Your Weekly Dose (3/9/22)
No common threads this week, but some challenging prescriptions in the film and print sections (note: sexual violence in both) and another comedy for a bit of levity in the TV section. As always, thanks for subscribing and sharing. Take care.
FILM
Fresh
Fresh stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Noa, a young woman frustrated by the contemporary dating scene, and Sebastian Stan as Steve, a charming, attractive doctor, who appears set to break Noa’s “losing” streak. When the two go away for a romantic weekend, Steve reveals his true colors, and Noa must fight to save her life and that of her best friend Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs), who becomes entangled in Steve’s web when she goes searching for her missing friend.
Sure to be one of the year’s best in the thriller/horror genre, Fresh is a grotesquely violent film, but one that is exquisitely made and grounded with two strong performances from Edgar-Jones and Stan, who share a convincing chemistry. It is an over-the-top indictment of the insatiable consumption of the 1% of the 1%…and the underlings that feed those appetites. It’s also a smart commentary on the vulnerability of women in the contemporary dating scene and their ability to navigate it with humor, resilience, and power.
If you’re a fan of the genre and body horror films, then Fresh is for you. If not, you’ll likely want to steer clear of this one. Fresh is currently streaming on Hulu.
TV
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty
One of the first things that Winning Time wants you to know is that the National Basketball Association wasn’t always what it is now, a global brand with superstar household names running the show. If you’re a fan of the sport, you know that what we’re going to see over the course of this series changes the course of the Association forever. Whether or not the series lives up to that task remains to be seen (only the pilot episode aired this past weekend), but it’s off to a rollicking start thanks to the charm of both John C. Reilly as The Lakers then new owner Dr. Jerry Buss, and Quincy Isaiah as Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
The series will follow the evolution of Showtime, a high-flying, glitzy spectacle on and off the court that lasted from 1979 to 1991 and impacted professional sports for generations to come. I’m intrigued to see how the series will integrate its supporting cast, especially Gaby Hoffman as Claire Rothman and Solomon Hughes as Kareem Abdul Jabar. There are opportunities for commentary on issues of gender, religion, and race here. We will have to wait and see if the series can convert.
New episodes of Winning Time stream on HBOMax on Sundays.
The Sparrow
Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of my favorite novels…of all time. Sharing many similar themes and a couple of major plot points, Mary Doria Russell’s novel, The Sparrow, is quickly climbing up my list to join Canticle. The Sparrow was originally published in 1996, and I have no idea how I’ve gone this long without reading it or even knowing about it. I’m grateful that Tony Jones had assigned it for a course we are co-teaching on literature, film, and theology this Spring. While it’s an easily accessible novel for all readers, it should be required reading for all seminary students or scholars of religion, not only for the specific theological questions it raises but for the ways in which it presents them. Questions about belief and doubt, theodicy and suffering, evangelization and colonialization, to name a few, have never felt so fresh and immediate.
The Sparrow tells the story of Emilio Sandoz, a Puerto Rican Jesuit priest with a gift for languages. Fr. Sandoz and a small group of scientists discover life on another planet. When the Jesuit community learns about this (before anyone else), they quickly launch a mission to explore this new planet and make contact with the residents there, cleverly inverting the alien invasion narrative. Every action humans take on this new planet have consequences beyond what they can possibly imagine.
This is speculative fiction of the highest order, with technological advancements and feats of engineering that seem to be just beyond our current grasp and, therefore, more believable. But it is Russell’s characters that make all the difference. She has a talent for mining the human heart as deeply as she explores the cosmos. These individuals and the relationships that form between them are some of the most complex, compelling, and fulfilling as any that I’ve encountered in the genre. Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the rich theological and philosophical implications at work here. Does God exist? What would discovering life on other planets mean for how we talk about God, how we relate to the Divine, and our place in the universe? What is God’s role…or God’s plan…in needless suffering? Are some experiences beyond redemption?
Make no mistake, The Sparrow is brilliant fiction in its own right, but for those who are open to more specifically theological conversations, it is a feast of a story. The Sparrow is available wherever books are sold, but consider purchasing a copy from an independent bookseller like Skylight Books.
And who knows, it might well be a future TV prescription.