Blogging has been pretty light — okay, non-existent — the last few days because, in addition to my usual work, I was having a fun time hanging out at the Mennonite Educational Institute as their writer-in-residence this week.
There were lots of interesting moments, but perhaps my favorite was the one where a student asked me what I thought of Dead Poets Society (1989), and because I haven’t seen that film since it was brand new — since I was not much older than the student herself — I found myself giving her an opinion of the film that was probably older than she was. Every time I mentioned an element in the film that supported my opinion, I added the words “if memory serves” and waited for her to confirm that my two-decades-old recollection of that element was correct. And thankfully, she always did. But I hadn’t realized until then just how old that film is now. Maybe I should give it another look.
It was also interesting to see how quickly cultural touchstones can fade in importance, or relevance. One of the teachers there mentioned that he had been using my review of Signs (2002) in his class as an example of how to approach films from a Christian point of view, but whereas, five or six years ago, he could assume that all of his students had seen that film, nowadays it isn’t quite so well-known.
Oh, and one student asked me to settle a bet, by declaring which actor was the first to play James Bond. When I said “Sean Connery,” he turned to the girl sitting next to him and said, “See?” And she replied, “But he couldn’t be! He’s so old!” I replied that the Bond franchise was now 46 years old, and indeed, the first movie had come out back when my dad was in high school.
Anyway, I hope to get back to regular blogging soon, but I had a wedding to attend this morning, and my evening is currently up in the air, and tomorrow I might be catching a plane out of the country, so it might take a while. Soon, though, soon!
And thanks to Graham Nickel and the other teachers and students at M.E.I. who made my week a very interesting one.
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