Category: Blog

1 star for Nicolas Cage
1 star for the guy who played Cameron Poe
1 star for the dude who said “Put the bunny back in the box”
1 star for the The Godfather director’s nephew
1 star off for not enough Nicolas Cage

4 Stars

One of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, in the best way possible. I kept expecting the absurdism to become desensitizing as the film went on, but each conversation instead brought something new. I’ll be thinking on what I believe this work meant, may add more thoughts later.

4.5 Stars

Scorsese’s “Silence” looks at the concept of Faith, its torture, its beauty, its consequences, and everything in between, in ways no media has ever done before. 

Does a country have a right to choose the religious beliefs of its people. Does another country have the right to make serious attempts to bring their religion to other lands. Though both positions carry their own troubling implications, it seems that one can’t be false unless the other is true, offering a polarizing complexity that often moves in tandem with one another. I both ache for Garfield as he tries to do what his heart tells him is right, and for the individuals affected by the message he tries to spread, making the answer seem impossible as the two realities are juxtaposed.

We put so much stock in beliefs and faith, yet only ever get silence in return. Why do we feel so inclined to follow something that often only brings deafening silence, a fact which subjects everyone in this film, whether the imprisoned or the imprisoning, to such suffering. And at what point must we override our own beliefs when it brings only silence and inaction in the face of atrocities we have the power to put an end to. Thus, we as the viewer are supposed to consider the film’s dismantling of the binary concepts of right or wrong with respect to faith.

In typical Scorsese fashion, we are shown not what we want to see, but what we must see to contemplate such difficult ideas that plague virtually everyone, which is what makes film like Silence necessary cinema, even if it offers no easy answers.

5 Stars