Reviews and Views
Refuge for refugees
I attended a Christian/Catholic group discussion a few Thursday nights ago about empathy toward refugees and creating room for welcoming those in need. It included listening to a song by John Legend & Sara Bareilles. It was insightful.
The event this week at my church was a panel of 4 people discussing the future of women leadership in the Catholic Church. The discussion was led by Geraldine Doogue and was live streamed. I attended and it was a lively thought provoking discussion.
For me, the cartoon movie has a heron who enables the boy to enter other realms and with the heron he travels to the place of a god- like leader where he has a little insight into the leader’s ulterior motives and I think avoids being trapped in a negative leadership system. The heron represents positive and negative influences and assists upon a journey of choices to comment as needed on how it appears from a more worldly perspective.
Apart from having 2x Japanese Exchange students stay at our place in my youth, I worked briefly for a sushi bar. This gave my a little chink of light into a Japanese side of life, as the cartoon does too.
Once my sister and I had the pleasure of meeting Wendy Harmer in person when we were audience for the ABC Radio production of Thank God It’s Friday! In this video she speaks of the quirks of being an author of ‘Lies My Mirror Told Me’.
The Movie
Margot Robbie & Ryan Gosling are far from vainglorious as Barbie & Ken in recent movie Barbie. I admit I managed to watch 1/2 of it on video (due to not having hired it myself). They outline a Mattel endorsed lifestyle that is walking a tightrope and is destined to change due to Barbie’s discovering existencey of a real life beyond the materialistic confines of the present known doll’s life. The elements of ’real life’ suggest danger and disarray compared with the predictability of a doll’s life. It provokes discussion of thé clash between dolls’s or their imagined ‘perfect’ lifestyles and reallife and the problems each situation brings mechanistically.
Great ‘doco’ type movie, with Dame Maggie Smith’s humour stripe. It showed the different stories of a group of women who knew eachother a little who went to Lourdes France for their cure, hailing from Dublin Ireland – whether their malady was obvious or not, and they grew in warmth and understanding of each of their true characters and what it took to be them.
In 2023 I watched the movie Emily, about Romantic period author Emily Brontë (1840s) who wrote the novel Wuthering Heights. The movie was awesome. I liked how Emily and brother Branwell yelled out on the Moors “Freedom of Thought”! This reminded me of John Henry Newman’s book (1852) The Idea of a University.
I also liked how she spoke French at home and spoke her mind with her sister when using it ( it sounded so delicate in the French tongue) and I liked how there was a twist in the tale at the end. The movie brought tears to my eyes, even in the nonchalant parts, I suppose as a precursor, i could sense the movie’s building of heaviness and the sense of gloom near the end. I like Emily’s sense of adventure and the theme of “ the greatest joy in life is love and be loved”.
What I loved about the movie was the fact that the father (the mother had died) and sisters and brother encouraged eachother to best their best person and to write! What a roller coaster ride of emotions in this movie! Worth seeing.
I have always had a love for insects, amphibians, reptiles and other animals ever since I was young. I now like to take photos of them as I come across them spontaneously in the suburbs.
I love to come across flowers on my walks. I will endeavour to post a few flowers over time here…
