MOVIE - First Reformed

R (1:48)

Limited release May 18, 2018

Viewed Thursday evening, June 21, 2018 with Sandy at Carlisle Theater
IMBd:  7.7/10

RT Critic: 96   Audience:  70
Critic's Consensus:  Brought to life by delicate work from writer-director Paul Schrader and elevated by a standout performance by Ethan Hawke, First Reformed takes a sensitive and suspenseful look at weighty themes.

Cag:  How do you rate a movie like this?  Yes, I liked it....

Directed by  Paul Schrader

Studio A24

Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, 

My comments:  Holy shit, what did I just watch  What happens when you combine loneliness, despair, environmental issues, alcohol and religion? (and barbed wire, Drano, magical mystery tours, and holy roller, born again music...)  Well, watch this movie and you'll find out!  AND, what an ending!

RT/ IMDb Summary:  Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church is now a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities and 5,000-strong flock. When a pregnant parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) asks Reverend Toller to counsel her husband, a radical environmentalist, the clergyman finds himself plunged into his own tormented past, and equally despairing future, until he finds redemption in an act of grandiose violence. From writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver; American Gigolo; Affliction) comes a gripping thriller about a crisis of faith that is at once personal, political, and planetary.

80. In Search of Mercy - Michael Ayoob

Minotaur Books, 2010
HC $24.99 TPPL
293 pgs.
for: adults
rating: now that's a good question. The ending just sucked. So.....3?

Modern day Pittsburgh, PA. The story is told in the first person by Dexter Bolzjak,a young man still living a brutal part of his past over and over. An unusual loner with few friends, he spent most of his youth watching gruesome videos and trying to discover when and how they were edited. He was enlisted to become his high school hockey goalie when his quick reflexes were discovered. He'd never had any interest in sports at all, but became quite a hockey star. However, when sadistic fans capture him and brutally torture him, his life becomes more-or-less a non-life.

Now, years later, he makes a weird friendship with an old, sick drunk, who enlists him to find his long-lost love, a movie actress named Mercy Carnahan who had disappeared without a trace perhaps fifty years before. Is it possible to try to unweave the mysterious story after so much time? Dexter becomes determined to figure it out. And as he discovers clues, he flashbacks and mulls over his own devastating trauma.

This story had twists, turns, and plot devices that I would have never considered. However, when I finished the book I wanted to throw it across the room. It was and incredibly unsatisfying ending, left me flat, flat, flat.

I am writing this review 6 weeks after I finished the book, so it's spotty. I just remember that it's an unusual story with an unsatisfying ending and really odd happenings. Whew.

52. Tales from Outer Suburbia - Shaun Tan

Arthur A Levine Books/Scholastic,
Australia 2008, US 2009
$19.99
96 pgs, YA
Rating: 4
Endpapers: Tiny grey-pencil sketches from the stories on cream background

Fifteen bizarre short stories - all that make you think, look further and deeper, put two and two together to make seven or fifty-four.....

Contents: a different postage stamp for each story - the denomination is the page number and the illustration is the same as within the story.

Illustrations: all distinctly different from each other, in most cases they either tell the story or are needed to tell part of the story.

A sampling of stories: ERIC: a foreign exchange student comes to stay with a family. He is the size of a large nut and lives in the pantry. One day he leaves without saying goodbye, but has left a garden planted in tiny bottlecaps , boxes, and found-things.

BROKEN TOYS: An Asian man dressed in a deep sea diver's garb (see cover) arrives mysteriously with a broken wooden horse and is allowed to mysteriously enter the grouchy next-door-neighbor's house.

DISTANT RAIN: A collaged story of lost bits of poems adding themselves to an enormous ball of poems that rains all over the city.

GRANDPA'S STORY: A weird pre-wedding trip...both in pictures and words.

All quite bizarre, using weird parts of the brain to decipher, a book of stories that will really grow on you.