November 29, 2007 Archives

This summer marked the opening season of the Israel Baseball League. It opened to some controversy, because the sport's pretty American; in Israel, they play "football", of course, and some basketball. But baseball? Could the society support a new sport that was largely unfamiliar? Well, depending on who you ask, the season was either a success or a little bit more like a hung jury.

But what's been disappointing is definitely the aftermath. Because even though Israel is a relatively small country, one baseball league isn't enough, apparently, as the NY Jewish Week reports and as Yoda once said, "There is another."

I am somehow reminded of a scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" when members of the People's Front of Judea are mistaken for the Judean People's Front. And the Popular Front. And everyone's offended because no one wants to be mistaken for a member of the club they're not affiliated with. View the clip (some "adult language," but nothing you don't hear regularly on FX these days):

To read a Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy book is to tease your intellect with the idea that all the literal religious history and dogma you have learned, believed and followed may be...well, how do I say this politely...does “a pile of mythological hooey” sound too harsh?

Their latest work, The Gospel of the Second Coming, “the fourth book in their trilogy,” is an intelligent, self-deprecating and decidedly post-modern poke at the idea of a literal, physical return of Jesus Christ. This (fictional) gospel takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Peter who represent self-realization (or enlightenment), the human soul (ever torn between the physical and the spiritual) and the externally-fixated mind, respectively.

If my description sounds a bit dry, the reader need fear not for, as the subtitle foreshadows, “Jesus is back...and this time he’s funny.” And funny He is, since the King of Kings found within these pages is total mystical Monty Python, the antithesis to any pious Savior in the Mel Gibson “Thank you, Sir, may I have another?” sense.

When I ask Laura Linney if getting the green light for a movie set extensively in nursing homes was easy, she leans forward and lets out a loud, disbelieving “God no!” She’s meeting with journalists at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Boston, and she follows with a qualifier. “It’s the dreaded topic,” the actress says. “It instills dread in almost anyone. Thinking about it, having to face it, putting someone there, being in there. But guess what? If it’s a good place? I want to go.”

She does, in Tamara Jenkins’ new comic drama, “The Savages,” starring with Philip Seymour Hoffman as half of a brother-sister duo coping with putting their father Lenny (Philip Bosco) in a nursing home. The film is one of the first movies released by a major studio (Fox Searchlight) that deals with the topic – "Away from Her," Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” treaded similar territory. While that film focused on a man losing his wife to Alzheimer’s, the ailing Lenny Savage suffers from dementia. Both deal with the culture of elder care, portrayed as foreign and tragic to grown children and spouses faced with the prospect of turning their loved one over to a slew of anonymous nurses.