Sinners and Church-goers

I saw the movie Sinners over the weekend and found it very entertaining. I purposely didn't read much about the movie so I didn't know a lot about it. I knew the twin brothers in the movie were opening a juke joint and that vampires were involved: that's it. What surprised me about the movie was how downright bizarre some parts of the film were. The Irish tunes and dancing took me by surprise. I certainly wasn't expecting to see a Riverdance performance in the middle of a film about Black folks in the American South in the 1930s, yet there it was! 

There are a lot of religious themes in the film and, over the past Easter holiday, I'd been thinking a lot about my own religious upbringing as a Lutheran. During holidays like Easter and Christmas, I think a lot about going to church as a child and how much I enjoyed the songs and the services. During the Easter season, we often sang a song called "Christ Arose" and it's always been a favorite of mine. I was fortunate enough to not have a traumatic, negative experience going to church as a child, but I was still brainwashed in some ways by certain religious norms that my parents and our church home followed that I wouldn't follow now as an adult. For example, it took me many years (like into my 30s) to wear a pair of pants to church (when I was still a church-goer). I'd been brainwashed to believe I had to wear dresses or skirts to church. Then, one day, I just wore pants. I'd seen other women wearing pants and I finally broke down and wore a pair too. If you weren't raised like I was, you're probably wonder what the big deal was to wear pants to church, but it was a big deal for me. I recall one time years ago when my father refused to go to church with my stepmother unless she changed her clothes. She wasn't wearing pants (God, forbid!) but she was wearing a denim jumper. It was a plain dress, but my father felt it wasn't good enough for her to wear to church and sit beside him in the pew while he was wearing a suit. So, what did my stepmother do? Did she say, "I'll wear what I want and don't sit beside me if you don't like it?" Of course not! She went and changed her clothes.  Brainwashing, folks!

Decade of Fun

In the "By the Book" feature in the NY Times, they sometimes ask authors what book have they read that they consider as "guilty pleasures." My feeling is that no one should feel guilty about reading a book, but if I had to specify certain books as guilty pleasures, I'd have to go with books by Bret Easton Ellis. As someone who was a teenager in the 1980s, I read Less Than Zero like a lot of folks my age along with Ellis's other books. His work was so different from what I'd been reading at the time and I enjoyed it. I'm reading his latest novel, The Shards, now and it's entertaining. I saw Bret years ago at the Barnes and Noble in New York around Union Square. He was doing a talk and Andrew McCarthy was there also. They were discussing the movie version of Less Than Zero (that Andrew starred in). Bret talked about seeing the movie and realizing as he watched it that none of the text from his book actually showed up in the film. (I think they did use that "people are afraid to merge" line in it, but I digress.) What surprised me was how perfectly calm and likeable Bret seemed during that chat. I was expecting him to be a jerk, but he wasn't! He was funny and entertaining. I was also surprised to see so many younger people at that reading. I was expecting the crowd to be filled with people who were my age (Gen X folks), but we were outnumbered by the Millennials. 

I told my sister Bret must feel like he lived his best life during the 1980s because he sure writes about that decade a lot. I just don't understand writing about a specific time period over and over. But, to each his own, I guess. I loved the 1970s because I was a kid during that decade and didn't have the pressures that come with age back then. The 1970s were tacky and ridiculous, but I loved that decade. However, I don't want to relive that time. I don't want to relive the 1980s or 90s either, although the 70s, 80s, and 90s are all looking better and better compared to what's going on today!