Movie/Book Talk: Potter or Hitchcock

Movie and Book Talk: Potter or Hitchcock

I'm all for books that encourage people to read and that reach out to children about adventure, and good and evil. And being an Agatha Christie fan, I'm all for escapism (since reading murder mysteries is hardly an endorsement.) Yet, with the weakened faith base of Western civilization, I've not been thrilled to the core of my being by the Harry Potter series. If children today were as soundly grounded in the reality of the world and in their Christian faith as they were in the 1950's, I'd have no problem at all with them watching Harry Potter movies and reading the books. But children do not have the stability of both rational reasoning and faith that the earlier generation possessed. And so there's been this gothic, vampire, magic, despair, and hierarchical (magic or muggles) obsession in arts that are peddled to children.

I wrote a "sword and sorcery" type of fantasy trilogy over ten years ago for just the personal pleasure of a handful of friends who read it chapter by chapter as I wrote it. Despite their urging I would NEVER consider publishing it for exactly the reason outlined above. If I was writing for publication, I'd have written a different book, one that is adventurous yet still sensitive to the audience. When one has a big fat megaphone one has to be really careful what one peddles through it. What I wrote for a handful of sophisticated ADULT friends was never intended for mass audience, especially children. I wrote it during a time of familial aridity as an outlet, much as my poetry was. I did apply to the New School for their new MA in poetry program, and was soundly slapped down (my poetry is very romantic and not at all depressive and "modern") and they probably laughed their asses off. They weren't kind in their rejection, that's for sure. But anyway, I had a text that several of my friends called "The Female Lord of the Rings" but I would never allow it to be distributed and published, because it was not intended for anyone but a handful of people. I also knew that people would confuse my vocation as spiritual director with my hobby, which was that book. Any book I write I would be 100 percent crystal clear about how people should view it.

While thinking about this today - the responsibility toward the reading and viewing audience, and also how appearances are not always reality - I thought about one of my favorite films. My favorite actor of all time is Cary Grant. I just adore him. Hitchcock's "Notorious" is not my favorite Cary Grant film, but it is one of my favorite films. It was released in NYC August 15, 1946 (I was not there ha ha) but I wanted to remind people of how brilliant filmmaking was even during the war and at the end of the war. Hardship did not affect people's balance and talent, and there certainly was no need to be depressive and depraved, though people certainly could have used the horrors of World War II as an excuse. And of course Ingrid Bergman was magical.

Tagline: Notorious woman of affairs... Adventurous man of the world!
Plot Outline: A woman is asked to spy on a group of Nazi friends in South America. How far will she have to go to ingratiate herself with them?