Le Tout Nouveau Testament

Le Tout Nouveau Testament (The Brand New Testament) is a film nicely established by its first line: "God is real, and he lives in Brussels." The premise is extended by the stipulation that God lives in a top-floor apartment, which he has never left since the beginning of time, with his wife and 10-year-old daughter (his son having snuck out in a well-documented episode and Gotten Into A Bit of Trouble With The Romans). He runs everything through an outdated computer in his bigger-on-the-inside home office. And "runs everything" really means everything: we see him devising weather disasters, the rule that "the other line always moves faster", and managing individuals' lives, all through this computer.

God is also kind of horrible, true to the Old Testament version of things. Corporal punishment, strict rules, no empathy with suffering. His daughter sneaks into his office, SMSes everyone on the planet with their exact date of death, changes the root password, and then escapes the apartment (Jesus told her that the washing machine has a secret tunnel down to the Earth!). When God (of course) follows her, to try to retrieve (1) his daughter, and (2) access to his omnipotent computer, he is confronted with the unpleasantnesses of the world that he devised. To great comedic effect. The directors, editors, and writers clearly want God to be an unsympathetic character, and they are successful. His sympathetic daughter, of course, seeks apostles while on Earth and has a scribe (homeless man) following her, writing a new testament. She does some miracles, just light ones --- doubling a sandwich, walking across a canal. Nothing showy, but played for laughs in contrast with God's clear lack of powers (he plunges into the canal, and is hungry, dirty, and eventually deported).

It was a neat movie, although it didn't contain as many laughs as I expected from the premise. Many of the apostles' stories (interwoven, of course, throughout the film) were lonely and bleak, and invited serious reflection in the audience. (The color palette, dominated by greys and rain, echoed this.) These were intercut with cute "news" segments showing ridiculous things, but the overall tone was more somber than expected. (I think I expected something more silly, like the tone of Amélie.)

I recommend.


This post's theme word is naches, "emotional gratification or pride, especially taken vicariously at the achievement of one's children." Not much naches is on display here.

Statuary at the Victoria & Albert

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a beautiful, well-lit, thoughtfully arranged collection of art and art-like objects. It breaks with the stereotypical joke about British museums: most pieces are accompanied by a title plaque which indicates their provenance. (British Museum, I'm looking at you: "basically an active crime scene." - John Oliver) The day was too beautiful to spend much of it indoors, but I did sneak in and poke around the astonishing collection of statuary and... statue-like things:

The scrolling scenes on the pillars tell a story.

The rooms containing these items were themselves pretty, although a bit toned-down and plain, I think to divert visual focus onto the art. Solid-colored walls, understated balcony railings, beautiful square skylight grid.

Door decorations, things to hang on the wall, and freestanding... art? of religious significance?

The pulpits, excised from the cathedrals and collected like medical specimens.

The museum entrance is luminously bright, with a giant open space. In the center of this space was hanging a special... piece. Not quite a chandelier, since it served no lighting function, but in the place a chandelier would go and of similar size, vertical style, and eye-catching details.

The view from below as our tentacly overlords dangle the bait.

I don't remember finding a title placard for this piece of magnificence, but I think of it simply as "default hair behavior without intervention". Yes, in blues and greens.

Level side view of the glassy fuzz of curls.

Across the street from the V&A sits the Natural History Museum, which sprawls over a much larger footprint and is completely and totally delightful. Again, since I was in London for The Single Sunny Day of 2015, I did not spend much time inside. But still... I spent several hours. It was very, very cool. I went on a quest for the whale skeletons --- large, but surprisingly difficult to locate in the museum's people-flow maze. Their full majesty was impeded by the extensive scaffolding supporting the scientists employed to clean and stabilize the whale skeletons, in what must be the coolest boring job title in the city: Blue Whale Rib Duster.

This open space filled with a fine lace of metal and wood.

This post's theme word is crepitate, "to make a crackling or popping sound." The suspended cetacean skeleton's crepitating boded ill for the giraffes and hippopotamuses below.