#24 The Cross

The Cross (2009)

directed by

Matthew Crouch

 

In case you haven't been following along, Hallie & I are watching most of our DVDs in order to simply watch many we've bought and never put on (we mostly buy them cheaply in thrift stores) and then decide whether or not to keep them. Based on the way we've shelved them, we're watching 5 "regular movies", 1musical, 1 religious movie/documentary, 1 Hitchcock, 1 sci-fi, 1 Western, 1 war, 1 documentary, and then 1 music movie/video collection. We're on the third span of "regular" movies, but I've got a bunch of catching up to do.

We're not even sure where this film came from, maybe Hallie's aunt. It's a fascinating, if a little hagiographic, documentary about the life and travels of Arthur Blessitt. He was a charismatic preacher who set out to evangelize young people in LA in the late sixties. With a church next to a go-go club, he became known as the minster of Sunset Strip.

Starting on Christmas, 1969, he began traveling the world with a large, wheeled cross, preaching and talking to anyone and everyone. Since then, he's traveled to every continent, almost every country, and walked 43,000 miles.

His first international trip was to Northern Ireland. In 1982, he ended up in Beirut during Operation Galilee and prayed with Maronites and Yasser Arafat. From things he says he clearly made no political judgments - I'm not even sure if he has any sense of politics. His story of traveling through Central America is pretty nuts (and disgusting). He comes across as a modern version of the holy fools from medieval Russia, wholly dedicated to Christ and almost oblivious to the mundane world around him.

Verdict: keeper. I don't know when I'll ever watch it, but it's an interesting story. Also, that section is so small we probably won't ditch any of them.

Arthur Blessitt

#8 Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur (1959)

directed by 

William Wyler

screenplay by 

Karl Tunberg

I grew up watching this almost every year, just like The Ten Commandments and King Kong. Like with those movies, I was swept up by the epic scope, the exoticisms, and the fantastic elements in Ben-Hur. Rewatching last night, for the first time in some years, I find I'm still transfixed by it. Sure, Hugh Griffiths' brown-face makeup is a little distracting, a lot of the dialogue is stilted, and except for Judah Ben-Hur the characters are thin, but I don't care. It's a surprisingly devout and reverential Hollywood Biblical epic. I definitely missed that as a kid. Of course, what is most attention-grabbing and best remembered are the galley battle and the chariot race. The latter was filmed in a full-sized hippodrome built in a quarry and the race was run essentially for real in front of an audience of 7,000. Clearly the source of the pod race in the terrible Phantom Menace, there's simply no comparison between Lucas' CGI monstrosity and real horses and people. I'm also a fan of Charlton Heston. He could be wooden, but when he's on target, like much of the time here, he's great at doing smoldering anger. He's also a great physical actor, which he gets to prove numerous times here. Stephen Boyd as the villain, Massala, is fine, and Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim is fun.

For Staten Islanders, I picked this up at Bayware Video in Stapleton was when it was shutting down.

Verdict: a keeper