love at first sight, hate at first sight

The Passion of Joan of Arc is great. It's black and white, silent, with a score written for it if you want, which I did because it's not like silent movies were ever shown without music plus I question my ability to pay attention to a movie without music, and it mostly consists of close-ups of the Joan's face. Her eyes are usually looking upward and leaking tears. One thing that always bothers me about Salem witch trial stuff is that no one ever bothered to transcribe the trials. Just another shitty thing about the Puritans. Anyway, the great thing about this is that the Catholic Church did transcribe Joan of Arc's trial and so the dialogue from this film is the same. How great is that? I think it's so great. So, you know, French teen girl, visions of saints that say Hey teen girl, go save the King! and she does but she has to dress up like a boy, etc. The Passion is just her trial and execution, none of her leading anybody in battle. She's still dressed like a boy, and there's a lot of focus on dressing like a boy or dressing like a girl. Man, the Catholic Church wanted her to dress like a girl so much! And she wouldn't. The voices were like, no dice, not until the King is totally saved. I don't know the whole story, but I guess the French threw her under the bus anyway. There's some nice allegory/juxtaposition of the area where she's gonna get burned at the stake being filled with circus performers and then slowly getting filled with execution spectators. It's really short, and it's on instant. I liked that there were a few monks that stood up for her even though it didn't save her in the end and that also she waffled a bit. It wasn't as cut and dry, I guess, as I had thought. I bet nothing is.

And then, the hate at first sight. I thought, hey, that movie The Messenger with Milla Jovovich whatever, who I really like, is in it and plays Joan of Arc and I wanted to see her really kill it, er kick butt, er what have you, but I got distracted because right from the get-go they have her getting visions of *jesus* as a little girl and not the saints, I'm not a total accuracy-stickler, although I do prefer the saints to the jesus, so maybe that was it. It was good to get mad at a movie, though, and take it out on not watching it. Then I did some tai chi and ate some fried eggs. It's fried eggs now, on a cast iron pan, the little one that people always cook bacon in so that it's already all oiled up. Yum.