Blog Archives
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah”
Dear Frank,
Monday night, about ten minutes before a screening of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, I made the following joke on Twitter:
Do you think I’ll have a hard time understanding “Noah” if I don’t read the book first? (I remember hearing it was based on some book…)
Not exactly groundbreaking, as jokes go. But it happened to be couched in some amount of truth. I would probably consider myself a spiritual person, but that spirituality owes absolutely nothing to the Good Book and any knowledge of the material within is due largely to pop culture’s appropriation of it. Like, I know what Gethsemane is, but only because there’s an X-Files episode called that, you know?
(DAMN IT I almost made it a full 24 hours without referencing The X-Files in some context. Frank, I was doing SO GOOD.)
Point is, I know the basics of the Noah story — God decides to punish Man with flood, one guy builds a really big boat to save the creatures that can’t swim to survive it — and went into Aronofsky’s interpretation assuming that the rest of what happened in the film would be drawn from the original text.
But the next day, when I was talking with people online about what I’d seen, I was surprised to learn that NOPE. Not only is the original text, in one person’s words, “really bare bones” but Aronofsky took some, um, liberties with the source material. And Aronofsky’s version? BONKERS. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In the Anti-Choice Drama “Sarah’s Choice”
Dear Frank,
There was a sad article in Salon this week about how the savvy video store clerk is becoming an endangered species, replaced by algorithmic recommendations developed by companies like Netflix and Amazon. This article is depressing on a personal level, because I spent some formative years behind the counter of a video store, but also depressing because Netflix recommendations are FAR from accurate.
How do I know this? Because a movie called Sarah’s Choice ended up as one of my Netflix recommendations at some point. Now, due to the amount of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I watch, I’ve always assumed that Netflix thinks I’m a gay man with a crush on Dr. Bashir (which isn’t too far off from the truth). But somehow this anti-choice abortion drama slipped through the cracks.
A properly-trained video store clerk would never have let this happen. And more importantly, they would have never let me watch it, even for comedy purposes. Alas, I am alone. So let’s do this. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Left Behind”
Dear Frank,
The bullets I take for you keep getting bigger and bigger, but I don’t know how I’m going to top the first book in the Left Behind series, because this insanely popular global phenomenon (16 books! 25 bajillion copies sold! at least sixty souls saved!) is just… Just… Oh, I lack the words at this moment.
But let’s make something clear up top — I’m not anti-religion in the slightest. What I am is anti-bigotry, anti-ignorance, anti-hatred and anti-judgment (except when it comes to shitty media). This keeps me at odds with most contemporary Christian denominations, especially ones that seem to really enjoy reading a poorly-written Tom Clancy-esque rendition of the Rapture unfolding on Earth. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In... 