Watching movies

So this past weekend my family sat down and watched the movie The Singles Ward. (Jeanne and i had seen it before, but it was the first time any of our kids had seen it.) If you haven’t seen it before, it’s not world-shatteringly great but it’s also not a bad little movie, and you should watch it if for no other reasons than (a) it has a really fun soundtrack that would drive some of our more, um, intensely artistically conservative church members absolutely insane* and (b) the rest of this post assumes you’ve seen the movie and at least somewhat remember it.

Anyway, as i watched this movie for the first time in several years, i was struck by two things. One is that the Discman shown at the beginning and end of the movie certainly dates it, even though it’s only just over a decade old. The other is more substantial: The big important turning point of the movie involves the female lead becoming severely angry and hurt because the male lead makes jokes about Mormons in his stand-up routine.

This reminded me of what i thought was the really, really major flaw of the movie:** Was the female lead character really worth chasing after? I mean, anyone who would be offended by such mild jokes, well, i don’t think such a person is worth it, you know?† But no, she gets held up as this amazing ideal, and we’re supposed to feel empathy for her. Sorry, folks, but if someone can’t watch others poke fun (mildly, even!) at a group they’re a part of, they really need to grow a thicker skin before they’re such the ideal.††

* Seriously—find Rooster’s version of “Popcorn Popping” from the movie’s soundtrack and download it now. You will be happy.

** Also, in the same sequence, a minor flaw: The evil female character’s use of the verb “to play” in a way that i’m still trying to figure out—it almost but not quite matches any of the (slang) meanings i’ve ever heard, or that i can find even on Urban Dictionary.

† There’s an irony of sorts, too, in that one of the stock characters that the movie uses to make fun of singles ward folks is a woman who is offended by patently non-offensive things.

†† I think i’m going to use the rare “Mormon-oriented literature” tag on this one, just to annoy the kind of people who don’t think literature departments should teach courses in film.

Should it be a classic?

I recently ran across an old copy of Spencer W. Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness that was sitting on the wrong shelf, and i flipped through it. I didn’t do a close rereading of it or anything, but it reminded me that i’ve never understood the appeal of the book.

So what’s up with it? What am i missing about it that makes it such an allegedly wonderful thing?

What we’re ashamed of

This is normally a text-only blog, but the following recently came across on GraphJam, and i just had to post it here:

Yeah, that seems about right.

Voices, an epilogue

The title of my last post reminded me that the song “Voices” from Saturday’s Warrior was the only halfway-decent song in the entire movie/play.

(And yes, “In Our Humble Way” is listenable for the humor value, but being funny doesn’t make it any good. Sorry.)

All about the unintended messages

Michelle’s response to the last post on this blog reminded me of a memory that had been buried in the back of my brain for a long time.

Back when i was a teenager, i read a lot. (Still do, actually.) Since i was growing up Mormon, a chunk of what i read was the pablum that passes for adolescent literature directed at Mormons (which is not to say that most adolescent literature not directed at Mormons isn’t pablum, but that’s a separate issue). This was particularly the case since my parents ran a Mormon-oriented bookstore for a bit of my growing up.

Anyway, one book in particular (the title and author of which, sadly, are lost in the mists of brainfog) was written to try to steer young Mormons away from four of the Big Vices—alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, and premarital sex.* This book’s particular approach to the de rigueur hamhandedness of the genre was to take the done-without-names third-person narrative common to Mormon lesson manual narratives of the 70s and 80s** and apply it to horror stories about the way things could go terribly, terribly wrong for teenagers who committed sins.

I remember a few of them, but the one i particularly remember was the story of a girl (cleverly named “a young woman”) who started having sex at a very young age (i can’t recall if it was twelve or thirteen) with pretty much any willing guy she could find, and ended up contracting a sexually transmitted disease that left her infertile. This was presented as the most negative of all possible outcomes. I still remember thinking, as a teenager, that if someone was engaging in such high-risk sexual behavior, infertility would probably be a positive outcome for that person, what with having one less thing to worry about and all—and if i, in my early teens and not playing the sexual promiscuity game, had that thought, i can only imagine that there were a few teenagers who were being sexually promiscuous who figured that they’d just been informed of a novel way out of some of their major life stresses.

Like the title says, it’s all about the unintended messages.

* You’ll notice the conspicuous absence of rock and roll from this list. Apparently, the author felt that Lex de Azevedo had already done such a poorly-reasoned approach to the subject with his book Pop Music and Morality that it could never be surpassed.

** Those of you around then will remember this—stuff like “A relief society president decided she needed a better way to reach the newly-married sisters in her ward…” and “A young girl was praying at dinner one night…” I mean, could they have telegraphed that they were made-up stories any more blatantly? Probably, but i can’t think of how.