Girlfriends (1978 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Its nebulous ending is not much of a flaw.  Claudia Weill‘s Girlfriends (1978) is still a pretty good film about a young Jewish woman (Melanie Mayron) who loses her live-in friendship with BFF Anne (Anita Skinner) when the latter moves out to get married.  The arrangement worked, but for Susan, the Jewish girl, very little after that works very well, including a foolish dalliance with a married rabbi.  On her own, Susan painstakingly searches:  for herself no less than for an actual job that will relieve her poverty.

Weill directed and Vicki Polon wrote this trenchant, fundamentally comic (and low-budget) picture.  At 88 minutes long it is soundly interesting with a mild edginess.  Memorably does Mayron play the charming and errant Susan.  Girlfriends is enjoyable, despite some visually ugly nudity.  “Sarna at the Well” (an artistic 1939 photograph by Gotthard Schuh) it ain’t.*

*Susan, by the way, is a budding photographer.

*I have yet to see “Sarna at the Well” on the Internet.  It is displayed in the book, Nude Photography by Peter-Cornell Richter.

English: fragment of the Gospel of Matthew (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“And if anyone gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.”

This is from Matthew’s Gospel (NIV), and I do not believe that by “little ones” Jesus meant believing children (merely).  He meant believers period.

A person who provides a follower of Christ with a cup of water will not lose his Heaven-sent reward, whatever it may be.  But if he’s unsaved, what does it matter that he will get a reward if after he dies he just goes to Hell?  How much value can the reward have?

Natalie Portman, actress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Five women (Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, et al.) investigate a dangerous swampland captured by something known as “the Shimmer,” previously investigated by military operatives who lost their lives.  This is the premise of the recent movie Annihilation (2018), a sci-fi tale largely nonsensical and thus inferior—but intriguing too.  It is also deeply disturbing, in a way that has the ring of truth about life.

What seems to be the case about the Shimmer area is that it is representative of pathology.  It is a place of metastasizing, of mutation, of refracted DNA.  The dialogue contains references to cancer, dementia, etc.  The women are in a sphere of deadly catastrophe essentially no different from their own.  What has to be done to annihilate the annihilator?

Sophisticated acting by Portman and Leigh and others enrich the film, and director Alex Garland “has crafted sequences of strange splendor” (Alan Scherstuhl).  Annihilation, in truth, is neither a success nor a failure (I don’t know about the novel from which it is adapted).  It is simply disappointing as sci-fi and compelling as representational art.

Did you ever see the late Dr. Richard Eby, a Christian physician, on Christian TV?  Like Bill Wiese, he claimed to have visited Hell (in the guise of an unbeliever) and to have witnessed Revelation’s lake of fire.  In his telling, the lake of fire is not merely the “second death,” as the Book of Revelation teaches.  But Christian universalist Gary Amirault maintains that Eby eventually told him he believes God will save all mankind, and that he read a letter from Eby to his cousin with statements to that effect.  Curious.  Was Eby not sent to Hell, after all?  Did he never see the damning lake of fire?  He used to assert that these were loci of everlasting punishment.

Another thing that should be pointed out is that Eby declared on TV that at some point Jesus told him Eby would still be alive when Christ made His second coming.  But the man died in 2002.  And this is to say nothing about whether in his stories about Hell there are the same kinds of contradictions that exist in Bill Wiese’s stories.

Rembrandt – The Mennonite Minister Cornelis Claesz. Anslo in Conversation with his Wife, Aaltje (detail) – WGA19143 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Taking the existence of God for granted, Silent Light (2009) is a truly religious picture—and a superlative one.  In it, the head of a Mennonite family living in northern Mexico has confessedly fallen in love with another woman (“confessedly” because he told his wife about it).  That the wife is as understanding and tolerant as she is just might strain credulity, but so be it.  What’s important is Carlos Reygadas’s poetic filmmaking for the crafting of something spiritually, metaphysically meaningful.

The first half of this long film is partly about the illusion that sin is some kind of summum bonum—evident in the scene of outdoor smooching between the two adulterers.  Assuredly the second half is about sin as well, but the theme of grace also emerges.  The “silent light” of the title—since light never makes a sound, it must be a metaphor—is a divine miracle near the movie’s end.  It may be a miracle hard to accept, but Reygadas is intimating that the concept of the Deity in control should not be hard to accept.

Silent Light is a Mexican film whose dialogue is in the Mennonite low German language.