Institute for Bible Reading appoints next Executive Director
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. The Board of Directors of the Institute for Bible Reading (IFBR) is delighted to announce that it has selected Alex Goodwin to serve as its next executive director beginning July 1, 2021. He will replace Scott Bolinder who is retiring as the founding executive director.
Alex Goodwin is a co-founder of IFBR and currently serves as its senior director of marketing and communications. He previously served at Biblica following graduation from Virginia Tech where he earned a B.S. in marketing management.
Goodwin says, “I’m humbled by how God has used our organization to impact hundreds of thousands of lives in the five years since our founding. Bible reading is at the center of spiritual formation, yet it’s clear that many people are struggling to meaningfully engage with the Scriptures. We are grateful to see that the resources we’re providing are helping people connect with the Bible like they
Viggo Mortensen s Falling Finds Empathy for the Unredeemable Directed by Viggo Mortensen
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henricksen, Laura Linney
6 I m sorry that I brought you into this world so you could die.
A father whispering that to his son is the first signpost of trouble to come in
Falling, the new film from Viggo Mortensen as writer and director. A mostly prosaic recollection of 1950s simplicity is given a dark current, one that reverberates in the present, where the father, played by Lance Henricksen, is struggling with dementia as his son, Mortensen, copes not only with this but also with decades of his dad s toxic behaviour.
Viggo Mortensen is a terrific actor with a wealth of memorable screen work to his credit. Unfortunately, his feature directorial debut, “Falling,” does not, er, fall into that category, though it’s not for lack of trying: He also wrote, starred in, produced and scored this problematic film.
It’s a grim, oddly misguided attempt to tell the story of the fractious relationship between a gay airline pilot, John (Mortensen), and his thoroughly insufferable dad, Willis (Lance Henriksen), as the obstreperous senior sinks into dementia.
Set, for some reason, in 2009, the film finds upstate New York farmer Willis visiting John and his husband, Eric (Terry Chen), who’s a nurse, and their adopted daughter, Mönica (Gabby Velis), in Los Angeles. John wants Willis, who can no longer properly take care of himself, to move nearby, though that’s got disaster written all over it as does most everything else that involves the black-hearted bigot.
Mick LaSalle February 3, 2021Updated: February 3, 2021, 7:59 pm
Viggo Mortensen in “Falling.” Photo: Quiver
The best thing about “Falling,” Viggo Mortensen’s debut film as a writer-director, is that every so often, and increasingly as the movie goes on, it’s borderline hilarious by accident.
It’s the story of a son in his 50s doing his best to attend to the needs of his elderly father, who is in the middle stages of dementia. Sometimes Dad doesn’t know where he is. Sometimes he can’t tell his daughter from his wife. And often he thinks that long-dead relatives are alive.
“As a baby, I crawled out of the crib twice, and they had to look for me,” Viggo Mortensen tells me. “Found me with a dog one time in the woods.”
If you were to ask me which actor was most likely, as a baby, to have been found wandering in the woods with a strange dog, Mortensen would be at the top of the list. Throughout his career, before and since his breakout as Aragorn in
The Lord of the Rings, Mortensen has cultivated an aura of quiet eccentricity about him, bolstered by the various facts of his life: He lives abroad in Spain, runs his own independent publishing company, writes poetry, unceremoniously appears fully nude onscreen, and, at least until 2016, used a flip phone.