Stigmata (1999)

  I always had a weird mystical streak, even as a kid.  I would go into flights of religious ecstasy and I would have done anything to get stigmata...despite the fact that I was raised Baptist.  I never let a little thing like that get me down.  This came out when I was in the eleventh grade.  I remember because some poor idiot took me to see it for a first date.  He found it creepy and off-putting.  I was enthralled.  I can't get back that feeling of the world unfolding before my eyes, that first bright, heart-cracking rush of joy but, for the time it takes to watch this movie again, I can remember it.

Frankie (Patricia Arquette) starts developing strange wounds after she receives a package containing a rosary that belonged to a dead Brazilian priest.  An atheist, Frankie has no idea what is happening to her.  The doctors think she's suicidal or possibly epileptic.  Her friends think she's losing her mind.  She has an attack on the subway where she is scourged with an invisible whip right in front of a priest and two nuns.  The priest forwards the video to the Vatican where Cardinal Houseman (Jonathan Pryce) assigns Father Andrew Kearnan (Gabriel Byrne) to investigate.  Father Andrew strikes up a rapport with the afflicted and becomes convinced that she is trying to relay a message.  A message that certain Church officials believe to be dangerous.

I'm actually reading a translation of the Nag Hammadi gospels in between all my silly fantasy novels.  Every once in a while, I make myself get a non-fiction book on the basis that it will make me smarter.  Or at least more pretentious.  I try and read stuff that I am actually interested in.  I wish I could say the Nag Hammadi books are worthwhile, but they're really dry.  Mostly they're from a fringe Christian group in the 2nd Century AD.  For some really entertaining reading, I suggest the Book of Enoch.  That one is much cooler.