[Gocamino] More Camino movies; Sil's book

[Rosina]

Hello you all,
"The Week" is a magazine that publishes a compilation of news and editorials, in summary form, from major U.S.A. and international media. In terrific time-saving form, it also contains reviews of books, exhibitions, TV programs, movies, etc.  and all sorts of interesting and entertaining information about all sorts of things.
This week's edition, dated Oct. 21, has writing about  the movie The Way. It reads:
"           THE WAY, directed by Emilio Estevez (PG13)  *** a father walks 500 miles in his dead son's footsteps.
While it may not be a great or urgent film, The Way is a pleasurable and "quietly positive" movie about a spiritual journey, said Roger 
Ebert in The Chicago Sun Times.  Martin Sheen stars as an elderly curmudgeon who decides to follow an ancient pilgrimage trail across Spanish mountain country  to scatter his son's ashes on the very path where the young man died. Sheen is directed by his own son Emilio Estevez, and in "a nice touch," Estevez plays the deceased son in the movie flashbacks. Despite early signs that we are in for a "rote" tale about the importance of seeking new horizons, the movie broadenbs into something more, said Tasha Robinson in the A.V.Club.  The fellow travelers whom Sheen encounters are burdened by personal issues that "run deep enough that they can't be wiped  clean with a simple ha[pily-ever-after moment."  The movie ends up being "slightly too long," said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post, But Sheen keeps it at all times "firmly grounded in emotional honesty." In his first feature-film lead in many years, the star of 1979's Apocalypse Now  is "simply terrific."     "




Sil's new book  "Your Camino" is pretty terrific itself.  Furthermore, the wealth of detailed attention to every possible eventuality in, and questions about, the Camino pilgrimage is astonishing, as is the infinitely practical advice and information given.
The book also contains vignettes of individual pilgrims who at some time wrote about a significant experience in the Camino,  a personal revelation or epiphany, or a very dear memory. One of these is a message I posted more than ten years ago about what transformed me from an unwilling, irritated and resentful quasi-chaperone,  emotionally blackmailed into going to northern Spain to keep an eye on a foolish and stubborn family member who somewhere somehow had decided to go and bicycle the Santiago Camino (which I have never even heard of). The thought of her bicycling away, in her Savannah-Georgia style shorts, blond pony tail flying in the air, amidst all those hot-blooded Spanish men was too much even f0r me and I went along planning to follow her, by car, while providing some much needed rest to my fifty-plus year old body. But I did resent  having  my fairly plush Manhattanite comfort disturbed by someone else's plans, and was mightily peeved.  While in Pamplona waiting for the bicycle to be assembled, etc, and giving jet-lag a chance to dissipate we went sight-seeing around the environs of Pamplona and eventually stopped at the Leyre monastery, located at the top of a wind-swept hill with immensily beautiful vistas all around and the solemnity of the interior of a Cathedral but in the open air of a windy mountain. We went into one of the monastery's two adjoining medieval churches, ostensibly to hear the gregorian chants for which the monks there are noted, but I, still ill-humored and resentful about having to make the trip, went into the church  just to sit down. But after a few minutes of the chants, the inner structure of my entire existence was dismanteled and thrown into utter emotional confusion. It turned out that the ceremony was in memory of 7 brethen monks that had been beheaded, in front of one another, in Algiers just a few years earlier. Through the ceremony it was disclosed that the monks could have left their Algerian monastery-school-clinic, and, in fact, had been urged by their abbott to do so,  but they knowingly and willingly stayed to meet their fate knowing what it would be. At the end of the ceremony the letters that the monks had written on the day of their execution were read at the church; thery were, and are, both heart-wrenching and challenging.  A day or so later almost mindlessly I got walking boots and a walking stick at SJPP and started up the mountain.  Many days later, after Sto. domingo de la Calzada,, I began to glimpse the shape of my Camino which has become clearer and clearer with the years.
Many books have been written about the monks' beheading, but I haven't had the fortitude to read them. Now the French have released a movie aboout them which is being shown world-wide; it is called "of God and Men", it has won all sorts of prices and is freely available in DVD. 
The religious order to which the monks belongued is the same order that sketched the Santiago Camino for us, from their french homeland to Santiago, with their foorsteps so very many centuries ago.
On a happier note, a new Brasilian movie about the Camino is enjoying a big commercial success in the movie houses of Brasil and of adjacent South American countries.  Its name could be freely translated as The Whereabouts of Happiness. It is sort-of a comedy about a couple whose marriage problems lead one of them to the Camino.  It was filmed mostly in the Camino itself by award-winning film makers, and, I am told, the views of it are breath-takingly beautiful. Reportedly, the film will be available in DVD in a few months.  Brasilian movies are hugely popular in Latin countried, both American and European, and when released in Dvd have Spanish, French or Italian subtitles.  A fee, however, have had English subtitles.  So, let's hope.
Hugs!

Rosina
ps. Some years ago my son, or somebody, fixed my computer so that ads, messages, or such from certain provenances do not get through.  No doubt owing to this convenience I did not receive the message(s) about which so many of you have written me. I do not know, nor care to know, what the contents might have been. But I am, indeed, flattered by your chivalrous concern.  How nice!