BEFORE: My wife and I are finally recovering from our colds, enough to leave the house, anyway - we drove out to Long Island on Saturday to get her car inspected, and then we found a new little restaurant gem, we seem to have a knack for finding little hole-in-the-wall BBQ restaurants. This one (The Good Steer) has been in the same spot since 1957, and it's possible that they maybe have never changed the decor in all that time. I got a big "Pitmaster's Plate", with 3 ribs (I think they gave me 4), some pulled pork, brisket and a pile of onion straws, along with rice and beans - I nearly couldn't finish it all, and I've had a lot of experience taking down big plates of barbecue.
Then today I went out to dinner in Manhattan with my friend Victoria, since it was her birthday last week. My boss and his wife gave me a gift card (maybe 3 birthdays ago) that was good at a number of French restaurants around town, but the one where I wanted to use it, Café D'Alsace, is on the Upper East Side, and I almost never go to that part of town. Which is a bit odd, since I'll travel to Dallas or Nashville for good BBQ, but dining out on a Monday I'll rarely go north of 42nd St. But since it's Restaurant Week, I offered to use the gift card if Vic would venture to the northern part of town with me (they do have buses and subways that go there, after all) and it turned out to be a great meal.
After watching "The Way Back" I wrote something about how I'm not really in touch with my Polish heritage, and I'm more comfortable thinking of myself as mostly German and part Irish. But that doesn't really extend to cuisine - I know Polish food, and Irish food, and German food from Bavaria. But some of my German ancestors are from Alsace, which is a territory that's been both German and French at different times (yet my family would never consider themselves of French heritage, which is weird.). So tonight I got in touch with my Alsace heritage from a culinary POV, and the results were amazing. I had a savory winter tart with beets and goat cheese, a cassoulet with duck confit, duck sausage, foie gras and lamb, and a molten chocolate gateau with raspberry sauce and vanilla ice cream. My friend had the frisée salad with pears and lardons, a fantastic beef short rib (I tried some) and a creme brulée. If this is part of my culinary cultural heritage, then I say bring it on.
Of course, it's not just genetics that draws me to this food - it's all French & German comfort food, so naturally it was delicious. Eating those foods is like getting a big warm hug from inside your stomach, but still, I feel I should go back and try some more things on the menu just to be sure.
Andrew Garfield carries over from "Hacksaw Ridge", and plays another man bound by religious convictions, only in another time and place.
THE PLOT: In the 17th Century, two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to Japan in an attempt to locate their mentor, who is rumored to have committed apostasy, and to propagate Catholicism.
AFTER: I sort of skirted by the topic yesterday, but I just can't avoid the subject of religion here, it's front and center. I don't really agree with the concept of missionaries, who travel to foreign lands to spread their chosen religion to the "heathen" natives, as if their Jesus is really SO much better in the end than Allah, or Buddha, or the Sun God Ra. Can anyone really be that arrogant, as if their religion is not only the BEST religion, but also the only REAL one? Why yes, I've found that in fact most religious people adopt that attitude, even though very often the only reason that someone is Catholic, or Jewish, or Muslim is because they were born into a family of that belief. How does that make their religion RIGHT? I can sort of take religious converts a bit more seriously, someone who's just born into a religion strikes me as someone who never really learned to think for themself. Because once you think for yourself and start to ask questions, the belief in any religion tends to unravel quite a bit.
And think about all the times that people died because they were SURE that their religion was right, and the other guy's was wrong. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Holocaust - and that's just off the top of my head. Hundreds of thousands dead in the last few thousand years because they were practicing the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time, and someone more powerful was upset that they weren't practicing the RIGHT religion. Meanwhile, both religions probably had some precept against killing that was conveniently ignored, or didn't seem to apply to the heathens. And in all cases, neither party was able to take a step back and say, "Hey, maybe we're BOTH wrong about this religion thing..." Nope, that's just never an option, now, is it? Everyone's sure that the answer that THEY were given as a child about how the universe works is the correct one. What a damn shame.
Maybe I'm just not in the target audience for this film, which features people clinging to their faith during the most difficult times, and here I spent several years during my twenties trying to get AWAY from organized religion. Life is much simpler when you're not living for an imaginary guy up in the sky and worse, dealing with his human representatives on Earth who want to tell you how to act, what to eat and who to marry. And it is possible to still maintain a moral code while still not practicing a religion - I like to say that I "practiced" enough, and at some point it's time to stop practicing and go out to start doing. Heck, I practiced the clarinet for about 6 years, and when I realized I wasn't ever going to be great at it, it was time to stop wasting my time and try something else.
Anyway, the Jesuit priests here travel from Macau (a Portuguese territory) to Japan to find out what happened to a missing Jesuit priest, even though he sent them a letter (that took a few years to arrive) that said he was doing fine in Japan, had renounced his Catholic faith, and not to come looking for him. So of course they ignore that last part and head straight for Japan - it couldn't possibly be that a priest got tired of all the Catholic B.S. and started thinking for himself, could it? (Yes, apparently I still have an ax to grind against Catholicism...)
What they find is a populace that is full of Christians desperately in need of priests, natives who were baptized at some point by missionaries but do not have regular access to the sacraments of Communion and Confession, and I can confirm that this religion really stresses the need for both, and of course without them they're not likely to be eligible for paradise when they die. What a racket. Nothing like keeping the rubes in line with the threat of eternal damnation. The samurai, meanwhile, are traveling from village to village looking for any signs of Christian iconography, and asking the locals to step on an icon of Jesus, or to spit on a cross, to prove that they're not Christians.
This sets up something of a conundrum, over whether it's all right to lie to the Inquisitors if telling the truth will get you killed. It's a sin to tell a lie, of course, but surely God wouldn't want his followers to die if they don't have to, right? But then again, if they die for the cause then they're guaranteed everlasting paradise, and how is that not a good thing? But then again, doesn't Christianity start to sound a lot like the Muslim faith with its promise of 47 virgins for those who die for the religion? And if heaven's so great, why aren't we all rushing to die in order to get there?
And once the samurai find the two Jesuit priests, they're forced to watch as the locals they converted are put to death, quite gruesomely - a process that could end if only the priests would renounce their faith. Which then becomes a no-win proposition, really - even if they could keep converting the Japanese, what good are converts if the government insists on killing them? The only thing that I can really agree with here is the fact that conversion is depicted as an ultimately futile effort - but that's probably not the message that the director, Martin Scorsese, intended.
Even though I didn't really appreciate all the religious stuff, I found that Andrew Garfield looked enough like Hayden Christensen from "Star Wars: Episode II" that I could imagine this as some impossible lost tale from the Star Wars Universe, with Anakin somehow teaming up with his future grandson, Kylo Ren (Driver), to track down his original somehow-alive mentor, Qui-Gon Jinn (Neeson). After all, the priests here all wear Jedi-like robes, and what are Jedi but the priests of the Star Wars movies?
Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Liam Neeson (last heard in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Ciaran Hinds (last heard in "Justice League"), Shin'ya Tsukamoto, Tadanobu Asano (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Issey Ogata, Yoshi Oida, Yosuke Kubozuka, Nana Komatsu, Ryo Kase, Bela Baptiste.
RATING: 5 out of 10 rosary beads
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