Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

30 March 2023

8 min read

Meditating on violence

Violence is inherent to life - and a lot of movies. Yaroslav Walker asks if it has to be accepted, as he reviews Creed III, Scream VI and John Wick 4.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

In a boxing ring, an umpire stands between two boxers who stare hard at each other.

Michael B. Jordan, Jonathan Majors, and Tony Weeks in Creed III.

MGM.

In March I watched a lot, A LOT, of violence. For me this has been a month of cinematic punching, stabbing, shooting, grappling…and its all been a bit exhausting. Oh well, let's get cracking with Creed III. The ninth instalment in the Rocky franchise has the temerity to exclude Rocky himself! I’m tempted to end the review there. No Stallone, I’m going home! It is a shame, and his presence is missed, especially when the Creed films have always felt a little like repeats of the Rocky Balboa saga. Creed III is somewhat of a mish-mash of Rocky’s III and V, and there’s nothing thematically new in this film.

So, it’s a little unoriginal and quite disrespectful to its origins…and yet I did enjoy it. Michal B Jordan makes his directorial debut, and he delivers a perfectly serviceable boxing film. Jordan’s Adonis Creed is living a perfect life: he ends his boxing career on top, has a beautiful wife and child, is running his own gym, and has found success as a boxing promoter. His idyllic life is interrupted when a figure from his youth returns, and Adonis realises that the one fight he can’t win is with his past. There are secrets, there are betrayals, there are home truths delivered and personal growth achieved; and of course there is a training montage and a climactic fight.

The plot is decent (if derivative), though rushed towards the end, and the script is solid. The performances are all fine and familiar - Jordan simply is Adonis Creed - with Jonathan Majors and Tessa Thompson being standouts. Thompson plays Adonis’ wife with a long-suffering air that subtly draws you in to an emotional dynamic that is fracturing. Majors is superb as Dame, the long-incarcerated childhood friend of Adonis’. He has the brutal physical presence needed, with his sudden, cautious, and jerky movements always reminding us that he has just come out of prison. His face is permanently set in a posture of desperation: desperate because in his eyes we see a terrifying combination of broiling rage and a deep, sad longing for love and support. Every second he is on the screen is a masterclass in building tension.

Jordan’s direction isn’t perfect, and he does indulge himself a little too much. He has spoken in interviews of his love for anime and how that has influenced his visual style (with some shots being homages to famous anime scenes). One moment in particular – where the crowd disappears during the climactic fight, and it is only Dame and Adonis in the ring sparring and raging – is just distracting and took me out of the drama of the moment. I can see what Jordan is trying to do, the innovation he thinks he is reaching for, but it fell a bit flat for me. Overall, its fine… quite fun even, and elevated more than it deserves by Jonathan Majors (he’s been doing that quite a lot for mediocre films lately). Buuuuuut…I stand with Rocky. You can’t do a Rocky film without Stallone, and no matter what anyone says this is indeed a Rocky film.

3 stars.

Scream VI

A woman concentrates as she pauses at gate in a set of tall railings.

Courteney Cox in Scream VI.

Scream VI was next. I know the question you’re asking: ‘Why do we need a Scream VI?’ Indeed. We don’t. We didn’t need a Scream 2! The original Scream was perfect and singular. It was a glorious satire of slasher tropes, done to perfection by a master of the genre. It was witty, gritty, violent, and hilarious. IT…WAS…PERFECT! To say that the steam has run-out by Scream VI is an understatement. It’s a limp and lifeless excuse of a film, trying to ape a satirical edge; except now it has decided to turn its satirical edge on itself. Now it is the tropes of franchises, and especially the Scream franchise, being dissected, except the scalpel of wit being wielded is so dull and uninspired the film is killed by blunt-force-trauma.

Perhaps to try and overcome this, the kills have now become unreasonably brutal (far too much so for a 15 rating). The camera seems to linger on the wounds and the pain inflicted with an adolescent glee that is deeply unpleasant. There are a few enjoyable and tense set-pieces (one involving a ladder precariously perched between two high-rise windows), but their impact is undercut by the film’s general awfulness. The cast is hamming it up to a ludicrous degree, seemingly without any sensible direction. The returns of veterans Courtney Cox and Hayden Panettiere are welcome until they try to deliver their lines…and who on earth thought they could make a Scream sequel without Neve Campbell!? You can’t do Rocky without Rocky, you can’t do Scream without Sidney!

1 star.

John Wick 4

A hero and armoured opponent stand ready to fight.

Keanu Reeves in John Wick 4.

Finally, I settled down to what I knew would be a comforting friend of a film: John Wick 4. The man in black, all long hair and long stares, gun-fu and jiu-jitsu, is back…and he bored me, a little. I’m so sorry to say it, and I will force myself back to the cinema to see it again to make sure I wasn’t just in a bad mood, but I really did get bored. When John Wick hit the screens in 2014 it was like a sucker-punch. It was a bonkers B-movie coming out of nowhere, that built up a bit of pace and then went hell-for-leather, and it was glorious to behold. Director Chad Stahelski’s Hollywood career had been as a stuntman and stunt coordinator, and he brought all that knowledge to create a gorgeous, gory ballet of hand-to-hand combat and frenetic gunplay saturated in neon and drowned in darkness.

It was, like Scream, a perfect one-shot. It gave us an iconic laconic Keanu Reeves performance, magnificent action, and a beautifully compact story that alluded to a larger world of assassin culture but left it for the audience to build this world in their imagination. Three sequels later and I find it all a bit of a drag. Everything is pumped-up, everything is bigger, everything is louder, and more and more people get shot… yet it’s all a bit repetitive. Every set-piece is the most fantastically choreographed dance, but they drag on too long. The assassin world has been built with a ludicrous operatic grandeur, but that takes some of the imaginative fun out of it for the audience. I’m not sure anyone really needed more John Wick in their life.

On the plus side: it looks gorgeous, it is shot masterfully, Reeves is spectacular and looks like he’s having the time of his life, and his interaction with Donnie Yen (himself on superb form) is joyous. On the downside: it is too long, it is too repetitive, and I’m not really sure what Mr Wick is doing any of this for anymore. The beauty of John Wick was the simple motivation: revenge for a murdered dog. By John Wick 4 that narrative simplicity – the real strength of the franchise – has disappeared. I did have a good time to a degree; every twenty minutes or so I’d get sucked into a set piece and marvel and what Stahelski and Reeves are able to accomplish, but then it would very quickly fade and I’d be bored again. It gains points for excellent (if far too brief) usage of Clancy Brown and Hiroyuki Sanada… Hiroyuki Sanada is enough to see any film. It loses points for Bill Skarsgård’s performance (a rare miss from him) and the Scott Adkins fat-suit…when you see it, you’ll know. The film is like junk-food: an initial rush followed by a bit of queasiness. But Reeves, Yen, and Sanada raise the standard…oh, and Ian McShane!

3 stars.

A mildly disappointing month, and at first I wondered if it was the sheer amount of violence I’d watched. Sporting violence, murderous violence, balletic violence…was it all a bit too much? The more I’ve reflected the more I think this can’t be the case – I blame my disappointment, now, on franchise fatigue. It can’t be the violence, as violence is a vital part of the Christian story. As I write this review the Church is about to enter Passiontide: the last two weeks before Easter, where we meditate on the final days of Christ’s life. Violence - the violence of Jesus’ arrest, scourging, and crucifixion - is an essential part of the story. The horror and pain of Jesus’ Passion must be meditated on, because only then can we see the wonderful and transformative power of God, who raises Christ from the dead.

Violence is an inherent part of the Christian story: Cain and Abel, the wars of the Israelite Kingdom, the oppression of the Jews under the Roman Empire, the Passion of Christ, and the fact that from the beginning of the Church to the present day there are Christians made into martyrs (those who dies rather than deny the faith). Violence and death are not some things that can be avoided, and we shouldn’t try. We ought to face up to the difficult truth that we live in a world that is often violent and painful. When we do, we begin to see those serendipities that reveal the ultimate truth - a life of pain and struggle is not our ultimate destiny.

Violence and pain, and ultimately death, are those things which God’s goodness and love will overcome. Every wrong is an opportunity for forgiveness. Every tragedy is an opportunity to show love and charity to one’s neighbour. This is not to diminish violence and tragedy, but to recontextualise it, to transfigure it. This is what Christ does on the Cross - he takes death and transfigures it into eternal life. This is what was so depressing and dissatisfying about the violence in Scream VI: it was meaningless, and for its own sake. In Creed III the violence is for sport and for the resolution of tension, and in John Wick IV the violence is a performative dance more than an actual assault, but in Scream VI its just there to leer at. Christianity accepts violence as a fact of the world, but never a fact in itself and for itself. Violence and pain are not to be ‘accepted’ - like all aspects of creation, good and bad, they point to the deeper truth that God is always working to save the world that He created in love and to bring it to Himself. This is what we can see in the aftermath of violence. This is what we can see in the aftermath of the Cross

Article

Culture

Mental Health

Music

25 October 2024

5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.