Jack has written several excellent blog posts about films he’s watched with Elena and John. Generally old ones, and often classics, some Disney. Some of these movies we loved in our youth stand up, and some do not. Jack has much less patience for bad movies than I do, so most of the movies he’s willing to spend an evening with are good, at least by the prevailing opinion of a trusted few.

Anyways, I rewatched part of The Prince of Egypt today while Roby was napping. That’s how I get away with watching so many not so great movies, I do them once the girls have gone to bed or while they’re napping. But this movie was not bad, this movie was excellent.

It starts out going 100 miles per hour and pretty much keeps that up the entire run time, or at least for the first half, which is what I got through during this particular nap.

I had a visceral memory of watching this movie on the floor on a CRT screen on the second floor of the first house I lived in in Burlington. I believe I watched it alone, and I recall it absolutely blew my mind then The beautiful songs and stunning artwork and the excitement of a supernatural story that purported to be actually TRUE, was stunning when combined. Unlike fantasy or science fiction or kids stuff it was a story that most adults knew and held to be true and important and worth knowing.

That that story was somehow more true than most fiction was fascinating, and the truth it was describing was pretty insane. That it landed at what was essentially the dawning of my existential concern, undeniably had an impact. I remember asking about that story and the Bible and loads of other things in around and about it and all of the answers were disappointing to an extent I could have never guessed.

They stayed disappointing for a long, long time. About twenty years, maybe more. I’m not sure exactly when I watched that film, but we can call it the beginning of disappointment. That was around when my older cousin came to visit I think, and I found some of her answers to be the most disappointing of all. She even took me to church, and wow, that was horrible. It’s not fault of hers or of that church, I’ve always been a pretentious bastard overly concerned with aesthetics, even when I was a tween, apparently.

All of these things that read as disappointment then feel more like seeds now. Should I be concerned or suspicious of my concern with aesthetics? Is it the icons that have drawn me to Orthodoxy? Did I only like The Prince of Egypt because the music was good and the art, too? Does that make it more true? Or just the same?

I think beauty makes a thing more true, at least some of the time. You can lie with beauty, but I don’t think it’s an essential part of it, you’ve just gotta be careful.

All true things are beautiful, but not all beautiful things are true. And if they aren’t beautiful, you’ve gotta look closer or harder or from a wider angle.

Look through Heaven’s Eye as the song goes.