Final Destination 5

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (2 stars) Fr Dennis (for those who like this kind of movie 3 stars, for those who don’t please don’t go).

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1622979/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv091.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110810/REVIEWS/110819993

Final Destination 5 (directed by Steven Quayle, written by Eric Heisserer and Jeffrey Reddick) is a movie that is DEFINITELY _not_ for everybody (understatement of the year (nervous ;-).  Parents: The movie _definitely_ deserves its R-rating and I can’t imagine why any parent would even want to take a pre-teen to such a “in one’s face” (and I’m not kidding, remember this is 3D) _again and again_ exquisitely filmed slash and gore fest.  I’d also add that anybody _with a heart condition_ ought to avoid the film, especially the 3D version.  And to anyone who is somewhat pressured to go see the film, honestly remember, _it’s okay_ to “close your eyes” at times (I learned this trick a number of years ago, when I was going with our parish youth group to the Six Flags / Great America amusement park.  I found that if one just closes one’s eyes, one could basically ride every roller-coaster no matter how frightening it would otherwise seem to be ;-).

That said, I’ve been around teens and young adults (and _I was_ a teen / young adult) long enough to know that movies like this are magnets to both age groups.  In fact, it was one of my parish's college-aged young adults who first told me that this movie was coming and that, yes, she was definitely going to go see it when it opened.

Now why would that be?  Why would movies like this be so attractive to young people?  Well Stephen King explained in his book, the Danse Macabre, that a good horror story is one that “touches a nerve.”  That is, it takes a value of the audience – in this case youth and vitality – and inverts it.  So one gets gore and splat.  The actors and actresses in this film are all attractive.  This adds to the shock appeal of, for example, actress Ellen Wroe playing a young gymnast going through her routine.  Everyone knows what’s coming, just doesn’t know when.  And then in an intricate, seemingly utterly random sequence of disasters she hurls off the apparatus in a seemingly utterly random fashion, lands _not_ on her feet (even on her head) but in a previously inconceivable, but truly _worst possible position_ ...  and splat (OMG how was that even possible?) the character in the story is dead, instantly.  Now repeat the same idea played out in a kitchen of a swanky high end restaurant, at a LASER EYE CARE center, at an acupuncture clinic ... and ... you get the picture.  Beautiful young people, seemingly “with their whole lives ahead of them” die _one after another_ in utterly unexpected but intricately plotted ways and ... that's the appeal.  They're so young, so beautiful, so full of life, yet instantly ... so dead.  Thus the movie plays on some of one’s greatest fears: that one could find oneself dead in an instant and in a seemingly utterly unexpected way.  And is one _really_ that surprised that young people who flock to roller-coasters and various ‘fright fests’ and ‘haunted houses’ around Halloween time would flock to a movie like this?

So what’s the story?  (Is there a story? ;-).  Well there's sort of a story: A group from an office of a nondescript “small company” set out on a chartered bus to go on a two day “company retreat.”  While on their way to the retreat center, they are to cross a long suspension bridge.  There’s road work occurring on the bridge.  The bus stops.  Then, one of the people from the group, Sam Lawton (played by Nicolas D’Agosto) has a horrific premonition of the bridge collapsing.  The bridge collapse sequence is, of course, horrific and graphic.  As he is about to fall off the bridge, he wakes up, _realizing that it was a dream_.  But as he wakes up, he realizes that things are happening _exactly_ like in the dream/vision that he just experienced.  So he freaks out and drags his girlfriend, Molly Harper (played by Emma Bell), off the stopped bus.  Six other confused passengers follow – junior exec Peter Freidkin (played by Miles Fisher), intern/college gymnast Candice Hooper (played by Ellen Wroe), hot secretary Olivia Castle (played by Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), creepy I.T. guy Isaac (played by P.J. Byrne), new-factory floor manager Nathan (played by Arlen Escarpeta) and department boss Dennis (played by David Koechner).  Because these eight got off the bus, they were able to “cheat death” and survive the Tacoma Narrows Bridge style collapse.

But Death does not like to be cheated.  So during the rest of the movie, Death moves in to take them all, one by one...

Is there any value to a movie like this?  Here I would like to note that the CNS/USCCB gave the movie an “O” or morally offensive rating because of the gore and because the reviewers there had an honest question about whether there’d be anything redeemable about a movie like this.  Well, if the movie does help to  remind young people that “death comes to all” and to pray for the dead –  for friends who died in teenage accidents (and teens do die that way) or for their loved ones who’ve died over the years -- then perhaps there would be a positive aspect to a story like this.  If it makes young people a bit _more careful_, not to take stupid chances, which young people often do, it’d have a positive value as well. 

So I don't see the movie as a total loss.  And I do know that a lot of the young people (even among the young people I know) are going to see this movie, whether they tell me or not.  Just folks remember that if you do see the movie, then do take the time to pray for the loved ones that you know who have died.  And remember to live life basically on the "straight and narrow" because _none of us knows_ when our lives will end, and when we’ll have to make an accounting for how we lived them to our God.


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The Help

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv088.htm
Roger Ebert review - http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110809/REVIEWS/110809983

The Help (directed and screenplay written by Tate Taylor based on the novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett) is a story about the women of Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 near the end of the first half of the Civil Rights Movement.  There were references to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr’s March on Washington D.C. (as something about to take place / just having taken place) as well as a scene with a whole household – white family and “its” black help watching the funeral of John F. Kennedy on a “new” (now ancient) television.

It is important to understand that neither the book nor the movie was intended to be a documentary but rather to be historical fiction, seeking to give to readers/the audience a sense of the life of a relatively minor, arguably “quaint” though deeply troubled state capital in the Deep South of the time.  In this Kathryn Stocket follows a long, storied tradition of historical fiction writing coming from women of the South that would make Margaret Mitchell who wrote Gone With the Wind and Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird proud. 

As I write this, it is clear to me that who is sill missing to complete this pantheon of women writing about the South would be a work written by a black woman reaching the acclaim of these three as yet white women, who nonetheless have pushed the cause of humanizing African-Americans in the larger American culture.  Margaret Mitchell arguably began this process as she humanized the various black servants working on the plantations of the Old South (even as she did not outright condemn slavery).  Harper Lee further humanized a black victim of false accusation who ended up being lynched (though the lynching itself was not portrayed).  Kathryn Stocket chose to write a fascinating book from the perspectives of the black maids of Jackson (though the story still passed through her pen).

In each case, these were steps that on one hand could be portrayed as large.  And yet on the other hand seem painfully small.  Perhaps a black woman will one day complete this cycle of writing about the Old South.  Or perhaps, the subject itself may not prove to be altogether interesting to African American women writers of today/the future (or fraught with other dangers, such as _no matter_ how good a black writer’s book/novel may be, it may not get the kind of attention that a better connected / still more "mainstream" white writer would receive) who may prefer writing about other pressing challenges.  In this regard, please check the ADDENDUM to this Review (below) for the link to the statement and suggestions of the Association of Black Women Historians with regard to this book/film and general topic of African American domestic workers in the pre-Civil Rights era South or just click here.

It is also important to understand the book as historically based fiction rather than documentary because the characters in the story do feel more like “types” than actual people.  The characters inhabiting the universe of the novel/movie _are_ important but the viewer will have no trouble identifying who the people who’re supposed to be sympathetic are and who we’re supposed to despise.  So it’s a morality tale stocked at times with ringers.  But it is well done and perhaps pertinent to our own time.

The specific hornet’s nest that The Help may kick-up is the identification of Hilly Holbrook (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) as the movie’s “Queen Bee” chief villain.  To be sure, Hilly mistreats not only her “help,” Mimmy Jackson (played by Octavia Spenser) who she fires after Minny refused to go outside to use the “help’s bathroom” during a tornado but used the house bathroom instead, as well as the woman who replaced her ostensibly for “stealing” (but the story’s more complicated that than), Hilly _also_ makes sure to keep her white-women “friends” in their places as well.  She keeps the writer of the story, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phalan (played by Emma Stone) off balance (who was the only one of this circle of white women to have gone to college – Ole Miss’) by constantly reminding her in one way or another that, college grad though she may be, she’s the only one of their friends who still wasn’t married.  And Hilly’s particularly vicious to a sweet, but “out of her depth” woman “with a white trash background” who had married one of Hilly’s old boyfriends.  She also pressures subservient “friend” Celia Foote (played by Jessica Chastain) to build a bathroom for her maid (and the movie’s narrator) Aibileen Clark (played by Viola Davis) because _she_ does not want to use a bathroom that could have been used by a black person.

In other circumstances, the prominence of Hilly’s “Queen Bee” character as the story’s chief villain could be appalling.  Yet, we do live in a time when we have two _snarling_ former beauty queens Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann becoming powerful fixtures on our national political scene, arguably _nationalizing_ the power-dynamics played-out in Jackson, Mississippi in this story.  Indeed, the two, Palin and Bachmann, have come to have a hate-filled fixation on bringing down our nation's (first) African-American President Barack Obama. Say what one may about his politics (note that abortion aside, I tend to agree with him on _just about everything else_) like _most_ of the black “help” in the movie, notably Aibileen (Viola Davis' character), Obama is intelligent, measured and _calm_.

So while the movie is about Jackson, Mississippi of the 1960s, it is also about our time.  For “those who have eyes, see...”

ADDENDUM -

I wish to add here an Open Statement to the Fans of "The Help" by the Association of Black Women Historians.  Included at the end of the statement is a _suggested reading list_ of books, fiction and non-fiction, that address the realities of black domestic workers in the Pre-Civil Rights Era South.


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The Devil's Double

MPAA  (R) Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr Dennis (3 stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270262/
Roger Ebert’s Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110803/REVIEWS/110809989

The Devil’s Double (directed by Lee Tamahori, screenplay co-written by Michael Thomas and Latif Yahia, based on the autobiographical book by the same name by Latif Yahia with assistance of Karl Wendl) is about true story of Latif Yahia (played in the movie by Dominic Cooper) who during the regime of Saddam Hussein (played in the movie by Philip Quast) was extracted from the Iraqi military and forced to serve as a body double to Hussein’s psychopathic son Uday (played in the movie by Dominic Cooper as well).

If the totalitarian bosses of recent history were often ruthless and evil, the children of these dictators have often been remembered of being even worse.  In this regard, I would recommend an article by Franklin Foer of Slate Magazine who goes through the sordid stories of the adult children of notorious recent dictators.  Many/most of these children of dictators grew-up to have alcohol and gambling problems as well as _torture and rape_ problems.  Uday Hussein, for example, as head of the Iraqi Olympic Community was said to have tortured the members of Iraq’s national soccer team after losing a qualifying match.  Nicu Ceausescu, son of Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu also had a thing for Olympic athletes, apparently making his rounds of Romania’s medal-winning women’s gymnastics team when “dad” was still in power.  To be sure, Nicu wouldn’t torture the women athletes; he’d just sleep with (rape) them.  It’s generally been “good to be the king” (or the king’s son...).

So then, this is the world that Latif found himself brought into.  Extracted from the front during the Iran-Iraq War by Iraqi intelligence, because it was noted that he looked “a lot like” Uday Hussein, he was given by Uday an offer he could not refuse.  Even though given “a chance to think about it,” that chance Latif found out, was to be taken in the solitude of a prison cell.  Eventually, Latif gave in and after the making of some special dentures (to make his teeth look like Uday's) and apparently a number of minor surgical alterations on his face, voila, Latif got to play Uday for as long as he could stand it / his luck lasted.

What was the life of a “son of a god?”  Well, certainly God or Allah and their various "quaint moral strictures" (like Moslems aren’t supposed to drink alcohol, to say nothing of "thou shalt not kill, covet or commit adultery") didn’t matter for much.  The booze, the coke and the women flowed freely.  At one party in some private club in Baghdad during the lead-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Uday demanded that all his guests “take off their clothes,” and soon enough, male / female, most of the party-goers were naked.  Parents take note: If it wasn’t obvious to you already, this movie _really isn’t_ for the kids.

Uday also had a thing for young brides and even school girls.  Documented was a case where Uday watching a lovely wedding reception at some resort on the outskirts of Baghdad proceeded to come over and take (and soon afterwards rape) the bride.  In the movie, she proceeded to commit suicide, jumping off a balcony onto the wedding reception (still going on) below.  Uday would also drive his Italian sports car around Baghdad looking for teenage school-girls abduct.  Later, he’d have his assistants literally dispose of the bodies in the desert outside of town.

How much can a bystander (or even a forced body-double with a gun to his head) take?  Well when Uday had Latif go out _in his stead_ to talk down a particularly angry parent who had lost a teenage daughter in this way, Latif took out a knife and proceeded to slit his own wrists.  For his attempted suicide, Latif was dumped on the doorsteps of his parents’ home who had not seen or heard from him in 9-years (They had been told that Latif died during the Iran-Iraq War).

But anyone who’s ever watched or read a mafia tale knows that it’s not _that_ easy to leave an “outfit” like this.  The rest of the movie is about Latif’s attempt to "get out of Dodge.”

Perhaps the one difference between a purely mafia outfit and a political one is that other assistants / henchmen in a regime like this do come to have qualms as well.  So Latif does occasionally get some unanticipated help from people that, on the surface, one wouldn’t expect. (This same motif/insight was also present in the recent movie There be Dragons about Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva, set during the chaos and carnage of the Spanish Civil War and it _may_ be worth pursuing/reflecting on this in the future – not everybody associated with an evil regime is necessarily evil and people even in such evil circumstances are capable of unexpected kindness and change).

All in all, The Devil’s Double makes for a viscerally graphic (gold and blood drenched) movie.  Movies like Scarface and Goodfellas as well as the movies of Quentin Tarantino come to mind.  Parents, the R-rating is definitely appropriate and the movie is definitely not for kids / preteens.  Still, The Devil’s Double is mostly historical (Some of the scenes, particularly near the end, feel like they were “adapted” to fit the needs of a telling a compelling and coherent story, much like a criticism that could be made of recent cable television series like The Tudors or The Borgias).  And the story does make note of some of the complexities of the various characters in the story.  Nobody, including Uday or his father, is portrayed completely one-dimensionally. 


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Life in a Day [2011]

MPAA (PG-13) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1687247/

Life in a Day (directed by Kevin MacDonald along with Natalia Andreadis and Joseph Michael) is a production sponsored by LG, National Geographic, YouTube and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions which asked people around the world to submit video footage of what they did on a single day, July 24, 2010.  They received thousands of hours of video from people over 190 countries.   This footage was organized into a 95 minute film which showed life across the earth on that day from 12:00 AM (0:00) on that day until 11:59 PM (23:59) that evening. 

The movie does run like an “edited 95 minute collage of YouTube videos from around the world.”  So if you’d like or even be fascinated by something like that, you’d probably enjoy this movie.  If you would find something like that either “too much” or “too boring,” you’ll probably not like it.

Since I’ve done my share in recent years of filming essentially "random" (read "quite simple" or "quite boring" ;-) events in my life, I probably fall in the first group.  I _do_ find value in projects like Life in a Day.  It’s a reminder to us of both the _diversity_ and the _universality_ of our day-to-day experiences.  After all, we _all_ have to get up, wash ourselves up, eat, go to work/school.  We all play or do things for fun.  We all have important events in our lives (though perhaps not every day).  We all have loved ones.  And we fear  various things including perhaps “disappearing” or “not having had mattered.”

So I did find this project and compilation fascinating but I do understand that it wouldn’t be for everybody.


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The Change Up

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (1 ½ stars) Fr. Dennis (0 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1488555/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv086.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110803/REVIEWS/110809994

The Change Up (directed by David Dubkin and cowritten by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) is a movie that I haven’t seen and _don’t_ plan to see because I can not think of any worthwhile reason to do so. 

Why am I bothering to write a review of a movie that I don’t plan to see?  I don’t want a lack of a review in this case to be misconstrued as an endorsement of this movie or movies like it.

Why would I be so particularly negative about _this_ movie as opposed to other more youth oriented movies that are also of questionable value?  I suppose (1) it would depend on the movie in question (if a _really bad_ irredeemable youth oriented movie came out I'd be similarly negative about it), and (2) there often is at least something redeemable in most films, if nothing else offering a opportunity to engage people in some way leading to a more positive truth.  In the case of The Change Up, I don't see _anything positive_. 

Why should an audience be indulged in the fantasy of a married man, Dave (played by Jason Bateman), with a beautiful intelligent wife, Jamie (played by Leslie Mann), who loves him ... to want “more?”  Why should a man, Mitch (played by Ryan Reynolds), who already could enter into a serious relationship with any number of women who seem to be dropping at his feet be allowed to want/have the beautiful intelligent wife of his best friend _as well_? 

Perhaps I’m being kinder to the young than to people closer to my own age, but I simply don’t see why _pay Hollywood_ money indulge in such reckless fantasies.  At 20, one’s life still is an open book, and if one hasn’t yet found someone who one is both friends with and attracted to, then perhaps ‘dream.’  But at 35+, when one is _already married_ or certainly _marriagable_ it becomes pathetic.  You’ve got what you’ve got in life.  USUALLY IT IS REALLY QUITE GOOD and just learn to be happy with what God has given you.  Afterall, the 9th and 10th commandments are:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, and
You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.


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Rise of the Planet of the Apes

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1318514/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv087.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110803/REVIEWS/110809988

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (directed by Rupert Wyatt, written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, suggested by the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle) is a surprisingly good update to the Planet of the Apes movie franchise of the 1960s-70s. 

All Sci-Fi stories require a certain degree of “suspension of disbelief.”  I always found the Planet of the Apes franchise to require this to a far larger degree than other popular American Sci-fi.  Yet by the time the closing credits finish here, one has a scenario (with some holes but not as many as one would expect) for both the rise of the apes and the fall of humanity.

So what happens?  Will Rodman (played by James Franco), a scientist who works for a pharmaceutical company named Gensyn is working on a drug that would reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.  The drug, whose delivery mechanism is a virus, introduces a number of genes into brain cells which would encourage them to divide anew and make new synapse connections with other brain cells.  Initial testing on chimps proves promising.  However, the whole project is shut-down after one of the chimps, a female, goes berserk.  The company believes that it is a side-effect of the treatment.  Instead, we find out that it was because she was pregnant.  The head caretaker of the chimps, Robert Franklin (played by Tyler Labine) ordered to take down the chimps because of the failed experiment, can’t bring himself to kill the new-born chimp as well, and asks Will Rodman to take the little chimp home, even for a few days, while he tries to figure out what to do.  And so this is how Ceasar, the new born chimp makes it out alive and comes to be raised in a human environment at the Rodman home.

Now it turns-out that Will Rodman had more than a professional interest in working on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, his father, Charles Rodman (played by John Lithgow) has it. 

In the 4 years that follow, Ceasar the chimp grows up in the Rodman home, approaching maturity.  It is clear that genetic treatment that his mother had received had penetrated into his fetal brain while she carried him in her womb as well.  So he becomes one smart chimp, learning to sign and do all sorts of tasks that an average chimp would never be able to do.  In the meantime, Charles is just getting worse.  Seeing that Ceasar had no ill effects from having been exposed to the treatment, Will decides to steal a number of the remaining vials of the experimental drug from his lab to give the treatment to his father.  Initially, the treatment works miracles on his father as well.  HOWEVER, soon it becomes clear the Charles’ immune system is fighting the viral portion of the treatment.  Will realizes that if this treatment was going to work on humans, a different virus would have be used as a delivery vehicle to the brain.  What to do?

Will convinces his boss, Steven Jacobs (played by David Oyelowo) that the treatment had not been a failure for the reasons the company had thought.  It did not cause the chimp subjects to go berserk and, in fact, the treatment had worked (at least initially) on his father.  Finally, Rodman tells his boss that if anything, the treatment had made _both_ Ceasar and his father (temporarily) more intelligent than they ever should have been.  Intrigued at the possibility that this therapy could actually increase human intelligence, the boss gives Will the go-ahead to work on a new virus delivery vehicle.

The rest of the movie is driven by two things.  First, Ceasar is growing-up.  And no matter how intelligent he may be, he’s still physically a chimp.  This means that he’s becoming far stronger than any human being around him, something that San Francisco zoo veterinarian Caroline Aranha (played by Frieda Pinto) warns Will about.  Second, using a virus as a delivery mechanisms is a tricky thing.  The first virus proved too weak for the human immune system.  Would using a different virus as the delivery mechanism prove better?

With several fortuitous twists the story proceeds to fulfill its task of explaining how the Planet of the Apes came to be.  Yes, it stretches the imagination but not as much as one would think.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes moved the story from the original series’ completely improbable starting point to a movie resembling Jurassic Park in many ways.  But I’ll leave it to viewers to judge for themselves whether they were satisfied with how this movie played with the elements of science and fiction.

Finally as a note to parents, I do believe that the PG-13 rating is appropriate.  Yes, there is violence.  But like a lot of recent comic book based movies, notably Iron Man I/II, Green Hornet or Thor, there’s a lot of glass breaking and shots (at the end) fired, but not really a lot of blood.  So if you found those other movies basically okay, you’ll find this one okay as well.


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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan [2011]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1541995/
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729995

REVIEW REVISED to incorporate new information on Oct 12, 2011:

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan [2011] (directed by Wayne Wang and co-written by Angela Workman, Ronald Bass and Michael K. Ray based on the novel by the same name by Lisa See) is a story about two sets of “sworn sisters” in a type of relationship called laotong in Lisa See’s novel.  

The film begins at a restaurant in contemporary Shanghai with a group of business-people celebrating the finalization of plans by their firm to open a new office in New York.  The boss (played by Russell Wong) notes that just like the restaurant where they are sitting is adorned with butterflies, so too their company is about to transform into something new and announces that he’s sending his two best people, Sebastian (played by Archie Kao) and Nina (played by Bingbing Li) to New York to open the office.  As the dinner continues, the film shifts to a young woman Sophia (played by Gianna Jun) on a motor-scooter, who tries to call someone with her cell phone.  Unable to reach the person, she hangs-up, turns on her motor-scooter and heads-off.  Shortly afterward, we hear the sounds of an accident. Later that night, when Nina is already sleeping at home, with Sebastian sleeping at her side, she gets a phone call from a hospital.  Apparently that there’s been an accident and Nina was the past person that the last person that the woman (who had been driving a motor-scooter) had called prior to the accident.  Nina immediately gets up, dresses and rushes to the hospital where she finds Sophia badly injured and in a coma.

The film then switches to 1997.  We see teenaged Nina and Sophia dancing together to a pop tune in a relatively upscale Shanghi apartment belonging to Sophia’s step-mother Mrs Liao (played by Hu Quin Yun).  Mrs Liao comes home and is irritated at the music being danced to by the two teenage girls and puts on “something more appropriate.”  We find out that Nina had been hired by Mrs Liao and her husband rising businessman/stock broker, Mr Liao (played by Zhong Lu) to tutor Sophia, who had come from Korea (probably North Korea) after the death of her mother.  We soon find out that Nina comes from a more working-class Shanghai family composed of her and her parents, Mr and Mrs Liu (played by Shi Ping Cao and Ruija Zhang), who live in a much more modest flat.   Despite differing social circumstances and differing intelligences, the two – Nina and Sophia – become very close friends.

One day, a younger aunt of Sophia’s (played by Vivian Wu) comes over.  This aunt is something of a Chinese feminist/historian and artist.  She had come-over to the Liao’s home to get from Mrs Liao a number of items left over from a great-great-grandmother who lived in the 1800s and died in the early 1900s.   Among the items that she came for was a seemingly impossibly tiny embroidered shoe and a fan with mysterious writing on it.  The teenage girls look at both items (and particularly the shoe) with amazement.  The aunt explained that up until the twentieth century, Chinese girls’ feet were bound at a young age in such a way that even in adulthood, their feet remained unnaturally small.  This was done because it was popularly believed in traditional Chinese culture that the more perfectly small a woman’s feet were, the prized she was in marriage.  The aunt explained that the procedure was, yes, unimaginably painful and served to diminish a woman’s capacity to live independently of males. 

The young aunt then explained the writing on the fan.  The script on the fan, she told the girls was called Nu Shu (or literally women’s writing) and that this was a secret language used by women in sworn relationships called laotong to communicate with each other.  The aunt explained that marriage in traditional Chinese society was primarily done “for men’s reasons – economic and to produce sons.”  In contrast, a laotong relationship entered into by young girls at a time when their foot-binding procedures were nearing completion waw entered into for “women’s reasons” or a life-long emotional bond.  The two teenagers, Nina and Sophia then decide that _they_ want to enter into such a relationship... The aunt, finds “an expert” who writes out an informal contract (interestingly enough on the cover of the record that Mrs Liao did not like) and that was that.  They were now “sworn sisters for life...”

The rest of the story that follows is an interplay between Nina’s and Sophia’s laotong relationship taking place in our time, and the laotong relationship of Sophia’s great-great-grand mother named Snow Flower (by Gianna Jun who also plays Sophia) and her laotong Lili (Bingbing Li who also plays Nina).

In both cases Sophia/Snow Flower and Nina/Lili encounter all kinds of trials and reversals in life.  Lili like Nina grew-up initially at a lower station than Snow Flower/Sophia.  But Lili’s feet proved more perfect than Snow Flower’s and Nina was more ambitious and intelligent than Sophia.  So both Lily/Nina rose to greater prominence during their lives than Snow Flower/Sophia.  In contrast Snow Flower, whose feet were “less perfect” ended up marrying a “mere” butcher, even though she enjoyed more women friends than Lili.  Sophia’s economic fortunes also decreased.  She apparently never got into the university (there’s a scene in the movie in which Nina really tries to help her, even to the point of trying to take her entrance exams for her) and her step-parent’s economic fortunes collapsed with a crash in the Shanghai stock market.  Nevertheless, she also seemed to have a richer (if somewhat more scandalous) personal life, having at one point an Australian lounge singer boyfriend named Arthur (played by Hugh Jackman) who Nina did not approve of.

The movie ends with a rather beautiful monologue by Nina talking about the changes that occur during the course of one’s  life  – and honestly imagine the number of changes that China has gone through in the last 50 years from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s-70s, to the gradual liberalization that started under Mao’s successor Deng Xiaopeng that took a radical turn in 1989 with the Tiananmen Massacre, to today’s headlong rush toward unprecedented market-based prosperity, even as the Chinese Communist Party retains strict political control – and the need to look in the midst of such change for something that is permanent (like a laotong friendship). 

It’s a remarkable ending to the movie, and _very_ Eastern/Buddhist. where the primary tenet of Buddhist philosophy is that of samsara or “all things change.”  Indeed, it’s worth watching the closing credits of this film, because as the credits roll, this change of which Nina talks out graphically before one’s eyes – first there are nothing but rice fields, then a town of huts is built, than those huts are replaced by more permanent pagoda like structures.  Those are replaced by European looking buildings and finally those are knocked down to be replaced by skyscrapers.  In the meantime, a statue by a river keeps getting torn down or blown-up and replaced by something or someone new.

All in all, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan makes for a very nice reflection on the value of bonded friendship.


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Another Earth [2011]

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (3 ½ stars) Fr Dennis (3 ½ stars)

IMDb listing
Roger Ebert’s review

Another Earth (directed and cowritten by Mike Cahill along with Brit Marhling) is an independent-film which recently won 2 awards at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and IMHO deservedly so.

Driving home somewhat inebriated from a party, 17-year old Rhoda Williams (played by Brit Marhling) a talented student who had just been accepted into M.I.T (astrophysics, astronomy?), hears on the radio that a “new planet” _looking almost identical to the Earth_ had _just been discovered_ and _could be seen_ “just right of the north star” in the evening sky.  Looking-up at the sky for seemingly “just a second” to try to spot this new planet, she misses a stop-sign and crashes head-on into a stopped car at the intersection, putting the driver John Buroughs (played by William Mapother) into a coma and killing his wife and young son instantly.  Rhoda ends up serving 4 years in prison, presumably for DUI and manslaughter. 

After being released and not having really forgiven herself for what she had done, Rhoda takes a job as a janitor in her old high school.  (I just _loved_ the “cleaning lady” symbolism).  By chance, she comes across news that the driver of the car that she had hit had recovered from his coma some time back (apparently she did not learn of this while she was in prison) but that he had withdrawn from life, having given-up on his previous career as a composer and was simply living in an old broken down farmhouse somewhere in the nearby countryside.  She decides to go see him. 

When she arrives, he does not recognize her.  (He had been in a coma during her court proceeding at which she presumably plead guilty, and since she was a minor at the time of the accident her name apparently had not been publicly released).  Introducing herself as a cleaning lady, she offers to clean his home with a one-day-free trial.  He accepts.  Both impressed with her work and remaining utterly depressed (understanding that he was in no shape to take care of himself on his own), he hires her to come once a week to put his wreck of a house in order.

In the meantime, the story of the “Other Earth” does not go away.  Apparently this “Other Earth” was exactly identical to our Earth, only that for some reason had been previously hidden.  Visible now, it also proved not particularly far away (reachable by space flight).  During the course of this time, contact is attempted between this “other Earth” and ours.  When it is established, to _everyone's astonishment_, it is made between two scientists with exactly the same names, born on exactly the same days, one living on one Earth and the other on the other Earth (wow... ;-). 

An Australian sounding entrepreneur decides to build a space-craft that would fly from our Earth to the other one and offers an internet essay contest to _anyone_ who’d like to join him on this expedition.  Rhoda, who had previously wanted to be an astrophysicist, applies, writing a poignant essay recalling that the sailors who had done most of the sailing during the “European Age of Discovery” in the 1500s were "not the princes" but people, like her, at the margins of society, with stories to tell and pasts to expiate.  She of course wins.

In the meantime, as Rhoda cleans up John’s house, his life slowly improves and he starts to “have feelings" for Rhoda.  But of course "he does not know ..." What to do?

The rest of the film has its twists and turns, some rather predicable, some not.  The film has the feel of an old Twilight Zone episode.  And, of course there is a resolution. 

The basis of the story is a play on a theory, which is increasingly capturing the imagination of the public – that of a possibility of the existence of parallel universes, which differ only slightly from our own.  In one (statistical) conception of the theory, at _every point of decision_ that each of us comes to, the universe would split in two.  Presumably the final “outcome” of the Universe made up of all these parallel universes is the sum total of their individual outcomes.

So in this movie, a terrible accident happens just at the discovery of another identical world.  Guess what happened on the other world?

I really liked Another Earth and for _a lot of reasons_:  First, as I’ve written in this blog many times before, I am generally going to be a fan of low budget, independent creativity.  Second, I _really liked_ the theme of this movie of a search for redemption.  I _really liked_ Brit’s symbolic choice of profession (of “cleaning lady”) after returning home from prison.  It reminded me of Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of God as “maintenance man” in Bruce Almighty.  Finally, I do hope that a movie like this would encourage _all of us_ think a little, dream a little, reach out a little toward more ultimate questions than those that surround us in simply the day-to-day.  Day-to-day concerns certainly have their place, but they are _invitations_ to reach out to something more.  For we “do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4:4).


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Crazy, Stupid, Love

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr Dennis (3 ½ stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1570728/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv085.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/REVIEWS/110729985

Crazy, Stupid, Love (directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, written by Dan Fogelman) is a good if mis-rated if very painful/funny romantic comedy for married forty-somethings with families.  I say mis-rated because while I _do_ understand why many parents would want their teens (and perhaps even certain tweens) to see this movie, I do believe that an R-rating (requiring that minors see it with their parents) would probably be more appropriate.  The language alone would justify the R-rating to say nothing of many “separated/divorcing parents acting stupid” situations.

But then the “separated/divorcing parents” situations are _exactly_ what makes the movie quite surprising, indeed compelling.  Ultimately unswayed, the CNS/USCCB gives the movie unsurprisingly an “O” (morally offensive rating).  Still there is a gentleness to this movie despite its many embarrassing situations that I do believe deserve consideration by families especially those that may be experiencing some problems (and the CNS/USCCB does recognize positive elements to this movie as well, even as it ultimately goes back to it's "O" conclusion.  So parents, I'm saying please read the CNS/USCCB review as well).

So, what’s the movie about?  The movie begins with 40-something married couple Cal (played by Steve Carell) and Emily (played by Julianne Moore) finishing dinner on a night-out.  Cal asks Emily what she wants for dessert.  She answers that she’s trying to figure out what she wants.  He announces that he’d like a slice of apple pie, she announces that she’d like a divorce.

The drive home is awkward.  Emily talks mostly in tears as she is driving about how they’ve drifted apart, and that yes, she’s gone to bed with a man in her office David Linghagan (played by Kevin Bacon).  Cal remains mostly stunned and silent, until after being pressed by Emily to say _something_ he declares that he’d just like to drop-out of the car, opens the door and does so (fortunately, they were near home, going rather slow on a residential street ...).  Now stunned herself, she stops the car, goes out to him as he brushes himself off.  He tells her that he’ll move out that night, and get his things as soon as he finds some kind of an apartment.

They come home where 17-year old babysitter Jessica (played by Analeigh Tipton) is waiting for them.  She’s had a quite a night as well, as she accidently caught Cal and Emily's 13-year-old son Robbie (played by Jonah Bobo) touching himself (Emily and Cal also had a smaller 8-or-so year old daughter) whereupon Robbie confessed that he was touching himself while he thought of her.  The strangeness of her evening is trumped however by Cal and Emily’s announcement to her that they are getting a divorce.

Why would they tell her, of all people, first?  Well they were both in shock.  And besides someone had to drive Jessica home, and it would explain why Cal was doing so, since Cal is leaving the house anyway... In the car, it becomes clear that Jessica is not only stunned that Cal and Emily are getting a divorce but that she’s also kind of had a crush on Cal.  Cal doesn’t respond to this at all and probably for two reasons: One, he’s not an idiot (and is basically a good man, as is _everybody_ in this story as we progressively learn). But also two, he was in shock about what happened at dinner with his wife.  So he just drops her off and her parents house and heads off, to a bar.

At the bar, he first runs into local playboy Jacob (played by Ryan Gosling), who the audience had already seen in action in a previous scene in which he struck-out with one young lady, Hannah (played by Emma Stone) and rebounding, scored with someone else.  Jacob is everything that Cal is not. 

Trying to drown his sorrows in the succeeding days, Cal goes to the bar a few more times always to run into Jacob there as well.  Jacob is scoring and Cal is moaning.  Finally Jacob gets irritated with Cal’s rather loud and repetitive complaints about how his wife left him (and was sleeping with another guy).  So Jacob calls Cal over.  He first reminds him that thanks to his loud complaints everybody in that bar probably knows more about Cal’s life than they should.  Then, he offers to help him “recover his manhood.”  Why would he do that?  Jacob himself says that Cal reminds him of someone he knew.  In any case, Jacob pulls Cal out of his funk, gets him a haircut, advises him on buying some new clothes, and teaches him a few lines.  Soon Cal is starting to score with the women at that bar as well.

Very good.  Why would there be _anything_ redeeming about this movie at all?  It’s what follows.  There _are_ a fair number of twists and a good number of awkward situations.  But as the dust settles at the end, EVERYONE HAS BEEN CHASTENED FOR THEIR SINS (often initially in surprising ways, but when one thinks about it, not all that surprising) BUT JUST AS IMPORTANTLY EVERYONE IS STILL STANDING and ARGUABLY HAPPY and _in their proper state_. 

I’ve seen a whole bunch of Steve Carell movies over the years including 40 Year Old Virgin, Evan Almighty, Get Smart, Dinner for Schmucks, Dispicable Me, Date Night and now this one.  ALL OF THEM were fundamentally _gentle_, even when in pretty much _all of them_, Steve Carell _plays the fool_ for the others.  I _really like_ Steve Carell’s stuff.  I like the gentleness and I like fundamentally positive message of his movies: we may often be weak, we may make mistakes, but that we are fundamentally good and certainly redeemable. Good job Steve and good job rest of the cast and crew!  And yes, the other performances by Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon and even the babysitter Analiah Tipton and Marisa Tomei (as one of 13-year-old Robbie's school teachers) were _all_ good to excellent as well.

ADDENDUM:

Given some of the controversy surrounding one of the subplots in this film involving (off-screen) teenage sexting, I was wondering if someone like Chris Rock should redo this movie in a couple of years, perhaps even having a white wife (and hence mixed race children).  I say this because the people who end up suffering the most as a result of morality laws tend to be black men. As of a few years ago, there were black male minors in jail for having been caught with white girlfriends in sexually compromising situations for which it'd be next to _impossible_ to believe white male minors would find themselves serving time.

I personally think that sexting is unbelievably reckless (and yes, sinful). But given technology and teenage hormones, I find it to be almost inevitable (among teens). But it horrifies to me to hear of teenage lives destroyed by something (and again, often enough _black teenage lives_ destroyed by something) that wasn't intended to destroy anyone.

In any case, I liked this movie, definitely_not_ for its sexting. Rather, I liked it because, as in the case of many Steve Carell movies, at the end of this movie EVERYONE was left standing, and EVERYONE was basically happy. There were no "goats", no "villains." Carell finds/makes movies like this over and over again. And that I believe is a wonderful thing!


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Cowboys and Aliens

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (L) Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr Dennis (3 stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409847/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv084.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/REVIEWS/110729987

Cowboys and Aliens (directed by Jon Favreau, screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and others, based on a graphic novel by Scott Michael Rosenberg the same name, and at least partly supported by Stephen Spielberg, who served as one of the film’s executive producers) has one of the most audacious and clearly _intentionally unreal_ plot-lines of a major American motion picture made in years:

Stock characters (Cowboys, Indians, Outlaws, Lawmen, shop-keepers, womenfolk, youngsters and even a cute and very faithful dog) from a typical  American pulp-Western story (set in the l870s in the American South-West) are confronted by a sudden, unexpected but existential challenge posed by a foraging/data-collecting/mining expedition (representing an advanced guard?) of a technologically superior alien race from outer space.

Similar stories of an otherwise divided humanity uniting to fight a common (alien) enemy have been put on film before, notably Independence Day and Signs.  Interestingly enough, I’ve probably enjoyed Cowboys and Aliens the most, precisely because it was so obviously a parable and set sufficiently back in time to be “safe.”  For instance, I remember a number of Servites (members of my religious order) from Latin America scoffing at the “message” of Independence Day finding offense that its climactic battle was fought on “The Fourth of July” and led by the Americans (how convenient ... as a propaganda piece, "Big Brother America leading the rest”).

In Cowboys and Aliens, the “cowboys” find themselves being suddenly treated as badly (or worse) by the technologically superior space-aliens as they were treating the technologically inferior “Indians." Both groups find themselves needing to cooperate to confront the new existential threat.  Indeed, even the “cowboys’” vocabulary changes as the threat presents itself, with the cowboys starting to talk about the need protect “their people.”  This of course is the message and echoes a famous speech made by Ronald Reagan at the United Nations during his presidency in which he noted that all our world’s differences would probably fall quickly aside if we were to face an existential threat from an alien race. 

The performances of the various human characters are excellent – Daniel Craig playing the Outlaw Jake Lonergan, Harrison Ford playing Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde, a crusty Civil War veteran turned rancher a with no-good lout of a son Percy (played by Paul Dano) and Dolarhyde's right-hand man, if Indian born, named Nat Colorado (played by Adam Beach) who Dolarhyde took under his wing, when he saw him orphaned.  (Nat was far more responsible and a better “son” to Dolarhyde than Percy ever was, but Dolarhyde could never bring himself to call him that because of his “Injun past.”).  There’s the Sheriff John Taggartt (played by Keith Carridine) his spunky grandson Emmett Taggartt (playe by Noah Ringer).  There’s a plainspoken, gunslinging preacher named Meacham (played by Clancy Brown) and hapless Saloon owner named Doc (played by Sam Rockwell) and his devoted if initially probably far more capable wife Maria (played by Ana de la Reguera).  There’s Black Knife (played by Raoul Trujillo) a young but wise for his age Indian chief  leading a local and recently decimated band of Apache Indians.  Finally, there’s Ella Swensen (played by Olivia Wilde) a beautiful and mysterious character who seems to know more about the alien threat these humans are facing and how best to defeat them (and who as is often the case in the sci-fi/horror genre turns out to have a special role to play).

Yes it’s a story.  Yes, it’s a preposterous one.  On the other hand, perhaps precisely because Cowboys and Aliens is so preposterous, I found it quite easy to enter and watch.  All these characters are symbolic and the whole story plays out around a town called Absolution – as classic and symbolic a name as one could come-up with for a good ol’ Cowboy and Indian Western story even if, in this case, it is mashed-up with “space aliens.” ;-).

Finally, while Cowboys and Aliens is certainly a preposterous story, I would note that in current UFO lore there _is_ place in New Mexico called Dulce Mountain where supposedly there’s an underground base from which space aliens have been conducting abductions/animal mutilations for decades if not for centuries. As I watched the movie, I could not help but think that, _fictional_ as it is, that it was at least partly inspired by these stories and Indian legends.


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Conan Can't Stop

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr Dennis (3 stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1864288/
Roger Ebert -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110622/REVIEWS/110629993

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (directed by Rodman Flender) is a documentary which followed Conan O’Brien on his nation-wide comedy tour after his having been been first promoted and then 6 months later deposed as host of NBC’s Tonight Show. 

Much has certainly been written about his drama involving the transition of the hosting of the Tonight Show from Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien and then six months later back to Jay Leno.  However, what interested me first in the story and then in this documentary is that the Conan-Leno-Tonight Show saga doesn’t appear to me to be an isolated one but one which has played out in other areas in contemporary culture.  Indeed, I noted and wrote about this battle of the old vs new (and the apparent triumph/restoration of the old) in my review of this year’s Academy Awards show where I found this phenomenon repeatedly playing out from the triumph of The King’s Speech at the awards – a film about a stuttering dead English king from the middle of the last century to the blasting by (mostly older critics) of this year’s show’s new and very young hosts.

So I do believe that what had happened to Conan is not really an isolated incident but indeed a manifestation of an age-old battle between generations (old vs new) that even Sigmund Freud wrote about as the point of origin of war, civilization and even "Father/Patriarchical religion:"  A jealous father drives his sons away to keep his power / women to himself.  The exiled sons organizing themselves a band of brothers eventually overwhelm the father killing him.  But feeling guilty about this, they eventually deify the now dead/murdered father (S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism [1939], pg 130-131, Totem and Taboo [1950], pg 140-41, Civilization and its Discontents [1961], pg 47-48).  Interestingly enough, with the advent of diminished numbers of births due to the wide use of birth-control, this inter-generational conflict could actually have tilted in favor of the older generation (The older generation doesn't have to find excuses for wars anymore to cull the numbers of the younger generation.  The younger generation's numbers are now controlled at conception).  So expect more Conan O"Brien-like sagas in the future and more tear-jerking movies / miniseries about long dead white English kings (or even about long-dead corrupt Popes) and other symbols of Order and Stability.

So then, what could one say about this particular documentary?  First and above all, it is a movie about someone going through a fairly large disappointment in life.  Whether or not Conan “really was right” for the Tonight Show, whether he felt he entitled to it (after many years hosting NBC’s Late Night Show after it), whether or not he was promised it by NBC and then had that promise ripped away from him, it was clear that Conan was wounded by the experience.  So the documentary was largely about Conan making his way through that experience of disappointed and woundedness to something new.

In the process, a number of other things became rather clear.  First, Conan really is an _authentically funny guy_ and one capable of laughing at himself.  Promo “Where has Conan been these days?” shots for his comedy tour included him donning a _huge_ fake beer-gut, and lying passed out among empty pizza boxes and beer bottles.  As a __quite good guitarist_ in his own right, the blues song that Conan played for his audiences while on the tour – “I was born upper middle class” (“My ma, worked every day of her life – as a tax lawyer.  And my no good, no good dad was microbiologist, studying infectious diseases I believe ...”) – was hilarious.  Noting that NBC “probably still owned” the rights to the “Masturbating Bear” character on his old show, he unveiled a ever so slightly different “Self Pleasuring Panda” character to his cheering audiences.

All this is goofy, silly stuff, that made him such a hit among young people at the time-slot following the Tonight Shot.  Still, as he went through these very, very funny routines, it also reminded me of why this couldn’t have possibly worked on the Tonight Show whose viewers generally have been rather heavily stocked with seniors including seniors from my own parish.  Funny, yes, but would you imagine your grandma watching this stuff?

Finally, I was left wondering if all that many college aged young adults really care about the Tonight show either, especially since they can view and share clips from any of a large number of “late night comedians” (George Lopez, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and yes Conan O’Brien) any time they wish anyway.  So I was left wondering if Conan’s “tragedy” had been that tried and failed to become the “Captain of the U.S.S. Missouri” (or perhaps even the U.S.S. Arizona) in an age of Twitter, flash mobs, WikiLeaks, remote control Predator drones and cyber-warfare. 

So Conan, yes, you sort of got screwed.  But get over it.  The Tonight Show is going the way of network news and the Radio City Rockettes.  Just remember your friends, your fans, and yes you probably staged the best damn end to any talk-show on American TV with Will Farrell joining him playing Free Bird ;-).


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A Love Affair of Sorts

MPAA (NR) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (1 ½ stars) Fr. Dennis (3 stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1776033/
Rober Ebert’s Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110713/REVIEWS/110719993
AV Club Review -
http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-love-affair-of-sorts,57974/

A Love Affair of Sorts (directed by David Guy Levi and story by him and Lili Bordán both of whom also starred in the movie) is an experimental film that recently played at Facets Multimedia here in Chicago.   I became intrigued by the film when I read its listing on Facets' website promising that the movie was the first to be filmed in its entirety using cheap commercially available “flip" cameras.  Last year, I saw such cameras on sale at a Walmart.

A number of the reviewers have since panned the movie -- The youth oriented AV Club (the “serious side” of The Onion newspaper) gave the movie a D+ – but that did not dissuade me from taking a stab at seeing the film, and it proved to be a generally good decision to have taken the chance.

I have been a long-time booster of youth oriented/inspired, low-budget ingenuity – As a teen I loved Han Solo’s “Millenium Falcon” from Star Wars and I have generally squeezed every ounce of creative capacity out of any computer or item of consumer electronics that I have ever bought since.  As a young adult in the 1980s, I loved the Macgyver series.  In the 1990s, not long after I bought a Sony Handycam, I was more than impressed with what the makers of Blair Witch Project did with cameras basically of the same quality.  I enjoyed the premise of the recent movie Super-8, which was a nostalgic look back amateur film-making using Super 8 film cameras, that I knew well when I was a kid.  Finally, I was very impressed by the low budget creativity shown by the makers of Paranormal Activity I (and II, which I reviewed early in this blog).  I’ve also done my own “filming” in recent years of “waves,”  “fog” or “snow on Lake Michigan” or “autumn leaves in a forest preserve” using nothing more than the “movie option” on a low-end pocket digital camera.  So I was more than intrigued this movie’s technical challenge.  

I also think that I “got” (understood) the film’s premise as well:  Two “regular people” “meet” and decide to do a film project together, documenting their lives during the (Christmas/Hanukkah/New Year’s) Holiday season in 2009.  A _key twist_ in the story presented itself in the middle of the film, when it is revealed that _one_ of the two “regular people,” a “Hungarian au pair” named Enci (the other being the film’s director David), is actually being played by an actress (Lili Bordán).   So this “documentary” about "two regular people during the Holidays" turns out to _not_ be a documentary after all.

I thought the premise was awesome and actually quite important for people to realize – Just because something appears to “regular” / “common” etc, does not mean that it is not _staged_.  In this regard, A Love Affair of Sorts becomes a low-budget “regular people’s” rendition of the movie Wag the Dog, a very important (and arguably prophetic) movie of from the Clinton era, which also noted that in the media age everything, _even wars_, can be “staged.”

Finally, the film dealt with quite well (in that it was able to avoid) what one would expect to be a definite pitfall in this kind of amateur film-making (and a pitfall that would make PARENTS of teens understandably very nervous): Given “two people and couple of flip cameras” trying to “tell the story of a Holiday season together,” an “amateur film” of this sort, could have _easily_ fallen into the realm of porn.  To their credit, both the protagonists in the film (who were _also_ the film’s makers) were professional enough to not let the film collapse in that direction.  However, as one watches this film, one _could imagine_ how easily the film could have gone that way.  (It is also clear that the two protagonists/film-makers were aware of the boundary because _they did flirt with it_ -- the movie's called A Love Affair of Sorts, after all --  but they clearly recognized that they had a far better/more compelling movie if they didn't cross the line).

As such, while I would recommend this movie to _college aged young adults and above_, I would _not_ recommend this movie to teens or else _only_ with caution. I write this because it is _so easy_ to imagine a group of initially well-meaning teens to screw-up an “amateur film project” of this sort that they conceived themselves and end-up on all kinds of trouble.

Seriously, teens if you pick-up a camera, be very, very careful, because _if you screw-up_ and film something inappropriate _you_ could literally end up in jail (and on a sex offender list) with _your_ life ruined.

But if you’re a _young adult_ (already over 18) and make it a point to _work only with adults_ (and avoid the _cheesiness_ of porn) you could actually end up producing some really good stuff.  Indeed, a whole bunch of professional film-makers, from Martin Scorcese on down have _long said_ that the future of film is more what one sees on YouTube than what one sees at the theatre.

So with those words of caution, I have to say that I enjoyed the creativity of this film and I hope continue to _generally_ be a booster of such creativity in the future.


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Friends with Benefits [2011]

MPAA (R) CNS/USCCB (O) Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr. Dennis (2 ½ stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1632708/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv082.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729998

Friends with Benefits (directed by Will Gluck and co-written by Keith Merrymen, David A. Newman and others and starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in the leading roles) is the second romantic comedy to be released in recent months exploring the meaning of current American jargon in the dating arena, the other movie being No Strings Attached starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in the leading roles.  Perhaps, it should also be noted here that Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman co-starred together in last year’s movie Black Swan, which earned Portman an academy award for best actress in a leading role and many felt that Kunis deserved at least a nomination for best supporting actress as well.  So whatever else one may think of these movies (as well as the performances of the leading men, Kutcher and Timberlake) these two actresses can’t easily be dismissed anymore as “lightweights.”

Having said this, what then could (or should) one say on this blog regarding Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached?   As I wrote in my review of No Strings Attached, NSA could be considered simply as a “day dream,” in the tradition of the tradition of romantic comedies dating back to Shakespeare's era like Midsummer Night’s Dream and more recently the famous Beach Boys’ song “Wouldn’t it be nice...?”  And after all is said and done, Hollywood comes to _the same conclusion_ that Holy Mother Church (acting _exactly_ as a _good_ and worried mother) would advise all along: that it’s impossible even on a relational/emotional (in Church/Magisterial speak “unitive”) level to become involved with someone sexually with “no strings attached.”  It can’t be done because one or the other in the couple is going to “fall in love” or come to understand the sexual relationship to be _more_ than “just” a sexual relationship.  And the Church, again _as a good mother, concerned for all her children_ would take the side of the person who was hurt.

I do believe that the expression “Friends with Benefits” is even more problematic than “No Strings Attached.”  NSA is at least honest in that it seeks to “play tag” with flat-out fantasy: that one could (or should be able to) have sex with someone without any consequences.  That’s simply a fantasy even in the emotional/relational/unitive realm.  “Friends with Benefits” assumes that two comprising the couple in question are already _friends_, hence that they already like/respect each other as friends.  Then, since they are entering into a sexual relationship, they are also physically attracted to each other.  At this point, one could imagine one’s family (and this plays out in this movie) _and hence _Holy Mother Church_ throwing its hands up in the air in exasperation, asking quite sincerely: WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT?  And I do believe that this is a fair relational question that anyone seeing this movie, or any couple contemplating a “friends with benefits” relationship ought to ask: What am I / are we wanting to do here?  We’re already friends, we’re already attracted to each other?  What’s preventing me/us from calling the relationship what it is, _serious_, and why _should_ MARRIAGE (even EVENTUAL MARRIAGE) be considered “out of the question?”

It should also be noted here as I already mentioned in the review of the other movie, No Strings Attached, that THE ENTIRE PREMISE of a NSA (or in this case FWB) relationship _depends_ on contraception, certainly in the heterosexual realm (which still is, and by simple statistics will simply always be the normative relationship model.  The number of gay relationships will always be relatively small in relation to the number of heterosexual relationships).  Here again, the voice of Holy Mother Church, articulated best perhaps by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (the Gospel of Life) deserves _at least a hearing_.  He notes that even when contraception “works,” it has consequences: In the context of a “contraceptive mentality” the accidental conception of a child becomes a disaster or failure (EV #13.2).  Paraphrasing now and using _my own_ rather evocative phrasing ;-), a child conceived “accidentally” ought never to be thought of as having been conceived "as a result of a breach” that is, as a “spawn of Chernobyl” or something like that.

Then additionally, it should be noted that the whole contraceptive mentality runs in opposition to much of contemporary thinking.  I personally find it fundamentally contradictory for someone to be a vegitarian, eat only “organically grown foods,” oppose nuclear power and pretty much any hydroelectric project as being _inherently unsafe_ and “playing God,” etc and then _uncritically_ accept the birth control pill and condoms as _inherently safe and effective_.  Condoms fail (and generally _due to human error_) far more frequently than nuclear containment buildings and birth control pills re-engineer chemically hundreds of millions of women’s reproductive systems for the duration of their use of the pill.  Human experience has taught us to be skeptical of the safety claims of scientists in virtually every other realm from franken-foods, to the space shuttle, to nuclear power plants.  Why should one uncritically believe that birth control pills are _by definition_, “amen, alleluia”_inherently safe_?   I mention this simply to note the contradiction in thinking in popular society today and to note that the Catholic Church _has a point_ in its skepticism of the validity and ultimate morality of artificial birth control.

Wow.  All this to think about / reflect on as a result of a “simple rom com”???  Well welcome to life ;-) And yes, I’ve long believed that if one is going to evangelize, make comprehensible the Gospel and the teachings of the Church in the world today, one has to engage (and not simply condemn) popular culture. 

Would I recommend this movie?  Yes as a discussion piece to college aged young adults and above.  Also some of the supporting performances in the movie, notably Woody Harrelson playing an over-the-top studly gay coworker of Justine Timberlake, Richard Jenkins playing Timberlake’s beginnings of Alzheimer’s afflicted father, Patricia Clarkson playing Mila Kunis’ “still stuck in the ‘60s” mother are worthy of mention and and some discussion (notably Harrelson's whose enthusiastically gay lifestyle suggests that in the homosexual arena, NSA/FWB relationships are entirely possible).  But the central question asked in this movie is whether the concept “Friends with Benefits” is a worthy and ultimately workable one in the heterosexual arena.  And it should not surprise anyone here that as in NSA, Hollywood comes down on this matter actually quite close to Mother Church’s view (at least with regards to the relational dimension), that it just doesn't work. 

FINALLY NOTE TO PARENTS: The movie's R-RATING is _entirely appropriate_.  While the nudity in this movie is rather minimal, much more takes place in the movie’s bedroom scenes (yes, "covered by a sheet," but ...) than most parents would probably be comfortable with if they were viewing this movie with their pre-teens or teens.  People are people, parents are parents, but at least you have been warned.  Still, for the college-aged and above, I do think it is a great movie "to talk about."


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