This Netflix film has a star-studded cast, some of whom are playing against type. But it’s fun to watch everyone having a good time. The critics maintain that the books upon which the film is based are even better. I suspect that’s very true.
Like all good murder mysteries, the clues have to be followed, and we the viewers must keep our wits about us, until it’s finally over and done with. Then we get to see them live happily ever after…
That finality seems to be a hint that there won’t be a follow-up film. As a stand-alone film, this one is satisfying. So, if you want to be entertained for a couple of hours, definitely watch this one. Enjoy.
Let’s face facts: I’m a sucker for dog stories. This one was suggested by a family member, We watched it on Netflix, last night.
Just to give you a larger slice of the story, watch this clip:
You may have heard during that last clip that this film is based in Seattle. That’s code for actually being filmed in Vancouver, B.C. The first visual clue I had was a shot of the seawall in Stanley Park. So this is yet another Canadian-based Hollywood film.
Enzo is the Golden Retriever’s name. When Denny and Eve have their daughter, they named her Zoe. Hmm. I once said that if I were a dog, I’d be a Golden Retriever. Well, not so much these days. But in my younger years that fit my personality very well. So I thought that the twist at the end was significant.
I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s definitely in the realms of possibility.
Where has the time flown? I remember her youthful innocence, so well. (And I’m not referring to Janis Ian.) On Monday, Miss B. will be 17! Can you believe it? I remember how it felt to be that age, way back when, but the current state of play in Canada and elsewhere is that young people are still at risk.
Of what? you ask: sexual exploitation. The key seems to be that the sexual partner must not be more than two years older than the younger person. Only when the individual reaches 18 in Canada does that distinction fall away.
Like all teenagers, Miss B. is trying to skirt her parents’ rules and regulations, which means that she hides her real intentions behind the usual instances of going out with “friends.” Her dad is wise to all the ruses she uses, having raised two teenagers before her. Unbeknownst to her, he can track her cellphone. That means he can tell, for example, if she’s in a car being driven over the speed limit, just by comparing starting and ending locations and calculating the time it takes for the journey. Miss B. didn’t realize that. The other way of control is just reviewing her online usage. You can tell what is on a person’s mind just by seeing what their internet searches are. Does that seem excessive to you?
At this delicate age, everyone thinks they’re grown up. That’s probably Nature’s way of ensuring the continuation of the species, but these days it may seem too early to be experiencing ‘life’.
As always, the parents have to protect the ‘child’ from making a mistake that may harm their life. But when is it time to loosen the family ties, even just a little? Hmm.
We have only just started watching season 2 of this mini-series on the CBC. It has a weird twist for a plot: If something has ‘gone wrong’ you can go back to the past and correct it, for a credit card payment.
But what if that doesn’t go to plan, either? Seems you have to phone again, and the weird twins will come to your home and carry back to the past, again? Very expensive proposition, for sure.
The moral of the story is that, no matter how many times you think you can fix things, in the end, you really can’t. Take my word for it: karma is a b*tch.
She’s Heather from Texas, he’s Jack from New Zealand. They’re opposites: she has her future mapped out; he’s living for today. (She’s probably a Capricorn and he’s probably a Cancer, just sayin’.)
They meet on an overnight train ride through Spain. Their only thing in common is that they’re both reading “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity. His spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, demonstrates his “Iceberg Theory” of writing.
Wikipedia
(That’s a hint, folks.) Heather (and her companion girlfriends, Amy and Connie) are supposed to have one last day in Barcelona before flying back to the States to resume their lives. Jack persuades Heather to stay for a while longer. Then they embark on a two week odyssey, using Jack’s great grandfather’s post-WWII journal as their guide. The film turns into a travelogue, of sorts.
What made this Prime Video film so special was the young lady who plays Heather. Madelyn Cline, looks like Susan’s granddaughter Morgan. Every time Ms. Cline smiled, our hearts lit up.
But the road to true love never runs smoothly. Along the way, everyone has to find their own true path in life.
As a post script, I must admit to loving the scenery, and especially the views of the stops along the way. I’ve been to Barcelona, and I think I’ve passed Santa Pau on the road from France. It’s all so familiar to me, even in retrospect.
I’m not being facetious: my ‘initiation’ into the Inner Guide Meditation was totally self-directed, while retaining the instructions from the author of the book.
What the Sun wanted from me was to be mindful of his existence every day. What he gave me was a skeleton key. The reason for the key was to unlock secrets of the universe. He placed it in my heart and that was to remind me that I had to ‘feel’ how others feel, in order to help them with healing.
I came away from the experience as if a light had been turned on in my body.
This book by Whitley Strieber is in the form of a dialogue between himself and only a Canadian man who doesn’t pay taxes. That seemed a strange detail. His name might be Michael, or it might be Legion. Hmm. In format, it is identical to Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God”. That’s a clue, folks.
Several sections of this dialogue seem to refer to other publications or films that I’ve seen over the years.
To remain a separate being after death, there must exist the ability to maintain the structure of the radiant body by the action of attention. This is why we have been so insistent that you meditate. Otherwise, we will lose you when you die and we don’t want that. If a being cannot self-maintain after the elemental body no longer does it automatically, it is absorbed into the flux of conscious energy. You go into the light, as it were.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 48). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
What of Jesus? What of Buddha? Those are two different, but intertwined, questions. First, you must understand that the teachings of Buddha had reached the community of Hellenized Jews in which Jesus lived. So they form a part of Christianity. He was a spiritual revolutionary who brought a message of mercy and compassion and the dignity of man to a world of unimaginable terror.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 61). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I have written of it—evolutionary pressure. It explains what’s being done to us—the theatrical appearance of UFOs in the sky, the assaults on us by night, the ferocious official secrecy, the collapse of the environment—all of it. It is all part of the plan of your evolution. Pisces, the little fish, will be poured out onto dry land by the stream of Aquarius. Then, how will you live? How will you breathe? You will make a leap of evolution. You will square the circle or die.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 76). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
An attempt is being made to induce an evolutionary leap. Only desperation will do this. There will come a time when your planet is dying and you are dying, and you will see these aliens all around you. But they will not help you, no matter how hard you beg, and you will beg, believe me. Their inaction, however, is their help. As agonizing as it is for them to see you suffer, they do it out of compassion, for without it you will not succeed in the mission of this age, which is to open the elemental body to ecstasy. Mankind, over the next two thousand years, is destined either to go extinct or ascend. The elemental body will become transparent to the radiant body, which will shine with the light of God.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (pp. 82-83). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
You cannot bear to be seen or to see the glory around you, which seems to you like a searing fire, so you turn inward, shielding yourself as a man would shield himself from the burning sun. But you cannot escape. For you, the fire of ecstasy is the fire of agony.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 93). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
How can they be exploited? Material of souls is harvested and used to make intelligent machines. An intelligent machine is a being without the potential to be free. In this sense, it is not alive. It must act as it acts.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 117). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
What happens then? By then, you must have perfected techniques like mass prayer. If a human being prays, a voice is raised. But a million human beings make an even greater voice, and if all pray in the same hour, the whole universe will hear you. But remember this: in that terrible hour, you will be greatly afraid. It will be difficult for one voice to be raised, let alone the billions. But between now and then, mass prayer can be used to change the world. It isn’t necessary to pray the same words or to the same god. But only to raise your voices. There is a music, then, in the world of the soul, a fine music.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 128). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
How do they get them? Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The dead man, exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon, he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most hidden and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (pp. 128-129). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Am I marked by the sins of my nation as well as my own, or the sins of mankind? You are marked by what you know should mark you, and no matter how much in this life you tell yourself you should not be marked, your soul’s conscience is never wrong. When you die, you see yourself truly. Better to see the truth now, when change is possible, than find out later that you must remain strapped to the wheel of life. The longer you delay your ascension, the longer you deny God the chance to taste of your ecstasy. When you sin, you hurt yourself, but more than that, you are cruel to all the rest of us. You are cruel to God.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (pp. 140-142). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Upon waking up later that same morning, Whitley Strieber said to himself:
“That was the best conversation I’ve ever had.”
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 155). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There’s nothing new under the sun. There are thoughts unthought and words unspoken. For example, I have a message for you about the next age, and the one just passed.
Strieber, Whitley. The Key: A True Encounter (p. 42). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I was alerted to this book by a retrospective YouTube video from Whitley Strieber:
Here’s what I read on amazon.ca:
From the bestselling author of Communion comes the mysterious true story of how an unknown visitor barged into Strieber’s hotel room late one night–and imparted extraordinary lessons in personal development and man’s fate that challenge us to rethink every assumption about the meaning of life.
At two-thirty in the morning of June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber was awakened by somebody knocking on his hotel room door. A man came in, and everything he said was life-altering.
This is the unsettling and ultimately enlightening narrative of what happened that night. Strieber was never really sure who this strange and knowing visitor was–a “Master of Wisdom”? A figure from a different realm of consciousness? A preternaturally intelligent being? He called him the Master of the Key. The one thing of which Strieber was certain is that both the man and the encounter were real.
The main concern of the Master of the Key is to save each of us from self-imprisonment. “Mankind is trapped,” the stranger tells Strieber. “I want to help you spring the trap.” In a sweeping exchange between Strieber and the stranger–which takes the form of a classical student- teacher dialogue in pursuit of inner understanding–the unknown man presents a lesson in human potential, esoteric psychology, and man’s fate. He illuminates why man has been caught in a cycle of repeat violence and self-destruction–and the slender, but very real, possibility for release.
In its breadth and intimacy, The Key is on par with contemporary metaphysical traditions, such as A Course in Miracles, or even with the dialogues of modern wisdom teachers, such as D.T. Suzuki and Carl Jung.
Well, how could I resist?
High strangeness, indeed: Venus is inconjunct with Pluto. (That’s probably why Whitley rang his wife, Anne, the very same morning after waking up to get her to be witness to the fact that this event did happen, even if it was months and then years before he got it finally in a print form for the public. She was the push he needed to remind himself that it truly did happen and that he should write it down.)
The Key to the whole adventure was that Venus (being conjunct Whitley’s Venus in Taurus) making that inconjunct significant in Whitley’s life. The other interactive inconjunct links Whitley’s Saturn with the event’s Uranus. It seems to me that a small doorway between two different worlds was opened that night.
I’ll be reading this book and reviewing it in a later post. But for now, let’s enjoy the fact that nothing is accidental, and that there really is nothing new under the sun.
I’ve been following Suranne Jones’ acting career since her early days on Coronation Street. She’s come a long way since then.
To get to play the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom takes some acting chops, especially under duress. Abigail Dalton has to make an impossible decision. The Iron Lady would have been proud.
I won’t spoil the plot for you, but suffice it to say that, as some reviewers have said, this show is improbable and too fast-paced to give you time to see it that way. It’s a wild ride, and the story’s ‘traitors’ think they’re ‘patriots’. Where have we seen that before? Oh, right: January 6th.
Coming in at under four hours, this Netflix show will entertain you, of that I have no doubt. But will you believe it? That’s another question entirely.
Imagine, if you will, being accused of murdering a flat mate, just because you were the one to discover strange details in your rented property before you rang the police. In a nutshell, this happened to Amanda Knox in 2007. Was she always going to have this happen to her? I think so.
Evidently, this birth time is accurate. There are four inconjuncts, two of which (Neptune and Pluto) form a Yod pointing at her Gemini Ascendant. The other two inconjuncts link Mercury EXACTLY with the Midheaven and the Sun with Saturn. This is definitely not accidental. There is a karmic plan at work, here. Even the placement of Saturn in her 7th House of “Open Enemies” seems timed to her legal issues.
So, Did She Have Anything to Do with the Murder of Meredith Kercher?
At first glance, I would suggest that her role as the flat mate who discovered that ‘something’ was wrong, that fateful afternoon of November 2, 2007, is all that was required. But the close conjuncts between Amanda’s Moon and the event Jupiter, Amanda’s Uranus and the event Pluto, Amanda’s Pluto and the event Sun, and finally the event Mars being between Amanda’s Sun and Mercury seem to prompt me to say that she was ‘intended’ to be involved in the periphery of the murder, without direct participation. In other words, this would impact on her life, even though she was innocent of any crime.
Have you ever wondered why Trump never listens to advisors? He isn’t a narcissist, as everyone thinks he is; he’s just someone with a coping mechanism to shut out others’ opinions and thoughts so he can concentrate on thinking his own thoughts. He just ‘talks and talks and talks’.
No filters, no scripts; just the man and his words, constantly filling the room.
cdsmiller17 