"Catholics believe in forgiveness, Jews believe in guilt."
It takes me a while to get around to seeing things sometimes...for example, I just recently, through the magic of Netflix, finally watched the cable miniseries Angels in America, based on the vastly acclaimed play by Tony Kushner, and featuring an all-star cast including Al Pacino and Meryl Streep! Streep plays the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the mother of a closeted gay Mormon son, AND a liver-spotted Jewish rabbi delivering a eulogy! And PACINO...my God, what a loathsome character, but my GOD, what a brilliant personification of that loathsome character! Angels in America is full of hallucinatory vignettes that verge on the operatic - Emma Thompson tearing the roof off a sick man's bedroom and appearing in angelic form, Sarah Jessica Parker escaping the harshness of reality in her imagination's version of Antarctica (with Jeffrey Wright of Basquiat as her gum-chewin' tour guide to a Valley of the Frozen Dolls). It's a pretty grandiose conceit, and more than a little self-congratulatory, starting with the AIDS epidemic in the early '80s and ending with a hallowed vision of those same virus-stricken homosexual men as harbingers of some sort of holy work of God (if I'm understanding the ending properly), leading humankind towards a greater sense of solidarity and compassion. (It hasn't entirely worked out that way, has it? Well, to some extent it has.) I'm certainly glad I finally caught up with it, though. And I feel sorry for people who had to wait for each separate episode to be released back when it first came out!
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