Critic Cal

It's been a few years since I last watched The Matrix but Switch's quietly horrified "Not like this" is a long-running household meme for reasons which I have entirely forgotten. The line is from the scene where Cypher exposes himself as a traitor to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar and, having liaised with the Agents to set up a trap, and shot Tank and Dozer on the ship, begins to pull the plugs on those who are still inside the Matrix. Trinity, on the other end of the phone line, watches helplessly as her friends drop down in front of her... "By the way, if you have something terribly important to say to Switch, I'd suggest you say it now," he taunts. All this, in exchange for the promise of a life of blissful ignorance inside the Matrix. As it does many other aspects of the Christian 'story', the film captures the gut-wrenching bleakness of betrayal pretty poignantly: one of their own ...one with whom they have lived and eaten and bravely co...

We finally got round to watching ' Un Prophete ' the other day. It recounts the Machiavellian progress of a young inmate in a French prison, amidst horrendous violence, racism, injustice, corruption...it's pretty unrelenting, and if there's any sort of redemptive subplot I didn't find it. 'It was good, I liked it'...Hmm. Seems I'm pretty inured to graphic depictions of hopelessness and brutality nowadays. Perhaps that's partly because the brokenness of the world is not news to me...I agree with the film's 'diagnosis', so far as it goes. But it doesn't have (from my perspective) the whole picture : there is a hope, and it comes from outside of human nature. That film didn't recognise that hope, but it didn't challenge or undermine it, or offer any sort of alternative...it was just as though it hadn't 'discovered' it. So, for me, it inspired compassion for the world but not despair for myself. By comparison, ' ...

Mr. W had ' No Surprises ' on at full volume in the car when he came to pick me up from work the other day. So we didn't talk to each other for a full 3 and a half minutes…letting the song have its moment, waiting in shared appreciation until it felt ok to speak… Course, I'd forgotten what came next, and ' Lucky ' is hardly background music for chit-chat either. All in all Radiohead pretty much stymied any chance of conversation till we got home. In a previous post I confessed to having actively destroyed a few particularly 'dangerous' CDs in a moment of ascetic fervour.* Indeed, my cherished Radiohead collection was first in line for the cull. I tease myself, but it was a smart move, at the time. Music is powerful: the better the music, the more dangerous. And Radiohead are pretty epic. All that raw, bleak, despair - unchecked by any rational basis for hope - Thom Yorke's fragile wail over layers of tense, resounding instrumentals...and the gui...

(Black Mirror, Channel 4 2011) OK, last of the TV 'events': I'm really not a big TV watcher but I can't talk about Sherlock and This is England without mentioning Charlie Brooker, diagnostician extraordinaire. The prognosis he offers is pretty grim…though surely the only rational one within the worldview he presupposes (which is expressly atheist and, I would suspect, rather coherently so given his evident thoughtfulness). I knew Black Mirror had got to me when I tried to watch a bit of Masterchef the other day and couldn't look at poor old 'John and Greg' without thinking of the excruciating reality TV-ruled dystopia of episode 2 ("15 Million Merits"). Boy was it bleak…and convincingly so. A particularly low point was watching the hero's impassioned and hard-won opportunity to 'tell it like it is', all the while anticipating the inevitable synthetic affirmation of 'the judges' and eventual compromise. Brooker follows in a...

(This is England '88, Channel 4 2011) Whatever Meadows believes about Christmas he certainly seems to 'get it' in a way that the rest of the world (including lots of us 'in the church') have either missed or prefer to ignore. His latest 3-part installment in the 'This is England' story had me gripped…with desperation for the plight of his characters, remembered pain from shared experiences*, fearful glimmers of hope as I dared to believe that they might make it through the darkness after all… Although the redemptive plot elements primarily focus on human forgiveness and restoration of relationship, Meadows does not exalt this to the position of a be-all-and-end-all fix-it for his characters. Woody and Lol, in particular, end up poignantly reminiscent of Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost: "hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow". Moreover, he explicitly deals with the 'what if?' of Jesus - recognising the need, the darkn...