The Road From Awe

On the recomendation of Steve and the blog 'This Divided State' , on Teusday I saw the Darren Aronotsky film The Fountian, staring Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman. At first I really hated this movie, but later I was merly dissatisfyed with it. It's a very pertensious film, that interwins three story lines, each staring Jackman and two staring Weisz, but all centerd on the common themes of deep love and the search for eternal life. We have a 16th Century Spanird searching for a hidden temple in America on behalf of his queen, a 21st Century doctor trying to find a cure for his wifes brian tumor, and a man flying through a nebula in a giant crystal ball in the company of an ancient tree in the year 2500. The moment when the two most temporaly divergant story lines intersect should strike the viewer as either brillent, or one of the stupedist things they've ever seen, and I'm affriad that I lean towards the latter. As its often been called in reviews, the Fountian is an ambitious and visually dazzeling experiment, that largely fails. I was more impressed with the episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer I was introduced to later that evening.

Tonight Jesse Jackson was in town and spoke at Boise State University, and I got to see it. While needless to say I don't agree with Jackson on many things, he's a fairly charismatic man who came across better then I might have expected him too. I'm glade I went, especially since I got in free.

I picked up at the library today, and started reading, a book called Inside the Mormon Mind: The Social Psychology of Mormonism, by Elizabeth T. Tice, Ph.D. This book endevours to explore the relationship of the LDS Chruch to the internal psychology of its practicing members as well its larger role in the social conditioning and behavorial control of said membership. So far what Dr. Tice has had to say seems reasonable/right to me, i.e. I understand it. Infact I think this would probably be a great text for (particularly) secular people who want to understand something of the inner workings of there Mormon friends minds, and how the movment serves to construct reality and identity on a larger scale. At only about 80 pages, I think even Jeff probably could stomich it, and I recomend it to him. If I come across anything else in the text I feel like bloging about, you can probably expect me to do so.