These burning fits but meteors be

A friend lent me Wit. She'd bought the video after seeing the play, which she highly recommended. She warned me it's a horribly depressing movie, and she was right. At its core, the film explores the of facing death alone, the ironies inherent in medical objectivity, and the conviction of human emotions in poetry and art.

Emma Thompson is brilliant, as usual, this time as an English professor undergoing cancer treatment. The film also incorporates very stage-like shots of the main character talking directly to the camera. In a theatre it's how the narrator directly engages the audience, by having a one-sided conversation with them; it works well in this movie too because it highlights how isolated the character is from any other human contact, so her conversation with the viewer becomes one of her only interactions. The other brilliant but vaguely eerie aspect of the movie (probably taken directly from the play too) was that the professor's flashbacks to teaching the works of John Donne are done with her in her hospital gown and shaved head.

As a teen, I was a little morbidly drawn to the works of John Donne. I think it was because my mother made me watch the film and then read the book Death Be Not Proud in middle school.
Indeed, Wit bears a strong resemblance to Death Be Not Proud, a memoir about a son's losing battle against a brain tumor. And of course the poem is quoted in the movie!

Words and their nuances are a central puzzle in the movie: the long or witty or tricky words of the Metaphysical Poets that the cancer patient dissects, and the long and seemingly cold words of the medical profession to which she must submit herself.

One of the themes of Wit is the polarization of the arts and sciences; the young doctor in the film repeatedly makes comments about how English majors would not have been able to pass his Biochemistry class, but any good science student can pass the hardest and most difficult English class. (Which of course is ridiculous, and brought back long-buried class discussions with very smart science friends who couldn't grasp basic postmodern theory. Thinking --unrelated to academic excellence-- is just one mode or ability to see a bit of the world, and the way one person or field goes about it isn't necessarily superior to another. It's just a different lens for seeing a different part of the whole. But arrggh, the old chip on the humanities shoulder still remains!) The other end of the stereotype, of course, is that science lacks feeling and human empathy. That too is horribly untrue, and I think the film does an excellent job of conveying the complexity of academic rigor and human interaction across various fields of study, through the various characters and the words of John Donne.

Wit is a portrait of how humans relate to each other as teacher/student, scholar/subject, and parent/child and a host of other subtle roles. It ends of course as the viewer knows it must, as the inevitability of not just the character's life and death but the viewer's as well. There is no neat wrapping up of character lines, no happy hint of hope, no explanation and no answers to any of the human conditions portrayed.

Wonderful film, wonderfully written and acted, wonderfully philosophical and depressing.

So after Wit's heavy-handedness, Netflix (due more to neglect in reordering of the queue than fortuity) delivered something from the complete opposite end of the mental spectrum: Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. It is a truly, truly terrible movie. I thought the first movie was okay. Not wonderful, but not hugely terrible either. But the sequel had every possible bad cliché: the cheesy and dumb kidnappers, the black lady who performs the "surprise" show-stopping song on stage, the gay fashionisto, the gruff FBI supervisor. The only redeeming quality was the saw-it-coming moral of the story, which is that little girls should just be their beautiful selves and shouldn't change for other people.