Thursday, April 15, 2010

#95 The Seventh Seal: Doomed, doomed, doomed!

1957. dir. Ingmar Bergman, starring Max von Sydow, Bengt Ekerot, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Nils Poppe. Swedish with subtitles.

Seen it before? No.

Netflix now has streaming content on the Nintendo Wii. We got our disc yesterday and this was the movie we watched. The interface is much more Wii-ish than it is on the PS3. The picture quality is a little worse, but that was expected (since the Wii doesn't do HD.)

This movie takes place in medieval times, during the Black Plague. A knight (Max Von Sydow) is returning from the Crusades, and he encounters Death. He challenes Death to a chess match. Yep, just like Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. That's the aspect of the movie that everyone talks about, but actually that's only a small part of it. There's also some nonsense about a troupe of actors, one of whom runs off with the blacksmith's wife. There's a girl who's getting crucified for being a witch, and people whipping themselves for some reason.

The title of the movie comes from the book of Revelation:
And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
Lots of lengthy religious discussions here, about doomsday and the absence of God and so forth. Kind of longwinded. Not being religious myself, I didn't really get most of it.

Position on the list: 115
So I have a question: Why is the Book of Revelation in the Bible? I mean, think about it. Any time I've asked people how they picked which books were included in the Bible, they say, "well, these are the ones that are historically accurate." Putting aside whether that's true or not, if all of the stuff in Revelation is going to happen in the future, how do you know it's accurate?

No comments:

Post a Comment