Fr. Dennis at the Movies

Being Flynn

2012-03-12T23:11:00.002-05:00

MPAA (R) Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455323/
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120307/REVIEWS/120309983

Being Flynn (screenplay written and directed by Paul Weitz based on the book entitled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir by Nick Flynn) is probably one of the better serious movies to be released in this "off season" immediately following this year's Oscars.

The film's about a very difficult father-son relationship. Jonathan Flynn (played by Robert De Niro) is an aging father, who's spent most of his adult life in prison (as a petty and apparently not particularly good con-artist, forging checks, etc). However as is often the case despite the massive evidence to the contrary, he's convinced that he's actually a great man, in his case a great writer just about to be discovered. Indeed, the film begins with Jonathan Flynn introducing himself to the audience declaring in voice-over that "there have been only three truly great American writers Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger and myself, Jonathan Flynn." As he waxes eloquent about his importance, he enters the parking garage, punches-in, gets into his taxi and begins his shift ...

A second voice-over then begins, that of his son, Nick Flynn (played by Paul Dano) who concurs that this story is indeed about his father Jonathan Flynn, except that Jonathan isn't really the one telling it, Nick is. Nick then proceeds to re-introduce his father as having been largely absent from his life -- because Jonathan had been in prison during most of Nick's childhood.

We then see a flashback with Nick as a child (played by Liam Broggy) reading a letter from his dad already talking about how great a writer he is and that Nick, being his son, would probably inherit some of that gift. For a few moments impressed, his mother Jody Flynn (played by Julianne Moore) quickly sets him straight. "You know where that letter came from? Prison! Great writer? Ha! He's in prison for writing forged checks."

Most of Nick's childhood is marked then by repeated disappointments at the hands of both of his parents, and finally himself. In his later teens, Nick's mother killed herself. As if often the case in situations such as these, Nick can not but partly blame himself. Therefore, it's not entirely surprising that when we meet Nick he's something of a listless loser in his 20s, unemployed and kicked out of his girlfriend's apartment after she finds that he's been using the place to sleep with random women while she was at work.

Nick crashes in a dive with two similarly troubled roommates who take him because, well, they need someone else to split the rent with. Through these room-mates however he somewhat randomly meets Denise (played by Olivia Thirlby) a friend of theirs who works at the nearby Harbor Light Inn, a large homeless shelter. With no other ready prospects, he decides to go there to see if he could get a job as well. The shelter's manager, Carlos (played by Eddie Rouse) who had story of his own was initially unimpressed with Nick's explanation of why he'd want to work with the homeless (basically he didn't have one) but decides to hire him anyway.

In the meantime, Jonathan's life, unravels as well. Yes, when we had met him, he was gainfully employed -- as a taxi driver. This had allowed him to afford a place to live -- an apartment in a somewhat seedy part of town -- but at least it was a roof over his head. Remember however that Jonathan had some delusions of grandeur. He's supposed to be a great writer. So he gets upset "at the noise" made by some of the other tenants in his building. As a result, when he inevitably overreacts one time, he gets evicted from his apartment. That's when he makes his first contact _in years_ with Nick asking him to help him move his stuff "into storage" while he finds a more permanent place to live. Nick, surprised, helps. But of course Jonathan's slide is just starting. A few weeks later, he's lost his taxi job and sometime after that he ends up at the homeless shelter where Nick is working. Much ensues ...

It's not an easy time for either of the two. Yet in the haze of more or less obvious borderline mental illness on the part of the father (again he continues to maintain that he's a great writer just about to become famous), he does actually help the son: The son eventually shares with him the circumstances of his mother's (Jonathan's estranged wife's) death. And in _one moment_ of lucidness, the father tells the son: "I may have made you (a favorite saying of his throughout the movie). You're mother may have made you. But we are not you. So I absolve you (of _our_ sins)." And it is enough, the son's life changes... as actually does the father's.

Great movie.

One complaint. There is one very random anti-Christian line of dialogue in the movie that certainly stuck with me until now. Describing the people working in the homeless shelter, Nick rattles through stereotypical dismissals of everyone there. Regarding "the religious types" he gives an example of a young woman there who (in exaggerated fashion) declares to the audience: "I'm here because I want to act as Jesus did" then continuing under her breath "and also because I hate my rich parents."

To be fair, Nick dismisses the motivations of just about everybody else as well. And arguably this dismissal of the motivations of everybody else working in the shelter was symptomatic of Nick's own issues at the time when he began working there. As much as he would have hated to admit it, he was all too much "like his dad" ... who was also more or less obviously dismissive of the people around him (he was a "genius writer" afterall...).

Still, I didn't like the anti-Christian dismal because my own experience has been that it's not true (or perhaps stops being true). I also did the helping at the homeless shelter "thing" (if one wanted to call it that) in my 20s. Further I too had a mother who died early (of cancer) and I too was angry at the time at my dad who (even to his surprise) "came into some money" some time afterwards. Still, I'm 20-years over all that (long since made peace with my dad) and for the last 10 years, I have been taking my parish's Confirmation and high school kids to a soup kitchen here on a regular (4x a year, whenever there's a 5th Sunday) basis and both the teens and the parents love going. We also go and (try to) sing twice a year at a nursing home (around Halloween and Christmas). We decorate cookies for a hospice around Christmas time. And we've written both our troops and on behalf of political prisoners abroad. Finally, in recent years, we've blessed animals on St. Francis' Feast Day and even done a few gardening days around the Church with the teens. And everybody gets it. This is what Jesus would want us to do.

So perhaps a part of my early motivation in my "concern for the weak" would have been some anger and pain. But that pain and anger had long since dissipated. And what's left is a lot of young people having a chance to have some good memories as they grow-up of helping "the least among us" (Mt 25:40).

So I didn't particularly like the comment made in the film about the Christian worker there at the homeless shelter, though I do understand that the character dissing her (and the others) at the time was in a very bad place himself. We can say stupid things when we are down ...

Still, Nick grew (though we never know if he changed his opinions of the people who worked around him as he himself). And in any case so can we ...

Avé

2012-03-10T20:42:00.000-06:00

Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1833647/

Avé (directed and cowritten by Konstantin Bojanov along with Arnold Barkus) is a sad if compelling young adult "road movie" from Bulgaria that I recently saw at the 15th Annual European Union Film Festival held at the Gene Sickel Film Center in Chicago, IL.

The film is about two young hitch-hikers, a late-teen early 20-something young woman named Avé (played by Angela Nedialkova) and young university student, male, named Kamen (played by Ovanes Torosian).

Avé appears to have been from a fairly rich family. Her father had been a diplomat and she and her brother had spent part of their childhood in India while her father had been stationed at the Bulgarian embassy in Dehli. As a result, Avé knows some English. Kamen appears to have lived all his life in Bulgaria though he did have some education as well being an art student in Bulgaria's capital city of Sofia.

They both find themselves hitchhiking for their own tragic reasons. Avé is searching for her drug addicted brother, figuring that she'd be more likely to find him by chatting up people she meets at road-side cafes, diners, truck-stops and so forth. It's clear that she's done this before. Kamen, on the other hand, is trying to get to the village of his best friend in time for his best friend's funeral. What happened to his best friend? He committed suicide. Why? Because he had caught Kamen sleeping with his best friend's girlfriend. So he's going back to his best friend's village in part to atone and in part to say, if he finds the courage, that he's sorry.

Bulgaria is a rather poor country. As filmed in this movie, I could not help but find it to look something like the "New Jersey of Europe," not particularly picturesque. A good part of the two's journey involved both crossing and traveling along the rather industrialized Danube River. It becomes also clear in the film that Bulgaria is dominated by two major cities at opposite ends of the country -- Sofia its capital at the far western interior side of the country and Varna its principal port on the Black Sea. (New Jersey is also dominated by two major metropolitan areas at opposite ends of the state -- New York City just to the north and east of the state and Philadelphia, PA just to south and west of the state). Then just like New Jersey, with its Jersey Shore, Bulgaria has been famous over the years and in different times for its beaches on the Black Sea. Indeed, during the Cold War when citizens of the various countries of the Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact/Eastern Bloc could not travel outside of the Warsaw Pact, Bulgaria's Black Sea Coast was one of the Eastern Bloc's most popular tourist destinations. Pretty much all of my Czech relatives spent one or two summer vacations on the Black Sea, in both Romania and Bulgaria.

Most of the film appears to be filmed in the countryside and small towns between Sofia and Varna. It's winter or fall. So it's rather cold, dank and grey. When the two arrive at the village of Kamen's best friend it is simply raining and it doesn't really stop until they leave. And of course the mother, religious (Bulgarian Orthodox), is devastated and dressed from head to toe in black. The rest of the relatives only join her in her weeping, and worry about their Viki's (Viktor's) soul. "It's a great sin to kill oneself," they keep muttering in their tears, trying to comprehend why. Eventually Kamen, perhaps from the city and remember he came in part in hopes of somehow apologizing, perhaps because he can't stand listening to them anymore or perhaps trying to help them understand asks: "But what's so heroic about living if all life's about just going from 'point a' to 'point b'?

Remember this is a film about two hitchhikers more or less randomly traveling a grey desolate countryside seeking in part to atone for losing one soul, and searching for another.

No, Avé, this is not exactly a cheerful movie (though the character Avé does give it charm because as she talks up people for information about the possible whereabouts of her brother, she also enjoys embellishing her story in ways that makes her randomly going "from point a to point b" interesting). But above all, the movie comes across as very sincere. Bulgaria in the winter must be very grey.

Still all the major people associated with this film -- the writer, director, cinematographer and both main actors -- deserve recognition and praise for this film. They told a very sad story, but told it very, very well, in a manner that all viewers could understand.

Friends with Kids

2012-03-10T17:38:00.000-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1720616/
CNS/USCCB review -
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120307/REVIEWS/120309981

Friends with Kids (written, directed and costarring Jennifer Westfeldt) is a romcom that's going to rattle and at least initially outright offend a fair number of people. Two still-single attractive young professionals, Jason Fryman (played by Adam Scott) and Julie Keller (played by Jennifer Westfeldt), "living the dream" in Manhattan, New York, watch aghast as their married best friends Leslie and Alex (played by Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd) and Ben and Missy (played by Jon Hamm and Kristen Wigg) "change" (become more stressed, arguably meaner) as they begin having families. They also note (whether true or not) that people often remarry better after their first marriage falls apart (according to them, largely on account of those kids necessarily changing the relationship existing in the first marriage).

The solution that the two talkative and iconoclastic single friends come-up with is to have the kid outside of wedlock with someone that they kinda care about but not enough to marry (hence start "already divorced") and then just look for the "post-first marriage soul mate" who (according to their theory) seems to materialize out of the ashes of the first marriage (destroyed by having kids). And the two decide, of course, that their current relationship (best friends but not attracted to each other) fits the bill. What could go wrong? Right?

Here we can thank Jennifer Westfeld for making the movie, definitely NOT to serve as an "example" of how things ought to be done in the world today. Rather we should thank her because the film serves as a thought experiment and a discussion piece for all of us watching it. Indeed, the other characters in the story, including the parents of the two adventurous, again iconoclastic young adults, are given opportunity to voice various objections to the scheme, objections that Westfield does not disparage in her piece. Indeed, if anything, I do think that she encourages the characters in her story (and the audience) to respond to the unorthodox, even shocking undertaking of the two lead characters of the story.

And as the film plays out, she does present some of the flaws in the scheme -- how does one come to explain this unorthodox arrangement to the kid (at 2 at 5 at 8 at 12 at 15 at 17 at 19 at 22 at 28 at really age)? And then what is the true nature of romance? Is it only to be found simply in beauty / roses / fine things and sexual acrobatics? Or can it be found even in the changing of a diaper of a kid experiencing "projectile diarrhea?"

So as has often happened to me in the past by the time I get to the end of my review of the film, I find myself liking the film far more than when I started.

Folks, please don't take the scheme of the two lead characters in this film to be "the way things ought to be." Rather understand the film to be intended to be a "discussion piece." I've written here many times in this blog that ultimately Hollywood is far more traditional / conservative than one may initially believe. Hollywood may flirt with radical ideas but often to return to and validate that which we understand as "tried and true" by the time the closing credits role.

I do believe this film to fit in this mold. It's a heck of a ride. The two characters of this film bravely step out of the mold to try something new (and remember there's safety in this being "only a film", a "thought experiment," a "day dream"). Yet by the end, after ample "free discussion" by "the peanut gallery" (composed of the other characters in the story, and even we, the viewers) of the couple's avant guard choice, I do believe that the vast majority of us will leave appreciating "the wisdom of the old way."

Great film!

One last note to parents. It should be obvious from the discussion above that even a teen won't "get' this film. There is some bad language but no nudity. Yet this film definitely deserves the R rating. It's simply meant for adults, college aged or even post-college-aged and above.

Silent House

2012-03-10T16:26:00.001-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1767382/
CNS/USCCB Review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv031.htm
Roger Ebert's Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120307/REVIEWS/120309982

Silent House (directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau who also wrote the screenplay for this film as a remake of Gustavo Hernandez' Uruguayan film La Casa Muda [2010]) is a film has several things going for it that in other circumstances I could find myself seeing. The things going for it include: (1) that it is based on a relatively obscure foreign film that Hollywood deemed good / intriguing enough to remake, (2) it stars Elizabeth Olsen with whom I was very impressed in Martha Marcy May Marlene last year and (3) claims to have been shot "in a single take" (88 minutes in all) which would be "one heck of a take."

However, there's been a glut of "haunted house" movies of late -- Don't be Afraid of the Dark, Dream House, The Woman in Black, to say nothing of Paranormal Activity 1, 2 and 3. Consider then the young woman driven psycho thrillers like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (starring Noomy Repace in the 2009 Swedish version and Rooney Mara in the 2011 American version), the recently released Gone (starring Amanda Seyfried) perhaps even Martha Marcy May Marlene (already mentioned above that Elizabeth Olsen herself starred in) and perhaps the reader could understand my exhaustion:

I would imagine that Silent House is probably pretty good. Further, reading the CNS/USCCB's review of the film, I'm pretty much certain that there isn't any gratuitous attack on the Church or Christianity or even gratuitous display of nudity in it. Parents, I'd take the CNS/USCCB's rating that it is A-III (for Adults) as being almost certainly appropriate. Yet since there have been so many movies similar to it that have been made in recent years, I simply can't justify going even to a bargain matinee to actually see it.

Perhaps if I were an older teen or college student in a group that liked these kinds of movies (and didn't already see many of the other movies similar to it) I'd think about seeing this one. But the film seems too similar to so many others that have already been made. So for me, the well here is dry. Though I imagine the film itself is probably pretty good (if one likes this sort of thing), I can't justify spending the money (even with a matinee discount) to go see it.

Cousinhood (orig. Primos)

2012-03-08T21:50:00.002-06:00

MPAA (unrated but probably would be rated R) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1592521/

Cousinhood (orig. Primos), written and directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo is a happy-go-lucky if certainly irreverent and definitely morally questionable (by both U.S. and U.S. Catholic standards) comedy from Spain that played recently at the 15th Annual European Union Film Festival held at the Gene Sickel Film Center in Chicago, IL.

Still even if irreverent/crude at times, the film is not without value to a American viewer (obviously the version I saw was subtitled) and many, especially the young who speak Spanish would find themselves rolling over laughing. The film reminds me of a fair number of Italian similarly light romcoms that I saw when I was studying in Rome in the seminary in the 1990s. Finally Cousinhood's (orig. Primos) very _light_ humor appears to me typical of the Spanish young adult humor that I've encountered over the years both through relatives and the various Servites that I'm met from Spain.

For an American viewer to get an idea of the irreverent / morally questionable humor present in the film, I'd suggest thinking of Animal House [1978] which while also obviously morally questionable in its humor, I'd _also_ recommend to non-American young adults as a prime example of, indeed, emblematic of _white_ American youth culture humor. Yes, it's irreverent, yes it's morally questionable, yes it's often stupid, but ... a film like this still can be really, really funny (especially if it's understood to be intended to be that way).

So what's Cousinhood (orig. Primos) about? It's about three male cousins in their late-20s. The movie begins with one of them, Diego (played by Quim Gutiérrez), teary eyed, in a tux clearly dressed for a wedding addressing apparently an assembled group of guests first thanking them for coming-out and then continuing to explain: About a month ago, in preparation for the wedding, though having lived together for some time, he and his fiance decided that they abstain from sexual activity until the wedding night -- in mentioning this, his voice clearly increases in intensity even as he continues crying -- in hopes of having a "really _great_ wedding night."

Anyway, three weeks into this period of waiting, he just couldn't stand it. But reaching out to caress her cheek, she turned away and started to cry. Getting a hold of himself, retracting his hand and quickly apologizing: "I know, I know, I'll hold out too, I'll hold out too," he didn't realize initially that (of course) that was _not_ the reason why she was crying. Instead, she told him that she's not sure that she loved him anymore and thought that they should just cancel the wedding. "What could I do? She was crying more than I was," he explains. So both crying, they decided to cancel the wedding and that "she'd tell her guests and he tell mine." He finishes his words adding: "Obviously, it didn't turn out the way I thought." The camera draws back and we see that he's speaking inside a church, half of which is filled (the half with his guests) and half of which (his bride's half) is empty ... "Now please thank you for coming but you can go home now. I need some time alone ..." and sits himself down, hands over his face, on the floor beside the altar.

The film resumes with the Church empty except for two others, his cousins (his "primos"). There's Julián (played by Raul Arévalo) who's kind of the leader of three, and José Miguel (played by Adrián Lastra) who had also been a strong formidable sort of a guy (with "balls of Spartacus..."). But he came back from "serving in Afghanistan" with a glass eye and nerves so shot that he's been reduced to a pill-popping basket case.

Trying to cheer up Diego, Julián asks Diego to think of any girl that he may a shot with to get him quite literally off of the floor and (as we would say in the United States) "back into the saddle" again... The first woman that comes to Diego's mind is Martina with whom he had his first sexual experience ... way back when he was 17 back in the sea-side town that the three primos and their families used to go to in the summertime when they were growing up.

Okay, it was a real long shot. But at least the very idea of Martina of "way long ago..." gets Diego on his feet again. So the three jump into a car and head off to the town that they used to spend their summers growing up in hopes that they might still run into this young woman there. Much ensues...

Among that which ensues is that, of course, they run into Martina (played by Irma Cuesta). She's now a drop dead gorgeous single mom with an .. (is it 8 or 9 year old?) son named Dani (played by Marcos Ruiz). He seems kinda big for 8... When they run into her, she's amiable, feels kinda sorry for Diego and his breakup, but makes it clear that she's quite happy being single raising her 8-9 year old son in peace.

One of the funniest (if very very stupid) scenes that I've probably ever seen on film follows as the three "primos" discuss their recollections of what Diego had told them "back then" about his first sexual experience with Martina 10 years ago. Diego insists that he used a condom, "You know, the one that I had carried around that whole year in my wallet." As they recall how he had gotten that condom, they remember that it had been made in a country that (fairly or unfairly...) immediately makes one wonder about its quality assurance practices... "But you told me that there was a hole in it" says José Miguel." "No there wasn't." "Or was it a tear? Yes, there was a tear because that's why you said that it fell off at one point." "No it was fine, or yes, I 'fixed it'" Finally, since he really had only that one condom ... he remembered that "used it a second time" (ick, even if "creative" as only a clueless and horny 17 year-old would be "quick-thinking"/"creative" in a moment like that ...

All this becomes an absolutely hilarious exposition of all the things that could possibly go wrong when using a condom and becomes an entry way for someone like me to remind young folks why the Church (as a good mom...) tries to teach her children that one really shouldn't get involved with a person "in such a way" unless the two are both willing and able to accept the consequences of getting involved "in such a way."

Anyway, Martina has this amiable if somewhat hypochondriac kid who's of a suspicious age ...

Various other things happen as well. Diego's ex-fiance finds out where he is and comes, teary-eyed looking for him.

Julián in the meantime runs into an older man nicknamed Bacci (played by Antonio de la Torre) who used to run a video store in the town when the primos and their families used to come there. The video business had since gone down hill and he became the village drunk. On the other hand, his once precocious little daughter had grown-up (and is disappointed with her dad). Some fixing needs to take place there as well...

All in all, the movie is very light, often rather crude and more or less obviously morally problematic but always with a twinkle in one's eye. In the end of course everything gets resolved, and (of course) more or less satisfactorily.

Parents note that there is definite nudity in the film. Remember that if nothing else, the film takes place in a Spanish (hence European ...) seaside resort during the summer. So we see a lot more of Martina than the average American would initially expect (though Martina as I noted above, looks really, really fine...). And it's all done then in a typically European or even typically post-Franco Spanish sort of way, with a mix of matter-of-factness and humor: "Hey, what ya lookin' at? Haven't ya seen plenty of these before...?"

So I would probably tell folks to keep the young ones and even young teens away. The film is more for young adults / 20-somethings anyway. But then I do think that this film would be good for American adults and especially young adults to see because Primos (Cousinhood) would give an American adult a lighthearted if sometimes somewhat morally questionable window into a very different way of life and would definitely help an American appreciate why a European would be happy as pie to be European (and here specifically a Spaniard would be happy to be a Spaniard). There is a lightheartedness that pervades this film that is endearing.

ADDENDA:

I've found it often good in reviewing films like this to look-up what's being said of the film in the home country where it was produced. So I would recommend to readers here to take a look at some of the external reviews of this film listed in the IMDb database noting that one can always run Spanish language webpages through translate.google.com to get at least a sense translation.

I also found an very good Spanish language movie review site Pantala90 operated by the media office of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Spain. Alas, I could not find a review of this film Primos (Cousinhood) there. However, a lot of the popular American films that I've reviewed on the blog are reviewed there as well and the reviews that I read were quite impressive.

The Secret World of Arrietty (orig. Kari-gurashi no Arietti)

2012-03-06T12:36:00.001-06:00

MPAA (G) CNS/USCCB (A-I) Michael Phillips (3 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568921/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv021.htm
Michael Phillip's review -
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-02-16/entertainment/sc-mov-0214-secret-world-of-arrietty-20120216_1_studio-ghibli-animation-borrowing

The Secret World of Arrietty (orig. Kari-gurashi no Arietti) directed by Hiromasa Yonesbayahshi, screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa) is a lovely children's animated film voiced here in English, made by the famed Japanese Studio Ghibly and distributed in the United States by Disney based on the first of the children's book series The Borrowers (Amazon [1] [2]) by Mary Norton.

It's about a family of tiny people called "borrowers" -- 14 year old Arrietty (voiced by Brigit Medler [US version] and Saoirie Ronan [UK version]) and her parents Pod (voiced by Will Arnett [US version] and Mark Strong [UK verison]) and Homily (voiced by Amy Poehler [US version] and Olivia Colman [UK version]) -- who live under the floorboards of houses and are responsible for taking (err... "borrrowing") little items that we find/discover that we've "lost" or "misplaced" in our homes.

Ideally the items that these really tiny little people take are things that we wouldn't particularly miss anyway. So on one of the early adventures in the story, Pod and Arriety set out on an expedition to "bring home a sugar cube." On the way, Arrietty finds a clothes pin, which becomes her "sword." It's all really, really cute.

The life of these little borrowers is, however, fraught with danger. Relatively small animals like cats, crows and even mice that we find around our domestic confines appear really big to them, and these animals have been known to eat the borrowers that they catch. Further, people don't seem to differentiate much between "borrowers" and other "household pests." So when they spot a borrower, more often than not, they call an exterminator to deal with their pest problem.

That then sets the stage for the story here. A little Japanese boy named Sho (in the US version named Shawn, voiced by David Henrie [US version] and Tom Holland [UK version]) awaiting a major surgery is sent to rest in the countryside by his great-aunt (voiced by Gracie Poletti [US Version], Phyllida Law [UK version]. (In the original books, the Boy was English sent by his great-aunt into the English countryside to recuperate from Rheumatic Fever that he contracted while in India). The house is where his mother had grown-up. And when he arrives, he spots one of the "borrowers."

He's all excited because his mother had told him about them. The borrowers are terrified, however, in particular mother Hillary, because being spotted by the humans generally means "bad things will happen to them," and actually "children are often worse than the adults." (Presumably human children would treat them as they would bugs and other small creatures, that is, bring out the spy/magnifying glasses, put them in jars, while forgetting to feed them, etc...).

Actually, Sho's quite nice. But the caretaker of the house Karin in the Japanese/UK versions, Hara in the US version (voiced by Carol Burnett [US version] and Geraldine McEvan [UK version]) wants to call the exterminator. So much ensues ... but Sho, himself lonely and facing suffering turns out to be a good protector/friend to the frightened little borrowers.

The drawing in this film is just beautiful. The garden scenes in particular are beautifully captured as are the (seemingly) huge dew/rain drops that adorn the blades of grass and the flowers every morning. It makes one want to cry.

And the story reminded me a lot of a Czech children's classic Broučci (Fireflies) about a family of fireflies that came out in England, in English translation during the war years, 1942, some years before Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952) was first published. There are clear differences in the story but there are also similarities (the greatest of which being the portrayal of the world from the perspective of a really, really small anthropomorphic being -- similar to the "sugar-cube" episode described above in Arrietti, the fireflies in Broučci would drink wine out of a grape ... ;-).

Anyway, it wouldn't bother me at all if Mary Norton could was influenced or partly inspired by that Czech children's story. I just want to note that the other story was also very, very cute and that probably stories like this (about "little people") are going to tend to be very, very nice.

The House (orig Dom / Dům)

2012-03-04T18:18:00.003-06:00

Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821406/

CSFD listing [CZ] [Eng-(Google)Trans]
CSFD reviews [CZ/SK][Eng-(Google)Trans]

The House (orig Dom [sk]/ Dům [cz]) written and directed by Zuzana Liová (CSFD listing Eng. translation unavailable), a young Slovak born director, is a joint Czech and Slovak production that recently played at the 15th Annual European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.

Set in a small Slovakian town in the mountains, it is a lovely current film about a clash of generational aspirations and expectations:

Inrich (played by Miroslav Krobot [IMDB] [CSFD]) is trying to be a good father by building a house for his daughter Eva (played by Judit Bardos [IMDB] [CSFD]) about to graduate from high school, the house of course being right next door to her parents' home ... ;-).

Eva, of course, has completely different plans. She wants to go to London to work as an au pair (nanny) to see something of the world in this way, and, yes, implicit in this, perhaps score an English husband ... A rather smart/talented teen, she's successfully put-up an online profile on an au-pair website and she's been saving-up money for the cost of getting to England by writing term-papers for her less ambitious classmates.

Part of the tragedy implicit in the story is that Eva is clearly a very smart young woman. And what does she want to do with her life? Go to College? Clearly she's bright enough, and indeed, that's Inrich's Plan-B. He's even saved up money to help her go to college, but will give her the money that he's saved up for her only if she does that. Instead, Eva wants to go to England to work as a nanny for a couple of years and hopefully get married there.

So the two are at loggerheads. What does ma', Viera (played by Tatjana Medvedská [IMDB] [CSFD] ) think of all this? Well, clearly she's unhappy, sees a coming train wreck between her husband and her daughter and seems powerless to stop it.

Worst of all, she's seen all this before. After Inrich had forbidden their older daughter Jana (played by Lucia Jašková [IMDB][CSFD]) from "going to Norway" after her graduation (Why Norway? Well, like the younger sis' Eva's dreams of England, Norway would be an attainable goal not all that far from Slovakia. And well, Norway's somewhere "other than Slovakia..." ;-), Jana got back at her father by marrying the amiable but rather loser of a son of a former "two bit" Communist party official that her dad hated. By the film's start, Jana has three kids with said amiable "loser" and Inrich has no clue of how to reconcile with Jana, her husband (who he hates) and thus with his three grand-kids that he has through through them.

Being forced by her father to stay in town (or at least in/near Czecho-Slovakia), Eva starts "acting out" as well by entering into an illicit relationship with a man in his 30s, Jakub (played by Mari á n Mitaš [IMDB] [CSFD]), who turns out to be her English teacher her final semester at school. (Jakub had just returned from England to Slovakia because his Slovak wife "wanted a house..." when Eva first meets him. What kind of a job can someone returning to rural Czecho-Slovakia get after having spent many years in England? He becomes an English teacher at the local high school...).

A relationship such as this between a high school student and teacher is, of course, illegal / immoral in most parts of the world today. So it ends badly. As soon as the two are found out, Jakub is summarily fired by the school's Principal and Eva is barely allowed to graduate.

But what are Inrich and Viera going to do now? Having already horribly botched their relationship with their older daughter Jana, now Eva's acting out and they're at the precipice again. That's what the rest of the movie is about...

A few notes coming from someone like me, who is of Czech descent ;-), that may help the non-Czech or non-Slovak to appreciate the movie better:

(1) This is really a remarkable post Czechoslovakia, Czech and Slovak production. It's clearly set in Slovakia. The family in the film lives in a non-descript town in the Slovakian mountains. The currency used throughout the film is the Euro. (Slovakia decided to go with the Euro a number of years ago, the Czechs perhaps with pretensions of "being like England" or even "becoming like Switzerland" have chosen to stay with the "Czech Crown." This all makes for interesting conversation in both Czech and Slovak households in light of the current Euro crisis). Still, while the movie was filmed in Slovakia, many of the actors are Czech and the film was apparently produced in both Czech and Slovak languages. The version that I saw in Chicago was Czech.

(2) Since this movie was set in Slovakia, the Catholic Church does have a fairly significant presence in the film. (Slovaks are some 90% Catholic, while the Czechs are about 60% Catholic and by reputation, especially in the cities, far less fervent...). Eva is an organist at the local Catholic Church and when Eva's parents find out that she's had an affair with one of her teachers, they drag her to the priest where the irritated father (speaking perhaps for all irritated fathers everywhere) orders his daughter: "Tak spust se!" ('Okay now spill it ...!") to the dismay of the priest ... So much for the niceties of "private confession" apparently when one's teenage daughter is found acting badly ... Yet, we actually don't know what happens after Inrich orders his daughter to confess to the priest, and whatever would have been said, probably would have ended in private Confession. Still we see an irate dad, demanding justice here from the Church against his daughter who's been misbehaving.

Would a scene like this play out in the (by reputation) "far more worldly" Czech Republic? My guess is probably not in the cities. But it is possible that in the countryside and in particular (at least by reputation) in rural Moravia (in the Eastern part of the Czech Republic, closest to, in fact, the border with Slovakia) the scene could well play out as well.

In any case, parents, whether practicing Catholics or secularists could probably relate to the scene and in the case of secular families, THEY MAY EVEN WISH THERE WAS A PRIEST OR PASTOR IN THEIR LIVES TO GO TO IN TIMES LIKE THESE.

(3) Americans may find the anger expressed between parents and children in the film (and even between the spouses) quite jarring. I certainly found it jarring and I grew-up in a Czech home (if in the United States). Perhaps to try to explain the rawness expressed (and not merely in the dialogue but also in the facial expressions) one could appeal to the basis of the conflict in the film: Two sets of expectations, those of the father and of his two daughters, were utterly at odds. The father was trying to be a good dad. Yet he was utterly off-base with regard to what his daughters actually wanted.

As is typical perhaps of films in general (and actually of Czechs and Slovaks in particular), everything does get resolved in the end because no one really wanted to be so "right" as to irreversibly cause pain to the others (being Czech and having known and worked with Slovaks all my life, I do believe this to be a fundamental characteristic of both peoples -- these are two _small_ and fundamentally amiable peoples who don't want to be angry with another forever). So it becomes inevitable that there would be a happy ending to this story.

Just how it all works out, I'm not going to say ... ;-)

Dr. Seuss': The Lorax

2012-03-02T14:32:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG) CNS/USCCB (A-I) Ted Zwecker (3 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1482459/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv028.htm
Ted Zwecker's review -
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/movies/10940243-421/lorax-the-right-prescription-for-dr-seuss-fans.html

After decrying on this blog a year of surprisingly stupid, often arguably hate-filled and flagrantly politicized children's films on one side teaching kids that Hispanics (Hop), all people of color (Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2), all people with "foreign", that is, non-American/English accents (Hoodwinked 2) are bad to Evil and on the other side encouraging kids to mock a former American Vice-President (Dick Cheney er oil baron "Tex Richman" in The Muppets Movie) and a former President (G.W. Bush in the person of a "bumbling, out of touch Santa" in Arthur Christmas who in the story did, in fact, "leave one child behind...") one comes to Dr. Seuss': The Lorax (directed by Chris Renaud and Kyle Bala, screenplay by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul based on the children's book by the same name by Dr. Seuss).

Even in its original children's book form, The Lorax, is a somber (not-particularly funny) and rather direct parable about the consequences greed and environmental destruction. The Once-ler (voiced in the film by Ed Helms) sets-up shop outside of town among the "Truffula trees." He chops one of the trees down to harvest its "tuft" which was "softer than silk and had the sweet smell of fresh butterfly milk." The tuft he processed into a product called a Thneed. What's a Thneed? Well it was something that people didn't even know that they "needed" but once created it became "a fine something that all people need."

Soon the Once-ler has a good business going. He builds a factory, hiring all his cousins, uncles and aunts to work there. And though initially he tells the Lorax (voiced in the film by Danny DeVito), a short mustached creature that comes out of the stump of the first tree that he chopped down that he "just chopped down but one tree, I'm doing no harm," the Once-ler is soon chopping down Truffula trees on an industrial scale ... until there's nothing left of the forest, all its whimsical creatures are gone (even the Lorax), and even his former customers have gone-on to buying other things discovering that they didn't "need" those Thneeds after all.

Obviously "there's a message" in this story. But the next question ought to follow: Is it a bad one? I don't think so, because what the story of The Lorax describes has happened already many times before:

(1) It is said that when the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth Rock on the Atlantic Coast in Massachusetts in 1620, "a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from the Atlantic Coast (Plymouth Rock) all the way to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground." That obviously is no longer true and the plundering and burning of often fantastically "old growth forests" for no good reason (other than that it can be done or even that "the trees are in the way") both in the United States and more recently around the world has certainly been well documented.

(2) Mountain-men and fur trappers did, in fact, decimate the beaver population in North America because the underside of the beaver pelt came to be used to make felt for "felt hats" (most famously the "top hats" that men wore in the nineteenth century). But once there were no longer enough beavers to go around to make those stupid felt hats, fashion went on to "other things...").

(3) The wading birds of the Florida Everglades were also all but wiped out by the 19th century fashion of using the feathers from exotic birds to adorn, this time, women's hats. Again, women who had happily lived without having feathers adorning their hats before this fad, have come to live without them again since the birds from which the feathers were extracted were all but wiped out...

(4) Thanks to such "environmental extremists" like John Muir, John James Audubon and perhaps most importantly U.S. President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, much of the remaining forests and wildlife regions of the United States were saved from imminent destruction by swift/decisive government fiat (often involving summary Federal takeover) that would stun most Americans of a more right-wing persuasion today. Yet, that the pristine stone face of Yosemite's El Capitan is not obscured today by waterslides, pawn shops, wax museums and wedding chapels like those cluttering the Wisconsin Dells, Lake George, NY, and the Niagara Falls or that there are any wading birds at all remaining in Florida and the other bayou regions of the South Eastern United States is the direct result of these men's convictions to preserve the remaining natural beauty of our nation for future generations.

(5) In the 1990s over-fishing by fishing fleets of various nations resulted in a crisis and even collapse of cod fisheries across the North Atlantic. Demand had increased, the size and number of fishing vessels had increased but there were only so many fish to catch. The collapse of a number of the fisheries in the North Atlantic has had a devastating impact on the fishing industry across the region even as, past consumers of those fish have moved-on to eat other things and other fish from other places ...

So, yes, both the book and now the film "talk" of such stupid, unthinking environmental destruction driven by unconcern/negligence and an "it's okay simply because we can do it" mentality for the sake of products that we never really needed (and won't need after the resources required for their production are gone) in a manner that even a 3-5 year old could understand. But honestly, as one from a religious tradition that tells us to live modestly and with concern for others, I don't see that as bad ...

Finally, there are a number of plot differences between the book and the film that those who knew the book would quickly recognize. First of all, there are many other characters added to the film that weren't present in the original children's book. But these changes allow the book to be translated better into a film:

In the original book, there really were only three major characters. There was Once-ler, The Lorax and finally a boy who comes to the Once-Ler to ask what happened to all the trees.

In the film, the Once-ler and the Lorax obviously continue as characters. The boy's given a name, Ted (voiced by Zac Efron). Growing up in a spick-and-span if utterly artificial suburban-looking paradise called Sneedville, he starts to ask about what happened to "real trees" only after Audrey (voiced by Taylor Swift) a girl he's trying to impress tells him that she'd really, really like to see a "real tree" one day. Ted gets help from his Grandma Norma (voiced by Betty White) who still remembers trees and tells him how to find the Once-ler who lives someways "outside of town."

To get "outside of town" proves not altogether easy, because the cozy, suburban paradise turns out to be ringed and isolated from the larger (and far less idyllic world) by something of a wall a la The Truman Show [1998]. Indeed, Ted, gets himself into trouble with the "powers that be," notably "bottled air" magnate Mr. O'Hare (voiced by Rob Riggle) when he tries to get outside the cozy confines of Sneedville.

After recounting his sad story and that of the Lorax to Ted, Once-Ler gives him the last seed of the last Truffula tree which Ted brings back for Audrey. Much then ensues ...

The message however of both the book and the movie remain the same: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not." That is, unless we come to care for the trees and all the whimsical animals living among them, they're all going to go away. And while we may live in a "plastic paradise" for a while, we'll end up paying for even "bottled air."

Yes, this makes for a "political message" in the United States in our time. But this message is one that I don't mind hearing said. We do have to care ... And yes, I do think that this is the best animated children's movie to come out since its creators' previous film Despicable Me [2010].

ADDENDA:

Since at least the time of Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church has been reflecting on the Environmental questions of our day and has offered a characteristically balanced approach to the issue. While certainly not divinizing Nature, it has argued that respect for Nature (Creation) ought to be seen as a necessary expression of our respect for our/its Creator. (John Paul II, Peace with God our Creator, Peace with All Creation, message for the World Day of Peace, Jan 1, 1990).

In this line, the Servite Order to which I belong has recently produced a lovely reflection on a Servite expression of this ethic called Cultivating Environmental Concerns with Our Lady.

This Means War

2012-02-29T13:53:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (1 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596350/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv020.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120215/REVIEWS/120219990

This Means War (directed by McG, screenplay written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg, story by Timothy Dowling and Marcus Gautesan) that was released for Valentines Day is a rather typical rom-com that outside of the context of that holiday or perhaps a need sometime to see/rent something both conventional / romantic isn't exactly a "must see." But it's not an awful movie either. Just really, really "pop corn" light ...

Indeed, as is typical of most contemporary Hollywood rom-coms (that don't "go dark"), This Means War is a story of three beautiful people along with a number of similarly beautiful friends and acquaintances who surround them. So there's a definitely "Wouldn't it be nice...", "Much Ado About Nothing", "All's Well that Ends Well," daydream quality about the film that's been a staple of romantic comedies since at least the time of the "Bard of Statford upon Avon," that is William Shakespeare or since the "California bards" of the 1960s, the Beach Boys, were singing about cars, surfboards and "Two Girls for Every Boy ..."

Actually, the film is something of a play on this line from the Brian Wilson/Jan and Dean song "Surf City," where the boy to girl ratio is reversed in this film and one girl finds herself involved with two guys, who it turns out were actually friends. Ah, the complexities of "young love ..."

So how do the protagonists in this story get into their predicament? Lauren (played by Reese Witherspoon) a gorgeous if somewhat nerdy young woman moves across the country to be closer to her boyfriend, Jason (played by Clint Carlson), only to be dumped because apparently Jason didn't expect their LDR to last... Grieving the loss of her relationship, spunky Lauren puts her energy into her job coordinating/interviewing "focus groups" trying-out various consumer gadgets that show-up on late night commercials. It's not much of a job, but at least she gets to hit things, break thinks, whack things with a stick every so often ... and encourage others to do the same ;-).

Her married best friend, Trish (played by played by Chelsea Handler) becomes so concerned that Lauren just "get on with her life" that she creates an online profile for her on a dating service. Initially, Lauren is aghast by the description that Trish wrote about her (Apparently Trish was somewhat bored with her own life and had been hoping to live a little, if vicariously, through her still single friend...). 'Turns out though, that among the replies that she gets is that of a good looking guy who works in a "travel agency" named Tuck (played by Tom Hardy).

Now Tuck's actually not "a travel agent" at all. He works for the CIA with his much cooler, "far more at home in his job" partner and best friend FDR Foster (played by Chris Pine). Indeed, that Tuck would pick his "cover story" to be that he's "a travel agent" is somewhat indicative of his own somewhat nerdy personality. Even his ex-girl friend doesn't really believe he's a "travel agent" though she has no idea he's actually CIA either -- "You've got to be the most traveled 'travel agent' I've ever heard of." But he can't tell her what he really does for a living ...

Anyway, the two, Lauren and Tuck, set-up a meet if not a date at some coffee shop. Friend FDR decides to hang-out in a nearby video store during this meet to give Tuck an excuse to leave and someone to have a few beers with if things don't work out. Things do work out, but ... after Lauren and Tuck split-off to go their separate ways, Lauren runs into FDR (and FDR doesn't know that Lauren was the girl that Tuck was meeting ...). Much ensues ...

First with no guy (and pining still for her ex-guy) but now suddenly with two, Lauren the drop-dead gorgeous Hollywood fantasyland character that she is, does what Hollywood scriptwriters with drop-dead gorgeous fantasyland characters in their plots have them do: She decides that she's going to "break the tie" by "sleeping with both of them" and see which one she likes better. I can't even think about that scenario without the Beach Boys song "Wouldn't it be nice ..." playing in my head ... And that's a pretty good indication that we're entering here into the "Great Land of Beautiful People, no AIDS, no ..., no consequences ... with Unicorns floating about." It makes for one heck of a day dream, but ... Ma (and Mother Church...) would be concerned ...

So there you have it. All does end well for everyone (except perhaps for Jason, Lauren's ex, who perhaps discovers he shouldn't have dumped Lauren so casually ...).

Again, This Means War, is not exactly Tolstoy, but understood to be "popcorn light" ... it's not exactly the Apocalypse either. Just understand the film to be a "daydream" and perhaps remember that "nerdy people" can end-up being far more interesting than you think ...

We Need to Talk About Kevin

2012-02-28T13:24:00.000-06:00

MPAA (R) Roger Ebert () Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDB listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/
Roger Ebert's review -

We Need to Talk About Kevin (directed and screenplay co-written by Lynne Ramsay along with Rory Kinnear based on the novel by the same name by Lionel Shriver) is a fictional account of a mother's reflections on her teenage son's becoming the perpetrator of Columbine-style school massacre.

In the book, it's clear that the mother, Eva (played in the movie by Tilda Swinton), had been ambivalent about having the child. In the movie, her ambivalence is not as clear, but it's clear that she herself thought that she had her own problems. In both cases, however, it's obvious to the reader/viewer that from pretty much the time that Kevin was a toddler something was very wrong with him. He seems aloof, developmentally slow (starts talking fairly late, and certainly takes his time and fiercely resists getting potty trained), and he's mean. Eva sees this but as is often the case the other parent/her husband, Franklin (played in the movie by John C. Reilly), does not. A manipulator from almost before he could walk and certainly from before he could really talk, Kevin plays the two parents off against each other. What a nightmare ...

And it doesn't get better. As Kevin grows up (Kevin's played as a toddler by Rock Duer, as an 6-8 year old by Jasper Newell and as teenager by Ezra Miller), he hones his skills of playing-off his parents (and other adults) against each other, being mean to animals and to his developmentally normal little sister (played by Ashley Gerasimovich) but never quite mean enough to finally force the hands of his parents and the other adults in his life (mostly at school) to actually do something until one day he locks the student body of his high school in the gym with bicycle locks he bought over the internet (he told his parents that we was "going to make a killing with them (they think selling them) at school") and starts picking off his classmates, one after another, with a cross bow.

What went wrong? Both in the book and in the film, Eva, in part, blames herself, in the book because she knew that she never really wanted to have children (Kevin) to begin with, in the movie because she knew that she wasn't altogether psychologically fit herself when she had him. Did Kevin know from early on that she never really want him (the book)? Did Kevin inherit her psychological troubles (the movie)?

To some extent the reader/viewer could ask whether that inner angst of the mother is really relevant (other than being melodramatic) here. Perhaps better questions could be asked: What can society do to identify psychopathic youths before they do it harm? Can a pattern of uncalled-for / gratuitous meanness become seen as a symptom worthy of flagging someone as a potential danger to oneself and society and worthy of progressively more attention/supervision by parents/teachers/law enforcement authorities?

Yes, psychopathy like other neurological conditions (autism comes to mind) would probably exist on a scale. Still a consistently mean child, even for the sake of the child (to say nothing of the larger society), would deserve to be supervised/watched (and not just by the parents but by society, mostly at school) to make sure that others (innocents) don't end up being killed by that child as/when he or she grows up.

Safe House

2012-02-27T23:08:00.004-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (L) Michael Phillips (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1599348/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv017.htm
Michael Phillips review -
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-02-09/entertainment/sc-mov-0208-safe-house-20120209_1_safe-house-spy-thriller-cia

Safe House (directed by Daniel Espinosa, written by David Guggenheim) is a post-9/11 post-Bourne Identity spy thriller (hence with the fundamental theme of "who can you trust?") that aside from being set in Cape Town and then the countryside of South Africa, doesn't really add anything particularly new to the genre.

Still, like a dream/nightmare that repeats itself until it dissipates or gets resolved, these kind of spy thriller paranoid action films like this seem to "work" today. Safe House has a 70% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes website and three weeks out, it's still in the top 5 at the box office and it's grossed some $97 million.

So what's the film specifically about? Matt Weston (played by Ryan Reynolds) is a rookie/tenderfoot CIA operative with a rather boring "doing one's dues" initial assignment: He's the "manager" of a "team of one" (apparently just himself) project: maintaining a CIA safe house in Cape Town, South Africa, should the need ever arise that it'd be needed. In other words, he's the "groundskeeper" of one of those "undisclosed locations" / "secret prisons" made famous (or infamous) during the G.W. Bush Administration.

It's pretty boring work. Six months into the assignment, he's had no "house-guests," and about all he has to show for his time in Cape Town is that he's found a French girlfriend, Ana Moreau (played by Nora Arnezeder), who he can't be honest with about what he really does for a living. All he can do is be "vague" about his work and promise her that his "work" may take him to Paris "one day." She likes that promise but it's pretty clear that he doesn't have a chance at getting that kind of an assignment since Paris would probably be a rather prestigious CIA posting. And what has Weston been doing? He's been playing "cleaning lady" / "maintanence man" in a "stainless steel basement" of an outwardly utterly nondescript-looking building in Cape Town that inside/underground opens up to a compound filled with jail cells and interrogation rooms and all sorts of wild electronic gear. But the compound NEVER, EVER GETS USED because NOTHING EVER "HAPPENS" IN SOUTH AFRICA ANYMORE.

So Matt spends his time listening to "French language tapes" and trying to get his former mentor David Barlow (played by Brendan Gleesan) stationed at CIA headquarters in Langley to get him the hell out of this spick-and-span but half mothballed dump in Cape Town and on to Paris. But Barlow has no reason to promote Weston because HE HASN'T DONE ANYTHING to justify promotion. Life can suck ...

Well be careful what you wish for ... One day, a rogue former CIA agent, Tobin Frost (played by Denzel Washington), walks-up to the gate of the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town, and to everyone's -- Matt's, Barlow's and Matt's immediate superior (but still way out in Langley) Catherine Linklater's (played by Vera Farmiga) -- surprise Matt's gonna get an actual "house guest." Why? Well, Frost had been supposedly one of the CIA's top agents, and then 10 years ago he suddenly "walked off the reservation," sold all kinds of secrets to all kinds of people, often enemies and potential enemies of the United States. Yet NOW for some reason, he "waltzed back" to the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town apparently asking for the U.S. government's assistance. The obvious question reverberating among the good folks in the U.S. spy/diplomatic community is WHY? Why the heck would he come back? And given his past selling of U.S. secrets left and right to all kinds of people, the folks at the CIA are "mighty angry about it."

So when the CIA's "team" comes to Matt's stainless steel basement safe house with Frost in chains and a hood they're not particularly interested in being "nice" to Frost. Yes, they want answers, eventually, but they also want payback. So they bring out the water and the towels, and it becomes "water boarding time." But while the interrogation team is "not yet torturing" ("approaching the line of torturing") Frost, a second team comes in and shoots-up the place, killing everybody but Matt and Frost, who manage to get away.

The quick thinking, CIA veteran turned fugitive Frost had convinced the rookie Matt Weston that it "would look really bad" (presumably on his next performance evaluation) if Weston's "house guest" turned-out to be killed. So Weston gets Frost out of the building (at least still in handcuffs...) and, rookie that he is, "calls Langley for directions ..."

Much ensues and eventually we get an explanation for "what the heck just happened" and indeed why someone like Frost would have "gone rogue" and arguably betrayed his country after doing so.

There will be folks who will not like the explanation. But anyone who knows a little about the power of keeping things secret would certainly suspect that this power could be used to cover-up all sorts of things, many of which would have very little to do with actual "national security ..."

Anyway, there's not necessarily anything new in this film, except perhaps the rather comical portrayal of the quite boring life of a spy-agency "safe house" operator. (In the film, Frost and Weston make their way to another CIA "safe house," this one out in the South African countryside that makes Weston's old gig "in the city" positively thrilling ...).

Still, we live in a world now of "secret prisons" in "undisclosed locations" and super-trained, super-compartmentalized special forces units trained to perform missions (and do them on faith...) that we can only imagine. Add then the temptation to sin, that is to use all that secrecy and power for less than virtuous ends ... and well ... that combination offers a plenty of fodder for a lot of films just like this.

84th Academy Awards (2012) - Hooray for Nostalgia!?

2012-02-27T01:01:00.001-06:00

Billy Crystal Rules! Say what one wants, he delivers. From the very first sequence where he passes through a montage of scenes from last year's top pictures, most nominated, some like Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 4, not, he was a hit, in great form and carried this through a great show.

Hollywood's surprising conservatism that I commented on in my review of the last year's Academy Awards, came through again. Martin Scorsese's 3D wonder Hugo came into the Awards show a favorite to win the top awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best (Adapted) Screenplay and Best Cinematography. Yet it walked away with only technical awards as well as Cinematography (arguably "technical" in this case as well).

In contrast, the darling of the Oscar's this year was the well deserving film The Artist, a technically perfect nostalgic look back on Hollywood's Silent Screen era. The picture won Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius) and Best Actor (Jean Dujardin).

And Nostalgia arguably factored in pretty much all of the other prestigious awards:

Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Beginners. He was certainly excellent, won on merit. But it also felt like a "lifetime achievement award" as well. Plummer is 82, only 2 years younger than the Oscars themselves.

Octavia Spenser won Best Supporting Actress for her role in a film that was arguably anachronistic. It was said about The Help when the came out this past summer that while the topic itself was nice, it was yet another story written by a white woman about race relations in the South. Yes, this worked well in the 1930s with the celebrated Oscar winning screen adapation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and even in the early 1960s with the similarly celebrated Oscar winning screen adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird. But this is 2011/12. Yes, Octavia Spenser, African American, was the only one who won an Oscar for The Help, a screen adaptation of the book by the same name written by Kathryn Strocket. But the Association of Black Women Historians rightly asked last summer how long will it take before a story written by a black woman about race relations in the South will get such Oscar buzz?

Meryl Streep, universally acknowledged as the best actress of our time and possibly of all time, won her third Oscar after being nominated and then snubbed 14 other times (Yes, she's been nominated for the Academy Awards 17 times) because, yes, she's the greatest but also because she played here the role of the towering (and now aging...) British figure of the late 20th Century, Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Nostalgia is written all over this award...

Finally Woody Allen received the award for Best Original Screenplay for his film Midnight in Paris which was precisely about an American screenwriter of today (played in the film by Owen Wilson) nostagically looking back at Paris of the 1920s.

I suppose that story-telling is always going to be largely based on nostalgia (And at its base that's what Hollywood does -- tell/sell stories). And, it's not easy (and certainly would be limiting) to come up with compelling stories about about times, places and people who haven't existed yet.

Still I do find it fascinating that there was such an uproar last year over the Oscars' young hosts (Anne Hatheway and James Franco). And then there was an almost counter-revolution in the Oscar balloting last year when a story about a dead stuttering English King (The King's Speech) won all the major awards, vanquishing the modern retelling True Grit (whose star was no longer the venerable John Wayne but a spunky young actress named Hailee Steinfeld playing a teenager) and the ultra-cutting edge films like The Social Network and Inseption.

This year, the Oscars' counter revolution was complete with the "resurrection" of Billy Crystal as host, something that to Crystal's and the show's producers' credit the show's initial sequence joked about. And one must admit that Crystal was good!

Further to Meryl Streep's and Woody Allen's credits, both have become quite famous for working with and mentoring new talent. Anne Hatheway (The Devil Wears Prada), Amy Adams (Doubt, Julie and Julia), and Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia!) have all gotten to work with and learn from Meryl Streep. And the list of young actors and actresses that Woody Allen has worked with over the past decades is simply too long to list here but they have included Mira Sorvino, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johannson, Javier Berdem, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, et al, et al.

So even though the same names often do pop-up over and over again, there are folks like Streep and Allen (and I do suspect Crystal) who do seek to "share the wealth" (or at least share their knowledge). And any young person picked to host the Oscars in coming years ought to view both last year's and this year's shows and seek to learn from them. And until then, I return to saying Billy Crystal simply rules The Oscars. There's simply no one in these last 20 years who's been as good as he's been in hosting the show.

My 2012 Oscar Picks

2012-02-26T17:06:00.001-06:00

I've been somewhat ambivalent this year about giving Oscar predictions because I really did see a lot of movies this past year and thought a lot of films and performances were very good and deserved praise. So I even created a "Denny Awards" to underscore the films and performances (male and female) that I thought deserved recognition.

On the other hand, the annual Oscars is one of the largest shared experiences in the United States. So I'm quickly typing a list of Oscar picks now and will be better about this next year.

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
WILL WIN - Christopher Plummer (Beginners)
SHOULD WIN - Christopher Plummer
DESERVING OF A NOMINATION - John Hawkes (Martha Marcy May Marlene)

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
WILL WIN - Octavia Spenser (The Help)
SHOULD WIN - Octavia Spenser
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter), Judy Dench (J Edgar)

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
WILL WIN - Jean Dujardin (The Artist)
SHOULD WIN - Jean Dujardin
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Dominic Cooper (The Devil's Double), Leonardo DiCaprio (J Edgar), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), Antonio Banderas (The Skin I Live In), Martin Sheen (The Way)

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
WILL WIN - Viola Davis (The Help)
SHOULD WIN - Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady)
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Khomotso Manyaka (Life Above All)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREEN PLAY
WILL WIN - The Artist
SHOULD WIN - The Artist / Midnight in Paris
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Future, Another Earth, Take Shelter, The Way

BEST ADAPTED SCREEN PLAY
WILL WIN - Hugo
SHOULD WIN - The Descendants
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Higher Ground, Carnage

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
WILL WIN - Hugo
SHOULD WIN (AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED) - Melancholia (!),
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Take Shelter, The Skin I Live In, Like Crazy

BEST DIRECTOR
WILL WIN - Martin Scorcese (Hugo)
SHOULD WIN - Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) / Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
DESERVED OF NOMINATIONS - Pedro Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In), Clint Eastwood (J Edgar)

BEST ANIMATED PICTURE
WILL WIN - Rango
SHOULD WIN - Rango
DESERVING OF A NOMINATION - The Adventures of Tintin

BEST PICTURE
WILL WIN - The Artist / The Help
SHOULD WIN - The Artist

Russian Reserve (orig. Русский заповедник)

2012-02-26T00:20:00.000-06:00

MPAA (Unrated) Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2008621/

Russian Reserve (orig. Русский заповедник), directed by Valery Timoschenko is a Russian documentary which played recently at the at the Peace on Earth Film Festival held at the Chicago Cultural Center between Feb 23-26, 2012. The documentary is about a Russian Orthodox priest, Fr. Victor Saltykov living in a remote Russian village, which he notes is statistically "the poorest village in the Russian Federation." Yet it becomes clear that seen through the right lens, it is an absolutely idyllic place to live -- fields, orchards, lakes, rivers, a nice white Russian Orthodox church in the center of town.

Many thoughts came to my mind as I watched this film.

I recalled, for instance, that the Servites, members of my religious order, from my Order's Mexican Province, made a similar choice some ten years ago to accept a missionary assignment to one of the poorest municipalities in all of Mexico -- in Acatepec in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico among the Tlapaneco (Mephaa) people living there (video presentation of the Servites in Acatepec (Tlapa), Guerrero; interview, in Spanish, of Fr. Ruben Torres, OSM, one of the founders of the Servite Mission there).

I recalled my trips (3 each) to both the Servite mission in Acatepec as well as to the Servite mission in Acre, Brazil (in the Amazon) [2].

And I recalled my Slavic roots. My dad's mother was from a similarly idyllic little town, Obdenice in southern Bohemia (Czech Republic). My mother's father was Russian from the Kuban region of Russia.

The spirituality of the Russian Orthodox church is very well expressed in this film. It idylizes the life of the poustinik or pilgrim/hermit, who gives up everything to follow Christ. He/she lives simply, in the countryside, depending quite literally on what God gives him/her. A great book on the subject is Catherine De Hueck's Poustinia. Another great book is an anonymous text coming from 19th century Russia called "The Way of the Pilgrim."

In the film, Fr. Viktor, besides sacramental functions, tends cows, tends bees, instructs visitors how to cultivates potatoes. He notes that he has a special house setup for city dwellers coming out to visit him, noting that it takes a few days for "city dwellers" to get used to village life. With a smile he further notes that he had a couple visiting him some years back in which the wife initially demanded that her husband take her back home when they arrived. "Now she's the happiest (repeat) visitor here ..."

One then also recalls the Leo Tolstoy and the Tolstoyan Movement, recalling that even Mahatma Gandhi was influenced by this movement to celebrate simple, agrarian life.

At the end of the film, Fr. Viktor, who saw his little community (and others like it) as "little Noah's arks," summarized his philosophy in this way:

You don't have to save Nature, because it will outlast us,
You don't have to save the Church, because it will save us,
You don't have to save Russia, you just have to love it,
You don't have to save "the village,' you just need to live in one.

What a great and thoughtful film from a part of the world that most Westerners would know next to nothing about.

ADDENDUM -

The two books that I referred to above are both available on Amazon:

Catherine de Hueck-Doherty, Poustinia
Anonymous, The Way of the Pilgrim

Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1

2012-02-25T12:58:00.000-06:00

MPAA (unrated) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2090581/

Nuclear Savage (directed by Adam Jonas Horowitz) is a pointed and poignant documentary about the pacific islanders of the far-flung Marshall Islands where the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the late 1940s-though the 1950s. The documentary played recently at the Peace on Earth Film Festival held at the Chicago Cultural Center between Feb 23-26, 2012.

The accusation of the documentary is that the U.S. government purposefully used these pacific islanders as de facto human guinea pigs to the study the effects of nuclear contamination on people.

The accusation is based on a protocol (Project 4.1) written-up six months prior to a massive nuclear test (Bravo) in the Marshall Islands. The protocol outlined a procedure of how to study the effects of radioactive contamination on people. Six months later the Bravo test did, in fact, contaminate the Rongerik Atoll of the Marshall Islands along with its residents. The U.S. Navy then took its time, several days, to evacuate the residents of this Atoll by which time the residents were already thoroughly contaminated by the radioactive fallout.

The U.S. government has always maintained that the contamination of the Rongerik Atoll and its population was "an accident" the result of a sudden change in wind-direction in the hours just before the test. The islanders and their advocates have maintained that by the U.S. weather service's own records the U.S. government knew of the change in wind direction and made the decision to go along with the test anyway.

My own sense would be that while perhaps the irradiation/contamination of the residents by the blast was nominally "an accident," it was one that was more or less obviously foreseen by the U.S. government that eventually there would be such "accidental exposure" of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and hence why the government already had a protocol to "study the victims" of such an "accident" even before it occurred. That is to say that even if the islanders had not been irradiated and contaminated by that particular test, then probably _others_ would have been irradiated/contaminated by another one...

In any case, the effects of the irradiation and contamination were devastating. Surviving islanders interviewed in the film described bouts with cancer, leukemia, and horrendous, horrendous birth defects -- "My first child was born looking like a sack of grapes. My second was born without muscles or bones. He was like a jellyfish. Both died within a day of birth," reported one woman. Another reported giving birth to a child whose appendages "looked more like the fins of a sea turtle than arms or legs." Another reported giving birth to a "child who you couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but had a tail." All once again died early.

Worse, in 1957, the evacuated residents of the Rongerik Atoll were forced to return to live on the island even though the government knew it remained highly contaminated. And the cancers/birth defects continued. The Islanders were finally evacuated in the 1980 a second time -- by Green Peace -- but as of 2011 they were being forced (under the current Obama Administration) to once more return to their island to live there or risk have their compensations cut off. Needless to say ... the Islanders don't want to go back.

What a nightmare and what terrible things happen when sin occurs "far away," "in darkness," "when no one is looking".

A note about the title, Nuclear Savage. It's taken from actual language used by U.S. scientists in 1950s era newsreels describing these poor people who had their islands blown-up and contaminated by American nuclear tests while _nobody_ except Christian missionaries actually cared about them. Indeed, most of those "Savages" (1) contaminated by and evacuated sometime after the Bravo test, (2) forced to return, (3) evacuated once more and now (4) being forced to return again to the contaminated Rongerik Atoll WERE CHRISTIANS ALL ALONG. Among the remains on the contaminated and abandoned island are the remains of a Christian church and a Christian cemetery....

Tyler Perry's Good Deeds

2012-02-25T11:47:00.001-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1885265/

Good Deeds (written and directed by Tyler Perry), is a very well-written/crafted movie, both gentle and pointed, that's certainly about our times but which chooses to be positive.

The film is about two people: Wesley Deeds (played by Tyler Perry) and Lindsey Wakefield (played by Thandie Newton).

Wesley is a 30-something gentleman, 5th generation Ivy League graduate, who now heads his family's investment business from its high rise headquarters in San Francisco's business district. He has both the temperament and the capability to lead the company well and thus be a good steward of the family's fortune for another generation. But he's also unhappy. A good son to his mother Wilemina (played by Phylicia Rashad), a good future husband to his fiance Natalie (played by Gabrielle Union), and a good/competent leader of his family's firm, he's nonetheless going through the motions. He's good because he's always met expectations, done what he's supposed to do (and done so quite well).

Lindsey turns out to be a cleaning lady in the Deeds' high rise. Behind on her rent, behind on her bills, alone, with an 7-8 year old daughter Ariel (played by Jordenn Thompson) in tow, she's constantly fighting to "keep it together" even as she's obviously terrified that she's one step away from final disaster.

Even though Lindsey works for Deeds, the two "meet" for the first time when Lindsey cuts off Wesley in the Deeds' Building's parking garage to park in his reserved spot right by the elevator. Wesley is annoyed. His more problematic and certainly more hot-headed younger brother Walter (played by Brian White) is furious. Lindsey, ever in defensive mode, doesn't care, calls both names and runs up to the building's maintenance office to pick-up her check. She needs the check to cover her rent. From this initial encounter, much ensues ...

There are many things to like about this movie. Yes, the dialogue remains at times a little "stiff/unnatural" It's obvious that the characters represent "types" rather than complex individuals. Yet, Perry uses his characters and his film with purpose. He's both challenging his viewers (and perhaps even the larger society) and doing so in a positive way.

It becomes obvious in the film that Lindsey had no idea of who she was actually working for. When she runs into Wesley sometime later, having been transferred to the evening shift (Wesley habitually stays late working in the office), she has no idea that he actually runs the firm. She assumes that "Deeds" who owned the firm had to be some "old white guy." When she starts getting to know Wesley, it doesn't even enter into her head that she's talking to the CEO of the firm and that he's not even a "flash in the pan" / "upstart" but had inherited the firm from his father who inherited it from his.

On the other side of the coin, at a time when so much anger is being expressed at "the top 1%," both in film (Inside Job, Margin Call, Tower Heist, In Time, Man on a Ledge all good to very good films BTW...) and in society (with the Occupy Wall Street Movement), rather than condemning "the 1%," Tyler Perry (himself a theater mogul) offers "the 1%" a good example in Wesley Deeds. Wesley uses his money and his power to get involved in Lindsey's life. And as he does so, he finds himself. He becomes "Good Deeds."

What a nice, nice film!

Gone

2012-02-24T13:33:00.001-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1838544/

CNS/ USCCB Review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv026.htm

Gone (directed by Heitor Dahlia, written by Allison Burnett) is a rather uncomplicated if quite well played genre piece -- a paranoid/psychological thriller -- about a young woman named Jill (played by Amanda Seyfried) living in Portland, Oregon who had survived a traumatic ordeal.

Jill had been abducted by a man, thrown into a pit (dug by the abductor) somewhere deep in the forests surrounding Portland and survived to escape and tell the tale only because she was able to drive piece of a bone left from one of the other girls who had been abducted, presumably raped and then left to die in the pit before her. Disoriented after she emerged from the forest to safety, she was unable to lead authorities to the pit. After a couple of weeks of increasingly half-hearted searching the authorities apparently concluded that since they were unable to identify/capture her attacker or find the pit, she may have simply invented the story for reasons unknown. Indeed when we meet Jill in the film, we see that she is on a fairly strict regimen of medication needing to take several pills several times a day.

Film begins about a year after Jill's ordeal. It's clear that she at least has not given-up on finding the hole in the woods of the protected forest in which she had been held. Still, viewers get a definite sense of the vastness of the woods in the area and the difficulty of finding the hole especially if one's memory of the events was necessarily imperfect/clouded by trauma.

Still, Jill had survived her ordeal. This was something that was clearly significant not only to her as a survivor, but also to her abductor: She would be the only person who could presumably eventually find the pit (with the remains of the other abducted and killed women) and perhaps even find and identify him. So the film becomes not just of Jill trying to prove her story and capture her abductor, but also about the abductor trying to "tie up loose ends" (his own words, we find out).

So one night while Jill was at work and having borrowed her sister's car rather than driving her own, Jill's sister Molly (played by Emily Wickersham) disappears. Jill's immediately convinced that she was abducted by her abductor. The police, of course, think that she's crazy, noting that there could be any number of irrational / irresponsible reasons for a young woman like Jill's sister to "not be home" one morning, even if "she had a final exam that next day" and Molly's boyfriend "didn't know where she was either." One of the police detectives who had worked previously on Jill's case asks her "Did you ever think that your sister could have had a second boyfriend? Just saying, it happens..."

So Jill's convinced that Molly's been kidnapped and in immediate danger of being killed and the police is convinced that Jill's disturbed. Much ensues...

A genre film like this often depends on good writing and dialogue. I have to say that I found Jill's talking-up of various potential witnesses to the abduction of her sister and then of people who may have known something about the potential perpetrator to be very well done. All in all, for what the film was -- a paranoid/psychological thriller -- I thought it was quite well done and probably a lot of late teens and young adults would enjoy watching it.

Parents should note that while nothing is every shown, the film assumes as a matter of course a young adult sexual morality (immorality...), mostly heterosexual but at least in one case homosexual, that would make an R-rating for the film more suitable than PG-13. Indeed, due to subject matter alone -- after all it is about abducting and terrorizing young people -- an R-rating would probably have been more appropriate. Sometimes, I simply don't understand Hollywood's rating decisions, but parents just take note. This film, while certainly a pretty good young adult "date movie," it's not really "for the little ones."

Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance

2012-02-19T18:14:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Fr. Dennis (1 Star)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071875/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv023.htm

I found Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance (directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, story and screenplay cowritten by David S. Goyer along with Scott M. Gimble and Seth Hoffman based on the to be a monumental disappointment on almost every level.

A sequel to IMHO the much better film Ghost Rider [2007] based on the Marvel Comic Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze), it was clear to me that the makers of the current film made a decision to "go darker" with Johnny Blaze (played in both films by Nicholas Cage) who in the first film was arguably sympathetic. Johnny had made a deal with the Devil (played by Peter Fonda in the first film) only to save his father from cancer. (Shortly after signing his own immortal soul over to the Devil to save his father from cancer, the Devil turns around and kills the father in a motorcycle accident ... YOU GOTTA FEEL SORRY FOR JOHNNY THEN ...).

In this film, Johnny Blaze comes to enjoy way too much the Ghost Rider "job" that the Devil has condemned him to: Periodically, Johnny, a stunt motorcyclist (a "dare devil"...) would become possessed, turn into a flaming skeleton in a smoking leather jacket on a really, really hot, indeed FLAMING bike ... and speed-off to capture some really, really bad-guy (some true Evil Doer [TM]) -- usually by bringing him down with a HUGE red-hot metal chain that he'd throw at him, knocking him down and tangling him in it. Then Johnny Blaze (aka The Ghost Rider) would step off the bike, bring the Evil Doer close, look square in his terror stricken eyes, declare the charge and sentence "YOU PREYED ON / CHEATED / KILLED THE INNOCENT..." suck the Soul out of said terrified Evil Doer and send said convicted Soul straight down to Hell [TM]. Since the people that Johnny Blaze / the Ghost Rider sent down to Hell this way were generally truly awful people and Johnny was doing all this as "a cursed biker," one could feel sorry for the guy in the first film. However, in this film once possessed he seemed to enjoy this work way too much.

Then the plot of this film is far more confused. It's set not in the United States anymore but "in Eastern Europe somewhere" (where Johnny Blaze has apparently run-off to in hopes of somehow escaping the Devil there). There he finds himself trying to save a child named Danny (played by Fergus Riordan) of a young Gypsy woman named Nadya (played by Violante Placido) who the Devil named Roarke (played by Ciaran Hinds) wished to enter in order to do more damage on the Earth. This battle between Good and Evil comes to involve a strange Evil-looking traditionalist "Catholic-looking" religious Order (less DaVinci Code [2006] evil than Name of the Rose [1986] evil...) that wants to kill the boy before the Devil could enter him and a "hip" and very heavily armed "rouge Priest" named Moreau (played by Idris Elba). Fr. Moreau reconciles Johnny Blaze back to the fold of the living (or at least the non-cursed) by a Rite that looks vaguely like Confession, only to find to the horror of both, that he "reconciled him too soon" to be able to protect the boy. Guess what Johnny does then to save the boy ...

I think I've had my fill of gun-wielding priests over the past year. I was relatively kind to the sci-fi thriller Priest [2011] (based on a South Korean comic book series), then chose to ignore the film Machine Gun Preacher [2011], but because I liked the first Ghost Rider [2007] made it a point to see this film. But I think I'm done.

Finally, I actually did see this film in 3D, and have to report that THE 3D WAS AWFUL. It added virtually NOTHING to the film. The vast majority of the flaming CGI special effects that perhaps could have been really really cool in 2D looked absolutely ridiculous in 3D. Yes, Ghost Rider originated as a comic book. But even in the comic book genre, if the comics are poorly drawn, they don't sell...

So this Ghost Rider sequel (1) turned an arguably sympathetic (if cursed) character into a much less sympathetic one, (2) featured gun-wielding priests and vaguely Evil and certainly misguided Medieval-looking "Catholic-looking" religious monks, trying to kill a kid "in order to save him," and (3) did this utilizing hyper-expensive 3D technology to produce a monumentally disappointing (even visually, even buying into the 3D technology) product. If there is a Ghost Rider 3, I do hope that it will be done better than this.

Journey 2 - Mysterious Island

2012-02-19T11:57:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG) CNS/USCCB (A-II) Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1397514/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv018.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120208/REVIEWS/120209983

Journey 2 - Mysterious Island (directed by Brad Payton, story by Richard Outten, Mark Gunn and Brian Gunn, screenplay by Mark Gunn and Brian Gunn) is the latest film adaptation, this time in 3D, of Jules Verne's 1874 novel Mysterious Island (French orig. title - L'Île mystérieuse). Jules Verne, of course, was a pioneer in fantastic / science fiction writing and has been a perennial challenge to film makers since the invention of moving pictures. The recent movie, Hugo, was largely about the pioneering French film-maker Georges Méliès who was already putting together cinematic adaptations of Jules Verne's novels on the screen in the Silent Film Era.

So how does the present adaption go? The film begins with Sean (played by Josh Hutcherson), a teen struggling with and perhaps reacting to his mother Liz' (played by Kristen Davis) remarrying and thus the presence of Hank (played by Dwayne Johnson), Sean's new step-father in his life. Seeking to defend himself against this change, Sean seeks to keep alive memory of his dad's family's values and traditions. Specifically just as his grandfather and his father before him, Sean's become something of Jules Verne fanatic. His father deceased, and his grandfather (played by Michael Caine) "long gone" on account of this irritating interest in Verne and "proving" that Verne's books were "about real journeys" that Verne had taken, Sean's "hobby" comes across Liz and Hank as disruptive (and perhaps even delusional) as they try to build a new blended family together and get everyone, including Sean "on board" with the new reality.

One night, Sean becomes excited because he thinks that he has detected a radio message from his long lost grandfather, and that he may have found Verne's "Mysterious Island." What to do? Liz remains annoyed, but Hank, who apparently has some money, decides to try "to bond" with Sean by playing along. Together, the two decipher the coded coordinates that Sean's grandfather apparently had sent in his radio message and when they discover that the coordinates map to a location somewhere near the island of Fiji in the South Pacific. Then, they decide to "give it a shot" and fly out to Fiji to see if there's something to the story.

Out there in the South Pacific, the two rent a helicopter operated by a local tour guide named Gobato (played by Luis Guzman) and his teenage daughter Kailani (played by Vanessa Hudgens). They find out that the coordinates correspond to a part of the ocean nearby that's perpetually covered by clouds and stormy (hence why almost no one ever goes there). But Sean convinces everyone to try anyway. Once they arrive, (and even the journey is fraught with much danger), many further adventures ensue, including linking up with Sean's grandfather, who indeed did send that radio signal to the outsider world from the island during apparently a very brief break in the weather.

The story is obviously a fantasy, but so was Jules Verne's original. I do think it makes for a very nice story for pre-teens, perhaps indeed as a "father-son" or "step-father son" outing especially if a family were experiencing some "bonding issues" at home. Though I saw the movie in 2D, I would imagine that 3D would probably work well as well. (I still think that 3D is both needlessly costly and gimmicky ...) All in all, it's not a stupendous film but one that preserves and adapts, quite well actually, the legacies of both Jules Verne and the attempts by early film makers like Georges Méliès to put Verne's fantastic stories on film.

The Vow

2012-02-18T11:34:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606389/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv019.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120208/REVIEWS/120209977

The Vow (directed by Michael Sucsy, screenplay by Abby Kohn, Marc Silversteen and Jason Katims, story by Stuart Sender) is a nice enough date movie, released just before Valentine's Day asking the question: What would you do if the love of your life had an accident and forgot who you are? Would you try to win her (or him) back? The answer is, of course, yes, ... just not too creepily ... and, of course, we get to watch Leo try to do this. (With the script on his side, he does very, very well. On the plus side, however, his character does offer a rather good if idealized example of how to go about these things).

Though based on a true story, it's important to remember that it's Hollywood telling it, so the edges are smoothed out. Indeed, so smoothed out are the edges that an Indian friend of mine from my religious order [Intl] [USA] called it "the first true Bollywood [1] [2] movie made by Hollywood" ;-).

Still, I maintain my belief that even in the schlockiest story there are usually elements that make it more complicated than it may initially seem, which indeed make the story "work." If a movie were "just schlock" we wouldn't go at all.

The Vow is no different. There is more to the movie than the schlock and yet not so much that it becomes overwhelming and gets us complaining "hey wait a minute ..." Older foggies like me would recognize a nice message of reconciliation the film. And I admit that despite the still rather high "schlock" content of the story, I am positive that when I was in my 20ies, I would have certainly considered the film a really, really nice film to take a date to. Of course, with that kind of a recommendation, "Hollywood wins." But then I don't mind because I've obviously seen Hollywood as more of a "good if at times overly talkative friend" than an "enemy" here (I just hate its current push for 3D ... at least this film wasn't done that way ... yet ... but that's another story ... ;-).

So what is the story here? Leo (played by Channing Tatum) a recording engineer and Paige (played by Rachel McAdams) a sculptor, graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago (my ma' was actually a graduate of the school ;-) are a lovely (and surprisingly married if alas, not in any Church ...) "bohemian" couple living in Chicago and as happy as could be.

Yet, one snowy winter's evening, coming home from an "art house theater" (the Music Box) in their car, stopped at a stop sign on a seemingly empty street and in a romantic mood, they suddenly get hit by salt truck... Boom! Paige flies through the windshield. Leo apparently still with his seat belt on crumples into the steering wheel / airbag. The movie resumes some weeks later ...

Paige had been kept in an induced coma for the weeks that had followed the accident while the swelling in her head decreased. When she comes out of it, she has memory loss. Specifically, she can't remember anything of the previous 5 years, that is, she can't remember anything since before her meeting Leo. He is the first person she sees when she comes to, but she thinks he's the doctor ...

The actual doctor (played by Wendy Crewson) tells Leo that, well, with traumatic brain injury, it's hard to know what's going to happen, but perhaps after sometime she would fully regain her memory.

Now admitting that this is a story, but also admitting that it's based on a true story, I found the point at which her memory was lost fascinating: She woke-up to think that she was ONCE AGAIN a happy LAW STUDENT at Northwestern University engaged to a fellow law student named Jeremy (played by Scott Speedman). The morning after she wakes up, she calls her parents, Bill and Rita Thornton (played by Sam Neill and Jessica Lange respectively) who weren't hospital before and may not have even known that she had an accident. What the heck just happened?

The parents come rushing to the hospital. They're happy to see her, happy also that she's happy to see them, and frankly very happy that she didn't seem to remember the last 5 years.

There's a point in the story in which Bill offers to pay Leo "to just go away" now that they (the parents) "had their daughter back." Again what the heck happened?

Leo hadn't kidnapped Paige and she hadn't joined any cult. But it becomes clear that Paige must have had some sort of traumatic experience even before the accident that had led her to so radically change her life in the first place -- leave law school to enter into art school, dump Jeremy, cut ties with her family, and finally meet and marry Leo.

The rest of the story is about her (with her amnesia) figuring out and the audience figuring out what that story was. Knowing something of making radical changes in life, I do think that the movie does give a plausible, indeed (within conventions of a film like this) realistic explanation. Something obviously happened around the time that she made her first break ...

I'm not going to tell you "what happened" because that would really spoil the story. And I would also say to parents and to potential date goers that the movie deals with "what happened" nicely, gently and from a distance. So unlike a fair number of romantic comedies of recent years, one does feel midway through the picture like "Hey, I thought this was supposed to be a light romantic comedy, why all this stuff now?"

So I would recommend the film to all. The PG-13 rating is, for once, truly appropriate, and pre-teens would probably just be bored rather than "potentially damaged" by the film ;-).

Finally, I would like to write a little here on the value of getting married in the Church (or the Church of one's tradition) as opposed to what the couple did in the movie. Yes, I do "get" young people (both today and before ... hey, people like me, and my parents, and their parents ... were in our/their twenties before as well). But I do find it somewhat "egotistical" if a couple chooses to define everything on their own. There is a value to submitting one's relationship (and really one's life) to something "bigger" than oneself. Yes, Churches can seem at times "archaic," "behind the times" and all that. However, they are repositories of knowledge, past experience (millenia of past experience...). My ma' loved to remind me when I was a late teen and and in my early twenties that "Nothing is new under the sun ..." (Eccl 1:9).

So I do believe that it is worth it to "remain in dialogue" with "the family" with the Church, with the Traditions of one's past. I can also say that when I was in my 20s, my parents knew little; when I was in my 30s, they started to know more; and now in my mid/late 40s, boy were they wise ;-).

So while I do understand that it could be cool to get married "skydiving, by Elvis," (or in my case, it could have been "kinda cool" to take my vows "in front of Yoda," ;-), the families that we have are indeed, the families that we have and the Church(es) that we have are the Churches that we have. And it is ultimately a sign of maturity to be able to navigate and reconcile choose to become part of the pasts that we were given.

Our Creator has loved us, but Our Creator also loved our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and all the way down to our first parents ... and despite each of us screwing-up a number of times along the way.

Anyway, enjoy the film, but young couples, when you "find the one" have the courage to really get married and leave "Elvis" (or "Yoda") for later ... ;-)

Coriolanus

2012-02-07T22:34:00.001-06:00

MPAA (R) Roger Ebert (3 1/2 Stars) Fr Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb Listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1372686/
Roger Ebert's Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120201/REVIEWS/120209998

Coriolanus (directed by Ralph Fiennes, screenplay by John Logan) though filmed in contemporary Serbia including its capital Belgrade and Montenegro (also of former Yugoslavia) and certainly filmed with the intention of referencing the recent conflicts there, is based on and quite faithful to the play Coriolanus by William Shakespeare about the legendary figure Gaius Marcius Coriolanus from ancient Rome's Republican Era.

Why would a play by William Shakespeare about a legendary general from the Roman Republic era set in contemporary Serbia "work" as a film?

Giaus Marcius (played in the film by Ralph Fiennes) was a gruff, "blood and guts" Roman "war hero," who returns at the beginning of the story to Rome in glory after defeating an invading force led by Tallus Aufindus (played by Gerard Butler) of the "barbarian" Volschian people. Upon his return, he is triumphantly given the title Coriolanus by the head of the Roman army General Cominius (played by John Kani). Encouraged by his family and friends, notably by his mentor/promoter Senator Menenius (played by Brian Cox) and mother Volumnia (played by Vanessa Redgrave) with his wife Virgilia (played by Jessica Chastain) and young son on board as well, Coriolanus is persuaded to seek becoming Consul of Rome (basically the President).

This, however, produces a backlash. While apparently very popular among the elite (the Roman Patrician class), among the lower classes of Rome (the Plebes) Coriolanus is seen less a "war hero" than an oppressor and arguably a war criminal. Since alliances among the elites Patricians are always precarious and full of intrigue, a number of Tribunes, Brutus (played by Paul Jessen) and Sicinius (played by James Nesbitt), take advantage of the Plebian discontent to thwart any aspirations of making Coriolanus Consul. Instead conspire to drive him into exile, banishing him for being a dangerous man.

Betrayed by his country after having save it, Coriolanus makes his way to Atrium, the capital of Volschians. There he makes peace with his old rival Tallus Aufindus and offers to join with him and destroy Rome in revenge. Soon, the Volschian army, led by the two, is on the march and no one can stop them. Desperate, Rome sends Coriolanus' family -- mother, wife and boy son -- to Corliolanus to persuade him to not take his vengeance on Rome. Yet, he's already made promises to the Volschian army as well. What's he supposed to do?

I do think that the story does "work" somewhat in former Yugoslavia because of the traumas of the recent conflicts there, where often "war heroes" also became war criminals and large numbers of common people on all sides (today's plebes of the former Yugoslav republics) were left feeling used and betrayed by everybody.

Coriolanus however is above all a "soldier's tale." My problem with the application of the story of Coriolanus to the recent conflicts in former Yugoslavia is that a fair number of war criminals from those conflicts who sit now locked-up in the Hague could be handed excuses by this play (and its application here) to say "We're the Coriolanuses of our time." No.

If you lined-up civilians and shot them (or ordered civilians to be lined-up and shot), then you don't deserve to be considered "war heroes." Instead, you are war criminals.

A Separation

2012-02-06T22:13:00.001-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) Roger Ebert (4 Stars) Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832382/
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120125/REVIEWS/120129982

A Separation (written and directed by Asghar Farhadi) is a truly excellent film that comes from Iran that's been been nominated for Best Foreign Language film for this year's Oscars (2012). It is a very intimate film, small in scope, that nonetheless invites "those who have eyes to see and ears to hear" both in Iran and outside to open their minds and hearts and think.

At its core, it is about an Iranian couple Nader (played by Peyman Moadi) and Simin (played by Leila Hatami) with an 11-year-old daughter Termeh (played by Sarina Farhadi) that's going through a divorce -- an Iranian Kramer vs. Kramer [1979].

Why are they divorcing? As Simin explains to the judge in the film's opening scene, that three of them had gotten passports and exit visas (to leave Iran), exit visas that will soon expire but her husband doesn't want to leave Iran.

Why doesn't Nadar want to leave Iran? Because he can't bear to leave his father, who's somewhere in the middle stages of Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is, of course, a degenerative disease but it generally takes a very long time to actually bring about death. Nadar's father is still living with them and when we meet him, it becomes immediately clear that though he has Alzheimer's disease, it's going to take a long time before God/Allah takes him.

So what then is Simin's rush to leave Iran, the judge asks. Simin responds in a rather impolitic manner: She doesn't want her daughter to grow-up "under these circumstances." And it's obvious that she's not talking about watching her grandfather slowly die of Alzheimer's. The judge, with a somewhat offended voice, asks her what exactly she meant by that. Simin deflects the question, but the rest of the movie is, indeed, about what she meant.

Apparently, though unable to divorce or even travel out of the country without permission of her husband, nevertheless, both Nader and Simin understand that the marriage is over. Returning from the judge, Simin packs up some of her things and (as was done throughout the West decades before divorce became common/accepted) moves back to her mother's.

This leaves Nader with a problem. Who's going to watch dad while he's at work? With some help of Simin (again, anyone who knows anything of divorce would not be surprised by Simin's help here ... a marriage may be failing but the couple does not necessarily completely hate each other) Nadar hires a caretaker, a woman named Razieh (played by Sereh Bayat) with a cute little daughter and a husband who needs some help.

Though set in Iran, anyone who's ever looked for a caretaker for an elderly parent in the circumstances of Nadar and his family would understand the circumstances of this caretaker: She's kind. She's kind because she's religious. And she's interested in the job because she and her family need the money. As such, though religious and kind, she's not completely honest about her own circumstances (ie she's pregnant, and she has husband who's not particularly excited that she's working).

As such, though it may have seemed to Nadar that the situation with his father is at least temporarily resolved, right on the first day a problem arises: Razieh's cute little daughter who Razieh takes with her to Nadar's home to watch Nadar's father -- what's Razieh going to do? Hire a babysitter to watch her daughter while she watches an elderly man for another family? -- comes to her mom with the news: "I think the old man just wet himself." NOBODY had thought about this happening. Perhaps they should have thought all this through, but they didn't. Again, nobody (except perhaps Allah/God) can think everything through ...

What's a good muslim woman supposed to do? Well she calls the Imam (her priest) to ask: "Is it okay for a good muslim woman like me to change an elderly man?" And she's knows the circumstances, telling the Imam: "He's old, he's senile in one of more advanced stages of Alzheimer's, so he's probably not going get aroused. But he needs help." (Apparently the Imam assures her that in such circumstances she can change the old man's clothes ...).

In the days that follow, it just gets worse. There's one afternoon when the old man manages to sneak-out of the apartment and she (approaching 4 months or so pregnant) has to go about running through the neighborhood (and traffic) looking for him.

The next afternoon, Nadar comes home early. He finds his father with one arm tied to the bed and Razieh nowhere to be found. When she comes back, surprised to see Nadar back from his work so soon, she tries to explain. But Nadar's upset. In the course of firing her for leaving his father "tied like an animal" to his bed, he pushes her out the door even as she continues to try to explain why she wasn't there.

The next day the police come and arrest Nadar. Why? Razieh claimed that when Nadar pushed her out the door, she hit the floor and consequently suffered a miscarriage. Nadar didn't even realize that she was pregnant. He tells the investigator: "How was I supposed to know that she's pregnant, when she didn't tell me and women wear so many layers of clothes." By Iranian law, after a period of time (certainly by 4 months) an unborn child is considered a full human being. Nadar's being investigated for murder. And Razieh's husband is particularly upset because apparently he lost a son ...

What a mess. A good part of the rest of the movie is about resolving this new crisis. And while Nadar spends time in jail (if only for a few hours or overnight at a time), one's left wondering who's taking care of his 11-year old daughter and his aging Alzheimer's ridden father now...

Throughout the entire movie, the government is not portrayed as evil, but certainly paternalistic and to the Western observer unsettlingly/disturbingly/astonishingly (take your pick...) intrusive. Yet the Iranian government is shown as certainly operating within the scope of its understanding of its purpose/mission in society and doing so with a good deal of sincerity as it seeks discern who's in the right and who's in the wrong in the case, armed ultimately with the same blunt tools of any bureaucracy / DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services). Yet, most Western observers would find the level of government intrusion into the lives of both families disturbing/shocking.

After all is said and done, Nadar is able to avoid prison, though Razieh and her husband have lost an unborn child and their financial circumstances continue to be the same mess that they were at the beginning of the story. The situation of Nadar's father also remains precarious and Nadar's and Simin's marriage is conceded as finished by all.

All that is left is to resolve what happens now to their 11 year old daughter who it is clear to all both parents love. And after all the other tragedies that play out in the film, we're left with that one. Life is often very very hard ...

The Woman in Black

2012-02-04T16:28:00.002-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (L) Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596365/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv015.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120201/REVIEWS/120209996

The Woman in Black (directed by James Watkins, screenplay by Jane Goldman, based on the novel by Susan Hill) is an excellent horror movie set in England during the early part of the 20th century. Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame) is a young widowed lawyer from "living in the city," with a four year old son. His wife had died in childbirth. Such loss would certainly have been difficult and it becomes clear Kipps has had a rough time of it. Indeed the movie begins with Kipps arriving at work one rainy Tuesday morning where he is treated to a "lecture from Hell" by his boss: "Kipps, as one hopes you have learned by now, our firm does not 'take passengers.' Each of our lawyers is expected to pull his own weight." Kipps is then given the task of "settling the estate" of a client who had lived somewhere in the country. Kipps' boss makes it clear that if Kipps doesn't make good, make this case a profitable job for the firm that he's to expect to be sacked. He's told that this is his last chance... Wonderful, no pressure, huh ...

So Kipps boards a train for the country. Arriving late in the evening, he's given a ride into town by a fellow passenger who tells Kipps that he has the first and only car in the whole county. So Kipps is certainly not "in the city" anymore ...

When he's dropped off at the inn in the center of town, Kipps is very curtly told by the inn-keeper that the place is booked solid and that there's simply no room for him there (or really anywhere in town). Kipps responds that this is strange because he was under the impression that his firm had called up from the city to make the arrangements. The inn-keeper plays dumb, but his wife finally allows Kipps to sleep in a room they have in the attic. That room turns out to be the room from which their daughter and two other girls had mysteriously lept out of the window from some time previous and had not been used since (the girls' toys are still shown lying about).

In the morning, when Kipps asks for a ride to the Estate that he is to settle accounts for, NO ONE wants to give him a lift. Indeed, the inn-keeper had hired a carriage for him, but for the sole purpose of taking him back to the train station and presumably back home. When Kipps asks the carriage driver to take him to the estate instead, the carriage driver initially refuses and only agrees to do so after Kipps promises to pay him a fare many times the usual.

As they approach the estate, located by the sea, it becomes quickly clear that it had not been inhabited for a very long time. Further, the only access to the estate is a very thin winding causeway following the ridge of a sandbar across a salt marsh that gets covered twice a day with the tide. So arrival to and departure from the estate has to be timed according to the tides. Perhaps in centuries past, this would have kept "raiders at bay," but by this time, and even to the somewhat "behind the times" villagers, it could have only added to the creepiness of the place. ;-)

After Kipps arrives and starts rummaging through the papers at the estate, he becomes aware that the last resident of the estate had been a tormented, half-crazed woman whose sister had finally asked the town's authorities to take away her son from her. The little boy then drowned some time later _on that precarious causeway_ when the sister and her husband were in the process to taking him to visit her at the estate. The death of her son had apparently driven the half-crazed resident of the estate completely insane and she hanged herself shortly afterwards. However the town, which the tormented woman had blamed for aiding and abetting her sister in taking away her son from her, had not been the same since.

And this had all been going on for a very long time. The tormented woman and her son had died decades previous. Ever since then, the town had been tormented as well. Finally, presumably with the death of the sister, the long forsaken estate was presumably going to be liquidated, and yes, the villagers were all very, very nervous. What was going to happen now?

So this then is the horrific mess that Kipps finds him stepping into, a mess that he's being asked by his firm to "settle" ("clean up") or else be fired. And you may have thought that you had a tough time of it at work ... look at poor Kipps! ;-)

Much ensues ...

Now the CNS/USCCB rates the film an "L" meaning that it feels that even many adults would find the film troubling presumably because of the themes of suicide (and even child-suicide since apparently the children of the town were being led to their deaths by a ghost of a woman described by the title "The Woman in Black"). I do believe it to be a fair warning and so parents be advised.

All in all though, I found the film to be one very well told ghost/horror story, that though perhaps not for the smallest of kids, ought to do a good job in scaring the teens and adults. So if you like these kind of films, leave the little kids at home (or put them to bed) and prepare to be presented with a very well-crafted and ghostly tale. Indeed, I do believe that the former "Harry Potter" chose this story very, very well ... ;-)

Big Miracle

2012-02-04T02:43:00.002-06:00

MPAA (PG) CNS/USCCB (A-II) Michael Phillips (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1430615/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv014.htm
Michael Phillips' review -
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-big-miracle-20120203-51,0,3012326.story

Big Miracle (directed by Kevin Kwapis, screenplay by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler based on the book by Thomas Rose named Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World's Greatest Non-Event [1989] recently repackaged The Big Miracle [2011] to coincide with the release of the film ...) is indeed a nice feel-good family movie suitable for all but the smallest of children about a seemingly small event -- the 1988 rescue of three California grey whales stranded by ice off the coast of Point Barrow, Alaska -- that came to involve the cooperation of a truly improbable / remarkable coalition of rescuers.

These rescuers included:

Adam Carlson (played by John Krasinski) an Alaskan television reporter (affiliated at the time with NBC) who came upon this story as he was finishing a three month stint of reporting from Point Barrow, Alaska at the northern-most tip of the United States;

Rachel Cramer (played by Drew Berrymore) an Alaskan Green-Peace activist, previously romantically involved with Carlson who picked-up on the story soon after Carlson had reported it;

J.W. McGraw (played by Ted Danson) an oil executive, who despite having had documented run-ins with Cramer over oil drilling leases, became involved after the story went national (apparently then NBC Evening News Anchor Tom Brokaw loved stories like this) and was convinced by his wife Ruth (played by Kathy Baker) that it would actually be good for his company public in terms of public relations, if he offered the services of his company's ice-breaking hovercraft barge, then located at the oil producing center of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska;

Col. Scott Beyer (played by Dermot Mulroney) of the Alaska Air National Guard, who was tasked by Alaska's Governor Haskell (played by Stephen Root) to direct the transportation of McGraw's barge from Prudhoe Bay to Point Barrow with aid of two of AANG's Sikorski skycrane helicopters.

Kelly Meyers (played by Vinessa Shaw) liason from then President Reagan's White House. According to the film, having met as a result of this rescue effort and obviously having "hit it off," Meyers and Col. Beyer, actually married a year after the story took place;

The normally whale-hunting Inuit/Eskimo residents of Point Barrow, Alaska including 10-year old Nathan (played by Ahmaogak Sweeney) and his grandfather, Inuit/Eskimo elder Malik (played by John Pinkayak);

Two Minnesota small-time entrepreneurs Karl Hootkin (played by James LeGros) and Dean Glowacki (played by Rob Riggle) who arrived with a useful ice-melting gizmo that actually helped keep the the air holes being made in the ice by volunteers for the whales from freezing up;

And finally the crew of a Soviet icebreaker, led in the film by Captains Yuri (played by Stefan Kapicic) and Dimitri (played by Mark Ivanir), which was dispatched by then Soviet premier Gorbachev upon request of then U.S. President Reagan after it became clear that the only asset near enough to make a difference in the rescue effort would be Soviet.

All these people as well as a flood of reporters, big and small, including Jill Jerard, then of Los Angeles (played by Kristen Bell) came to the rescue of the three whales, who came to be known affectionately as Fred, Wilma and Bambam from the Flintstones cartoon.

Again, it's a feel good movie. But it does remind us that all kinds of people can come together, "cut through the ice" and even "move mountains," when mobilized for a task that is nice.

At a time when the United States is so polarized it may be nice to remember that in the case of rescuing these three stranded grey whales, activists from Green Peace and Oil Execs, to say nothing of the Americans and Soviets, were able to work together. The question becomes, could we work together now? For the sake of our country and our world, hopefully the answer remains yes.

Chronicle

2012-02-03T13:51:00.001-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (3 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb Listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706593/
CNS/USCCB Review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv016.htm
Roger Ebert's Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120201/REVIEWS/120209997

Chronicle (directed by Josh Trank, screenplay by Max Landis) is a well conceived, well executed film of the faux "amateur video log" genre popularized by movies like the Blair Witch Project [1999] and the Paranormal Activity [2007, 2010, 2012] series. These kind of films have become increasingly common with the proliferation all kinds of inexpensive video capturing/recording technologies (from Camcorders, to FlipCams to webcams) and socialmedia websites like YouTube and Facebook where one can share one's "captured moments" with the world.

The phenomenon was discussed already in when Time Magazine picked "You" ("Us") as The Person of the Year in 2006, noting that already in 1991 famed Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola expressed the hope at the end of the documentary Hearts of Darkness [1991] on the making of his blockbuster/megaproduction/hit Apocalypse Now [1979] that the increasing availability of quality but inexpensive camcorders would democratize film-making making it accessible to a far larger pool of talented individuals than in the past and thus make film-making far more of an art-form and far-less of a commercial enterprise than in the past.

Indeed over the years, a substantial part of Francis Ford Coppola's prediction has come to pass as there is an ever increasing number of "indie films" being produced as well as an increasing popularity of film-festivals world-wide catering to or show-casing "low budget"/"independent" productions. In the United States, the annual Sundance and Telluride film-festivals are perhaps the best known. However, pretty much every major city and/or region of the country now offers similar film festivals during the course of the year.

Followers of this blog will note that I have a special place in my heart for low-budget/independent insurgent productions, posting in the past year reviews of such low-budget, indie projects as Another Earth [2011], Elite [2011], A Love Affair of Sorts [2011], Rid of Me [2011], The Future [2011], and a YouTube compilation sponsored in part by Ridley Scott called Life in a Day [2011].

Still one gets the sense that the best productions are those that are story-driven, utilize the low-tech equipment when appropriate but are also unafraid (and able...) to bring in higher-quality special-effects and editing equipment when needed as well. Such a mix was apparently used in the making of the film Like Crazy [2011] (shot with off the shelf / consumer available video equipment, but then edited very, very well) A similar approach appears to have been used in the making of the current film, Chronicle, as well. The film-makers again made use primarily of off-the-shelf consumer available video equipment. However, they proved also unafraid (and able...) to shell-out some money for reasonably high-quality special effects to effectively tell the increasingly harrowing story.

Wonderful, so what then is Chronicle about? Chronicle's about Andrew Detmer (played by Dane DeHaan), a quiet teenager from a troubled home, his more outgoing and jockish cousin Matt Garetty (played by Alex Russell) and Matt's definitely gregarious and star-athlete best friend Steve Montgomery (played by Michael B. Jordan). They're all apparently upper-classmen in a suburban high-school in the Seattle, Washington metropolitan area. Andrew's mother, Karen (played by Bo Petersen), is very ill, needing oxygen to breath. Andrew's father, Richard (played by Michael Kelly) is a former firefighter on forced disability, clearly unhappy with his circumstances.

At the beginning of the film, Andrew buys himself a (large) old, used video camera to "chronicle" his days with (that is to play). A nerd already and from a family with not a lot of money, the contraption he buys does not exactly help him in his social standing: The camera is by today's standards huge, awkward to use, and only makes him the butt of jokes when he takes it with him to school to chronicle his day. The "douche bags" on the street that already picked on him, do so some more. At school, the other students make fun of the unwieldy thing as he walks with it in the hallways (forcing them break stride to not hit him as he carries it on his shoulder). As a final straw, a cheerleader approaches him as he sits in the bleachers after school filming them (as well as the football team going through drills) and asks him to "turn the camera off" because she found his filming them "really, really creepy." Not a particularly great day ...

That evening, his cousin Matt drags Andrew to a party that Andrew didn't particularly want to attend, but now with the camera decides to go in order to film it. On the way to the party, Matt tells Andrew what kind of a drag Andrew has been over the years. Apparently, they've had this conversation before as Andrew doesn't really react to it, just films it.

At the party, however, things begin to look-up as Andrew runs into a girl, Casey (played by Ashley Hinshaw), far more popular than he (and a girl that apparently Matt has some interest in) who's at the party _also_ with her camera filming it "for her blog." She finds it kinda cool that Andrew has a camera as well. Indeed, when Matt sneers at the two sharing the joys of their hobby, he comes to realize that his attitude is actually pissing Casey off. Hmm, maybe Andrew's not a complete loser after all...

Later in the evening, Andrew, having long-since spent pretty much all the little social grace that his nerdy self had, finds himself outside where the popular jock Steve runs into him. He calls Andrew over. He and Matt had found something "really cool" in the field/ravine below the house where the party was being held and thought it might be cool to actually video tape.

What Matt and Steve had found was a strange hole the size of an underground passage in the middle of that field, and when they entered it they came face to face with this strange, glowing (otherworldly?) crystalline structure. As they come close to it, Andrew videotaping it all, the crystalline structure suddenly starts changing colors and making noise. It gets louder and brighter, louder and brighter and suddenly everything goes black.

The movie resumes three weeks later. Andrew has a new camera (apparently the old one was broken in that strange encounter) and the three teens find that they've been effected in a strange way ... they find that they are able to move first light objects and as the days/weeks go by progressively heavier objects with only their minds, something called telekenesis. How utterly, utterly COOL! Much ensues ...

But part of what ensues has to do with Andrew, a teen clearly damaged already by life at home and at school. Can Andrew handle this new superpower that he and his two friends have acquired? Can the damage of one's past be "cured" by a single, sudden, unexpected dose of AWESOME COOLNESS? Or does one's past eventually re-emerge and make one even worse-off than before?

I found the movie fascinating, certainly one that most teenagers could appreciate. In particular, I found the teenage dialogue in this film outstanding, almost exactly how one would imagine teens would talk in the situation(s) that they found themselves in. And, yes, the film could be used to help young people appreciate the damage that they could cause by picking-on (bullying) others, as well as help troubled, previously picked-on teenagers realize the importance to getting help before those past experiences end-up consuming them.

My hat-off to the makers of this film: What a great, well acted and surprisingly "realistic" film they made! And congrats to all the actors and actresses as well!

Albert Nobbs

2012-02-02T11:27:00.003-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1602098/
CNS/USCCB review -
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120125/REVIEWS/120129981

Albert Nobbs (directed by Rodrigo Garcia, screenplay by Glenn Close, John Banville and Gabriela Prekop) is a diminutive tale based on a story first presented over the course of chapters 45-53 of the early-20th century Irish author George Moore's novel A Story Teller's Holiday [1918] about a waiter named Albert Nobbs with a secret working at a higher-end hotel in Dublin at the end of the 19th century, the secret being that he was actually woman though presenting him/herself to the outside world (most notably to his/her employer) as a man. The story was later reprinted under the title The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs in a collection of short stories by George Moore named Celibate Lives [1927]. The story was then adapted for as a one-person stage under the same title. Glenn Close, who has received an 2012 Academy Awards nomination for her playing the role Albert Nobbs in the current film, received an Obie (Off Broadway) Award for playing Albert Nobbs in the stage production in 1982.

What to make of a film based on a short story that originally appeared as merely an episode in an early 20th century novel by an otherwise largely forgotten author perhaps best known for possibly influencing the far more famous Irish-born author, James Joyce? Clearly the story has resonances with concerns of the present day.

Is it a great film? Not especially. It's primarily an art film. As such, its appeal is certainly limited. Nevertheless, it's a story that's interesting on a number of levels. First, the story serves as reminder that even in the early 20th century (and if one thinks of Oscar Wilde during the Victorian Era) questions regarding sexuality and gender roles were not completely buried. Second, the story/film reminds readers/viewers of a robust artistic/literary tradition that has existed in Ireland for at least a century that has often flown in the face of both sentimental and at times dismissive stereotypes portraying Ireland as a placid outpost of unquestioning, unreflective, 'yes man' Catholicism. James Joyce, after all, has come to be considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century and his book Ulysses was voted as the most influential English language book of the 20th century. In more recent years, with increased prosperity and the success of artists like Bono and actors like Liam Neeson, Ireland has become the home of an energetic youth oriented culture.

Indeed, I look forward to reading (and posting links to) reviews of this film coming from the various sectors of contemporary Irish society -- from its artistic/literary community (the film was screened to Irish Film and Television Academy members at a gala event in December 2011, and has since been nominated for sever 2012 IFTA awards), its youth culture (entertainment.ie, movies.ie), and yes, by one or another agency or office of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

I reiterate that Albert Nobbs (also starring Mia Wasikowka as one of the hotel's maids and eventually _something_ of a love interest to Albert Nobbs in the story) is not exactly a great film. I do think that the primary complaint that a lot of young people (late-teens, young adults, I would not recommend the film to folks below high school age) will have in regards to the film would be that it is quite slow/boring (hey, it was written only a few years after the end of the Victorian Era ...).

Nevertheless, I do see the film as an invitation for readers of this blog to explore / discover through commentary written about the film and recent movies in general an Ireland that is perhaps far more energetic and vibrant than many would have previously thought. And I do believe that St. Patrick, who indeed suffered much as a young adult and could be taken as a result as something of a patron to young adults, would be proud (I'm not talking here of this movie which is definitely still a "look back" or "backward looking," but rather of the cultural engine that Ireland has become over this past generation often led by its young).

ADDENDUM -

According to the Irish Times (3 Feb 2012), Albert Nobbs will be shown at the 10th Annual Dublin International Film Festival which will run between Feb 16-26, 2012.

Man on a Ledge

2012-01-28T22:39:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568338/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv012.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120125/REVIEWS/120129979

Man on a Ledge (directed by Asger Leth and written by Pablo F. Fenjives) is a film simple enough in concept that I suspect a fair number of people will object to account of its implicit politics: Two years after NYPD cop Nick Cassidy (played by Sam Worthington) is framed by New York financier "big shot" David Englander (played by Ed Harris) for stealing a diamond that never went missing (but Englander needed to report missing for the insurance money to cover his Leeman Bros. losses) Cassidy improbably breaks out of prison and sets about doing the only thing that he could do to prove his innocence: prove that Englander still has the diamond.

How does he do that? Well, he rents a room in a highrise upscale hotel next to Englander's headquarters and _walks out on a ledge_. Why does he do that? Well, to distract the police while his brother Joey (played by Jamie Bell) and Joey's hot (and more practically _thin_) girlfriend Angie (played by Genesis Rodriguez) break into Englander's offices to steal the diamond (and thus prove that Englander had it all along). Of course much happens.

Obviously, the film requires a good deal of suspension of disbelief. That Nick Cassidy would have been a cop, and then one who had previously "worked" in a sense for Englander (who had enough "clout" in the city to "borrow" cops on occasion for "security") does help the story somewhat. Nick Cassidy (and presumably then his brother) would know something of Englander's security setup in his offices. Nick would also know a fair amount about NYPD protocols. Still, there's a "come-on" feel to the film.

On the other hand, it is probable that (1) "terrorists" could first take-control and hijack an entire U.S. battleship, and then (2) a single sailor, a lowly "cook" (who it turned-out was actually a Navy Seal only pretending to be a cook) could then take-down the terrorists, one-by-one, and eventually re-take the whole ship? NO. But it makes for one heck of a movie for a lot of American men facing declining economic prospects, competition from foreigners abroad and women and home and who may have felt Under Siege [1992] by it all.

Man on a Ledge is a similar kind of film. It plays on a widely-held sense among the American public that "the little guy," who even followed the rules (a good cop) "took the fall" for 2008 financial crisis, while the big-shot Wall Street financiers who caused the crisis "walked between the rain-drops" and got away with _massive theft_ "scot-free."

The Grey

2012-01-28T00:00:00.004-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (L) Roger Ebert (3 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1601913/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv011.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120125/REVIEWS/120129984

The Grey (directed and cowritten by Joe Carnahan along with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers based on the short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers named "Ghost Walker") is about seven Alaska oil workers who out of a much larger group survive a plane crash in the Alaska wilderness only to be stalked, killed and eaten by wolves as they seek to find their way back to safety/civilization.

It is a thoroughly harrowing tale that in its starkness asks of both the characters, led by Liam Neeson who plays a rifleman who had been working for the oil company as a guard hired to precisely keep wolves and other predators away from the other oil workers, as well as well as the audience some fundamental questions about life and death -- Who/what do you live for? What/who are you willing to die for? What's the meaning of an existence that at times can be so randomly cut short and over which one often has so little control? And yes, where does God fit into the picture?

The picture becomes more poignant when one recalls that in real life, Liam Neeson (wiki) had lost his wife, Natasha Richardson, in 2009 to a freak skiing accident. As such the questions asked and the manner in which they are asked are honest if certainly challenging to a Christian/Catholic believer.

Indeed, winter, cold, snow, the grey skies of the frozen north, etc have all figured prominently in a fair number of American films in recent years -- The American [2010], Riding Hood [2011], Hanna [2011], The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011] and now The Grey [2012] -- often coupled then with explorations of themes of betrayal, loneliness, superficiality and/or hypocrisy. In this time after 10 years of war and seemingly long-term economic uncertainty, is Hollywood (re)discovering its "inner Swede"? and calling believers of our time to face fundamental questions of existence, justice/injustice with the honesty of the famed (and Nazi-era martyr) Rev. Dietrich Bonheoffer who already in the 1930s declared that he wasn't interested any more in what he dismissed as "cheap grace?" Perhaps.

One for the Money

2012-01-27T09:24:00.003-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598828/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv013.htm

One for the Money (directed by Julie Anne Robinson, screenplay by Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius based on the gritty New Jersey romance novel by the same name by Janet Evanovich) is a remarkably good, well written, laugh-out-loud funny, if at times foul-mouth, rom-com that really deserves far more recognition than this initial installment is going to get. However, One of the Money as a novel is the first in a series. So one gets the sense that we're going to be seeing far more of Stephanie Plum (played by Katherine Heigl who believed in the picture enough to be an executive producer for the film) in the years to come.

What's the film about? The film begins with Stephanie Plum approaching her parents' working-class Trenton, NJ home in her red sports car convertable, telling us her situation: She was coming home to Trenton, 6 months after being fired from working in the lingerie department at a Macy's department store somewhere in Newark, knowing that this was probably the last time she was driving her red convertible. She parks the car in front of her parents' house, takes a long last look at it, and notes that she's 5 minutes late, meaning that her mother will think that she's dead.

Ma (played by Debra Monk) opens the door and the first thing out of her mouth is indeed "You're five minutes late, I thought you were dead." Stephanie shrugs her shoulders, passes by the statue of Mary as the Immaculate Conception on her parents' porch and enters the house. Ma notices Stephanie's car, confused, impressed, we don't really know, because before she can say anything, Stephanie tells her "Don't worry Ma, it'll be gone within an hour." And the repo people are there taking the car away in less than ten minutes ...

Steph's home, so the family sits down to have dinner. There's Ma, there's Pa (played by Louis Mustillo) and Grandma Masur (played by Debbie Reynolds). Stephie shares her sob-story. She's lost her job -- six months ago -- they just took her car and she's broke. The folks quickly chime in with kind, well-meaning, "we're on your side" but, of course, totally obvious, generally inappropriate and certainly unsolicited advice: "You need a job," says Pa. "You need a husband," adds Ma. Grandma, confused, chimes in, wondering how bad the economy's must have become, 'cause: "Everybody likes a good thong ..." And there it is ... :-).

A job's still probably the most realistic thing to find at this point. Steph's already been married. It didn't work out, has no particular prospects and isn't exactly looking. Heck even her hair's all frizzy ... But where then to get a job? Ma, pa and grandma scratch their heads and come up with Cousin Vinnie, who runs a Bail-Bonds place in the center (or at the edge) of town (take your pick ...). "Cousin Vinnie? He tried to make-out with me at my wedding?" But at least it could be quick money. We find out at Vinnie's (played by Patrick Fischler) Bail Bonds place what happened: "Steph, look I'm sorry about what happened back then. I was very, very drunk and you looked like an old flame." "Vin, I was in a white dress and a veil." "Yes, but I was very, very drunk ..." And so it goes.

Vinnie's tougher-than-Vinnie secretary named Connie (played by Ana Reeder) finds her a job that Steph's certainly gonna love: bringing in Steph's first love, apparently former heart throb Joe Morelli (played by Jason O'Mara). Morelli had taken Steph's virginity near the end of high school (Okay, parents take note, this is _not_ a film that would give good role-model advice, except in a back-handed, "for the love of God don't do this" sort of way to impressionable teens...), "one night on the floor of the bakery" (where she worked in her first job). As Steph recalled the story, she noted "I gave him all my canoli that night." (Connie recalls, with a sigh "Honey, a lot of girls gave him their canoli back in the day ..."). And of course Joe dumped Steph.

It turns out that Steph had already gotten back at Joe years ago, something that Joe's mother (played by Angela Pietropinto) never forgave her for: "I just hope you live long enough to have your only son run over by some crazy-a b..., breaking his leg in three places, because she's pissed off at my boy for some crazy-a reason ..." And Joe also hasn't forgotten either, "I remember you, Steph, every time it rains ..." ;-). Anyway, Joe's since become a cop and was recently accused of shooting a low-life drug dealer but then inexplicably skipped-out on $500,000 bail. All of Trenton's police force, of course, knows exactly where he is and what he's doing, but no one's bringing him in. Still, Vinnie's out $500,000 and if Steph brings him in, 10% of that, $50k, would be hers...

So this then sets up the story. Steph sets out to find and bring in former "love-'em-and-leave 'em Joe" to the police (who know where he is already anyway ...). Joe of course doesn't want to be brought in. And there's obviously "a story" about that shooting that Joe was involved-in as well ... Much ensues...

There are all sorts of characters that both Steph and the audience are introduced to along the way, often in a very stereotypical but also in a very funny fashion. There's Vinnie's ace bounty hunter "Ranger" (played by Daniel Sunjata) who oozes such utter _coolness_ that he's like a refrigerator when he's in the room. He takes Steph, who wants to be a bounty hunter but doesn't even have a gun (just pepper spray) under his wing. There are two prostitutes who Steph befriends and become her "contacts." Says Lula (played by Sherri Shepherd), the friendlier, more cooperative of the two streetwalkers: "We have a good-cop / bad-cop routine here, only we're hookers ..."). There's a young gay Asian man named John Cho (Leonardo Nam) who "saw everything that went down the night" that Joe took down the low-life drug dealer, but between his accent and mannerisms it's all but impossible to understand him. Yet, despite the "challenges" that Steph faces ... to no one's surprise, everything gets resolved in the end ...

Obviously, this film not going to win any "Walton Family Legacy Awards" or anything like that. The lexicon of the characters of One for the Money has far more in common with that of the Blagojevich family of recent memory than with the Waltons ;-). So if language is an issue at home, this film is definitely not for you. But it is a very, very funny film and would certainly make for a _great_ young-adult date movie as Valentine's Day approaches.

Indeed, since seeing Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, I've often wondered how great it would be if a theme park like Universal City would create a section of its park where people could enter into the "Paris of the 1920s" created in that film to chat with the characters portrayed in that film. Leaving One For the Money, I felt the same way about Stephanie Plum's Trenton, NJ created in this film. What a blast it would be to spend an hour or two walking through the over-the-top world and larger than life characters portrayed here. Honestly what great story and what _great_ imagination! Congrats Janet Evanovich, the screenwriters of this film, and Katherine Heigl and the rest of the cast for taking it on!

My Reincarnation

2012-01-26T22:33:00.001-06:00

MPAA (NR) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1742084/

My Reincarnation (directed by Jennifer Fox) is documentary which has followed 20 years of the life of Yeshi Silvano Namkai (from his mid 20s to his mid 40s today). Yeshi was born in Italy some 40-45 years ago to Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, an exiled Tibetan Buddhist master, and Choogyal's Italian wife. A few years after Yeshi was born, Choogyal was informed by various Tibetan Buddhist practitioners from "the old country" that they believed that Yeshi could be reincarnation of Chogyal's uncle who had been a well known Buddhist monk prior to his death at the hands of Chinese Communist authorities in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Making note of this news, and informing his son of it at a relatively early age, Chogyal nevertheless had taken a perhaps typically Buddhist approach to the matter, one of detachment -- if this were true, that his son Yeshi really was the reincarnation of his uncle then it would inevitably manifest itself in some way, if not, then ... it won't. Fascinating!

Particularly interesting during the course of the film were Yeshi's evolving feelings toward his father, who at the beginning of the film (when Yeshi was being interviewed in his mid 20s) Yeshi clearly resented for being "detached" and largely away from his family, as well as Yeshi's evolving feelings toward predictions regarding his destiny, which at the beginning of the film (again when Yeshi was being interviewed in his mid-20s) Yeshi did not particularly take seriously. Yes, he knew what had been said about him -- that he was the reincarnation of his great-uncle -- but at the time of the beginning of the documentary (20 years ago) like most people his age, Yeshi was far more interested in getting married and getting a job (he found one working as a sales-rep/technician for IBM in Italy ;-).

However as the years went on in the documentary and he had gotten married and had kids of his own, Yeshi seemed to become more and more convinced that there may be something to the destiny that those Tibetan Buddhist practitioner friends of his father's had said that he was called to. He described rather vivid and specific dremas that he was having regarding his uncle's life and fate at the hands of the Chinese communists. At the end of the film, Yeshi does return (if for a visit) to Tibet as the religious figure that he seemed to be predestined to from birth. Angain, fascinating!

Now I know that a fair number of Christians and even Catholics would be disturbed by a movie like this. However, at least with regards to the Catholics, I would remind all, that the Catholic Church does see itself as a universal church, secure in its faith, and therefore capable of dialoging with respect with everybody. The Second Vatican Council's declaration on non-Christian religions indeed said as much.

I personally have found it very easy to admire and respect the Buddhist religions which are generally presented peacefully and without great rancor. And I also note the famous saying of Zen Buddhist master, D.T. Suzuki of the early 20th century, that Buddhism may focus "more on the Kitchen than the Cook" but that does not mean that it denies the Cook. It simply means that Buddhism chooses not to focus on the Cook. Focusing on the Cook is simply left to others, like us Christians and Catholics ;-).

And yes, over the last several generations we Cathoics and Christians too have come to appreciate more the beauty and value of the Cook's kitchen ;-). Yes, if we choose, we can all come to live together with respect and in peace.

Carnage

2012-01-24T11:06:00.002-06:00

MPAA (R) Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb Listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1692486/
Roger Ebert's Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/REVIEWS/120109982

Carnage (directed and screenplay co-written by Roman Polanski and Yasmina Reza) is an excellent screen adaptation of the play by Yasmina Reza named "The God of Carnage (orig. Le Dieu du Carnage) that has won all kinds of awards in Paris, New York and London. The play was a hit a number of years ago here in Chicago as well.

Screen adaptations of stage plays are often quite easy to spot. The set is generally relatively simple and the story is generally dialogue driven. In the case of Carnage, pretty much the entire story takes place in the somewhat upscale Brooklyn side of the East River condo of one of the couples involved. Thus it's "not quite Manhattan" but at least the condo's sort of facing it ;-). Then, yes, the story is dialog driven, but what a dialog it is! ;-) and I do believe that ANY couple with a grade school age kid or two could relate to it ;-).

So what's the story about? The film takes place over the course of a single weekday mid-morning meeting between two sets of parents, Michael and Penelope Longstreet (played by John Reilly and Jodie Foster) and Alan and Nancy Cowan (played by Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet). The two couples' 11-year old boys had gotten into a fight a day or two before. During the course of the fight, one of the boys picked up a stick and whacked the other boy in the face, breaking two of the other boy's teeth. So this had been altercation between two relatively young boys. Yet it seemed certainly serious enough to warrant a meeting of this kind between the two boys' parents...

So the two couples meet. One is apologetic, the other understanding, both couples straining really hard to do the right thing, be civil about it, and put the matter behind them. Va bene. It's just every time they are about to set things straight, resolve the matter like adults, say goodbye and put it behind them one or another of the four parents says something stupid that blows the "civilized agreement" up and the four have come back into the flat, sit down, and start all over again ... ;-)

As this starts to drag on, it becomes clear that though both couples live in this nice section of Brooklyn facing the River one of the couples is clearly wealthier than the other. Further, it also becomes clear that the wife of the not quite as wealthy couple is either better educated (or thinks herself to be somewhat better educated) than her husband. All four (as well as the audience) pick-up on these vibes and all four begin to jostle for position based on these perceptions: Alliances shift back and forth from couple vs couple, to "the more educated" vs "the less educated," to the "actual breadwinners" vs "the intellectuals," the men vs the women and back again.

As this meeting of parents continues, the cell-phone of one of the four begins to ring -- work is calling -- and the person has to take the call. Va bene. But soon the cell-phone rings again, and then again... Each time the cell phone rings the other three get more and more frustrated. The eyes of the spouse start rolling ... and the other couple begins to feel increasingly put-upon (who do these people think that they are?).

Not to be outdone, the mother/mother-in-law of the other couple calls as well. She's been at the doctor's that morning. It had been a relatively unimportant appointment, but she wants to talk about it. The couple has to say "Ma, we're in the midst of something here, can we call you back in 10 minutes?" Ma reluctantly agrees but calls back 20 minutes later saying, "Are you done yet...?" ;-)

What middle-aged couple could not relate to this? ;-) The whole movie is only an hour and twenty minutes long, covering the length of a would be meeting exactly like this. What a film! Does the matter get resolved? I'm not going to tell you ;-). Go and rent it ;-)

ADDENDUM -

As the readers here can tell, I really enjoyed this movie. However, the film was made by the very contraversial director Roman Polanski whose life has been marked by his committing of a truly horrendous crime: he did first drug and then by definition rape a 13 year old girl. To avoid prison, he fled the United States and has lived beyond the reach of U.S. justice in Switzerland ever since. He's been obviously a very talented man but who committed a truly horrendous crime, a crime that the victim has _after much pain_ has since transcended and forgiven him for. How should the public regard him now?

Wow, what a question? I'll leave it to the reader here to sort this thing through noting all the factors above (1) Polanski's talent, (2) the horrendousness of his crime, (3) the victim's forgiveness of him, (4) the apparent sense of contrition on Polanski's part, though apparently not enough to go back to the United States and go to jail for it and (5) that yes both Christianiaty and _especially_ Catholicism has been about reconciliation and forgiveness though (6) the Catholic Church itself has been embroiled in recent decades with a list of similarly horrendous crimes against minors by a fair number of its clergy. Again, what to do?

Perhaps the best course is exactly what society is apparently doing with regards to Polanski today: Allow him to make an occasional film, often very good (all four of the actors/actresses in this film should certainly be very proud of their performances here, as all four of the performances are certainly among the best of their careers), but also then note Polanski's past crime as well.

Underworld: Awakening

2012-01-22T19:37:00.002-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (A-III) AV Club (D-) Fr. Dennis (1 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1496025/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv009.htm
AV Club review -
http://www.avclub.com/articles/underworld-awakening,68061/

Underworld: Awakening (directed by Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, story by Len Wiseman who collaborated on the screenplay along with a host of others) is the fourth installment in the Underworld franchise featuring a seemingly unending battle between vampires and lycans (better known to us as werewolves).

Now that vampires and werewolves do not like each other underpins also much of the Twilight series. So a good question could be asked as to why they wouldn't like each other. Checking answers.yahoo.com and answers.com, it would seem that this "ancient rivalry" actually began with the Underworld Series. So the rivalry appears to make for a "really cool" device much like that which created such cinematic "wonders" as the hyper violent Predator vs. Alien [2004] even though the first Underworld [2003] movie predates it (and certainly this movie Underworld Awakening is hyper-violent as well).

Yet in the box office these vampire vs werewolf movies (both Underworld and Twilight) do really, really well. So the question of why that would be, why these movies/stories "work" (or other seeming strange or even stupid stories "work") fascinates me.

Part of it has to be in a fascination within apparently fairly large segments of the population with the vampire and werewolf archetypes. Vampires seem to be about "unbridled, indeed consuming passion," enough so that a vampire wants or needs to suck blood out of its victims. Werewolves seem to be about "the beast within." Both vampire and werewolf stories appear to have been very popular during the Victorian era notable for its conformity (the opposite of what "the beast within" would want to do) and sexual repression (the opposite of "unbridled, indeed consuming passion").

I wouldn't be able to prove it now (and honestly don't have a particularly great desire to pursue this) but I would imagine that a combination of the current societal "gender wars" (of which the Catholic Church is certainly an active party) as well as the "ick"/"yuck" factor associated with certain aspects of male homosexuality makes the vampire archetype somewhat relevant today. After all, why would one want to drive one's ___ up someone's ___? An "unbridled, indeed, consuming passion" perhaps ...

Then the wildman archetype has been postulated as being both around and necessary for healthy male spirituality since at least Robert Bly's book on Iron John. I would submit that the wildman archetype celebrating "the beast within" is really not that far from the characteristics of the werewolf.

So between the struggle to make some kind of peace with the existence of a homosexual community in society's midst (a community which previously had to live in the shadows) as well as a need by many men often feeling emasculated by the demands of modern life to rediscover the freedom of their inner wildman perhaps make both the vampire and werewolf archetypes "near the surface" of today's collective subconscious.

Still why would these two archetypes want to fight each other? I guess because it would make for a really cool series of visual images which if strung together long enough could even make for a really cool series of movies. ;-)

Besides put really really sexy "vampire" Selene (played by Kate Beckinsale) into a skin tight black rubber suit. Then put a very large and shiny automatic pistol with a seemingly endless supply of werewolf (er lycan) killing "silver bullets" into her hands and wow with this "Jungian anima with a gun"... it all must make for "one heck of a rodeo" in the Jungian scheme of the subconsious.

So what's a parent to think if one's teenager starts to really like films like this? I suppose look for signs of obsession and depression. Yes, to be perpetually "in a dark mood" becomes a problem. But recognize that probably 99 out of a 100 young males seeing this film are probably doing so because they like to see a really attractive young woman (in a tight black rubber suit) wasting a whole lot of monsters.

Yes, the violence is appalling. I'm amazed that the CNS/USCCB gave this film merely an "A-III" (for adults) rating while the far less violent and certainly more coherent film Haywire also about a heroine with a gun an "L" rating (of limited value even for adults) but then the MPAA is often rather inconsistent as well.

Bottom line, I don't see any particular "need" for any minor to see this film. I certainly wouldn't want to help or otherwise "enable" a minor to do so. On the other hand, I wouldn't make a huge deal about it either, unless one's teen seems to remain in a "dark state" focused on "dark matters" for long periods of time. Then I would be asking the teen with some regularity what's going on in his (or her) head...

Red Tails

2012-01-22T17:19:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0485985/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv006.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120118/REVIEWS/120119986

Red Tails (directed by Anthony Hemingway, screenplay by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder based on the book by Red Tails: An Oral History of the Tuskegee Airmen by John. B. Holway) IMHO gives viewers of the film an indispensable complement to the famed Band of Brothers [2001] HBO-television mini-series based on a similarly styled book by Stephen Ambrose. Indeed John. B. Holway could perhaps be called this generation's African American Stephen Ambrose for writing not merely the book on the Tuskegee Airmen but also writing a series of books on the Negro Baseball League of the first half of the 20th century when the segregationist Jim Crow laws still ruled America's South.

Indeed, so good, so historically important and so frankly _family oriented_ is Red Tails that I find it surprising (to say the least...) that the CNS/USCCB website would categorize the movie as A-III (for adults) unless such previous World War II classics as Cornelius Ryan's Longest Day [1962] (staring John Wayne) and the Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers [2001] series (produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks) were classified A-III (for adults) as well.

So what is the movie about? It is about the Tuskegee Airmen the first and only African-American fighter group to serve in World War II. A parallel African American bomber group was also "worked-up" at the time but never served in a combat role (no mind, at least that bomber group never had the blood of innocents on its hands, as carpet bombing of civilians, now considered by the Geneva Conventions and since at least the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes #79) by the Catholic Church to be a war crime had been considered standard operating procedure by all parties in that conflict).

Returning to the fighter group of the Tuskegee Airmen, the film begins with the group already serving in Italy, if still flying outdated P-40 aircraft on essentially mop-up operations. That the whole Tuskegee "experiment" had been saved by then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who scoffing at the then U.S. military's official assessment that "negroes lacked the intelligence to operate heavy machinery" came to the Tuskegee base on her own to "inspect" it and then insisted on _being flown_ by one of its recently trained African American airmen was not mentioned in the film, even though the incident was unfortunately true.

Eventually, faced with appalling bomber losses, the American Army Air Force allowed the Tuskegee Fighter Group (99th Fighter Squadron) to both get better planes (P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs) and fly bomber escort missions. However, they were only allowed to fly such missions after extracting a promise from the African American fighting unit that apparently the AAF could not extract from white units -- that the fighters would stay with the bombers throughout their escort missions rather than pursue German fighters (often flown actually as decoys) in pursuit of individual glory. (The film makes a point of noting that the white fighter pilots were nominally not doing anything wrong, that they _had been trained_ to pursue German fighters until shooting them down upon engaging them. Nevertheless, that tactical training had proven disastrous for bomber squadrons who were often left to their own devices after Germans lured away their fighter escorts with squadrons flying, in effect, as decoys). The African American fighter pilots, perhaps recognizing that little glory was going to go to them anyway if they chased German fighters in hopes of shooting them down, made the decision to follow orders and stick with the bombers. As a result, bomber losses dropped significantly and the white bomber crews became immensely appreciative of their African American escorts. (Indeed, the discipline and self-sacrifice of non-white units such as the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, helped drive the decision soon after the War to desegregate the U.S. military putting the first really big crack into the wall of racial segregation that existed in the United States at the time and allowing the U.S. to approach its next war, in Korea, with a desegregated military).

The film follows then the stories of various members of the Tuskegee fighter group, from its commanders to its pilots to its mechanics.

A particularly interesting aspect of the film was its treatment of fraternization between the African American airmen and (white) Italian women. One of the airmen Joe 'Lightning' Little (played by David Oyelowo) was portrayed as having an Italian girl-friend Sofia (played by Daniela Ruah) who lived with her mother.

I found the scenes remarkably well done and in conformity with what my own parents and uncles/aunts who had lived in Czechoslovakia at the time remembered of their encounters with African-American soldiers near the end of the war. My mother's family was, in fact, liberated by an African American armored unit presumably making-up part of Patton's 3rd Army, and one of my uncles on my father's side may have seen with his own eyes one of the Tuskegee fighter pilots in action noting that near the end of the war there was one time in which an American plane had swooped down low over the village where my dad's family had come from, so low in fact that he could see that the plane was being flown by an African American pilot.

My parents' generation was still too young to date at the time. But it was clear from their stories that the Czechs (like the Italians portrayed in the film) were frankly intrigued by the African American soldiers. For up until the closing stages of the war these were men that they had never seen before.

As one of Czech descent, I would also note some, admittedly irrational, pride in the fact that a good part of this film was filmed in the Czech Republic (There's a scene in which the beautiful Karlstejn Castle is shown in a flying sequence) and as a consequence the closing credits are heavily seasoned with Czech names.

In the United States, the Slavs have not been exactly known to be the most "racially open" of peoples. Yet perhaps because the Czechs and the Slovaks are such small peoples and themselves know a good deal about oppression, they have found a way to get past previous racial bigotry.

Of course the real test in this regard is in these nations' treatment of their own populations of "people of color," that is, of their treatment of the gypsies. And the record there has not been particularly good. Still it made me feel very good to see a film about African American airmen being filmed so prominently in the land where my parents had come from and with so many Czechs involved in its production as well.

Would I recommend this film? Absolutely. There is nothing in this film that parents should be wary of. Yes, it's a war film. There is some blood. But unless one is forbidding one's kids from seeing other World War II classics like the above mentioned Longest Day [1962], I just don't see why one would want to keep one's kids from seeing this film. It is about history, both about World War II and about the United States of that time. Knowing one's history makes for better people and for a better world.

Contraband

2012-01-22T11:51:00.001-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1524137/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv004.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/REVIEWS/120119998

Contraband (Universal, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski, based on the film Reykjavik-Rotterdam by Arnaldur Indriðason and Óskar Jónasson) is a so-so crime thriller largely about the wages of sin. In as much as it focuses on this theme, it's probably a worthwhile movie even if near the end the film, (spoiler alert) its makers chose to go, IMHO inappropriately, the way of the "happy Hollywood ending."

Even if as Christians, we actually dogmantically believe in the ultimate "happy ending," IMHO it just doesn't fit well here or at least not as "easily" as it plays out in this film. Nevertheless, the first 90% of the movie is definitely a cautionary tale almost counting-out the reasons why one shouldn't get involved in crime: (1) things rarely go as planned, (2) one signs away one's life when one gets involved in this way of life, (3) innocents inevitably get involved, and (4) it is really really hard to walk away from the consequences of one's past. These are all very good things to remember when one's tempted to "step off the reservation" and walk-over to "the dark side."

Very good, so how does this particular story play out? Substituting New Orleans and Panama City for Rotterdam and Reykjavik respectively, the film begins with Andy (played by Caleb Landry Jones) the young "loser" brother-in-law of former smuggler turned-legit Chris Farraday (played by Mark Wahlberg) finding himself "way over his head" trying to run a bag worth of drugs into the country on a New Orleans bound freighter for a coked-up two-bit low-life mobster named Tim Briggs (played by Giovanni Ribisi). When the huge container-ship freighter gets boarded by customs officials as it approaches New Orleans, Andy panics and throws the bag containing about $700,000 worth of cocaine into the Mississippi River.

All things considered, it's actually a petty amount but $700 grand is far, far more than most regular people have and so Tim Briggs trying to enforce discipline threatens to kill Andy, and more to the point, Andy's sister, Chris Farraday's wife, Kate (played by Kate Beckinsale) along with her and Chris' two small children unless he gets paid for the lost coke. That of course, forces Chris along with Chris' former smuggling buddy Sabastian (played by Ben Foster) "out of retirement" to try to "fix things." Much ensues ...

As the movie plays out, one's reminded of arguably much better films like The Firm [1993] and Shawshank Redemption [1994]. However, what I found intriguing about Contraband is precisely that it is about dark pasts and the film's obvious reminders (over and over again) of how hard it is to simply walk away from such pasts in the future. The Firm, after all was about a young lawyer who simply, perhaps too naively walked into the wrong Firm when he took his first job. In Shawshank Redemption, the lead protagonist got drunk and in a fit of passion _may_ have killed his wife after catching her with another man. Here Chris Farraday had been a criminal who had _luckily_ never gotten caught, and now was being sucked "back into the business." Thus Farraday is far less sympathetic of a character than the principal protagonists of either of the other two films. And yet one does feel for him as he tries really, really hard to walk (and remain) away from crime and become (and remain) legit.

Indeed, the film uses the device of having one of the main characters, Faraday's buddy Sebastian, going to AA meetings, presumably fighting alcoholism to draw the comparison between addiction to alcohol and being trapped in a life of crime.

I applaud this comparison and wish to extend it one step further: Thanks to the relatively awful recent film The Devil Inside, I've had to talk to young people at my parish about the topic of demonic possession again. And this time I suggested that one good thing about this recent movie was that it implicitly raised the point that the people who one should really be really be worried about are not the tormented, contorted, strange language speaking people usually portrayed by films about demonic possession.

Rather, one should be concerned about mass murderers and so forth. And I suggested to at least one group of young people since that movie came out that someone like Saddam Hussein could perhaps have been considered as having been "demonically possessed." True his head was never known to have been "spinning around" and all that. However, he did "cross a line" at some point in his life (he chose to send a person or two to their deaths to amass more power) and it proved to be a trap -- In order to continue to live, Saddam came to be forced to continue to kill more and more people. How's that for "surrendering one's soul to the Devil," becoming "possessed by the Devil" and remaining so trapped until one's death?

I submit that this movie about Chris Farraday is much the same,even if Chris had been a much smaller criminal than Saddam Hussein. Still it proved far harder than Chris would have thought for him to walk away from his previous life of crime.

So even though (spoiler alert again...) the film ends in a needlessly "tidy" way, for most of the film Contraband gives the viewer plenty of material to reflect about should one be tempted to enter into a life of crime: It's really, really easy to fall that kind of life (to fall into Sin). It's much, much harder to be able to get-out.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-22T01:44:00.001-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007029/
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/REVIEWS/120109984

As a Chicagoan, hence living in the 3rd largest city in the United States with a metropolitan area population of 8-10 million and a long tradition in the arts, theater, science and architecture, the first thing that I'd have to say about The Iron Lady (directed by Phydilla Lloyd, screenplay by Abi Morgan) is that I find it stunning that this movie about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played in her adult and older years by Meryl Streep) certainly one of the best of the year was withheld by movie execs and distributors from Chicago audiences until two weeks into the new year. This is emblematic of an arrogance by media elites on both coasts that only breeds resentment in self-evidently huge and well-educated media markets in places like Chicago and Atlanta that is really to the movie industry's detriment.

My protest stated, let me then go on to say that I found this film to be excellent and one that could be understood by film audiences on multiple levels not the least of which on a life history / family dynamics one. For whatever one may think of Margaret Thatcher's politics, the movie asks us to look at her legacy (and really anyone's legacy) from the perspective of her (and again, really everyone's) destiny: We will all grow old and we will all eventually die and the details of the "battles of the past" will fade. As such, anyone with an aging parent will probably be able to relate to this film. The parent who seemed so large, so awesome, perhaps so frustrating, so "in the way" when one was younger does get old, does get more feeble, yes, does begin to "fade away."

One could not have been an adult, young adult or even teenager in the English speaking world in the 1980s and into the 1990s without knowing who Margaret Thatcher was. Yet today, 20-30 years later? She largely falls into the category of "not yet dead," that is, older, necessarily more reclusive with each passing year, no longer relevant in any serious way except in the context of the past and the past's setting of the stage for our present.

Yes, on a more propagandistic level, some of the lines Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher is given do have a resonance with American political discourse today, notably the movie's Thatcher's concern that Britain would go broke unless it cut its spending, that taxes killed jobs, and that Europe's more social democratic model would not necessarily be appropriate or even beneficial to Britain and its destiny. These are certainly lines voiced in American political discourse today by many on the Right wing of America's Republican Party today. Yet, IMHO drawing absolute analogies is almost always a bad idea -- Britain is more European than the United States and the United States is both larger and more diverse and frankly with a different history and a different set of demons than Britain faced in the 1980s and/or faces today.

Perhaps what is more interesting is the film's portrayal of how Margaret Thatcher came to her convictions, and like convictions held by anyone, they came personal/family history -- Margaret Thatcher was born and raised a grocer's daughter (a daughter of a truly small businessman) at a time when doors were opening for women in England (and across the world) which would were unimaginable before. So the grocer's daughter was able to go to Oxford, something unimaginable to most women (and to most men) of generations previous to hers.

Thus this movie about one of the most political of figures in the latter part of the 20th century becomes (through extended flashbacks) largely about her relationships with her doting and supportive grocer father Alfred Roberts (played by Iain Glenn), her less supportive housewife mother Beatrice (played by Emma Dewhurst) and especially her husband Denis Thatcher (played by Jim Broadbent). (Margaret and Denis in their younger college/young adult years are played by Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd respectively). Stopping-in throughout the movie to "look-in on" the aging but still largely but diminishingly independent Margaret Thatcher is her middle-aged daughter Carol Thatcher (played by Olivia Coleman). What middle-aged adult today could not relate to this kind of reflection on an aging parent or mentor figure?

Thus even though Margaret Thatcher (and certainly Streep's Margaret Thatcher) would resist such humanization of her persona, the film actually makes one appreciative of how the Margaret Thatcher of history came to be, and serves as a reminder to all of us that no matter how powerful or important any of us may become in our prime, we all live on a conveyor belt of time and all of us will eventually fade from this Earth, remembered ultimately only by God.

Haywire

2012-01-21T11:32:00.003-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (L) Roger Ebert (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1506999/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv007.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120118/REVIEWS/120119992

It is mid-January and generally speaking two kinds of movies are generally playing or released into grudgingly second-tier markets like Chicago at this time: (1) movies that were released by film makers before the end of the calendar year in the premier/prestige markets of New York and Los Angeles and/or some "upper tier" European capital like London, Paris (and progressively going down the list ...) Berlin or Rome because the film makers believed they had a product that could do well on the awards circuit -- Academy Awards, British Academy Awards, The Golden Globes, The Directors' Guild Award, The Screen Actors Guild Awards, etc, etc, and (2) basically filler, that is, movies that aren't going to win or be nominated for awards but also are not expected to be "box office smashes" that tend to be conserved until the summer.

I mention this because Haywire (directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Lem Dobbs) is both a relatively good "action" movie but one that has only an outside chance of getting a nomination or two (cinematography, editing?) and one of two action movies released this week starring women as the action heroes (the other being Underworld: Awakening).

In the story, filmed in a definitely stylized way, Mallory (played by, I'm told, mixed-martial arts, MMA star Gina Carano) ia an agent working for an elite "private security firm" along the lines of the Bush/Cheney era Blackwater Services. (Yes, it's a murky business and Blackwater itself has undergone several name changes during the past several years, currently calling itself Academi). Mallory's firm gets contracted by Coblenz (played by Michael Douglas) apparently a high level US intelligence officer to do "a job" in Barcelona. Nominally, the job is to find apparently a Chinese dissident of some sort hiding there. It becomes clear, however, that everybody is playing everybody. Coblenz is playing the private firm, represented in negotiations with him by "Kenneth" (played by Ewan McGregor). Coblenz' Spanish contact Rodrigo (played by Antonio Banderas) is playing him and the firm. And ultimately, Mallory's being played by everybody. Who can she trust?

That's of course the key question being asked in this movie and what makes the movie "relatable" to the general public: We may not be "special agents," but in our current, increasingly privatized economy with specific "jobs" being "compartmentalized" and then "outsourced" from one firm to another, to a third, and back again, it's often hard to make sense of who's in charge of what and to what end. So Mallory represents the "everyday Joe" (not unlike the Steven Segal character in the action classic Under Siege [1992]) though, interestingly enough "Joe" is now cast as "Jane."

Now much has been and will be written about the psychological significance of casting the lead character as a woman and whether or not it panders to a "fanboy" (a male dominated video-gaming) audience. Indeed, Roger Ebert begins his review bringing up this question, though he evokes Sigmund Freud. I would invoke Carl Jung's concept of the anima/animus instead.

According to Carl Jung's theory on the matter within the psyche every male or female there is a weaker opposite gender persona that needs to be recognized and appeased and indeed helps us to relate better to members of the opposite sex in the external world as well.

As I wrote in a comment relating to my review of Sucker Punch [2011] (also released around this time of year, though last year), that I don't see it necessarily negative for younger, mostly male, video-game enthusiasts to "let their animas out to play" and watch, smiling ear-to-ear a woman-action hero beat-the-daylights out of male jerks who generally oppress them as well. And I do believe that these films _can_ be positive for young women as well (Haywire actually much more than Sucker Punch, where I do think there were legitimate issues about the setting and the young women's wardrobe) inviting them to "reach out" to their more masculine side and embrace the 'action hero' archetype.

Indeed, women (young or otherwise) who do find it within themselves to "enter into the cave" of men's video-gaming often find the experience surprisingly fulfilling as well and not simply in terms of the games themselves (which I certainly would not want to defend each individually here) but mainly in terms of the young men that they would have perhaps previously dismissed that they would meet.

Young men are being told all the time to "reach out to their more feminine side" in order to be able to relate better with young women. A movie like this can be an invitation to young women to "reach out to their more masculine side" to do the same.

Parents should note that there is a good deal of stylized violence in this movie. As such it is not really for kids. However, with parental approval it may not be bad even for teens. Again, this is not a spectacular movie but it is actually quite (and surprisingly) good.

In the Land of Blood and Honey

2012-01-08T15:24:00.000-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714209/
CNS/USCCB review -
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120104/REVIEWS/120109995

In the Land of Blood and Honey (written and directed by Angelina Jolie) is an excellent film that (1) needed to be made, (2) needed to be made _by a woman_, (3) needed to be made by a _prominent woman_ (like someone like Angelina Jolie), and one that despite all this will probably be seen by not nearly enough people and after its run in the theaters will probably be shown only at the occasional human rights gathering. That of course is a shame and yet also probably human nature. But one should be grateful to Angelina Jolie for deciding to make the film at all.

What is the film about? It's a film with a cast almost entirely composed of Bosnian actors about the war which raged in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia, and it highlights a particularly awful aspect of that conflict: the all routine, indeed systematic, practice of rape of Bosnia's women by the armies during the conflict. I say routine/systematic because when women are rounded-up en masse and then taken _to headquarters_ to both serve (cook/clean for) and "service" (be raped by) the soldiers/officers then rape becomes not merely an "isolated" crime perpetrated "by a few bad apples," but de facto standard operating procedure.

The focus of this movie (as was always the case even during the conflict) was on the Bosnian Serb army and I know that Serbs have _always complained_ that abuses of all kinds (including rape) were being perpetrated by all sides in the conflict. Nevertheless the point is made in this film that women were being raped en masse during this conflict and that, it is / ought to be recognized for what it is (or ought to be) -- a war crime.

To Angelina Jolie's credit, she also does a very good job at presenting the "other" (Bosnian Serb) side. The entire world has looked at the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s solely in terms of what was happening _at that time_. And yes, the Bosnian Serbs were conducting horrific atrocities at the time. But the Serbs were _not_ looking at this war in isolation. They were remembering both hundreds of years of previous oppression under the Turks (Moslems) but also _far more recent_ atrocities committed against Orthodox Christian Serbs by Catholic Croatians and Bosnian Muslims _in service of the Nazis_ during World War II. One of the main characters of this film, remembered _his mother and older sisters_ raped and killed by Bosnian Muslims serving the Nazis during World War II. So to Angelina Jolie's credit, she was sensitive to the complexities in that war. And I do understand that just because one's mother and sisters were raped and killed fifty years ago AND THERE WAS NEVER A REAL ACCOUNTING FOR THAT CRIME 40-50 YEARS AGO, shouldn't give one the right to send out one's sons and grandsons to rape the granddaughters of the perpetrators of those crimes. But one gets the sense of some of the layers of injustices that occurred in the region.

Then as one of Slavic descent (Czech, Russian and Ukrainian) myself, I am sensitive to the question of how these crimes (and they are crimes / WAR CRIMES) are portrayed, because these were crimes perpetrated by Slavs who have historically been looked at in Germanic ("Aryan") / Anglo-Saxon ("WASP") circles as being "at the lower end of the 'white race.'" So I myself would find offense if these crimes came to be portrayed in a racial manner, that is, in terms of "those semi-animal Slavs," continuing then: "We Anglos/Americans are far more civilized about these sorts of things. We _pay_ (cash on the barrel...) for _our sex_ during war time."

Indeed, one "good" thing that one could say about American involvement in its various wars in the Middle East over these past few decades is that it's put something of a damper on the "brothel" mentality that has accompanied U.S. military adventures since WW I: "How do you send Johnny back to the farm after he's seen the lights of 'gay Paris'?" (WWI), "The problem with the Yanks is that they're overpaid, over sexed and over here" (WW II), the summarization of the entire history of the Philippines since Magellan as "400 years in the Convent (under the Spanish) 50 years in a whore-house (under the Americans)," to say nothing of American behavior during Korea and Vietnam where after a long hard day of napalming the enemy, American fighting men would come back to the brothels around base to be serviced by the girls provided (eminently for cash...) by "Mamasan..."

So sexual exploitation/coercion comes in many forms and no particular army looks particularly good. Still one has to start somewhere and certainly Serb behavior during the wars in former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s helped give Rape as a War Crime the attention that it deserves. And Abu Gharib notwithstanding, even American/Allied behavior during war time has probably improved as a result.

Great, but then how does Land of Blood and Honey tell the story? The film follows a would be couple from Sarajevo, Ayla (played by Zana Marjanovic) a young artist from a secularized Bosnian-Muslim family and Danijel (played by Goran Kostic) from a blue collar Serbian family working as a police officer. The film opens with the two meeting happily at a Sarajevo dance club on an early date. Everyone's happy, everyone's dancing. A bomb goes off and those carefree days come to an end.

The film resumes four months later ... By this point the civil war is in full swing. Ayla's / her sister's apartment block is stormed by Bosnian Serb soldiers. They round up the people. They separate the young from the old and then the young men from the young women. The old are allowed "to stay." The young men are escorted down an alley and summarily shot (yes, that's what happened to the young men at the time) and the young women put on a bus to be transported to "HQ" to serve as slaves sexual and otherwise to the officers/troops. A young woman didn't quite understand what her role would be. So she's dragged in front of the others by one of the soldiers, her panties torn off and raped against a table in front of the others, in case the others didn't get the point. They did. And so it was...

It happened though that Danijel was serving in the same unit (now as a junior military officer) as this was taking place. So he was able to exert his influence to protect Ayla from the others. They then become, _in a sense_, "lovers" throughout the war. But it's unclear to everybody, from them themselves, to the other soldiers, to Danijel's father Nebojsa (played by Rade Serbedija) a senior officer in the Bosnian Serb army (and the one who remembered his mother and older sisters being raped by Croatian / Bosnian Muslim soldiers collaborating with the Nazis during World War II), to the viewers, what exactly Ayla's and Danijel's relationship was. Was it / could it possibly be "love" under such circumstances? Or was he just using her? And was she simply doing what she felt she needed to do to keep alive? Could either really trust the other under such circumstances? Perhaps most tragic: in a fratricidal conflict like this, could this awful kind of relationship so horribly flawed/contrived/ambiguous be "as good as it gets?" ...

Perhaps only someone like Angelina Jolie could tell a story like this, and IMHO I do believe she did an excellent job.

Note to parents: This is an R-rated film. There are many examples of disturbing violence throughout this film. There is also a good deal of nudity, though interestingly enough generally not linked with the various scenes involving rape. Rape was generally portrayed violently and yet left largely to the imagination. The nudity involved more the relationship between the two principal protagonists of the story. In any case, there's probably little reason unless one happened to be somehow more directly involved in the conflict (or one similar it) to take a minor to this picture. Minors probably wouldn't understand it anyway though young adults would: Imagine if your life depended on a guy who you barely knew and who you went out with only a few times "before the war." Or imagine if you found yourself in a position with quite literally "life and death power" over someone who you only dated a few times prior to this whole conflict who in other circumstances you might have even graciously broken-up with but now "break-up" would mean _her certain death_ ...What a truly awful situation.

The First Rasta

2012-01-07T10:17:00.001-06:00

MPAA (unrated) Time-Out Chicago (3 Stars) Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1789024/

Time-Out Chicago Review
http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/film/15063863/the-first-rasta-film-review

One of the joys of following films is that one occasionally runs into documentaries like this one, The First Rasta (written and co-directed by Helene Lee along with Christophe Farnarier based on the Helene Lee's book by the same name) about Leonard Howell (1898-1981) the founder of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica and beyond. It was picked-up by Facets Multimedia here in Chicago, itself a real gem for movie lovers.

As I would imagine most Americans who've lived in or near big cities, I've run into the occasional Rastafari during the course of my life with his/her distinctive hair and colorful garb. Most music lovers would also know of a link (of some sort) between Raggae music (popularized by Bob Marley) and the Rastafarian movement but perhaps little else. The joy of finding and watching a film like this is that it gives the viewer in a relatively short space of time a context and an appreciation of what Rastafarianism has been about.

Leonard Howell was born into a fairly successful black family in Jamaica, nonetheless found himself getting into trouble with the authorities fairly early in life and as a result he was forced off the island to find work in Panama. From there he became a seaman working on any number of the transport ships that were plying the seas at the time. The documentary points out very nicely that these ships were "the agents of globalization at the time" and that they transported "not only cargo but also ideas." Working on these ships were often the disenfranchised of the world of the time (as well as anarchists and bolsheviks) and from Kiel/Hamburg to Odessa/St. Petersburg sailors became the triggers of Revolution. (I honestly, never had made that connection before).

Among the places that Howell spent a good deal of time in during his travels was New York and thus the black culture of Harlem of the time as well as its various Afrocentric movements. Being Jamaican in origin, Anglican (Christian) birth, he also had contact with the Indian (Hindu/Muslim) diaspora in Jamaica. Finally after the rise of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia to the Ethiopian throne (the Ethiopian kings tracing their lineage back to the Biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba), Leonard Howell became the founder of the Rastafari movement which venerated Haile Selassie I (Ras meaning "Head" or "Duke" in Ethiopian and Tafari being Haile Selassie I's title before becoming Emperor) as Jesus incarnate for black people.

I honestly never knew of the connection between Ethiopia and the Rastarfarian movement though the colors that I've seen Rastafaris wearing over the years now make immediate sense to me as they are the colors of the Ethiopian flag. Then Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia some years afterwards takes on an even more tragic dimension: Ethiopia was a country that Africans and their descendants around the glove were coming to see as having a special significance and now it was suddenly and tragically brought low by the caprice of two-bit European despot, who governed, actually, from all places ... Rome (of Biblical significance as well).

In any case, Leonard Howell, founded basically a Hindu/Gandhi-style Ashram called Pinnacle in the hinterlands of Jamaica as the first Rastafarian community venerating Haile Selassie I as Jesus incarnate in this world along the lines of the occasional incarnation of a God in Hindu belief. The ethic of the Pinnacle community was simple and self-sufficient living, perhaps made easier by smoking lots and lots of pot, but actually having ideals very similar to those espoused by M.G. Gandhi at the time. Indeed, Bob Marley's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" gains a whole new meaning in a messianic 'God is indeed among us' context.

I loved this documentary! No I would not encourage "smoking lots and lots of pot" :-) as a means of arriving at happiness as this would obviously go against my own religion's teachings :-). However thanks to this documentary, I honestly "get" Rastafarianism in a way that I never would have understood it before. And I certainly understand / sympathize with the African diaspora's need at the time for hope and an affirmation that Africans like _all people_ are loved by God.

Previously, Spike Lee's film Malcolm X about the life of Malcolm X popularized understanding of the origins of the Black Muslim movement in the United States, which asked basically the same question: Why would blacks want to venerate a Christian God if popular (white) Christianity of the time would cast black people (and really all people "of color") as by definition inferior to them? I think that most reasonable people would get it: Either God is the God of all, or God isn't really worthy of being called God, or at minimum each race therefore has a right to search and venerate its own God. (But I would insist that of those "racial gods," none of them IMHO would be worthy of wasting time worshiping).

Helene Lee's The First Rasta helps one understand the origins and philosophy/theology of Rastafarianism in this context as well: If the Christian God is presented as somehow being "the white people's God" then there has to be a God for black people as well.

The Devil Inside

2012-01-06T10:00:00.002-06:00

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB () Fr. Dennis (0 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560985/

The Devil Inside (directed and cowritten by William Brant Bell along with Mathew Peterman) is a hard-R movie made in the fake "documentary" style of the Paranormal Activity series only (and perhaps inevitably) adding perennial public fascination with Catholic exorcism to the mix.

To understand the movie's concept, therefore, think of the fake but well crafted Paranormal Activity series mashed with last year's Hollywood produced film The Rite (which starred Anthony Hopkins and was based on a book by the same name about an actual Catholic exorcist). In this movie therefore, one gets to see well staged and (for effect) grainy "amateur" footage of some really bloody crime scenes and well as really sordid (bones cracking, vomit and menstrual blood covered people and objects flying) but ultimately fake exorcism scenes. All that was needed was "amateur 3D" which no doubt, will come in 3-4 years ...

This of course works really well for an audience of young people coming to the film to be entertained by being thrilled (in this case being made "really, really scared") -- the same reason that people pay to "bungie jump" or go to "really scary haunted houses" around Halloween-time or go on roller coaster rides at amusement parks.

As I was watching this film and thinking of its fake though thoroughly sordid terror, I thought of the cave men, who "back in the day" (the stone age...) probably got their thrills going into, well... caves ..., to poke hibernating bears to see if they could wake them up and then would "run like heck" out of the caves before the bear took a swipe at them, mauled them, or even ate them. Entertainment of this kind has probably been with us for a very long, long time...

Beyond the sordidness of the blood (often menstrual blood) and vomit covered contorted bodies splayed about throughout the film, even the more immune Catholic would eventually find offense in the persistent, every 5 minutes or so, criticism of the "official" Catholic Church: that is out of touch, that it wants to "keep these things quiet," "doesn't want to help people" and so forth.

But given that film's the two "rogue" 20-something priests as well as the film's "documentary makers" all come to rather awful ends in this film ... oh dear, I may have "spoiled" the film to some ... the "official Church" may actually come-out looking better than one would have expected. The two "rogue" if certainly sincere priests clearly didn't have a clue of what they were dealing with ...

As such, there is a place for _respect_ and silence. And often (certainly not always...) silence is honestly the most prudent and respectful course to take.

What to say to parents? I don't see any conceivable reason why a teenager would "have to see" this film, and I certainly would not want to be the parent enabling my kids (and/or their friends) to see it. Finally, the film is definitely not in any way, shape or form for pre-teens (it really is a graphic, sordid hard-R of a film).

But if in the end, if your teen finds a way to see this film on his or her own, you can just smile and tell them "You know of course that the movie's a fake" and walk away. Teens generally hate fakes ... ;-)

ADDENDUM:

An interesting exercise could be to go see the film Contraband [2012] released a week after this film and compare it to this one. While not about "demonic possession" per se, Contraband makes the point of just how hard it is for someone to leave a life of crime after one has entered it. Could this be, in effect, a far more subtle yet far more serious form of "demonic possession" than the head-spinning, vomiting spewing variety in which such possession has over the centuries been portrayed?

Miss Minoes (2001)

2012-01-03T01:06:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG) Roger Ebert (2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMdb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0279231/
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111221/REVIEWS/111219996

Miss Minoes [2001] (directed and cowritten by Vincent Bal along with Tamara and Berny Bos based on the children's novel Annie M.G. Schmidt) is a lovely, award-winning Dutch children's film (dubbed in this version into English) with a definite European sensibility about a cat, Miss Minoes, living in a small Dutch town who finds herself turned into a woman (played by Carice van Houten) one evening.

Why did she turn into a human being? Well, she drank from a barrel of apparently hazardous chemicals inadvertently dropped from a truck after making a hard turn as it sped through the town one evening. The same device (accidently dropped or otherwise improperly handled hazardous or radioactive cargo) has been used in countless Japanese and American horror movies to explain the creation of monsters (think of Godzilla [1954] or The Blob [1958]). In this case, a barrel of hazardous chemicals turns a Dutch cat into a person.

The human Miss Minoes (who we see only after she's found some rather simple/sensible clothes to wear, it's a children's movie after all ;-) is able to speak human language (Dutch in the original, English in this version) but she also retains the ability to communicate with other cats as well as other feline mannerisms: Until she runs into Tibbe (played by Theo Maassen) a hapless local journalist about to lose his job, she continues to feed herself by happily rummaging through garbage cans looking for scraps of food, especially fish; when she sees a dog, she jumps for a tree; and she spends much of her evenings on the village's rooftops.

Indeed, when Tibbe runs into her first, she's stuck in a tree after a dog (now much smaller than she) still reflexively scares her and causes her to scamper to the top of one. Later in evening when it's raining, she climbs down from what turns out to be Tibbe's apartment's rooftop and enters his room through a left-open window. When she enters, what does she do? Well she dashes straight for Tibbe's garbage can in the kitchen looking for food. What an odd person!

But Miss Minoes finds that she can help Tibbe in something. Threatened with being fired from work unless he comes up with a good story to print in the newspaper the next day, Tibbe asks Miss Minoes if _by chance_ she knew of something interesting to write about. Well, who knows a town better than a neighborhood cat, especially a cat who knows and gossips with all the other cats in town? ;-). So she saves him and they make a deal. She gets to stay in his place and eat, and she becomes his assistant giving him stories to write about.

Initially, Tibbe doesn't fully understand that Miss Minoes is/was really a cat. That's left up to the precocious daughter, Bibi (played by Sarah Bannier), of the land lady to figure out. But Tibbe actually doesn't care. He's just happy that his fortunes at work soon change, and _everybody_ wonders where the heck he's getting the information that he's getting about what's happening in the town. Much ensues.

Among that which ensues is Miss Minoes' managing of a rather complicated situation with the other cats. A lot of them don't like that "now suddenly she's a human." Some think that she's become something of a snob, "too good for the other cats." Others don't understand why she'd want to be a human at all. After all, as far as they are concerned, it's _cool_ to be a cat. Why would one want to give that up? But after she proves that she can still sing the "great cat anthem" (a loud persistent meowing that all the neighborhood cats promptly join in, driving all the neighborhood humans crazy), they come to agree that Miss Minoes "is still a cat" ;-).

And by the end of the film, it becomes clear that _no one_ should ever want to diss or otherwise mess with the neighborhood cats. They may act all cute when _they_ want to. But no person really knows what's going on their heads. And (of course) the cats like to keep it that way! The mystery of the truck rolling through town with those hazardous chemicals gets figured out. And the cats in their cute feline way exact their revenge.

But what now about Miss Minoes? Will she go back to being a cat or will she stay human now? Well, rent or see the movie ;-).

ADDENDUM:

At the beginning of my review, I mentioned that I thought that the movie had a definite European sensibility. As I watched the seemingly innocuous cats decide to come together and ever so cutely but firmly (as if with "paws of iron" .. ;-) take-down the one responsible for the hazardous chemicals passing through the town, I could not help but think of a very cute (and in its time well known) post-WW II Czech silent animated short called "Zpoura Hracek" (The Rising of the Toys).

In that Czech animated short, a Gestapo agent snoops around a humble toy-maker's shop to see if he was doing anything subversive and finds to his chagrin that he walked into the wrong toy shop! The toys themselves rise to chase him out ;-). Did the Dutch film-makers in 2001 (or Annie Schmidt the children's book writer) know of this 1946 Czech animated short? Did the Czech film-makers base their short film on a story already existing before? I don't know. But I would imagine that there were plenty of other variations on the theme playing throughout Europe in the decades in between and perhaps even before.

2011 Denny Awards - Part 3 - Most Compelling Performances (Female)

2011-12-31T12:19:00.000-06:00

Note: This List is Part III of Three.

Part I - Best Films
Part II - Most Compelling Performances (Male)
Part III - Most Compelling Performances (Female)

CHILD (female)
    Winner:
        Maggie Elizabeth Jones as Rosie in We Bought a Zoo
    Honorable Mentions:
        Khomotso Manyaka as Chanda in Life Above All
        Mélusine Mayance as Sarah in Sarah’s Key
        Elle Fanning as Alice Dainard in Super 8
        Chloe Grace Moretz as Isabelle in Hugo
        Amara Miller as Scottie in The Descendants

TEEN (female)
    Winner:
        Freida Pinto as Miral in Miral
    Honorable Mentions:
        Shailene Woodley as Alex in The Descendants
       Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, Pt 1
        Emma Roberts as Sally in The Art of Getting By
        Nikohl Boosheri as Atefah in Circumstance
        Marie Ferét as Narnel in Mozart's Sister
        Vanessa Hudgens as Lindy in Beastly
        Lily Collins as Karen in Abduction
        Stella Schnabel as Lisa (Miral’s Israeli friend) in Miral
        Analeigh Tipton as Jessica in Crazy, Stupid, Love
        Emma Watson as Hermoine Granger Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

YOUNG ADULT (female)
    Winner:
        Elizabeth Olsen as Martha, in Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Honorable Mentions:
        Felicity Jones as Anna in Like Crazy
        Zoe Saldana as Cataleya in Colombiana
        Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre
        Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
        Brit Marhling as Rhoda Williams in Another Earth
        Carey Mulligan as Sissy in Shame
        Taissa Farmiga, young-adult Corrine in Higher Ground
        Bingbing Li as Nina in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
        Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung in A Dangerous Method
        Rashida Jones as Cindy in My Idiot Brother
        Keira Knightly as Sabina Spielrein A Dangerous Method
        Katie O’Grady as Meris Canfield in Rid of Me
        Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary in Young Adult
        Cameron Diaz as Elizabeth Halsey in Bad Teacher
        Natalie Portman as Emma in No Strings Attached
        Anna Kendrick as Katherine in 50/50

ADULT (female)
    Winner:
        Jessica Chastain as Samantha in Take Shelter
    Honorable Mentions:
        Sarah Paulson as Lucy in Martha Marcy May Marlene
        Kirsten Dunst as Justine in Melancholia
        Dagmara Dominczyk as Annika in Higher Ground
        Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O'Brien in Tree of Life
        Vera Farmiga as Corine in Higher Ground
        Rachel Weisz as Kathryn Bolkovac in The Whistleblower
        Elizabeth Reaser as Charlotte in The Art of Getting By
        Kristen Scott Thomas as Julia Darmond in Sarah’s Key
        Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn


ELDER (female)
    Winner:
        Loretta Divine as Shirley in Madea’s Big Happy Family
    Honorable Mentions:
        Helen Mirren as the elder Rachel Singer in The Debt
        Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady
        Judy Dench as J.Edgar Hoover’s Mother in J.Edgar
        Viola Davis as Abileen Clark in The Help
        Angelica Houston as Diane (mom) in 50/50

HERO / VILLAIN (female)
    Winner:
        Milla Jovovich as Milady de Winter in Three Musketeers
    Honorable Mentions:
        Zoe Saldana as Cataleya in Colombiana
        Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
        Jennifer Lawrence as Raven/Mistique in X-Men: First Class
        Amanda Seyfried as Valerie in Red Riding Hood
        Emma Watson as Hermoine Granger in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
        Amanda Seyfried as Silvia Weis in In Time
        Bryce Dallas Howard as Rachel in 50/50
        Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly Holbrook in The Help
        Tyler Perry as Madea in Madea’s Big Happy Family

2011 Denny Awards - Part 2 - Most Compelling Performances (Male)

2011-12-31T11:16:00.004-06:00

Note: This List is Part II of Three.

Part I - Best Films
Part II - Most Compelling Performances (Male)
Part III - Most Compelling Performances (Female)

CHILD (male)
    Winner:
        Riley Griffiths, Joel Courtney, Zach Mills and Gabriel Basso as the kids in Super 8
Honorable Mentions:
        David Moreau as Wolfgang in Mozart's Sister
        Dakota Goyo as Max in Real Steel
        Asa Butterfield as Hugo in Hugo
        Karan Brar as Chirag Gupta in Diary of a Wimpy Kid II: Rodrick Rules

TEEN (male)
    Winner:
        Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black in Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, Pt 1
    Honorable Mentions:
        Nick Krause as Sid in The Descendants
        Freddie Highmore as George in The Art of Getting By
        Alex Schaffer as Kyle in Win Win
        Alex Pettyfer as Kyle in Beastly
        Taylor Lautner as Nathan in Abduction
        Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

YOUNG ADULT (male)
    Winner:
        Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Thor
    Honorable Mentions:
        Dominic Cooper as Latif Yahia / Uday Hussein in The Devil’s Double
        Seth Rogan as Kyle in 50/50
        Juan Cornet as Vicente in The Skin I Live In
        Ryan Gosling as the Driver in Drive
        Hamish Linklater as Jason in The Future
        Patton Oswalt as Matt Freehauf in Young Adult
        Austin Stowell as Kyle Connellan in Dolphin Tale
        Ryan Gosling as Stephen Myers in Ides of March
        Justin Timberlake as Will Salas in In Time
        Ewan McGregor as Oliver in Beginners
        Ashton Kutcher as Adam in No Strings Attached

ADULT (male/unattached/no kids)
    Winner:
        Leonardo DiCaprio as J.Edgar Hoover in J.Edgar
    Honorable Mentions:
        Tom Hardy as Tommy in Warrior
        Paul Rudd as Ned in My Idiot Brother
        Brendan Gleeson as Sargent Gerry Boyle in The Guard
        Jean Dujardin as George Valentin in The Artist
        Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe in Moneyball
        Paul Giamatti as Tom Duffy in The Ides of March
        Michael Fassbender as Brandon Sullivan in Shame
        Daniel Craig as Jake Lonergan in Cowboys and Aliens
        Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol


ADULT (male/parent)
    Winner:
        Alexander Siddig as Jamal (Miral's father) in Miral
    Honorable Mentions:
        Michael Shannon as Curtis in Take Shelter
        Damián Bichir as Carlos Galindo in A Better Life
        Alex Kendrick as Adam Mitchell in Courageous
        Clive Owen as Will in Trust
        Paul Giamatti as Mike Flahery in Win Win
        George Clooney as Matt King in The Descendants
        Matt Damon as Matthew Dee in We Bought a Zoo
        Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton in Real Steel
        Steve Carell as Cal in Crazy, Stupid Love

ELDER (male)
    Winner:
        Christopher Plummer as Hal in Beginners
    Honorable Mentions:
        Martin Sheen as Tom in The Way
        Kevin Spacey as Sam Rogers in Margin Call
        Albert Brooks as Bernie Rose in Drive
        Jeremy Irons as John Tuld in Margin Call
        Nick Nolte as Paddy Conlon in Warrior
        Andy Lau as Detective Dee in Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame
        Steve Martin as Stu Preissler in The Big Year
        Robert Forster as Scott Thorson in The Descendants
        Morgan Freeman as Dr. Cameron McCarthy in Dolphin Tale
        Anthony Hopkins as Odin in Thor

HERO / VILLAIN (male)
    Winner:
        Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto in X-men: First Class
    Honorable Mentions:
        John Hawkes as Patrick in Martha Marcy May Marlene
        Dominic Cooper as Uday Hussein in The Devil’s Double
        Paul Giamatti as Tom Duffy in The Ides of March
        Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Thor
        Albert Brooks as Bernie Rose in Drive
        James McAvoy as Prof. Charles Xavier in X-men: First Class
        Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
        Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
        Justin Timberlake as Will Salas in In Time
        Andy Lau as Detective Dee in Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame
        Antonio Banderas as Dr Robert Ledgard in The Skin I Live in
        Sasha Baron Cohen as Station-Inspector in Hugo

2011 Denny Awards ;-) - Part 1 - Best Films

2011-12-30T14:01:00.000-06:00

Ok, this is a bit on the megalomaniacal side. But having followed the movies for my first full year here and actually having a rather cool name for this ;-), I'm announcing my First Annual "Denny Awards" for Outstanding Achievement in Cinema ;-).

This List is Part I of Three.

Part I - Best Films
Part II - Most Compelling Performances (Male)
Part III - Most Compelling Performances (Female)

What do you think? ;-)

BEST FAMILY ORIENTED FILMS
    FOR FAMILIES WITH LITTLE CHILDREN -
       Winner -
            Winnie the Pooh - in a year marked by surprisingly awful (and politicized) children’s films, thankfully there was Winnie the Pooh, whose only agenda was finding a pot of honey with his friends.
        Honorable Mentions -
             Kung Fu Panda 2 - gotta love Mr. Ping, Panda Po's adopted dad ;-)
             Rango - the Hollywood classic Chinatown set among gophers and lizards in a ghost town somewhere outside of Vegas ;-)
             Rio - as every lover of the song Free Bird would know, birds are meant to fly ... ;-)
             Dolphin Tale - who wouldn't love a movie about a bunch of kids who save a dolphin?

FOR FAMILIES WITH PRE-TEEN CHILDREN -
        Winner -
             We Bought a Farm - Yes losing a parent can be terrible, but if you stick together, make new friends, and, yes, have a little faith you can make it
        Honorable Mentions -
             Soul Surfer - Everybody faces some adversity in life, but only we can give-up on our dreams. Don't.
             Courageous - Yes, it's true that it shouldn't be good enough to be a "good enough" parent.

FOR FAMILIES WITH TEENS -
        Winner -
             Super 8 - “Yes, your parents were kids once too ;-)”
        Honorable Mentions -
   Real Steel - "What can make your dad so exasperating can also be what makes him fun.
   A Better Life - Honestly, look at what your parents have often sacrificed for you.
             Trust - A serious movie about teenage girl who meets a sexual predator online and her parents, especially her father, having to have to deal with this as well.

BEST INTERGENERATIONAL FILMS (for Older/Adult Children and their Parents) -
         Winner -
             The Debt – “Kids, things were a bit more complicated than what we once told you...”
         Honorable Mentions -
             Beginners – “Yes your parents can be more complex than you thought...”
             Madea’s Big Happy Family – “When your ma’ (or pa’) really wants to talk to you, put aside your anger/baggage, ‘cause it’s probably important ...”
             Warrior - "Yes, your life could have been very hard but can you still open yourself up to reconciliation...?"
             The Way – “Even after death, it's possible to make peace and reconcile ...”
             The Descendants – “Parents, if your teenager starts flipping out, there’s probably a reason... and you might not want to hear it”

BEST TEEN ORIENTED FILM (for boys) -
         Winner -
               Thor - “To have a friend like Thor ...”
         Honorable Mentions -
X-men: First Class - "Okay, it wasn't exactly how it happened, but what a cool movie. And how would you use your super powers if you had them?"
               Transformers 3 - Okay, it seems like stupid movie about a kind of toy. But why does it work?

BEST TEEN ORIENTED FILM (for girls) -
          Winner -
               Twilight, Breaking Dawn, Part I – Yes, I’m pandering somewhat, but I’ve been surprised by the Twilight series. It's much better than I thought.
   Honorable Mentions -
               Monte Carlo – “Dare to Dream...”
               Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – truly “Best Friends Forever...”

BEST FILM THAT WILL HELP YOU WITH YOUR SCHOOL WORK -
         Winner -
               Midnight in Paris – “Ah, to live in another time ...” ;-)
   Honorable Mentions -
   Jane Eyre - You can never go wrong in English Lit by doing a report on Jane Eyre.
       Three Musketeers – Cool new take on this classic adventure story. But be careful here, there were no airships in the original... ;-)
       Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame - Great adventure story set during the Tang Dynasty in China. Again, the fire beatles probably weren’t real ;-)

BEST FILM THAT ASKS THE BIG QUESTIONS -
           Winner -
                 Melancholia – “What if we’ll just (more or less randomly) die and no one will remember us?”
Honorable Mentions -
                  Tree of Life – God’s modern-day response to modern-day Job's asking “Where are you God?”
                  Another Earth – Very creative ultra-cutting-edge metaphysical response to the question "What if I could have another chance?" The response: "Maybe there's a whole other universe out there where you/'you' have one." ;-)


BEST OPENLY RELIGIOUS FILM -
            Winner -
                  There be Dragons – “You thought you knew all that there was to know about a real-life Saint...”
            Honorable Mention -
                  Of Gods and Men – Actually a film from 2010 but one which only played widely in the United States after the New Year. Possibly the single best film presentation ever made of the rhythms of daily life in a contemporary but also traditonalist Catholic religious community.

BEST (YOUNG ADULT) RELATIONSHIP FILM -
               Winner -
                    Something Borrowed - For the really important things in life, you really do have to stand up and "Raise your Hand."
               Honorable Mentions -
                     The Future – “Yes, what you do does have consequences and what comes next can be scary ...”
                     One Day – “Yes, what you do (and do not do) does have consequences ...”
                     Like Crazy – “In the age of the Internet what’s the deal with borders anyway?”
                     Crazy, Stupid, Love – Yup, people often do dumb things when they’re in love.
                     50/50 - Cancer sucks period, but boy does it suck when you’re 25. Thought the film was a bit hard on the former girlfriend, however.
                     Rid of Me - Yes, your former SO (or even spouse) can really mess you up. But there is life after the break-up.

BEST FILM FOR FILM LOVERS -
              Winner -
                   The Artist - hands down. What a great tribute to the silent screen era!
              Honorable Mentions -
                    Melancholia – Yes, director Lars Von Trier called himself a Nazi and apparently had been blown-off by a Jewish girlfriend in his romantic past, but he still made one heck of a film!
                    Midnight in Paris – Yes, Woody Allen has had his own personal baggage, but boy can he still put together a story and then put it on film.
                   The Skin I Live In – Frankenstein lives, and who would have guessed ... in a castle outside of today's Toledo, Spain!
             Rango - the Hollywood Classic Chinatown set among gophers and lizards in a ghost town somewhere outside of Vegas ;-)
   Drive – Coolest genre film of the year, period.
   Hugo – Martin Scorcese spends $170 million to prove that aside from a few cool novelty shots, there’s really no reason why 3D makes either artistic or economic sense. But tell that to the TV makers who like Sony own entire Hollywood studios and are going to force us all to eventually buy 3D TVs.
      The Cave of Forgotten Dreams – The only truly must-see 3D film ever made and then only 5 minutes of it. Director Herzog is right. We don’t even use our 3D seeing faculty unless we have to. That’s why 3D films are so _tiring_ to watch. But that apparently makes no difference to the world’s television makers.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM -
              Winner -
                   Life in a Day - What a rich/wonderful world we live in today ...
              Honorable Mentions -
                   Page One - ... but the Internet will probably cull even the biggest/best newspapers in the business
                   One Lucky Elephant - How does one plan for a circus elephant's retirement and is it fair to the elephant?
                   Jesse / Shadows of the Lynching Tree - ... but can we finally care about all people too?
                   Cave of Forgotten Dreams - great documentary and possibly the best use of 3D ever to tell a story about a cave with 30,000+ year old prehistoric artwork that otherwise almost none of us would ever really see.

War Horse

2011-12-27T21:11:00.004-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (3 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568911/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv157.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111221/REVIEWS/111229995

As I was watching War Horse (directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis based on the 1982 children's novel made also into an award winning play by Michael Morpurgo) it became increasingly clear to me why Steven Spielberg would have been interested in making this film. All kinds of themes present in previous Spielberg films are present here (1) concern that E.T. [1982], Private Ryan [1998], even the Jewish captives on Schindler's List [1993] make it home safely, (2) depictions of complex heroes with their own stories who come to decide to risk their lives to help them reach safety, (3) the horror of war/terror (Schindler's List [1993], Saving Private Ryan [1998], Band of Brothers [2001]) and finally (4) war's moral ambiguity Saving Private Ryan [1998], Munich [2005]).

I write this because War Horse is not merely about a horse, even though the horse himself is important. However, War Horse is at least as much about the various human caretakers that this poor suffering horse had over the years who helped him survive the all but unsurvivable, the cataclysm of World War I where people themselves (never mind the animals) were being gunned-down and gassed like roaches on a monstrous mechanized industrial scale.

In the midst of this slaughter, Joey the horse, passes from one temporary owner / caretaker to another and yes, makes it -- beaten, bruised but survives. And through the sufferings of this poor horse the whole horror of that awful war is expressed. Much of course happens as this horse passes from the care of Albert Narracott (played by Jeremy Irvine) and his parents Ted and Rose (played by Paul Mullan and Emily Watson respectively) to British Cavalry officer Captain Nichols (played by Tom Hiddleston) at the beginning of the war, then to two young German brothers, Gunther and Friedrich (played by David Kross and Nicolas Bro) in the German army after Captain Nichols is presumably killed in a Cavalry charge, then to a young Belgian girl named Emilie (played by Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (played by Niels Arestrup) who find the horse on their property one day, then to Brant (played by Rainer Bock) a German sergeant responsible for horses moving heavy artillery equipment when the German army comes back to requisition him and to finally two soldiers, one British, one German (played by Himmerk Schoenemann) who find the horse one day trapped in barbed-wire in no-man's and come-out of the trenches in order to set him free.

It's a lovely story and often often a very sad one for what happens to both the humans and the animals portrayed in the film during the course of the war.

The last incident when the two soldiers, one British and one German, come out to save the horse is an artistic expression of a phenomenon that occurred repeatedly on all fronts during the whole of World War I. My grandparents' generation (in my family, my grandfathers and great uncles served in both the Austrian and Russian armies) had many similar stories about kindness shown by common soldiers on both sides of the trenches during the war. World War I was still a war where most of the common soldiers really didn't see a purpose in the conflict and often just wanted to survive, _not commit mortal sin_ and go home. Hence the British soldier's comment to the German one reassuring him: "I'm a terrible shot, and I'm absolutely certain that I'll come home having shot over the heads of every single German soldier I've ever seen," was almost certainly a sincere one. During the first Christmas of war in 1914, French, German and British soldiers sang Christmas carols to each other over the trenches. None of the common people on any of the sides really wanted that war.

Hence, I thank Steven Spielberg who grew-up certainly hearing many similar stories (as well as then stories of the horrors of the universally much more "bought-into" and hence crueler Second World War) for making this film. 9/11 did a lot to our country. But I'm certainly of a generation (as I suspect that Steven Spielberg is) who still REALLY wants to "Give Peace a Chance" and remembers that for most people "War, what is it good for? Absolutely Nothing."

Finally, parents should note that the battle depictions in War Horse are at least as intense as those in Saving Private Ryan [1998] or Band of Brothers [2001]. Hence the PG-13 rating is fully appropriate and younger children should probably not be taken along to see this film.

We Bought a Zoo

2011-12-27T14:12:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Roger Ebert (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb Listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1389137/
CNS/USCCB Review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv156.htm
Roger Ebert's Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111221/REVIEWS/111229994

We Bought a Zoo (directed and co-written by Cameron Crowe along with Aline Brosh McKenna based on the book by Benjamin Mee about his experience of actually buying the Dartmoor Zoo in rural England after his wife's death) is a somewhat hokey, certainly formulaic but still very nice family movie about Benjamin Mee (played in the movie by Matt Damon) and his kids, 14 year old Dylan (played by Colin Ford) and truly sweetie-pie 7 year-old Rosie (played by Maggie Elizabeth Jones) who buy a farm (in the movie in rural Southern California) following the death of their wife/mother Catherine Mee (appearing occasionally in dreams and conversations, played by Stephanie Szostak).

Both grieving and starting on such a surprising project as a result offer inevitable challenges, that provide the nuts and bolts material for the project. Yet, make no mistake about it, the film is about coping the loss of a loved one and struggling to find a future afterwards. "The Zoo" becomes an obvious metaphor not unlike Forrest Gump's "box of chocolates:" In life you don't know what's coming and you meet a lot of "interesting animals" (people) all of which need some care. And lest there be too much actual equivalence between people and animals, we hear the initially skeptical older brother of Benjamin, Duncan Dee (played by Thomas Haden Church) declare quite sincerely near the end of the film: "You know, I do love the animals, but I really love the people."

And the Dees meet plenty of wonderful if at times eccentric people along the way -- including chief zoo-keeper Kelly Foster (played by Scarlet Johannsen) and her daughter Lilly (played by Elle Fanning), zoo designer Peter MacCready (played by Angus Macfadyen) and even state inspector and chief "villain" in the story Walter Ferris (played by John Michael Higgins).

Again, the plot is often very predicatable but it is also quite respectful of reality. For instance, everyone probably expects a romance to begin between widower Benjamin Mee and Kelly the zookeeper. After all, Kelly is both very nice and, well, "looks like Scarlet Johannsen" ;-). But (if this is spoiler, so be it...) this does not happen, as it probably would not happen in real life. Instead, it is obvious that the Dees have still a lot grieving to do, and they all make _some_ but still incomplete progress along the way.

As such I have to say that I really liked this movie (and was actually surprised how much I liked it). It's sad, but it's also happy and it makes for a nice reflection on the life that we're given and which often doesn't necessarily go the the way that we'd like but ... if we step back a bit ... we can hopefully find that we're generally given quite a lot in life and certainly plenty of opportunities to make lots and lots of friends.

Indeed, even with that kind of rudimentary reflection we could perhaps appreciate that we really do have "someone up there" who is looking after all of us ;-).

As a final note to parents: while the subject is clearly about the loss of a loved one, which can be intrinsically hard for young kids to deal with, this film has been made with very, very gently, with a great deal of sensitivity. So I wouldn't be afraid to take anyone to this movie. The subject matter may not be something you'd want to take your kids to over the Christmas holidays. However if you or your friends have lost someone close to you, recently, the film could be useful to you. And I certainly wouldn't be afraid of taking kids really of any age to this film. It's really done quite well.

ADDENDA

First, in the Servite Novena of Our Lady of Sorrows, there is a line has long struck me, noting that "throughout her life Mary chose do to what God wanted her to do and not necessarily what she had wanted to do." Yes, like in the case of the family of this movie, there are occasionally events that happen in our lives that we'd wish didn't happen (times when we don't even have a choice but to respond/accept what happens). And there are also times in our lives that we do have to make choices between what we'd really like to do and what'd really be for a greater good, for the sake of loved ones, country, community, and yes for God and Church. (One thinks here of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life [1946]). Often what makes us truly Great are the times when we make the choice to do what is truly Good ...

Second, an image that has stuck with me for years since my time in the Seminary where we did study pastoral care for the dying and grieving has been understanding our lives as a web of relationships (and this before the internet became so much a part of our lives;-).

The loss of a loved one makes a tear in this web. The size and scope of the tear depend both on the role that the loved one had in our lives prior to his/her death and then the circumstances of the death. The sudden, violent death of a loved one is often the hardest for survivors to overcome. Yet eventually our web does mend. The web will show a scar as a result of the loss and the size of the scar will again depend on the importance of that loved one in our lives and the circumstances of his/her death. But our lives will eventually continue anew.

The above insight is not my own. It comes from a book that I read during my time in the seminary, but I no longer remember the name of the book... But I do think that many who've experienced the untimely death of a loved one (as indeed, my family had. I lost my mother when I was 22 and I'm approaching my mother's age when she died) will appreciate the value of the "web", "tear" "mending" "with a scar remaining" imagery in the metaphor.

And the family in this movie was clearly trying to find a way to "mend" the tear caused by the loss of their wife/mother.

The Darkest Hour

2011-12-27T02:31:00.000-06:00

MPAA (PG-13) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1093357/
Kinonews.ru - review / discussion -
(Russ. orig. / Eng. trans.)

The Darkest Hour (directed by Chris Gorak, screenplay by Jon Spaihts, story by Leslie Bohem, M.T. Ahern and again Jon Spaihts) is an American conceived alien invasion sci-fi/horror movie set almost entirely in Moscow. I found the idea to be both interesting and potentially problematic. How would the film-makers pull it off?

I did find the setting of an alien invasion movie in a non-American city interesting because I had been studying at my Order's International College in Rome the year that Independence Day [1996] had come out and I know that the film didn't go over well once one got past our nation's fair borders. Already known at the Seminary that I liked films, I was greeted by a fair number of rolling eyes that fall by our college's non-American students saying: "So you Americans are going to 'save us all' from 'alien invasion' one day and on your Independence Day no less. What if this invasion never comes? Or we don't particularly want to be 'saved' by you? Do we still have to be 'grateful'?"

Then a few years later Bruce Willis' Armageddon [1998] came out, a film extolling the innate goodness of oil-drillers and the inherent "wimpiness" of the French, Paris showed-up on screen only long enough to be blown-up by a shard of an asteroid (Oh, how the American Right hates the French ...) So an alien invasion film set in Moscow could have gone in a lot of directions ... and, yes, I've taken a fair amount of hits for the United States over the years, both in grad school and then in the seminary where I was often the only native born American in the program (and _I'm_ a son of immigrants ...). But I do like America and in good part for reasons expressed _nicely_ in this film.

Fortunately, the film-makers chose to _not_ have "Americans save Russia" but instead chose to create a film that certainly is still clumsy at times from a Russian point of view (see the Kinonews.ru review and discussion - Russ. orig. / Eng. trans. through translate.google.com) tried hard to underline the virtues of both American and Russian ingenuity (IMHO rightly identified as a characteristic of both peoples) as the survivors of the alien invasion sought to fight back.

So what is the scenario then? Ben (played by Max Minghella) and Sean (played by Emile Hirsch) are two software engineers from America who come to Russia to plug a "foursquare" type social networking site only to find that their Scandinavian partner Skyler (played by Joel Kinnaman) had stolen their idea and passed it off to the Russians as his own. When they protest, he simply tells them "Welcome to Moscow." However Ben and Sean's site is already online elsewhere and two American tourists Natalie (played by Olivia Thirlby) and Anne (played by Rachael Taylor), who know the site from the States happily use it to find some of the club hot spots in Moscow as well as to run into Ben and Sean at one of the clubs. Skyler's there too ... hitting on one of any number of Russian models at the club. True Ben and Sean are still pisse-off at Skyler but between the Lights, the pulsating Hip Hop (both English and Russian) dance music, the two young American women that they meet and all the other beautiful people present, Ben and Sean are getting over it.

Then suddenly the lights go out. Yes, one of the Americans calls out derisively "Moscow!" But soon it's clear that the power outage has nothing to do with any perceived flaws with Russia's electrical grid. Instead, all across the sky these orange glowing orbs are gently dropping toward earth. And they seem to do two things: (1) they quickly short-out electrical devices and (2) they quickly reduce any living organism including humans to ash. So it quickly becomes pandamonium when these strange orange-glowing entities hit the ground.

The five characters mentioned above manage to escape the initial onslaught. How they did so (why they were so lucky) isn't initially clear, but it becomes clearer as the story progresses. Initially, the five are content to hide. Eventually though, they have leave their hiding place in order to eat. When they do so, they gradually come into contact with other, Russian, survivors.

There aren't many. They initially run into Vika (played by Veronika Ozerova) who's their age as well as Sergei (played by Dato Bakhtadze) who's a bit older. Initially, none of them really understand why they "were lucky" to survive, but they start to piece things together and Sergei is certainly the first who really understands it. Note to the readers here, the reason isn't metaphysical like in Steven King's, The Stand [1994]. Instead, the reason is more down to earth. The gathering and growing group of survivors beginning to organize themselves into a group of "21st century partisans" also begins to figure out the aliens' weaknesses.

The story thus evolves into a reasonably good puzzle needing to be solved _and_ more problematically to some of the Russian viewers and reviewers of the film (see again the Kinonews.ru review and discussion - Russ. orig. / Eng. trans.) something of an analogy to the Russian/Soviet experience of surviving and defeating the Nazi invasion in 1941. Then too, the Russian/Soviets were initially overwhelmed by the invaders. But slowly they came to figure out the weaknesses of the invaders and to defeat them.

The movie ends only as the survivors begin to see how the alien invaders could be defeated. So the film has been made in a manner that allows for sequels. The ending also offers the possibility that these sequels could take place in other places in the world besides Russia (or the United States). So the creators of this film have created an "alien invasion" story that's _truly global_ with heroes coming from everywhere, and could continue to be told for many episodes to come.

As a result, I do applaud the makers of the film for attempting to create a series in this genre that could be truly inclusive of the whole world and certainly I will be watching to see whether the film-makers come through in actually doing so in the years to come.

ADDENDUM

A truly excellent book on the Russian/Soviet experience of World War II is a book by British historian/journalist Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945. Published only in 2006, it is easily of the caliber of Cornelius Ryans' Longest Day [1959] / Bridge too Far [1974] or Steven Ambrose's Band of Brothers [1992] (which were about Western Allied/American experiences on the Western Front during WW II). Merridale's book provides the English language reader probably the best available description of life in the Soviet army on the Eastern front during the war.