Movie Week

This year we decided to make the week between Christmas and New Year’s “Movie Week”, catching up on as many of the good movies that had come out as possible. While it was impossible to get to all those we wanted to see – we missed Invictus, Precious, and Up in the Air—I did see six movies during the week. Two of them were very good, three were okay, and one was absolutely awful.

The first movie of the week was “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” with Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. We were hoping to see Up in the Air, but it and It’s Complicated were both sold out (an experience we hadn’t had at our local multiplex for many years), so it was either The Morgans or Alvin and the Chipmunks. We should have chosen the latter. Within the first five minutes of the film, I wish I hadn’t heard about the Morgans. It was trite, it was predictable, it was stereotypical (some of the small western town stuff seemed downright insulting to me), and it was anything but romantic or funny. It was, in other words, a total waste of money and time. The best thing about the two hours spent in that show was the stale popcorn I ate, fresher than the ideas and jokes in the movie.

Movie number two was “It’s Complicated.” If there was one movie from the week that I’d say every woman over approximately forty who has ever been in a relationship that has ended should see if they want to just enjoy themselves, this movie would be it. (I’m not sure if this is a “old hen” flick or whether men might also like it.) There’s not much that’s deep or that stays with you for days afterwards, but the movie is both well-acted and funny. I laughed a lot and generally enjoyed every minute that I was sitting in the theater watching it.

Film number three was “Sherlock Holmes.” I’ve never been a big Holmes fan, though I had enjoyed seeing Crucifer of Blood with my mother on Broadway and with Danny at Purchase College and I’ve also had fun reading Laurie King’s Mary Russell mysteries (where she is Sherlock Holmes’ wife). The movie presents a rougher, less cultured, darker Holmes than I’d imagined him. I could have lived without so many fighting scenes—especially those done twice, first in slow motion then again at regular speed—but as a whole the film presented a good afternoon’s entertainment.

The next day we went to see “Avatar” in 3D. The movie lived up to just about everything I’d heard about it. I was captivated by the world that Cameron has created, the fact that the computer animated characters are actually real actors rather than just voice-overs makes a big difference in the reality of the world of Pandora, and the philosophy behind the film was well-presented and resonated with me. I was also glad that I saw the film in 3D. Having the plants blow in the breeze around me, the small jelly-fish-like spiritual beings float above my head, and the dragon-birds flying toward and away from me pulled me into Pandora in a way that a 2D viewing probably would not have. (It would almost be like the difference between having an avatar in Second Life and having one of the avatars that are created by the team in the film.) I suspect that Avatar successfully did several things. First, it revived the idea of seeing movies at the movie theater rather than viewing them at home. No home screen- not even a very large HD screen- is going to be big enough to capture all the wonder of this world. Ideally the film should be viewed at an IMAX. Second, it raises the standard of expectation for what computer games that come out in the next five to ten years should be like, since people are going to want games that allow them to be avatars in this much more engaging way than virtual worlds currently allow. And third, it offers what Joseph Campbell suggested that Stars Wars offered in the 70s and 80s—a new mythology with a spiritual message that speaks to those of us living in the 21^st century, in many ways offering language and experience that religious institutions should be offering but too often don’t.

We headed to the Jacob Burns a few days later to see “A Single Man”, based on Christopher Isherwood’s book that came out back thirty or more years ago, I think perhaps when I was in college. The film is well-done—one could almost get caught up in all the things that remind us what life was like in those days—the cigarettes, the rotary-dial phone, the cars, the children’s toys—and, as would be expected given the storyline, depressing. It was a good reminder of what life as a gay man would have been like in the 70s.

The last film I saw was "2012". It was exactly what it has been touted as being—a film that is meant to entertain you through calamity after calamity. It’s improbable, it’s got lots of action, and it’s got heroes and anti-heroes (all of who meet the fate they should meet). What I expected from it as I began to watch it was exactly what I had gotten as the credits rolled, nothing amazing but a decent action film.

Wild Things?

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen a few bad movies (Bright Star, for example, which I thought would never end) and a few mediocre ones (Whip It and Coco Before Chanel), but the movie to which I’d been looking forward was Where the Wild Things Are.

The book was one I’d read to my kids when they were little and I’d actually even enjoyed the video of it (made using pictures from the book) and In the Night Kitchen that they’d watched over and over, so I was excited to hear Maurice Sendak say that the movie was true to the book and that he was pleased with the overall results of the picture.

Saturday evening we went to see the film. My reaction to it was mixed. I thought that the way in which the Wild Things were brought to life in the film was amazing. The technology used meant they each developed a unique personality and appearance while holding true to Sendak’s drawings. That was a big plus for me, since it was great fun to see them “brought to life.” And the individual actors who voiced the Wild Things also did a great job strengthening the individuality of each.

On the other hand, there were things I definitely didn’t like about the film. The first was that each Wild Thing was given a name. A name is something that tames, that gives the entity knowing the name power over the one whose name is known. A Wild Thing doesn’t need and shouldn’t want a name, it seems to me. And then, though the names weren’t used in traditional gender ways, giving them very human sounding names—Carol, KW, Eli—made the naming seem even less appropriate for a WILD creature.

There were two other additions to the book’s storyline that I didn’t like. The first was that, instead of being sent to his room for acting wild and then having the room change into another place, Max runs away from his mother when she tries to get him to stop what he’s doing. We actually see her running after him street after street, as he gains an advantage and eventually loses her. And, at the end of the movie, when Max returns from his journey, we again see her at home, frantic as she waits for him. The film made me sympathize with Max’s mother (not necessarily a bad thing) in a way that I never had while reading the book. But it also suggested that running away from your parents when they ask you to stop doing something inappropriate can be a good thing. The other thing that displeased me was an addition to the storyline made after the Wild Rumpus, when the Wild Things want something fun to do. Max orders them to have a dirt-clod war, in which each team bombs the other with large pieces of dirt. In the process, one of the Wild Things gets hurt, but that’s largely ignored because everyone else is enjoying throwing the dirt. The addition seemed both unnecessary—why have such violence added to a wonderful story—and a bad precedent for a children’s film.

Angels and Demons

            The Friday it opened I went with some of my friends from Drew to see the film Angels and Demons.  It’s a movie in which I had a lot of interest since I’d used the book as a “text” for several years as part of a unit on science and religion.  I’d had the students sort out truth from fiction in the story and then debunk the parts that weren’t true, discovering what the real truths behind the false facts were.  

            The good news and the bad is that the film has done some real editing and revising of the book.  It escapes what I think is the major flaw of the novel—its going downhill in the last third of the story by getting more and more unbelievable.  In the novel, for example, Brown has Langdon jump out of a helicopter that is very high up in the air without a parachute.  Improbably Langdon manages not just to survive but to land safely and conveniently in a river that allows him to get where he needs to go quickly.  The film eliminates that unbelievable situation with no cost to the basic storyline. Langdon just doesn’t go up in the helicopter at all.  The ending seems a bit more believable because of such editing. (Of course, the whole book is unbelievable because antimatter wouldn’t provide any of the threat that the film suggests it does, but it’s easy to lay that fact aside in order to enjoy the film.) 

Also in the interest of making a better film, a lot of the longer dialogues throughout the book are eliminated.  That includes the dialogues toward the beginning of the book between Vittoria and the priest-scientist  (who is also her father in the novel) who dies early on in the story and some of the dialogues between Vittoria and Langdon. Most of these dialogues are focused on the positive relationships that Vittoria sees existing between science and religion along with explanations of the ways in which the interweaving of the two have deepened and enriched her life.  While the dialogues wouldn’t work well in an action film—they’d cause long “talking heads” scenes—they’re part of what I found that made the book rewarding for my students.  Without them, the only relationship between religion and science that comes through in the film is negative one between Galileo and his colleagues and the Catholic Church.  While my students quickly learned that—as Margaret Wertheim points out so clearly in her book Pythangoras’ Trousers—this understanding of what happened at the Galileo trial is one that was created in the 19^th century but didn’t exist at the time of Galileo himself or for several hundred years afterwards.

The end result of all this editing is that the film makes for a better story than the book does.  And for those of us who have been to Rome, it's also fun to revisit the various places as the actors race around Rome going from one Bernini work to another. But the film wouldn’t work as well for an interesting exploration of attitudes to religion and science over the centuries.  For that, we’ll have to stay with the book instead.

Two For the Show

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a chance to see three new movies. One was well done, one was superb, and one was drawn out and depressing.



I can’t objectively critique the film Doubt since as I watched it I constantly compared it to the Broadway play. While most of the major lines seemed the same, the movie was able to “fill out” a lot of the scenes in a way that plays can’t, providing subtlety (or in some circumstances blatancy) to the unresolved questions of the main characters’ personalities and actions. Streep and Hoffman were both excellent in their parts (no surprise there!). Streep’s portrayal of Sister Aloysius has both more depth (thanks to extra scenes where we see Streep caring for another nun going blind and leading the sisters in a discussion around the dinner table) and less depth (the very last line that Aloysius utters is spoken much more emotionally—and ergo much less effectively—by Streep, who plays Aloysius as the typical stereotypical nun) than the Sister Aloysius we met when Cherry Jones portrayed her on stage. And I suppose that technically the ‘doubt’ that was left unresolved in the play about what kind of person Father Flynn really is was still unresolved in the film, though the background scenes—the reactions of the boys waiting to go into the classroom to Father Flynn, the face of Donald as he responds to Father Flynn’s comments, homilies, and comforts, and the interchanges in the gym between the boys and the priest—tip the scales more heavily in one direction than the play did. So, while I think I preferred the play to the movie, the film version was still well worth seeing.


Milk is the best biopic I’ve seen in years, or perhaps ever. While I remember a bit of the news around Harvey Milk’s election and then death—especially the Twinkie defense that we studied in law school (though I don’t remember any implications then that White himself might have been gay)—I’d never known a lot of the details about his life and role in politics. The film sets the stage for Milk’s story with actual footage of raids on gay clubs taken in the 60s and 70s works well, drawing viewers in. Sean Penn is amazing in the lead role and probably deserves an Academy Award for his portrayal. Throughout the movie, I was reminded of how much things have changed, e.g. almost all the folks speaking for gay rights then were men. But I was also painfully aware as the film proceeded that, compared with the civil rights victories of women, African-Americans, and Latinos since the 70s, there’s been hardly any movement in civil rights for gays and lesbians.



I’d wondered, each time I saw the trailers, why more of a storyline wasn’t presented for Seven Pounds. Having seen it, I now know why. Had the plot been revealed in previews or trailers, I doubt anyone would have actually gone to see it. Will Smith is his usual self, playing a typical Will Smith type role. I felt like we were seeing another more depressed, less truly heroic version of the character in I Am Legend. Fairly early in the film, when the jelly fish is set up in his hotel room, the sad direction that the story is going to go is clear and you just sit there waiting for the whole thing to happen and be over with. Even the ethical issues that I’d guess those responsible for the film were trying to raise don’t even make the wait for the end worth it. I just kept thinking “I wonder if should go to get more popcorn” so that the two hours sitting there weren’t a total waste.

Ha-Sodot

Friday evenings we went to see Ha-Sodot. It’s a film set in Safed, Israel, which Avi Nesher has used to give it lots of shots of beautiful scenery for the background to the story. The story itself focuses on a midrasha where the young Orthodox students live and study Talmud. while in many cases also searching for prospective husbands. We meet several of the students attending and learn a bit—though only a bit—about each of their reasons for making a choice to attend—be it to learn more about a newly rediscovered religion, to avoid a marriage not desired, to find a prospective husband, or to—if it ever became possible—become a woman rabbi. The story gets more complicated as two of the young women—an unlikely pair to begin with—are sent to help an older woman from the town who has become critically ill. What starts off as help with grocery shopping and house cleaning quickly begins to interweave with spiritual help. Kabbalistic rituals (or pseudoKabbalistic rituals, since many are concocted specifically for the situation that has presented itself) and pratices begin to take over the lives of the three and lead them to a series of secrets (thus the title).



The dialogues throughout the film switch back and forth between Hebrew and French. My French was up to what was being said, but I was appalled to find that my Hebrew has gotten so weak that I could only pick up the most simple exchanges without looking at the subtitles. And, because lots of the scenes are dialogue-laden, keeping up with the subtitles while watching some of the complicated visuals is asking a lot of American audiences.


While I found some of the scenes with Fanny Ardant, who plays the ill, older woman, weak, the movie as a whole was well-done and raised interesting issues and questions. How would, for example, women these days adapt the Kabbalah to their modern lives? How would well-educated modern Orthodox teens respond to personal relationships between women and between Jews and non-Jews? And, though I’m sure it wasn’t true for any of the other people in the movie theater that evening, the question that was most interesting was how many of these midrasha exist in modern Israel that are pushing for and training young women to be ordained as Rabbis?

The Dark Knight

On Saturday I went to see The Dark Knight. I went hesitantly because, while I’d heard the great reviews about Heath Ledger as the Joker, I’ve shied away from DC-based action films in recent years. Ultimately, while I thought the movie was way too long, it was otherwise a great action film (so, so much better than Wanted, which we’d seen several weeks before). Not only was Ledger wonderful, but I also enjoyed the way that the Harvey Dent/Two-Face character was woven into the story. (I knew I recognized Dent’s name from the comics, but –despite the lucky coin being tossed around several times before in the film, it wasn’t until his face actually was burned that I realized it was because he was Two-Face.) Despite all this, can I say I loved The Dark Knight? I can’t.

The reason I didn’t love it once again became clear to me when I was leaving the theater and a friend with whom I’d seen the film said something along the lines of “Now that’s what I want to do… become the Dark Knight of (an organization we both belong to). Or even better, how about we both do that…” I just said “I don’t have any desire to be a knight of any kind” and let it go but it’s that knightly kind of feeling that the film stirs up in people that makes me less than love it.

For, just as I lamented when folks loved the most recent Harry Potter film, knights are virtuous examples of people who are superheroes, vanquishing evil by fighting the good fight, all to restore the status quo. Knights divide the world dualistically into good and bad, winners and losers, right and wrong, just as Batman and Harvey Dent did in the film, aiming to lock up all the evil criminals and throw away the key. And knights are more (and therefore less) than human—always on guard against evil, always living true to principle and absolute truth, always focusing on slaying whoever/whatever the dragon of the day may be and always keeping one’s self heroic and separate.

I’m not at all interested in that. I don’t see the world in those terms and no longer aspire in the least to be or become a knight in any cause or group (though I have to admit that in my teens I did). None of those who are heroes to me are knights, though society again and again tries to clean them up and make them such. Instead I’m interested in those who are more interested in struggling along with the people—good and bad—because they realize that we’re all a mixture of the two--, those who aim not to contain evil but to bring everyone together into a better future, those who put people above principles, and those who remain very, very human throughout it all.

I want to remember and follow in the way of the humanity of Gandhi, who despite poorly treating his wife and neglecting the education of his kids, still managed to think through and help put satyagraha into practice as a way to approach imperialisms of all kinds. I respect and hope to learn in my life from Martin Luther King Jr. who was no knight, but a flawed and wounded hero who spent the last years of his life not just dreaming a sentimental dream of integration, but searching, stumbling, experimenting and groping his way toward his wondrous Riverside Church speech and a life committed to working against materialism, racism, and militarism
and the very flawed but courageous non-knight John Kennedy who never really worked for a knightly Camelot, but almost brought us to nuclear war before turning and taking steps to move away from US imperialism and toward the end of the Cold War. (Just think of his speech at American University if you want to see the human Kennedy giving up knightly thinking and wresting with what it would mean to turn toward peace.)

Knightly thinking labels people and forces flawed but good people like Harvey Dent to become Two Faces when they can’t quite live up to their own principles and the principles they foist on others. I want to follow in the way of the least knightly person I know, Jesus of Nazareth, who cared deeply about those around him but refused a knightly role when Satan offered it; who in his humanity struggled with and fell short of God’s radical principles of hospitality and inclusion of all, needing to be reminded of God’s ever-available love by the least likely of his day, a marginalized poor Canaanite woman; who never seems to have used a knightly image in any of his parables, instead speaking about gardens and plants and birds and people who are a mixture of good and bad in his stories.

So go see the Dark Knight if you’re in the mood for a good action film. But as you do so remember how how much of a danger there is in seeing the world from a knightly viewpoint or taking on the martyr role that Batman assumes at the end of the film. After all, if we could just eliminate knightly thinking, there'd be more than enough work for all of us flawed two-faced humans to do together to move in the direction of God’s reign of love and peace!

Persepolis and Graphic Novels

On Monday we went to see Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s animation of her four graphic novels that came out in France starting 2000 and then were translated and spread around the world. (English translations of the first two novels came out in 2003 and 2004.) Worldwide, the film is controversial. While winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in 2007, Persepolis has been strongly condemned as Islamophobic by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some other critics have accused Satrapi of claiming to be something she's not. To me though, the film seemed a wonderful combination of autobiography and history lesson, describing Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran (during which the Shah was overthrown, the Islamic Revolution came into power, and Iran fought a war with Iraq), her high school years in Austria, her return to Iran (during which she went to college, got married, and then divorced) and her move to France (where she’s lived in self-imposed exile since). And, because it tells such a personal story, it’s also able to convey emotions—the bewilderment a child must feel in the contradictions between an open-minded home life and a repressive public life, for example—that most material we read on the period misses.

The movie does a nice job of capturing the feeling of the graphic novels, perhaps because Satrapi herself was so intimately involved with its production. Some of the more specific political comments found in the novels, such as those made about Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat when the Shah was overthrown and looking for a place to go into exile, were eliminated from the film—in the interest of time or for some other reason? Or perhaps it was the film producers resisting the temptation to use the story as a piece showing who was right or who suffered most? Instead Satrapi’s main focus in the novels-- the cost, consequences, and time that change takes and the importance of being aware of ourselves – stay center stage.

I also found myself hoping that films such as this will allow graphic novels to begin to take their rightful place in the world with other literature rather than being dismissed as high-falutin’ comics. As Satrapi herself said in an interview “Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.” Already some colleges are beginning to catch on to this. Hampshire College, for example, assigned Persepolis as their first year students’ common reading experience text this past fall. And several other universities—including the College of New Jersey, University of Connecticut, and George Mason University—have used the novels in women’s study courses.

I’ve got to ponder the significance of the title a little more. I know that Persepolis was the capital city of the Persian Empire, that Alexander the Great basically rode in and destroyed it, and that its ruins survive today, but I’m not yet sure how to connect that with Satrapi’s novels.

One Down, One Up

On Friday evening I went to see the movie Lions for Lambs, the film Robert Redford directed which stars (along with Redford) Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. Reviews I’d read had agreed that it was heavy on a liberal view of the war against terrorism, but had given ranged in evaluations from it’s being “a well-made movie” asking “many important questions” to it’s being a “preachy, immobile” film. What I was hoping for in the film was that it would begin to examine the issues with a depth beyond the two party Republican-Democrat, hawk-dove position – either something more along the lines of a “Wag the Dog” type film or a new way to approach the current political situation.

What Lions for Lambs turned out to be was more of a series of talking heads –Cruise (a young conservative) lecturing Streep, Redford (playing a college professor) lecturing a student—with some scenes showing an attack on Afghanistan interspersed, all in an attempt to deliver a tired, liberal message that has already been presented too many times. The acting wasn’t great. Cruise didn’t even stand the way those who have graduated from West Point do, much less present any depth to his conservative position. And when Redford asked the student he was lecturing in his office why the young man had stopped attending class and why he wasn’t more actively involved in the political science discussions and in volunteering, I kept wanting to answer for him “because you’re a rambling, boring old fool who has no connection with the realities of today’s world and so why would I waste my energy on you or what you’re suggesting I do!” Each time Redford took a breath and began a new part of the (one-sided) conversation, I had all I could do to hold myself in my chair rather than, on behalf of the student, walking out of the lecture and the theater.

Luckily, as I left the movie theater, I kept in mind that on Saturday afternoon I would be going down to Manhattan’s Second Stage Theater to see Peter and Jerry, a play in which Edward Albee pairs two of his one acters—Homelife, a piece written in 2001, with Albee’s first real play The Zoo Story (perhaps my all-time favorite Albee work, though much more recently written The Goat is a close runner up), written in 1958. Albee and his caustic wit would surely cure me of the blasé feeling I carried away from Lions for Lambs.

Homelife in many ways seemed to me a toned down version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a husband (Peter) and wife (Ann) politely exploring how their lives spent in an Upper West Side bourgeois setting have been civilized, predictable, complacent, and—when push comes to shove- much less than satisfactory, at least for the wife. Ann explains to her husband that he is "gentle, and thoughtful, and honest, and good -- oh, that awful word!” and that she yearns once in a while to experience the chaotic, animal madness she hopes still survives somewhere inside this bland, nice man she’s been with for years. Albee means for Homelife to explain and deepen the character of the “vegetable” Peter who is fairly silent through most of The Zoo Story. While I’ve never felt the need for such an explanation—leaving that to the details Albee provided in the Zoo Story such as the pipe and Peter’s job publishing texts had always seemed enough for me—it makes what was a subtext of the older play much more explicit.

Does it work? It does, though Homelife is much weaker than the strong writing in The Zoo Story. And, though Bill Pullman (who I thoroughly enjoyed back in 2002 as the lead in The Goat, playing Peter in both acts) and Joanna Day (Ann) are both excellent actors, Dallas Roberts as Jerry takes the day. At one point during the beginning of his story-telling of “Jerry and the Dog”, the cell phone of someone in the audience went off and Roberts stopped, keeping up the energy of his semi-psychotic, prowling character while glaring toward the sound until the ringing stopped. Because of Roberts’ powerful acting and the much more highly charged interactions in The Zoo Story, Act 2 of Peter and Jerry is what makes the performance memorable and worthwhile!

The Darjeeling Limited

Late yesterday afternoon we went to see the film The Darjeeling Limited, a truly weird though entertaining film by director Wes Anderson. Before going, I had my doubts about whether I’d enjoy it since I’d really disliked Anderson’s earlier films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Darjeeling had a lot of the same actors playing in it that had been in the other Anderson films, including Owen Wilson, Bill Murray and Angelical Huston. The theme even struck me as similar –one more attempt keep a melancholic tone while dealing humorously with and becoming free of one’s psychological and familial baggage. (In this film, the brothers do that literally toward the end of the film.) While I can’t say I loved TDL, I did enjoy it more than the earlier movies, partly because it seemed like Anderson had done a bit less navel-gazing in this piece—or maybe it’s just because I enjoyed seeing the Indian scenery enough that it balanced out a lot of the juvenile pepper-spray and poisonous snake jokes.

Harry Potter and his Knights

Kathy, Becca, and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night. I enjoyed it more than the book itself because it didn’t have all the annoying sections with Sirius’ house elf in it. But one of the things that struck me about the film—and I guess about the whole series—is how much it sees the world, using progressive political analyst George Lakoff’s terms, in a modern “winners and losers” type scenario rather than in a postmodern “challenge and response” way. Or to put it in the terms Cass Dale used over the last several weeks at Drew, Rowling has created a series with lots of knights and very few gardeners in it. (The only gardeners I found in last night's film were the Weasley twins and perhaps Luna.) And, as a gardener myself who has seen two many knights from my work in the legal field, I wish a book/film series would come along that was as creative and all engrossing as Harry Potter but was focused on problem solving rather than slaying the enemy.
Of all the books in the series so far, Order of the Phoenix makes this winners and losers worldview the clearest. Sirius Black tells Potter and the Weasley kids that Voldemort “has been recruiting heavily and we have been attempting to do the same.” Shortly afterwards Harry and his friends begin training for what they title “Dumbledore’s Army.” This dualism is not something that I could warm up to in biblical books like Revelation or the Johannine epistles. It’s the reason that, while I enjoyed the Star Wars series with its forces of light and dark, I’d prefer Star Trek with its focus on exploring frontiers anyday. And so, while I love the creative focus on magic, mythical animals, and another world to explore in Harry Potter, the dualism is not something I particularly like in Rowling’s series either.
As I was leaving last night’s movie, which ends with a great deal of emphasis put on the fact that either Voldemort must kill Harry or vice versa because of the “prophecy”, I walked out hoping that in the last book, Rowling will surprise us all by having a return to principles of the heart rather than to principles of good and evil, with compassion and grace as the redeeming forces. I know it’s a long shot, but would that, when volume seven is released next week, we learn that in her conclusion Rowling has spun a solution that moves everyone ahead together into the future rather than a solution in which one force conquers the other, the two are left regrouping for a latter day, or the battle of good and evil continues.