From: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com (aml-list-digest) To: aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: aml-list-digest V1 #863 Reply-To: aml-list Sender: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk aml-list-digest Wednesday, October 16 2002 Volume 01 : Number 863 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 10:56:26 -0600 From: "Clark Goble" Subject: RE: [AML] The Scriptures Are Books Too! ___ Mod ___ | Discussion of scriptures as literature is appropriate to AML- | List. However, discussion of Mormon doctrine per se, or | practices, or how to improve our lives through better scripture | reading, etc., is not really part of the purpose of AML-List. ___ Some great examples on the Bible as literature are some of Atler's various articles. There have been a few on the Book of Mormon, but I honestly think this is an aspect we've not really focused in on enough. - -- Clark Goble --- clark@lextek.com ----------------------------- - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 11:36:46 -0600 From: "Robert Starling" Subject: [AML] Re: _Charly_ (Film Review) Margaret said: >We're still building the foundation. And it does include some overdone = =66lourishes and maybe >even some vandalized brick, but the foundation is a good one. WHEN it is = =66ully >built, I anticipate that the structure it will hold will be magnificent. = =20 Well said! Sometimes the literary elitism of the "orchids" in the garden = seems kinda snooty to the rest of us "American Beauty Roses" (and = dandylions?). =20 I _loved_ "Charly"! And while it may not be Shakespeare, if it helps = someone cope with the loss of an eternal companion, or stirs the embers of = marital love that makes them a better wife or husband, or makes LDS youth = desire a temple marriage... then bully for it! We all have to "bloom where we're planted", with whatever talent and vision= = we have. Better to try and perhaps fall short of some other folks' standar= d= of literary excellence than not to try at all. One of my favorite quotes re: "critics" comes from Theodore Roosevelt: "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong= = man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.=20 The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face i= s= marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and = comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and = shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy = cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who= = at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be = with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat." While it's true that Pres. Kimball said great works of Mormon art must be = "refined by our best critics", I hope we will always do it with the kindnes= s= and love that befits a follower of Christ. Robert Starling - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 00:59:39 -0700 From: harlowclark@juno.com Subject: [AML] Nia VANDALOS, _My Big Fat Greek Wedding_ (Review) "Come, on Dad, it's Family Home Evening, We're going to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding." There are some movies so full of joy that I just want to claim them under Article 13 of the Wentworth Letter, movies like _O Brother, Where Art Thou_, _The Apostle_, and now _My Big Fat Greek Wedding_. (Hmm, "I just want to," that comes from a prayer pattern I hear a lot among Born Again Christians.) Nia Vandalos has done such a wonderful job at observing her culture that you wonder how anyone can watch that closely--can get it that right. Of course it may not be that right--the movie may be full of types and stock situations--but there's so much energy, so much affection for the characters and culture, that what I noticed was the energy and affection and good humor. I kept thinking, why can't we do something like this? A rhetorical question, because we can. We Mormons aren't a bunch of long-faced ("your chin is too long and your whiskers too sparse for a good beard" Donna tells me) pioneers plodding to the promised land. We know how to get falling down silly at a party with no alcohol present, and we have many cultures within the Church to draw eccentric, lovable characters from. We also love family. "I have 27 first cousins," Toula tells Ian. I have that many on each side, and some of us are really, really strange, especially the third son of the third son. (The third son of the third son of the third son is also pretty interesting.) We aren't as boisterous as Toula's family (though Donna did say in Testimony Meeting yesterday that sometimes it sounds like a yelling match at our house--especially between Matthew and me (but even if he's mad and yelling at me, he won't let me out of the house without a kiss), but some families are as boisterous, and every family has a character like Aunt Myrtle, who spent so much time doing road shows and making people laugh. For years at Soderborg reunions the women would all go off by themselves (one year I found this wonderful culvert under the road in Sugarhouse Park) for a while. I learned much later they were showers for new or perspective brides or mothers. Myrtle was famous for her jokes. Once she got some objects for a game. The others were supposed to make up rhymes about them. She put a picture of herself in a pot with a plant. She was thinking, "Aunt in plant," but someone else said, "Myrt in dirt." And every family has characters like that, every ward and neighborhood does. But _Greek Wedding_ is not simply a celebration of family life, it also deals with the pains of being trapped in a culture. Toula wants to do something besides spend her life in the family restaurant. She tells her mother she wants to go to college, but her father won't let her and "He's the head of the family, and what he says goes." "The father is the head of the family," her mother says, "But the mother is the neck of the family and the neck can turn the head any way it wants." Toula's father wants her to marry a nice Greek boy and make Greek babies, but the boy she falls in love with isn't Greek. Two serious issues, breaking away from a culture, and changing or bucking family tradition. The movie lets us feel the poignance of each issue, but treats them with such good laugh out loud for minutes at a time humor, and resolves them by expanding the culture to enfold the new people and ideas--just as the 13th Article of Faith invites us to expand our culture, seeking after and embracing anything "virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy." I found myself wondering how someone might make _My Big Fat Temple Wedding_. The wedding would probably not be a temple wedding, simply because you couldn't show the ceremony, but you could very well have a raucous comedy about a boy who embraces a new faith because he loves the people who profess it, and gets married in the chapel, with an exhortation to go to the temple. But weddings aren't the only events that bring lots of characters together. Jack Weyland uses two situations that bring people together in _The Reunion_, a ward and a high school reunion. Much of that novel is very funny, and it has some sharp observations about the demands we place on our bishops, and how we ply them for free services. (The bishop in this story owns a Lawn Doctor franchise.) There's a lot of promising material for comedy in our cuture--imagine a movie populated by people from Robert Kirby's columns. The example that _My Big Fat Greek (with its playful use of Sigmas as Es) Wedding_ gives is to celebrate your culture as a quirky, human culture, that, for all its quirks and pains is your culture. As Wright Morris called one of his books, _My Country Right or Left_. Celebrate your culture. Don't worry what people outside will think about your quirks. They'll love it. Oh, and along with getting Chris (?) from Cicely Alaska to play opposite her, Nia Vandalos got this wonderful running gag about how Toula's father uses Windex for everything (never on windows, though). She integrates it so well, it seems so natural, that it wasn't till I was out in the parking lot that I said, "Hey, that's the best product placement I've ever seen." Harlow Soderborg Clark (still laughing) ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ End of aml-list-digest V1 #863 ******************************