The American public is not interested in the realities their own lives are grounded in (or ground down in). They're chasing the American dream... followed by an exploding fireball.

"Ballast" isn't a movie about the lives of poor black people in Mississippi, and I'm not sure it's even trying to be. It might be a movie about a landscape, or an approach to photographing that landscape, which happens to come with anthropology attached. Maybe it's a movie about the process of making a movie about the lives of poor black people in Mississippi

If this is so, then one can only conclude that the raving Sundance critics have horrendously poor -- or at least extremely provincial -- taste. If the most raved about movies this year are really explorations of the process of making movies, then it's clear that there has become a serious disconnect between the movie industry and its (supposed) audience.

If people aren't watching movies that are such a "sentimental working-class melodrama that it comes out on the other side as something so stylized it's almost artificial," then it shows that they have good judgment and taste, I think.

We get it, it's 'real'. Underlit overexposed, wrong contrast, and jittery jittery jittery jittery jittery handheld jittery.

agree with you here, latest incarnation of Electro Robot, etc.

Those jittery cameras make me physically ill.

Like the phrase you've chosen for your latest handle. Sounds like something Bill Safire would have dreamed up for Spiro to say.

As a Mississippi-born writer (my first novel, Jujitsu for Christ, was set during the civil rights movement of the sixties in that state), I'm getting a little tired of outsiders using Mississippi for "authenticity." Mississippi Burning was dreadful, The Color Purple was pretty obviously not filmed in Mississippi (a black man with a mansion and a fine horse? Well-groomed grassy fields?). The John Grisham thing--A Time to Kill?--was bathetic, melodramatic. At least he's a Mississippian, though.

Shouldn't have to say this, but I found the racism of the sixties horrifying and evil, as I do all racism. Just wish the people who use the state knew something about it.

contemporary Catholic theology resists literal readings of Scripture and is not in the least anti-scientific

Uhhhmm, sorry dude- game over.

One of the most firmly held beliefs in the Catholic church is in the "Immaculate Conception." Trust me, the priests you mentioned in your review believe in it- literally. And if they don't they would be considered apostates.

So, unless there is some new science you've been holding back on, contemporary Catholic theology, is, at the very least, unscientific.

oops, sorry about the above post- Mods please move to appropriate spot

This doesn't mean that I deny a supreme being. I do deny most of the myths in the Bible. It's just handy to construct one's myths pre-camcorders.