While the mega-flick of the weekend revolves around a large, ill-tempered green fellow ("Why couldn't they have just found the 2003 equivalent of Lou Ferrigno and painted him green?" one wag asks. "Who would have been against this?"), there's another movie opening in NYC that looks equally intriguing. It's a documentary on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who actively opposed the Nazis.
The film, "Bonhoeffer," looks fascinating, with the narrator describing the Bonhoeffer family as "conservative in the best way, open to something new but not losing touch with where they stood." This description sounds a lot like the idea of pilgrimage in Paul Elie's book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a biography of four Catholic writers which I've just started reading. (And which Andy has probably finished by now on his lovely Florida vacation.) Elie describes a pilgrimage as a journey taken after hearing some piece of great news. In other words, it's living out the ambiguities of life, all its complexities, while maintaining a single story as both foundation and destination. For an English major ambiguity-monger like myself, this is a stimulating concept: active faith without oversimplification. I'm curious if the documentary will go in a similar direction -- but even if it doesn't, it's exciting to see a cinematic biography of a Christian hero not produced by Paul Crouch.
Posted by mesh at June 20, 2003 11:07 AM | TrackBack