Heather Donahue Does an Isothermal

Jean-Luc Bideau dissuades me from enjoying The Churchmen too much. I am sure there are priests like Fromenger, but this particular actor leaves me unconvinced, among other issues, but this admission in no way detracts from the fact that the series has more to it than Samuel Jouy's intensive, persuasive, sexually attractive fervor so ironically crippled in the second season. The series, taking into account the actual production, is not quite ten years old, and one might suppose it alludes to The Blair Witch Project to maintain a complimentary parallel to the metric system.

Along with the Matthew Broderick Godzilla, AI, The Sixth Sense, Blair Witch was one of the last films I saw at the shuttered Chestnut Street Cinema, and it flew over my head as the beginning of the generation gap between myself and those who came of age at the close of the Clinton era. I do not mean this in an aesthetic sense, though I believe the film fails, and Donahue's hyper holding it together and peeling apart like fried string cheese wasn't enough to carry a movie that was deliberately an imitation of rough captured home video. I recall the rapid monologue in dappled sunlight, the weirding out in the closed in motel, and a climax which might have been a bad case of menstrual cramps, and it made such slight impression because there was little that I could grasp in terms of cultural cues. 

Doing films on Chestnut was one of the few things I could do alone without a tortured sense of alienation, and I miss it for this reason. Unlike Liberty On The Rocks, which rankles me as much as I care about it as a sort of wry conceit on political bullshit, in the movie theater I could bond with others, and threw a distraught scene on the sidewalk too, despair surging forth in the stark realization of my doom, interior knowledge attuned to the fact that Cinderella will not be rescued by the perfectly abandoned slipper, much like the sage patrician sensibility of The Modern Catholic isn't quite what I envisioned when contemplating a contribution, and shall have to adjust my parameters if I make an effort. Catechism is long buried in spot memories of Mary Anne; I think she was Mary Anne, who got involved as a stabilizing force in my prepubescent years. She walked me on crutches with the classic cripple's leather helmet, locked me in standing tables, prepared me for communion, let me sleep over. She might have taken me from my mother, and I contemplate in amazement the absence of scars in the care of a decent physical therapy aide. My viewers inadvertently remind me some of my rage-trigger posts about independent living need a polish. Time constraints merit patience.