Stone (2010)

This is a movie about a parole officer whose life is drastically changed, for the worse, because of the manipulations of a convict he's working with, and the convict's wife.

The parole officer's name is Jack, and the film opens with a scene of he and his wife. His wife is obviously feeling distraught and trapped, and threatens to leave him. He runs upstairs after hearing this, picks up their sleeping daughter, and threatens to throw her out of the window is she leaves him. She doesn't obviously, and we fast forward to their golden years, where nothing much seems to have changed. And this is where the story begins.

Jack is a parole officer about to retire, and his last account is a young punk who calls himself Stone. Stone was convicted for accessory to murder and arson, the victims were his grandparents. Stone is a big talker, and eventually gets his very attractive wife involved to... convince him to let her husband go free. This sounds just like any other con movie, but (and of course anything with Edward Norton in it..) it goes deep than that. Throughout this process, Stone becomes increasingly entranced with this religion supporting the idea that we gain spirituality through our senses, through sounds and the like. There are various buzzing and droning noises throughout the sound scape of the film, and Stone interacts with noise and sound continuously throughout the film. Concepts of noise and silence in the physical world and the relation to the noise and silence within your own self.

Religion and the idea of spiritual connectedness play a large part in this film. Jack attends church every week with his wife (still long-suffering), and yet feels no connection to the faith. He confides to the priest on one occasion that he envies his wife's and daughter's ability to feel connected, but it just seems to get harder and harder for him. He seems to be most bothered by Stone's rising connectivity, which coincides with his further spiritual decline. Jack has never seemed particularly happy with his life, but in his dealings with Stone, it comes to light that not only is he not happy, he is connected to nothing, nothing is important to him. He doesn't care about anything or anyone. Maybe this is why he so easily falls into the 'con' planned by Stone and his wife.

Something else the film deals with is the idea that we're really harsh on people who get convicted for something they've done wrong, and it's not wrong for us to keep the peace, but there are people who do 'bad' things every day, and just aren't caught, or aren't even told that what they're doing is wrong, but they also destroy people's lives.

The movie end with Jack's wife reading some reincarnation theory saying that we all start out as stones, and work our way up the chin of beings until we become human, and we do that to pay for our sins in previous lives. Which ties into the spiritual growth, and maybe even to the ability to process sound on some level.

This was a worthwhile film. It was thought-provoking and gritty. It's not a movie to watch when you're in one of those 'feel good' moods, but it's definitely worth your time.

Old Turtle by Douglas Wood

This was a nice book on diversity. I think one of the things people get the most worked up over is spirituality. It's one of those things that can touch a person more deeply than anything else, and everyone's perspective will differ, even if only minutely.

This book starts off with animals and rocks and trees each telling each other what they think god is, and each being's god seems to resemble the speaker. Then the old turtle stops them and tells them that a new group of species is coming, humans, and these humans are meant to be a message from god. The people come and everything is going well, but after some time, they begin acting in a not so nice way and nature tells them to stop. At this point, all of the rocks and trees and other beings that had said god was like themselves at the beginning of the book, began saying that they were able to see god in others, in what was actually the opposite of what they previously said. I guess the moral would be to have an open mind about that which is different from yourself, because it really isn't so alien to what you believe.

God Is an Atheist: A Novella for Those Who Have Run Out of Time by N.Nosirrah

The premise of the book is basically in the title... though oddly enough when most people see me reading this they only see the words god and atheist and put the two together in whatever context they've associate those words with, which is kind of funny considering the subject matter of the book.
 
The book is about a guy who has a talk with god and finds out that god isn't religious. God doesn't see things through the moral systems society uses to explain or worship god, basically we created the ritual surrounding the concept of god because people are designed to believe in something, that is what makes us feel safe and in control, so we stories and then create how we feel about the stories and then go living our lives around the beliefs. But god doesn't believe in the belief, as he didn't create the belief, we did. It's not just religious people that are the believers though. Everyone who has a belief is a believer, so atheists are lumped together with the fundamentalists (appropriate) but it goes beyond religion. Politics, interests, likes/ dislikes, anything that distinguishes you as something apart, as an individual, does so because you believe that it does so. And you follow it because you believe it to be the best choice for you at the time. So eventually the point becomes that if you want to know god or truth, you have to know that you are nothing. And yet we can't be nothing because we are something.
 
The concept kind of reminded me of a documentary Monty Python did about the Life of Brian (called the Secret Life of Brian). Basically they were saying how they couldn't mock the basic beliefs of christianity so they just mocked the believers, and there's this one scene where Brian does something with his shoe and the crowd of people watching begin fighting over what the shoe's significance is and how they should bring it into their rituals of worship. And brian kind of rolls his eyes. Basically this book is underlining how we the people are the squabblers, making up beliefs as we go.
 
I just finished reading it about 15 minutes ago so I haven't really thought over the concepts in any depth, but its definitely an interesting read. There's a kind of inner monologue quality to how the information is presented, so you don't exactly get bored reading it, but there is substance to the words so while the writing style is light, it's not going to be a nothing read that you'll finish in half an hour (even though it's only 100 something pages). Yes you will have to think. The drawings kind of got on my nerves a bit... trying to play up the vonnegut -_- but it was good.