Friday evenings in Lent, RSVP to join us for the return of Lenten Movie Nights! Following a vegetarian meal (for those abstaining from meat on Fridays), we’ll engage with a curated series of films both classic and contemporary. This year, based on suggestions and responses to last years’ cinematic excursion, our series is based around this theme—The Tree of the Knowledge: Cinematic Visions of Good and Evil.
Our Lenten Film series continues on Friday, March 15, with the 2007 winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture: No Country for Old Men. The film is directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and based on the book of the same name by legendary American author Cormac McCarthy.
NOTE: The film is an unflinching look at a violent world in which goodness struggles to be good, a brutal wasteland where all is subject to the vicious indifference of chance. Consequently, No Country contains depictions of violence. However, as film critic Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “No Country for Old Men doesn’t celebrate or smile at violence; it despairs of it.” The film is rated R.
Last week with Throne of Blood, we thought about evil as being trapped in a repeating pattern of evil-doing in which the only way to escape the pattern appears to be more evil-doing…which only perpetuates the pattern. In No Country for Old Men, we’ll consider how goodness, beset on all sides by such patterns and seemingly overwhelmed by them, can possibly prevail against them without being caught up in them: is it possible? What does the film say? What does the Church say? A good-hearted hunter comes across the aftermath of a drug-deal gone bad in the Texas desert. His choice to take a suitcase of cash from the scene sets in motion a dangerous game of cat and mouse with local police, bounty hunters, cartels…and an implacable figure of deadly menace that the “good guys” find hard to comprehend or fit into any conception of a rational world. No Country for Old Men is a contemporary Western which, in typical Cormac McCarthy and Coen Brothers style, turns the familiar tropes of the genre on their heads.Join us Friday, March 8, for a dinner at 6pm and a film at 6:30pm, all in the Parish House.
The last film in the series is: 22 March: Zone of Interest (dir: Jonathan Glazer, 2023, PG-13)
Join us Friday, March 8, for a dinner at 6pm and a film at 6:30pm, all in the Parish House.
The last film in the series is:
22 March: Zone of Interest (dir: Jonathan Glazer, 2023, PG-13)
