Loved Blue Beetle

I'm glad I took a couple hours this afternoon to see Blue Beetle, the first character I've seen in a DC movie with zero connection to my childhood comic collection. Also, the only one I know who speaks Spanish. NPR liked it, so I gave it a try.

The young actor Xolo Maridueña who plays the central character Jaime Reyes is so sincere that any scene focused on his face is a pleasure. The camera focuses on his face; he's often focused on a member of his family with love, amusement, exuberant pleasure, pain -- he's a giving actor.

Jaime gets possessed by a piece of wearable technology from outer space that flies, protects him, shapes forcefields into any shape at will, etc. etc. -- just what we've come to expect from supersuits. It's also good for a laugh, as during a battle when the generic assistant voice tells Jaime that it must run a system check and reboot. But I enjoyed how Jaime's sweet personality teaches its AI something about love and family; in a fight to the death, the suit teaches him empathy for his opponent.

I enjoyed Jaime's family. They're played for laughs in a kind of Latino family sitcom kind of way. But they're part of the action from the get-go and they come to the rescue. When the grandmother says, "Now is not the time to cry," we know that there will be a time to cry later -- and it touches. (I think back on the original Star Wars trilogy, how the feeling of family that grew around Luke Skywalker was what drew me back to see it so many times.)

The primary villain Susan Sarandan's Victoria Kord is a kind of Martha Stewart of arms manufacturing, energetic and poised. She's almost adolescent in her pleasure when she directs minions to "target the family" so she can watch what the Blue Beetle suit is capable of doing in such an emergency.

As Kord's niece Jennifer, Jaime's love interest, Bruna Marquezine is just as appealing as Xolo. She brings intelligence and determination and beauty to every scene -- and the two of them are a joy together.

A word about Bobby Krlik's music: During the first bars of Krlik's score, Sensemaya came to mind, a 1939 composition by Mexico's prominent classical composer Silvestre Revueltas. Krlik is British with no Mexican connection; I theorize that he took his cue from images of Mayan pyramids in the title sequence and turned to Revueltas' colorful piece. Sensemaya tells in music a Mayan legend about hunting a giant snake, using low brass and dry crackling percussion and massive drumbeats to evoke music of the ancient Mayans. With synthesized sounds and some hip-hop style sampling, that's what I hear in Blue Beetle. If you're reading this, Mr. Krlik, I'd love confirmation. Thanks.

The Reyes family tempts Jaime to open the box that Jenny Kord told him he must not open.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day May-July 2023

Every morning I read scripture assigned for the day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer and then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

May Fr Perry Pauley of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix AZ draws our attention to metaphors that I, for one, have not apprecicated before.

For example, to imagine what a "living stone" might be (1 Peter 2.4-5), Pauley refers to the stones of the cathedral in Phoenix. Because of the climate, the stones still bear the marks of their quarrying a century ago and thus "live" in the story they tell. The "heart of stone" in Ezekiel 11 cues memories for Pauley of times when he has been hard-hearted, and he observes that every one of those times, he was responding to a perceived attack on his sense of self and his place in the world. To react harshly was a natural reaction, "almost a reflex," Pauley writes, but Ezekiel gives hope that God can soften our hearts; a threat to our place in the world might be mitigated simply by remembering our place in God. Pauley, noting that God can't be contained in a temple built of stone, suggests that to dwell in the house of the Lord forever is a mindset; again, I like the idea that God's love is a place. [That idea is foundational to the wonderful Port William novels of Wendell Berry. See my article Love as a Place (09/2009).]

Pauley shows us the metaphors behind Romans 12, do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit. Zeal stems from a word for boiling, and ardent from a word for burning. Paul isn't telling us just to be cheerleaders: Pauley points out that both words are about transfers of energy that transform their subjects, as water becomes steam and wood turns to ash.

Our reluctance to ask for help comes up several times in Pauley's meditations. Pleas for help are plentiful in Scripture, but with the apostles' panic in the storm-toseed boat, Pauley wonders if Jesus snaps, "Where is your faith?" not because they woke him up in their terror but because they had waited until they were out of other options. The story of the woman who stoops to touch just the hem of Jesus's robe reminds Pauley of an ex-Marine who kept apologizing to his church for needing help: Jesus's tender response to the woman is a model for how we can offer help "with no strings attached." Pauley tells us that beneficiaries often report feeling worse after they receive help, because they feel themselves to be weak. "Recognizing our weakness can be liberating," Pauley writes, and "we can borrow strength."

Responding to 1 Cor. 1.22, Pauley writes about his favorite part of baptism, when he gets to "seal" the person "as Christ's own forever." He thinks of it as a "first installment" of joy to come. Around the time I read that, I attended a cozy evening service for Ascension at which the Rector invited our comments. A woman "of a certain age" whose illness has kept her away from church got very emotional as she seemed to realize on the spot that her life has been "an ascension from one stage to the next." She assured us that she's not at the last stage, yet.

June I filled fronts and backs of three envelopes with tiny notes about how I related to Terry Stokes's reflections on scriptures assigned for June. Confirmed at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem, educated at Princeton and Yale, he's now a youth pastor in New Jersey.

I personally identified with aspects of his life. Living alone, Stokes doesn't expect to form a traditional family. He takes comfort from the observation that John the Baptist, childless and alone so often, left such a legacy. He observes the effect on him of the rare visitors to his apartment, "how I felt when each person was in the space -- how the house felt, how each of them added a layer of significance to each square foor of a relatively small apartment." In Mt 10/12-13, Jesus seems to imagine "peace" as a "substance ... that can move ... from people to homes and back again," and Stokes resolves to put more into "bestowing spiritual fruit" through hospitality.

Stokes reads how Abraham was sitting at the mouth of his tent when angels approached, and writes how he has always wanted to sit on a front porch to call out to neighbors passing by -- an image I've always liked, too. Stokes challenges us to sit outside our homes and be open to meeting some angels.

Stokes and I both finish fries left on friends' plates at restaurants, though we'd never ask for the first bites. But the first bite is what God commands the Hebrews to give up to the temple. Like Stokes, I thought that was a discipline of self-denial, but Stokes draws attention to Dt. 26.11: "Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house." I'll remember that the next time someone disparages the Hebrew Scriptures for harsh legalism and exclusivity.

I appreciate a couple of insights to scripture that Stokes derives from childhood experiences that we have in common. Stokes remembers delivering the message I like you for friends who trusted him to represent them well to the girls they liked. I'll think of that when I read Paul's odd word to the Corinthians, "You are my letter." Reading about "the weight of glory" in 2 Cor 4.17, Stokes wonders, "Isn't weight supposed to be a bad thing?" Then he remembers how he loved to lug his heavy scooter up the hill to ride it back down. A weight can be a privilege.

Stokes explores a tension in the way we Americans read scripture. We tend to turn passages about property and poverty into teachings about our personal spirituality. He knows it's wrong for him to go the other way, as he tends to see economics and politics in parables such as the one about the unjust judge that's all about prayer, the gospel writer tells us. Stokes admits, "I run the risk of removing the dimension of personal piety from my interpretations altogether in favor of making everything immediatley practical and political." But neither will he ignore the other kinds of questions just because they're "on the surface." He wonders as I do, in this time when all churches are in decline according to the metrics of attendance and pledging, if this time might be an opportunity for the metrics Paul applied to the churches he started in Corinth and elsewhere, "collectivism, love, earnestness, energy, and generosity."

A couple other observations counteract our tendencies to confuse knowing about Jesus with believing in Jesus, and to judge others. Peter, he said, knew about Jesus when he denied him three times. When Jesus commissions Peter three times to "feed my sheep" and knows this time Peter will follow through to martyrdom, not because of the knowledge of Jesus, but love. Then, in Luke 22.31-32, it's Satan who sifts us like chaff from wheat, as he does in Job, where he "demanded a chance to reveal Job, the poster boy for wheat, for the chaff that he really was deep down." That urge that comes with phrases like "tough love" and "upholding standards" is an urge that Satan uses. Unlike Satan, Jesus "overwrites our denial with affirmation and recommissions us to strengthen our siblings."

[I reflected on the shadow side of standards in Standards v. Specifications (04/2015)]

Reading how unknowable are God's thoughts in Psalm 139, Stokes speculates how the experience of incarnation might have changed God's thinking from the Old Testament times.

I'm adding to my wish list Stokes's book Prayers for the People: Things We Didn't Know We Could Say to God, in which he has composed collects for everyday crises: engaging in small talk, for going into a Target, and for asymmetrical friendships.

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

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Photo from Simon and Schuster

12 year old Odie O'Bannon lies his way to expensive new shoes for himself, his older brother Albert, and their buddy Mose. In the tale he spins for the shopkeeper's wife, Odie expresses such longing that "even I felt sorry for me" (107).

His real story is tough enough: they're escaping a labor camp for orphans, heading down the Mississippi on a raft. It's the Depression in the Midwest, and the boys are wanted by the police because, first, Odie killed an abusive instructor and, second, the boys supposedly kidnapped the little girl Emmy. In truth, they have rescued her from the despicable matron of the orphanage.

So early in the novel This Tender Land, author William Kent Krueger is calling to mind both Charles Dickens' plucky orphans and Mark Twain's resourceful liar Huck Finn. Odie even takes the cover name "Buck."

Krueger shows a special affinity for portraying young adults who have intelligence, sensitivity, and a fierce sense of justice. In his crime series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, the most affecting storylines involve children, including Cork's own and also Cork himself in childhood. [See appreciations of the Cork series at my Crime Fiction page] Krueger's other stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace also features brothers forced suddenly to grow up -- along with their parents.

Each section of This Tender Land has its own arc, as the kids land in a different community, learn how to survive or thrive there, and then have to escape. Through all the episodes, we witness Odie's growing understanding of the love between him and his brother, Mose's deepening sense of identity, and the emergence of a kind of mystical power in Emmy.

Late in the book, we learn Odie's full name, Odysseus. How could I have missed that other literary connection? (Especially since one of the bad guys early on is a cyclops, "One-Eyed Jack"). While Dickens and Twain wrote in wholly material worlds, Homer filled the world of his story with gods and sorcery. Krueger, too, opens his story to the possibility of spiritual forces involved in the lives of his characters.

The first words of the book allude to Genesis, how God created not only the heavens and the earth, but also the gift of storytelling. Odie is not only a storyteller, but a musician whose harmonica soothes bitter men and brings people together. The most charismatic character among the supporting cast is a beautiful but scarred faith healer who calls herself Eve. Her section of the book is called "High Heaven" (as in, something stinks to...), but the miracles don't end when her deceptions are exposed.

By the end, Krueger has made us feel something that must motivate the novelist: Good storytelling doesn't just open up the past, or just entertain in the present, but can change the future.

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Hey, Flash, Read This

Ezra Miller as the Flash times two, and Sasha Calli as Kara El, a.k.a. Supergirl

 

Social media pundits bashed The Flash even before it opened, for reasons to do with schisms at Warner Brothers and extra-curricular activities of its young star Ezra Miller. If the actor's feeling down about all that, here's a pick-me-up aimed right at Ezra Miller, who perfectly embodied the charming vision of the director and writers:

Ezra, as Barry Allen, a.k.a. the Flash, you twitch with nerves, your eyes scan others' faces for social cues, and you're flummoxed when a substitute barista throws off your morning routine. Before you run at super-speed, you go through a wind-up ritual that's part Kung-fu, part Speedy Gonzales. When you blurt out what's on your mind (because, Wonder Woman's magic lasso), you say, "I know there's such a thing as sex but I've never experienced it." You have no friends except the super-hero celebrities whom you call by their first names (Clark, Bruce, Diana...) the way a freshman waterboy might drop the names of seniors on the team. You're as funny and lovable as any of the kids I taught in middle school who had great talent and no social skills.

You do find a friend, thanks to time-travel and movie technology. He's you, a couple years younger, and he's as geeky as you. You tell him, "People are always asking me to shut up, and now I know why." Like you, he's a slob. But in his alternate universe, he knows nothing of the tragedy that has shaped your life -- the murder of his/your mother and the wrongful conviction of his/your father for the crime. Growing up with two loving parents, he has the confidence you lack, and friends, young women among them. Innocent of the pain you've experienced, he flips out when he experiences loss. That's you, too, and it's very affecting.

So, too, is your emotional crisis when you encounter your mother (Maribel Verdu) on the day she will die. Her tenderness to you, a young man, a stranger to her, is at the heart of this movie -- though it happens in a supermarket. Her fate turns on whether or not she remembers to pick up spaghetti sauce for dinner.

Spaghetti shows up again in Batman's kitchen. Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne uses pasta to explain the multi-verse to you. Time isn't linear like the uncooked pasta he hands to you. He dumps cooked spaghetti in a bowl and says, the multi-verse is like that: some strands run almost parallel, while others intersect at different points. Dumping sauce on top, Wayne says your effort to change only one thing in the past has created "a hot mess." Listening as Barry and Barry the younger, you are clueless and more clueless. When Keaton adds cheese, you have to explain to your younger self, "the metaphor is over." Of all the explanations of the multi-verse I've seen in the last couple of years (Everything Everywhere..., Spider-man, and even Barbie), this was the most fun. Props to the writer Christina Hodson for using just words with the props at hand in the kitchen, and props to you, you, and Keaton for making it funny.

I enjoy how you and the creatives imagine the Flash's response to an explosion at a high-rise hospital. You climb falling debris like a ladder to study the mayhem. You see nine newborns hurtling from the top floor, along with knives, broken glass, a microwave oven, a service dog that looks like he's having fun, a gurney, and a screaming nurse. At first, you look bewildered.

Let's pause a moment to note that critics -- even one who admits he only saw the trailer -- cite this scene for its "bad CGI." The babies especially don't look real. But I understand the distortions to be how things look to a guy who perceives at the speed of light. Besides, one of the babies does look just fine, smiling and clearly delighted with free-fall -- the director's child, if I read the credits correctly.

Back to the moment: I like that we're watching you formulate your response and that you smile before you jump into action. I like that your first priority is breakfast: from the microwave, you pluck a burrito and devour it -- at light-speed, we guess. Then you manipulate all the other pieces into place like an extravagant Rube-Goldberg contraption so that babies, dog, and nurse line up safely in a row. Rescue with flair. You even take a bow.

I'm sorry that I seem to be the only one to applaud. I hope you get your life and career back together.

Bikin' Kiev

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Scott Smoot (right, in Ukraine jersey) with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, virtually.

We're all Ukrainians now. (See my poem, Ukraine, Second Week.) But even before Putin's invasion, I had reason to put Kiev on my bike tour of places in the world I've "lived or loved."

The world tour is virtual: I've biked 536 miles on trails around Atlanta during the last 32 days. That distance takes me from Moscow to Kiev.

Before the 1980s, I knew Kiev as the source of a chicken dish my mom sometimes made, and I loved "The Great Gates of Kiev," grand finale of composer Modest Moussourgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I'm touched by his transformation of his jaunty "promenade" into a monument to the composer's late friend, whose design for the gates was never realized.

Then I met Eugene from Ukraine, enrolled in 7th grade where I taught in Mississippi. I wrote about him in my essay about a great detective novel set in Ukraine, and Eugene's father Arkady contributed some comments. See Arkadya. I think about Eugene often, and told generations of middle school students about my adventures with this undersized kid who carried himself like Arnold Shwarzenegger. As often as I imitate his quirky English, I remember him with affection. He must be close to 50 years old now; he was funny, talented, and intense.

Miles YTD 2215 || 2nd World Tour Total 15,750 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

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