A Pilgrimage to Cinema

More often than not, society imposes "acceptable" standards on how we should lead our lives: at what point we should finish our studies or get married or be filthy rich or achieve anything at all. It's like we are always obligated to look and feel good to everyone, to show to them that we did indeed achieve something. This has never been more pronounced than in this age of social media. But what if we choose not to live by such standards? What if we "normalize" leading a life where we don't have to prove anything to anyone? How about becoming that kind of anti-hero instead?  Such are the characters in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films, which include 2011's "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia." That's why Ceylan's films are not to everyone's liking: they feel that the characters are just wasting away their lives, that they're not up to society's "standards." In lesser hands, "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" would turn...

After watching both the 1930 and 2022 "All Quiet on the Western Front", but most especially the latter, I resolved to read the source material itself: Erich Maria Remarque's landmark 1929 novel. The copy that I got was a relatively easy read, just 280-pages long. This book I had to squeeze in among all the books that I am currently reading: works by Plato, Kafka, the Brothers Grimm and Freud (and there are some more that I am planning to start sooner or later). Well, I got to finish Remarque's novel in just four consecutive days (the book was made up of a brief prologue and 12 chapters). From my own perspective, that was Remarque-able indeed!  But what prompted me to read the novel? (I can hardly recall if I had already read "AQOTWF" sometime before;in any case, it was not a bad idea at all to read the book a second time.) The idea behind it was pretty simple: I just felt that there was something "wrong" with the 2022 German film, directed by Edwar...

"Godland", the new film by Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason, is rife with contradictions. The English international title suggests a blessed or divine land, a place that has been converted into a bastion of religious worship and adoration. Whereas the literal translation of the Icelandic or Danish title is "wretched land", which is a more apt description of the place depicted in the film. Visually speaking, "Godland" is a showcase of 19th-century rural Iceland's majestic beauty, with its landscapes, hills, snowscapes, falls, river and sea. Never has this specific Nordic geography been better captured on film. And yet, it is this same beauty that imposes some cruel challenges and impediments on the fulfillment of a religious mission. Nature can indeed be terrifying. Regarding the film's main character, a young Danish Lutheran priest named Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), his mission and intention of setting up a church in a foreign land may seem nob...