December 9 movie: Time Bandits. I read something recently that made me want to see this movie again, but I can't remember where I read it. Whatever it was, I thank them! I last saw it when it was new, but the movie is just as funny as I remembered. How often does that happen?
The movie's ending is shockingly pessimistic, but I realized on this viewing that it isn't quite as bad as I originally thought. [Major spoilers:] At the end the boy's parents are dead and his rescuer has driven off, abandoning him. It seems horrible, but he still has the Polaroid photo of the map! And an earlier scene establishes that he knows how to read it. So he can go back to Agamemnon.
The scene where Satan blasts his minion for suggesting that God can't be all bad because he created evil provoked an interesting conversation between Georg and me about Satan and evil. For instance, where do various sects and philosophies believe evil came from. Is it a byproduct of man's failure to live up to God's plan, in which case would there be no evil if there was no man? Or is evil an independant force like the White Witch in Narnia, in which case is God not omnipotent after all? Also, Georg told me that most mainstream Protestants believe Satan is a metaphor, not an actual being. Is that true? In Catholic school they didn't talk much about Lucifer, but I think they believed he was as real as the other angels. And the evangelical types depicted in Left Behind are obsessed with demons and Satan. (Which, by the way, I think that kind of fixation on Satan is itself a form of satanism, but that's another topic.) Anyway, I appreciate any movie which makes us think about interesting topics like that,
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