large degree of uncertainty about my future. I know that in 12 months time I will be doing a different job in a different place and this week has been a time for making important decisions and filling in forms! Such a lot of forms to fill in.
Things will gradually become clearer as time passes but I have a natural tendency to be impatient. I also like to take things into my own hands and get them sorted but many of things that are happening to me are out of my direct control. And I don't really like that.
But this is also a time of faith. Strange as it seems I feel a great sense of peace about what is happening. I really believe that God has everything under control and it will all be well.

Hoarding

I have had a clear out. It makes me feel good to shred things no longer needed. Was there any point in keeping those files of old bank and credit card statements from the 1980s?

But as I fed them into the shredder I had a feeling of some regret because I was destroying some of my history. There were the credit card entries from the French motorways as we drove through France. And there was the payment for a camera... and a payment to Toys-r-us. I haven't been in a toy shop for years now! I had to look away as I was taking too long to feed them into the shredder.

Well they are now all gone. But my memories are not gone? So many days hours and minutes summed up in those transactions which had been half forgotten. I suppose if you live a full life you cannot remember everything and anyway how accurate were those memories really? Those motorway tolls reminded me of great holidays in the Pyrenees but I had forgotten the tedium of the fourteen hour drive across France to get there! Memories are selective.

I am just grateful that I have so many good memories - it must be desperate if you cannot look back for fear of remembering too well. How sad if you are someone for whom the past is something you only want to forget.

Loving creation

"Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love." Dostoevsky

This is creation time in the church calender - when we celebrate harvest festivals. I was at one in the local primary school yesterday and the children brought gifts to be distributed to local old folks and had a theme of thankfulness for the good things from the earth.

But in the quotation we are called to go much further. This sort of deep spiritual respect for creation and reverence of it involves looking at the earth as a God of love must look at all that He has made. Loving involves embracing with the emotions and that can hurt. By loving we make ourselves vulnerable. So we are careful who and what we love as we try to protect ourselves. But this quotation reveals a greater truth - that though we might think that we do not have enough love to go round - if we give honestly of what we have, we will find ourselves renewed and refreshed so that we can give more that we ever knew we possesed. If we keep it to ourselves we will never find the potential vast love that is latent within us....