Movie Review: Into Great Silence

This inaugural movie review shall begin with a disclaimer: We hardly ever stop a film, book or similar piece of media before it’s finished. It’s incredibly rare. It’s “good part of an Ayn Rand novel” rare. You might catch trichinosis it’s so rare.

But a recent movie-viewing proves that it is not in fact a philosophical impossibility (unlike the Ayn Rand bit). Some movies, we now realize, are so offensive, so lewd, so implacably irreverent, so disrespectful and smearing and destructive and corrupting and filthy that it’s simply a moral imperative that you press Stop—before Satan steals the remote and leaves you powerless to end the madness.

We refer to Philip Groning’s documentary Die GroBe Stille (Into Great Silence)*. It is a two-hour-forty-minute expose of what really goes on inside a Carthusian monastery in France. We expected a sort of visual meditation, a serene slice of art. And for the first fifty-odd minutes, this is indeed what we received. But as it continued, the film degenerated into a celebration of racism, military supremacy, crassness, disrespect towards elders, and senseless propaganda.

The spiraling descent into debauchery is sparked by none other than the abbot of the monastery himself, Dom Marie Pierre. For those of you who, like us, lack European sophistication, this translates roughly as “Bossman Mary Peter”. Now despite his position of leadership and respect within a community that supposedly endorses virtue, asceticism and Roman Catholic morals, he is filmed while feverishly at work on an IBM laptop.

That’s right. A monk on a computer.

Clearly not supposed to happen. IBM might as well stand for Internet Baptist Machine—it wouldn’t change how little such a device belongs in a Carthusian monastery.

From here on, the entire direction of the film shifts. We begin to discover the vicious racial politics that infest the monastery. The sole African-American** monk, clearly one of the few remaining sincere brothers, is forced to read aloud, singled out from the others. We also see that the abbey is not the peaceful, quiescent place we thought it to be. No, these monks have decided to use fancy technology, beyond mere Internet Baptist Machines. Microphones and… amplifiers… are used to further promote the nefarious schemes of Bossman Mary Peter.

Whereas the monks had in the first hour been diligently toiling in the garden, the kitchen, or devoutly praying, they now start talking. And not just talking, but talking about things that monks should not talk about. They complain about the sparse number of washbasins in their sanctuary. They castigate the members of a nearby Trappist monastery for their owning the apparently unreasonable total of six washbasins. They begin to plot a hostile takeover.

And then, as if we were not already onto these monks’ plans to land in Gehenna, one of the monks discusses his airplane flight! This alone is clearly enough to result in the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the destination reveals yet greater devilry. The monk has booked a flight to a place the subtitles labeled “Seoul”, clearly a misspelling of Sheol, Lucifer’s own lair***.

At this juncture, Two Thumbs Sideways could not handle the smut that was being displayed on the screen. As we frantically attempted to stop the movie (in spite of the devil’s own attempts to thwart us), we were once again visually assaulted with a horrifying scene. A forest (that undoubtedly stood between the Carthusians and Trappists) was framed. We knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that these charlatans for monks were hiding a regiment of tanks. This regiment would soon go Fern Gully on this woodland tableau before razing the Trappist monastery to the ground in search of the five extra washbasins they so jealously desired.

If nothing else, after reaching their eternal hellfire, these conniving Carthusians will have very clean hands.

Small recompense for forcing two unassuming viewers to experience such a satanic, diabolical, fiendish vision.

-Two Thumbs Sideways-





* We at Two Thumbs Sideways apologize for the typographical inaccuracies in this sentence, which are due to our lack of a German keyboard and an all-around dearth of European sophistication.

** What an African-American is doing in France, we were never able to ascertain.

*** This is yet another incident that brings attention to the great paucity of qualified closed captioning professionals in modern society.

A Glorious Welcome To You!

We here at Two Thumbs Sideways are absolutely elated to be welcoming you into our humble, virtual abode. Although as will probably become evident very shortly, while the abode is humble and virtual, the occupants are not particularly humble. We are somewhat virtual, though, which will also be evinced shortly.

This here web log (or “blog” for you hipsters out there) will feature anything and everything, so don’t get mad at us if we review the mating habits of duck-billed platypuses at some time in the near future. We said “anything and everything” (seriously, you can look it up!). But, in all actuality, most posts will probably be about movies and books and rollercoasters.

There isn’t much else.

Now, as the “blog” (wink wink) description gravely states, we are two above-average intellects. But what else are we? Unfortunately, we cannot reveal this yet. While we cannot go further than to say that possible college/job/grad school/government position/election/alien abduction applications are looming in the near future, we can tell you that the anonymity will no longer be required after April 1st, 2010, the day when, coincidentally, college admissions decisions are due (we stress, coincidentally).

So then, you might ask, who are those dashing young men in the “blog” profile picture? Well, to be entirely honest, we are ugly. We did not desire to alienate our soon-to-be large fanbase (or overly thorough admissions committees) by repulsing them with our repugnant visages. So, we hired some of the best models we could find to pretend to be us. Seriously. Look at those guys. They ooze good-looks. Find us a woman who can walk by one of them without dropping her jaw and you’ll have found us a guy dressed up as a woman. You could write “sexy” on their foreheads and it would be redundant. Here at Two Thumbs Sideways, we are constantly amazed by how lucky we were to have found models that might be mistaken for Greek gods. In fact, we have it from reliable sources that they have been mistaken for Achilles and Apollo on occasion.

But enough about them (although, whether one could ever say enough about their startlingly thick hair and strong, broad shoulders is an open question). Soon enough, this “blog” will be inundated with witty, know-it-all, informative stuff. If you were to imagine an Ayn Rand novel, and then imagine the exact opposite of that—you’d get this blog.

~Two Thumbs Sideways~