BLITHE SPIRIT Weekly Commentary Jim Bowman, Editor & Publisher Oak Park IL April 10, 1996, PART TWO!

ALSO Two Cents and worth it!

Bravo "Braveheart"?

Is Mel Gibson the new Cecil B. De Mille? C.B. did the Biblical epics we have learned to watch at Easter time, especially "Ten Commandments" with Charlton Heston as Moses. He had a lock on the film epic. As a kid I took him for granted. His pictures passed religious muster, they were in technicolor, and they taught history. Shocked I was years later to read that their quality as moviemaking was routinely held in contempt: too obvious, wooden characters, quantity over quality, etc.

Now there's Oscar-winning "Braveheart" and the wonderful Mel, who employs so many actors. But already a non-admirer, America magazine film critic Richard Blake, calls "Braveheart" (3/9) a "cast-iron haggis." This cast iron would make the haggis inedible, to say the least, since haggis consists of sheep or calf innards boiled in the animal's stomach. Now if the stomach is cast iron . . . You get the picture. Blake has in his way called "Braveheart" a potboiler, which it is, populated for its first half hour with stage Scotchmen.

I can't say about the next two hours, because I walked out and got my money back from the obliging Lake Theater management. Yet another reason to shop Downtown Oak Park.

Bravo sans irony . . .

For "White Balloon," which just left the Lake. It's an Iranian picture featuring a marvelous seven-year-old girl and her brother, ten or so, and their efforts to retrieve a "500-note" (money) from beneath a grate. It's set in Tehran, without reference to Shah or Ayatollah or theocracy. The effects are meditative. Camera plays on features always to effect. There's lots of dialog. Once or twice I laughed but mostly was just fascinated and absorbed. The film was full of sidewalk characters, shopkeepers, passersby. It had a message about urban anonymity (I think) which landed so softly I didn't know it was there at first. The film's final, poignant image won't go away soon, nor do I want it to.

Seneca again, on anger again . . .

He is much taken with how anger can rule one's life. "There are cases enough everywhere. . . Rage will sweep you hither and yon . . . New provocations constantly arise." His solution, of course, is to have none of it. That's background for his next line, "Tell me, unhappy man, will you ever find time to love?"

What a line. Are you ever to be so involved in cherishing and nourishing your peeves and gripes that you will miss out on gaining friends, reconciling enemies, serving the community, etc.

Simple enough truths here, but part of the wisdom we have inherited from the likes of Seneca, who learned it from others, who learned it from others, etc.

Dissent on "African American" . . .

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks recently told Elgin High and Hoffman Estates junior high students she prefers "black" to "African American," which she said "rules out so many in our family," reports Literary License, newsletter of the Society of Midland Authors.

Among those ruled out, obviously, would be Africans, which leads to an interesting discussion. Don't we routinely call fellow Americans by their ethnic origins? Thus Irish-Americans are called Irishmen, Polish-Americans Polish, etc. So our black brothers are just Africans? Doesn't sound right, and I'm not about to start doing it.

Terms of acceptability change greatly, of course. "Negro" or "colored" were once standard terms of respect, and "black" wasn't. Then "Negro" was made to sound namby-pamby, and "black" -- sometimes capitalized -- became the going term, though I remember a mother telling me her six-year-old couldn't buy that, because she could see her skin was brown, not black. The same child considered a frequent white visitor to their home black, by the way. Why? Because black was coming to mean familiar, and that fit the white guy.

More recently, we hear "of color" as a good way to put it, as following "people" or "person" or "woman." Since Spanish-speaking people are generally part of the minority population here and "of color" is a catchall for those not white and Spanish-speaking people are often of recognizably different genetic origins, you hear "of color" applied to them.

In a bizarre application of that, "of color" has been applied, unthinkingly, to people from or in Spain! Thus the descendants of the conquistadors become colored people! What hath God wrought in the correct-expression arena!

Thanks . . .

. . . for the cards and letters. Keep 'em coming. Another deadline coming, say May 6, by which I have to hear from those who want to get this. Not those who already told me, of course. But new recipients, please let me know by May 6 if you want to keep getting this.

The 2-cent cost is waived. Nonetheless, let no person say this ain't worth two cents!