We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks [2013]

MPAA (R)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks [2013] (directed by Alex Gibney) is a somewhat uneven, though given the circumstances IMHO a rather admirable documentary about perhaps the most controversial website to have thusfar existed - wikileaks.org.

I confess that I've had a lifelong preference for openness.  Back in 1989, I was one of the primary instigators in the creation of the USENET newsgroup "soc.rights.human" which had a similar mission in the pre-World-Wide-Web days: Anyone from anywhere who wanted to post anything about a possible human rights violation could do so there.

The idea wasn't completely original.  I had been inspired to propose the creation of this USENET newsgroup after following what was being posted by Chinese students in the U.S. and Western Europe on the already existing USENET newsgroup soc.culture.china.  Being a son of Czech immigrants and named after an uncle who had been jailed by the Communists in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, I proposed to the USENET community (then basically computer programmers and computer sci majors working at universities and other research institution across the western world) that a generalized USENET newsgroup entitled soc.rights.human be created so that all people concerned about human rights in various parts of the world would have a place to news about human rights abuses.  And so it was, after following the USENET procedures for creating a newsgroup (there had to be at least 100 people on the USENET in favor of creating the group and, in fact, there needed to be 100 people more in favor of creating the group than there were opposed to it).  After making the appropriate appeals over a couple of months, tabulating the votes and followed by a couple of days of embarrassed inaction by the good people at CERN who were back then responsible for creating such groups for the USENET ... voila' soc.rights.human (or s.r.h. for short) came online about October, 1989 -- just before the Fall of the Berlin Wall ;-) 

The one thing that s.r.h. could not offer was absolute anonymity (though there were various nominally anonymous posting services available at the time ... and back then it seemed easier to create a more or less random/anonymous e-mail address).  On the other hand, soc.rights.human was truly "open source."  There were no "gatekeepers" (no moderators in USENET-speak) hence no problematic figures like wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Today, soc.rights.human is buried among thousands upon thousands of other USENET newsgroups and conspiracy theorists of all stripes have more or less taken the group over.  So today the signal to noise ratio is very, very low indeed.  (Though having checked the group just now, there are serious postings about human rights controversies in Burma and Nepal/Tibet as well as Israel/Palestine on soc.rights.human. as well.  It's not all "scientology," "the feds are brainwashing us via radiowaves" etc... That there are still a fair amount legitimate postings about human rights issues being made onto the group is kinda nice to see ;-)

However, the truly heady time for s.r.h. was in the months and years immediately after its founding, between the Fall of 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down) and the Summer of 1991 (when the last-ditch Soviet Coup occurred).  One of the proudest moments of my life (again, I was one of the original founders of s.r.h.) was when in the midst of the Soviet Coup, while I was still a grad student at U.S.C. in Los Angeles, I telephoned the L.A. office of Amnesty International to ask them if they knew about all that was being posted on s.r.h. at the time (computer programmers from all over Soviet Union had figured out how to post on s.r.h. and were posting more or less real-time news about what was happening all over the Soviet Union on the group).  The person on the phone responded, "Oh sure we know about s.r.h.  We're reading the same posts right here in our office."

Since then I've more or less assumed that s.r.h. has outlived its purpose (though I mention above, perhaps not ;-).  In any case, I would recommend to anyone reading this article who's concerned about human rights issues or has information about human rights abuses to try to report human rights violations directly to Amnesty International (amnesty.org or even send them along (on an appropriately secure/anonymous cell phone....) on twitter with the appropriate #, like #Syria ...).  Still if s.r.h. remains useful to you (and it may honestly be!), please use that means as well.

Given that quite reputable organizations like Amnesty International exist and they are now generally computer savvy, I don't necessarily understand the need today for a separate organization called "wikileaks."  Yes, wikileaks promised to be a more generalized site for "whistle blowers" and did promise absolute anonymity.  However, to be honest, even at its best, wikileaks could offer no more than what a reputable organization (like Amnesty International) or a reputable investigative periodical could offer (like The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel on which wikileaks ended up depending anyway...).  And at its "less than best," wikileaks became the inevitable target of the Goliaths of this world, who IMHO have just eaten Assange's tiny organization for lunch.

So then the current documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks [2013], while also generally sympathetic, chronicles the rise and the inevitable demise of wikileaks (or at least wikileaks1.0) And honestly folks, if there is to be a wikileaks 2.0, then please "reach out" to an organization like Amnesty International.  This is because the "universal whistle-blower" cause that wikileaks has tried to embark on doesn't really need hackers (except perhaps as actual whistle-blowers).  Instead, the cause needs LAWYERS (to protect the whistle-blowers) and that's what Amnesty International (which was FOUNDED BY concerned/activist LAWYERS) can provide.

Okay, what then about the rise and demise of wikileaks?  Well, the documentary presents wikileaks founder Julain Assange as an activist computer hacker from Australia.  The beginning of the documentary suggests that he (or a group affiliated with him) may have put a computer worm into the American Space Shuttle's computers to protest the highly controversial launch of the plutonium powered Galileo space probe.  The launch went fine and the Galileo space probe subsequently flew on to orbit and study Jupiter.  However, the concern was that if the launch itself went badly (and remember the Space Shuttle Challenger did explode and disintegrate on launch) then a fair amount of Florida and even the eastern seaboard of the United States could have been contaminated by "plutonium raining down from the sky" as a result of the disintegration of the Galileo space probe as well.

It was out of this hacker-activist background then that Julian Assange arose to found wikileaks, promising absolute anonymity to whistle-blowers of all kinds.  The documentary then points out that wikileaks did have initial success, exposing corruption and bad dealings within Iceland's banking system after Iceland's banks had suddenly collapsed near the beginning of the 2008 world-wide financial crisis.  It was at this time that Assange was becoming something of an international "rock star" and especially in Scandinavia for his site's success in exposing that corruption existing in Iceland.

This, of course, became "small potatoes" to what perhaps inevitably came next: A troubled American PFC named Bradley Manning, who somehow managed to get through basic training but was then deemed unfit to serve in a combat unit and so was assigned as an "intelligence analyst" at an utterly non-descript base outside of Baghdad began to freak-out as he was reading U.S. intelligence cables that he had access to.  Having been something of a "computer geek" in High School back in Oklahoma, Manning gravitated to the hacker-created wikileaks whistle-blowing site.  Eventually, he passed a staggering number of classified files (over 700,000 of them including some 200,000 U.S. State Department cables) on a stick-drive or two, to wikileaks.

It would seem that even Assange was staggered by the sheer number of files that were handed to his fledgling organization by Manning.  As a result, he did act with some responsibility.  He reached-out to The Guardian, NY Times and Der Spiegel).  The documentary claims that he even reached out to the U.S. Defense Department asking for help to try to clean the documents of sensitive names, etc, prior to their publication on wikileaks.  The U.S. Defense Department chose (perhaps understandably ... after all the whole episode was enormously embarrassing to the institution) to refuse.   What did happen with each of several "file dumps" onto wikileaks (after assistance of the three mentioned periodicals) was a coordinated media counter assault by the U.S. government on the person/reputation of Julian Assange.  He was portrayed as as an unhinged and rather scary freak.  (The documentary notes that the NY Times, et al were easily as complicit as Assange and wikileaks in releasing the various documents.  However, the U.S. government appeared to choose to target Assange)

It turns out that Assange had some skeletons in his closet, notably accusations by two women in Sweden of sexual impropriety from back in the days of his almost "rock-star-like" popularity in Scandinavia.  Ball-players and Rock-stars get into this kind of trouble all the time (no doubt in good part due to the corrosive effects on good judgement of the adulation they find themselves receiving - treated like "Gods" they start to think that they _are_ "Gods").   However, whereas ball-players and rock-stars making poor decisions generally pay for them monetarily and occasionally with jail time, Assange has found himself in a whole different level of trouble.   There are some really pissed off folks at the U.S. State and Defense Departments ...

So Assange perhaps finds himself correct in becoming "paranoid."  He's currently hold-up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Ecuador's government, often corrupt itself, having given him asylum in this way.  The coup de grace in his paranoia appears to have been that he tried to force the other volunteers and employees at wikileaks to sign a legally binding non-disclosure agreement ;-).  Gee, if the founder of wikileaks, found good reason to require his employees and volunteers to sign "non-disclosure agreements" perhaps the good folks at the U.S. State Department and Armed Forces would have good reason sanction "leaking" classified information as well ...

 This then appears to be the fundamental thesis of the documentary: Assange, cocky-idealist though he may have been and Bradley Manning, troubled as he appears to have been, were simply and utterly "out of their league," when suddenly faced with a file dump of 700,000+ of classified American documents.

As the documentary's best interviewee, Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and NSA noted: diplomacy is impossible without some concessions made for secrecy.  How much?  That becomes debatable.  But at least some secrecy in diplomatic communications, for instance, is absolutely necessary.  With regard to Manning, he noted that in the 200 year history of the U.S. military there have been "some really stupid PFCs."  It just happened to be that Manning found himself with post-9/11era access to millions of classified documents that previously would not have been available to him.  "Prior to 9/11 access to classified documents was made on a 'need to know' basis.  After 9/11 [in hopes of fostering better communications between intelligence agencies allowing them to better 'connect the dots'] virtually all documents of a given classification level were available to all intelligence personel with that classification level ..."  And with regards to Assange, Gen Hayden maintained that he's no more or less guilty (or only marginally more guilty) in this matter than the editor of the New York Times.

And so there it is: a tiny organization of anarchist leaning computer hackers found itself wildly "out of its depth" when faced with that enormous dump of 700,000+ classified American documents.  And even the U.S. government has found itself wildly embarrassed by a not-altogether-thought-through post-9/11 decision regarding classified material ...

We live in "interesting" indeed sometimes quite scary times ...


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Before Midnight [2013]

MPAA (R)  RE.com (4 Stars)  AVClub (A)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
RE.com (P. Villaça) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

Before Midnight [2013] (directed and cowritten by Richard Linklater along with the film's costars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpi, characters by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan) is the third installment (once every nine years) of a lovely (though also honest) romance/soap that allows viewers to follow the lives of two people, one an American named Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) the other a French woman (at least in part of Hungarian ancestry) named Celine (played by Julie Delpi).

In the first installment named Before Sunrise [1995], the two met as young 20-somethings (as college students / recent graduates) on the train between Budapest and Vienna during the summer of presumably 1994 or 95.  Jesse was flying back to the States out of Vienna the next day, Celine was heading back to her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris after having visited her grandmother in Hungary.  Having made acquaintance in the train and then chatted away together quite happily in the meal-car for a good portion of the trip, when they arrive at the train station in Vienna Jesse takes a chance (young guys reading this take note, life rewards the brave ... ;-) and asking Celine if she'd like to get off the train and spend the evening walking around Vienna with him.  Since her passage to Paris was valid on any train and since their conversation had been fun, she agrees and they have truly a magical evening together, walking around, eating, drinking, and yes ... having sex together (outdoors in a park after finishing bottle of red wine, now lying at their side) at the end.  The next morning, saying goodbye on a platform at the Vienna train station, they choose not to exchange addresses/e-mails etc (because that would be "boring" and lead to eventual dissipation of magic of their time together) but promise that they'd meet six months hence (in December) on the same day and same time at the same spot at the Vienna train station to continue their time together.  And if it doesn't work out, well ... at least they had shared that previous night.

The second installment named Before Sunset [2004] takes place nine years later, in Paris.  Jesse's become a writer since and is on a book tour peddling his book about ... you guessed it, the magical night that the book's protagonist had spent with a young Parisian woman who he had met on a train traveling between Budapest and Vienna nine years before, with the two ending their night together with the promise of meeting at the same place at the same time six months hence.  And guess who shows up at the book signing ... Celine.  They strike-up a conversation and since Jesse had a couple of hours before he had to head to the airport to fly back to New York, they spend the afternoon chatting as they walk through the streets and cafes of Paris.

But it's been nine years.  So that's a lot of water under the Danube, Seine or Hudson.  Jesse's now a writer, Celine an activist of some sort working for a Paris-based NGO.  More to the point, the two didn't meet back in Vienna six months after their encounter in the summer of '94.  It turns out that Jesse had actually borrowed money from his dad and flown out there but Celine was actually at the funeral of her Hungarian grandmother (in Budapest, nearby but obviously not near enough...) on that very day at that very time.  Sigh ... This then sets up the rest of the story.  Let's face it, it's been 9 years.  So Jesse's married, with a 5 year old kid.  His wife is his old college girlfriend, with whom he went out, broke-up with, went out again, eventually got her pregnant ... and they got married. (Yes, this is something of a plot device to make the rest of this chapter of the story possible).  Celine for her part, has had several boyfriends, but nothing ever really stuck.  Her current boyfriend, a photojournalist, is attractive in good part because he's generally away (He provides her with the opportunity of telling others that she has a boyfriend without him actually being around).  But here they are, nine years after that magical night together Vienna, both having remembered that night quite fondly, he in a "second choice" marriage (but a marriage _with a kid_ nonetheless), she having had a number of blaise' relationships with nothing really sticking... and they're IN PARIS ...

So they walk around.  He keeps pushing back the time that he really needs to start heading to the airport.  They stop at her apartment.  He asks her to play "one of the stupid songs" that she's says she's written for the guitar.  She does.  It's lovely.  But then she says, "You know who I really like is an American jazz singer who sings out here in Paris..."  She proceeds to do a nice, sultry imitation of the American jazz singer's voice ... and finally, looking at the enraptured Jesse staring at her, brings this second chapter of their story to its end saying, "I have a feeling, you're not going to get on that plane ..."

Chapter three is the current film, Before Midnight [2013].  It's again nine years later and to film-makers/actors credit, the film begins squarely acknowledging the consequences resulting from the way the previous film had ended: This third film begins at an airport in Greece.  Jesse is putting his 14 year old son by his first wife, Hank (played by Seamus Davey Fitzpatrick), on the plane to fly back home to his mother in Chicago.  Hank had been able to spend two weeks with Jesse, Celine and their twin nine year old daughters Ella and Nina (played by Jennifer and Charlotte Prior respectively) on their vacation in Greece, but then had to go back.  For the sake of his kid (and perhaps out of respect for the pain that he had caused his wife by leaving her for Celine), Jesse's being kind in his words about his ex to his son.  But the son who is also being both kind and matter-of-fact as a fourteen year old from a broken marriage who nevertheless loves both of his parents would be ... reminds Jesse in the conversation that they have in front of the security check-point prior to Hank having to go to the gate to depart for Chicago of the obvious ... Jesse's ex-wife just hates him (to this day) for what he did to her and their son.

We're later reminded (and actually repeatedly...) by Celine of what she thought of Jesse's first wife and the hell that she had put them through during and after the divorce.  Apparently, Jesse's ex-wife had really taken him to the cleaners (well he did dump her for Celine...) and even if they had stayed in the States, which they did not, Jesse would have gotten only twice a month visitation rights (and two weeks in the summer) with Hank.  Then Celine got pregnant with the twins and wanted to go back to France to be near her mother through the pregnancy.  So the twins were born there and, voila' that's where they stayed afterwards.

So after dropping Hank off at the airport (and knowing that the 14-year-old was going to have to make at least one connection somewhere before getting on a flight that would take him the rest of the way back to Chicago), on the drive back to the nice vacation villa that Jesse-Celine, et al were sharing with friends on the Grecian coast, Jesse articulates partly (but partly not so partly...) in a rhetorical sense a desire to find some way to see more of his son again: "He's 14, he's just starting high school.  In four years he'll be done and that whole part of his life will be over.  And you don't get those years back..."

But Celine, who's been working all these years in various NGOs and had just been offered a non-inconsequential managerial job in a French governmental relief organization, makes it clear that she's about to give that opportunity up to go to ... "Chicago" ;-).

[Folks I write out of Chicago, and while Chicago isn't America's Paris, one could think of Chicago as America's Prague.  It is a beautiful city, the architectural capital of the United States.  It is a significant player in the art community.  Until recently largest annual art expo in the United States and even the Western hemisphere (with hundreds of galleries from all over the world represented) was held here (and may again return).  When it comes to performing arts, the two most significant film critics in the United States (Siskel and Ebert) wrote out Chicago, this is where Broadway tests its theatrical productions prior to putting them on in New York, and generations now of SNL comedians began here at Chicago's Second City Comedy Club.  Finally, while I do understand that it was "Rio de Janeiro's time" for the Olympics, by dissing Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, the Prada/Christian Dior wearing both titled and entitled Mafia that runs the IOC (it's kinda amusing for Americans to realize that Chicago's Mayor Daley may have been too much of a "boy scout" when it came with his dealings with the IOC.  Even the Mormons of Salt Lake City knew better who they were dealing with ;-) did the world's tourists a huge disfavor by dissing us.  Our beaches along Lake Michigan (an inland FRESHWATER SEA) alone are an experience to behold: No icky salt to stick to your designer bikinis here folks.  And the water, in summer never as cold as the Pacific Ocean off the coast of LA, by August is ... just divine ;-)  Anyway, Celine you could do much worse than Chicago ... and who exactly do those NGO's that you've been working for seek to "help?" And do the people you "help" realize that you think of them as living in "hell holes?"]

Be all this as it may, Celine really doesn't want to go back to the "Chicago" of her imagination.  And so there it is.  And Celine even warns Jesse near the beginning of the film after he expressed his sighing desire that he'd like to find some way to spend more time with his son during the next few years, telling him: "This is how couples begin to break up.  Grudging compromises are made, resentments build ..."

And so the rest of the movie revolves around the question: "Can this relationship last?"  It began magically, was consummated (for real) rather scandalously and not without consequences.  Now can it last?  The dialogue often quite pained / angry is again, like in the previous two films, excellent.  It all makes for one heck of a film for folks in their forties...

How does it turn out?  Well go see the film ... ;-)


As a final note, what then would "The Church" say about this story?  After all, there are several more or less obvious "transgressions" in the couple's now three part story, some rather "gleefully" made...

Well anyone who's been in Pastoral ministry for any length of time would know that most, if not all couples, young and old, "have their stories."  And part of those stories are all kinds of disappointments and betrayals.  The question becomes, what do we do with them?  Do we dwell on the pain?

I also admit here that I find myself sympathizing more with Jesse more than Celine in this film.  Yes, it's probably partly because "I'm a man," perhaps even in part because I'm "a functionary with 'some power' in a Patriarchical Institution that clothes itself in the Blessing/Power of God."

But I have to admit that Celine's repeated comments about 'Chicago' (see above) kinda pissed me off ... and may reflect a kind of expectation of entitlement -- "I'm a Parisian.  Granted I'm the daughter of at least one Hungarian immigrant [Note that I who write this review am the Chicago-born child of two Czech immigrants and also had a beloved grandmother living in Prague who we used to visit as well as other relatives in the C.R. who we continue to be in relationship with ... and yes, thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Central Europe's subsequent economic rise, sometimes our Czech relatives come here now, yes even to 'Chicago,' even as we continue to go there to Prague as we can...] but I (Celine) grew-up in 'Paris' and therefore I deserve to live in the elitist aura of said Paris even as I insist on striving for and holding important positions in organizations, both governmental and non, seeking to help poor sops living in 'Third World hell holes...'" -- That in my experience is both unrealistic and arguably misguided.  I personally would not want to be "helped" by people who did not respect me ... But honestly, as I write this, Celine's "arrogance" can also be seen as simply "part of the script ..." (In the other films, she's IMHO a far more sympathetic character).

Anyway, with or without God (and I continue to be convinced that life is much easier _with_ God than _without_ ...) all couples and indeed all people have to sort our their priorities.  And one would imagine that a couple with the means that Jesse and Celine clearly had could find a solution to their problem: "Chicago" or "Celine's dream job."  Off the top of my head ... Jesse a writer who traveled on book tours no doubt would be traveling from Paris to publishers in New York with some frequency (and Chicago is $250 and 2 hours by air from New York ...).  Further as a metropolis of 8-10 million, the third largest in the U.S. behind only New York and Los Angeles, as elsewhere largely college educated, there are actually "a book store or two" in Chicago to visit (on said book tours) and even a University or two (U of Chicago [!], Northwestern, even UIC as well as the Catholic universities of De Paul and Loyola at Chicago) as well.  So Jesse could probably find a way to "drop by" to visit his son a few times a year, even as Celine and their daughters lived on happily in Paris completely free (if they insisted...)  from the possibility that they could _also_ become fans of "da Bears" and "da Bulls" by virtue of having a half-brother/step-son living in the States... ;-) Where there's good will, a lot can be done, where there is not, all becomes really, really painful and hard ...

In any case though, even if at times this film is hard to watch due to the arguing ... the issues are real and certainly thought provoking that most couples by the time they reach their 30s or 40s would understand.  Good if at times painful job! ;-)


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Now You See Me [2013]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  RE.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. McAleer) review
RoberEbert.com (I. Vishnevetsky) review
AVClub.com (A.A. Dowd) review

Now You See Me [2013] (directed by Louis Letterier, screenplay by Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt, story by Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt) is a rather enjoyable summer caper about 4 young street level or otherwise "b-string" magicians: J. Daniel Atlas (played by Jesse Eisenberg) a self-assured card trick/misdirection expert, Henley Reeves (played by Isla Fisher) his former onstage assistant now escape artist in her own right, Merritt McKinney (played by Woody Harrelson) a "mentalist" specializing in hypnosis and "reading people's minds" and Jack Wilder (played by Dave Franco) a simple con artist who actually plays-up being a lousy "street magician" even as he pick-pockets those who "see through" his "poorly executed magic tricks" ;-).  Each receive intriguing invitations (on personalized Tarot Cards) to participate in what amounts to a series of very public on stage Robin Hood-like heists (stealing from the rich to give to the poor).

The first of these heists involves "robbing a bank," in Paris, from a stage in Las Vegas.  Impossible?  Well at the end of the trick, actual Euro notes of various denominations are raining down from the vents on applauding crowd in Vegas while a carrel-full of nice freshly printed Euro notes really is missing from a previously assumed to be secure vault at one of the main banks in Paris ;-).  What the heck happened? :-)  Well both the FBI and French authorities want to know.  And soon Las Vegas bureau FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (played by Mark Fuffalo) and Alma Dray (played by Mélanie Laurent) sent to the States by Interpol are on the case.

Besides the four previously "no-name," "b-string" or even "washed-up" magicians, now with the attention of the world upon them and calling themselves "The Four Horsemen," two other, older figures, begin to play prominent roles in the story.  The first is an African-American showman named Thaddeus Braddley (played by Morgan Freeman) who had previously been a relatively successful on-stage magician before figuring out that he could make more money producing a syndicated online and perhaps cable-tv show "debunking" other magicians by explaining to viewers how seemingly "impossible tricks" are done.  The second is Arthur Tressler (played by Michael Caine) a rich white man with more money than he knows what to do with who's enjoyed being promoter of high gloss stage productions.  He doesn't know or particularly care to know how magic tricks work as long as they entertain.  And after that Las Vegas stunt, the "Four Horsemen," have, well, certainly caught his attention ... ;-).

Much of course then ensues and it would kinda ruin the experience of the viewer to say much more except that good ole Thaddeus Braddley keeps reminding Agent Rhodes, who always seems to be more than a few steps behind the "Four Horsemen" in their tricks that "the closer you get, the less actually you see..."

Does it all work?  Well you be the judges.  But IMHO it's a fun story and it's clearly designed to allow for sequels if the "stars align" again in the future ... ;-)


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After Earth [2013]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-III) RE.com (3 1/2 Stars)  ChicagoSunTimes (1 Star)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
RogerEbert.com (M. Zoller Seitz) review
Chicago SunTimes (R. Roeper) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky) review

After Earth [2013] (directed and cowritten by M. Night Shyamalan along with Gary Whitta, story by Will Smith) is a very nice father/young teenage son sci-fi drama (starring the actual father/son team of Will Smith and his14 year-old son Jaden) that I believe that any military/vet/cop family would probably understand.

The film begins far in the future on a planet far far from Earth (as Earth had become so polluted that humanity had to abandon it 1000 years ago) and it centers on the relationship between General Cypher Raige (played by Will Smith) a decorated indeed almost legendary special forces military officer and his 14-year old son Kitai (played by Jaden Smith) who, often missing his dad (because he's so often away on various, always distand and always dangerous missions) desperately wants to become "just like his dad." Again, ANY military family or one with a hero could probably relate to this situation.

There are women in this family too, of course.  There's Faia Raige (played by Sophie Okonedo) Gen. Cypher/Kitai's loving wife/mother and then there was Senshi Raige (played by Zoe Isabella Kravitz), Kitai's older sister, and who had clearly been otherwise hard-nosed/cold Gen. Cypher Raige's "apple of his eye." 

Senshi had died when Kitai was only 5-6 years old protecting him (Kitai) from a horrible monster-like animal living on the planet where the Raiges and other humans now live, an animal species that literally "smells fear."  If Cypher had always been quite cold/distant (indeed trained to "mask his fear") in the past, he had become even more so, emotionally and otherwise, after Senshi's death.  Beyond grieving the loss of his favorite daughter "in his own way" by perhaps volunteering to go off on those always distant, always dangerous missions, it becomes clear that he partly blamed his son (even though he could not have been more than 5-6 at the time) for the loss of Senshi.  For his part, Kitai, racked by guilt that his older sister had died saving his life (and sensing the devastating effect that her death had on his father) Kitai was trying all the more to prove himself to his father ... who was almost never around (and who as noted above at least on some, if irrational, level blamed him for her death).

This then is the emotional set-up for the film.  Things come to a head, when Gen. Cypher, having come home from one of his missions is asked by his wife to take their 14-year-old son, Kitai (who's now "a cadet" after all, trying so hard to become a special forces Ranger "just like his dad") with him on his next mission.  After all, it was supposed to be "just a training mission," with cadets not unlike Kitai though a few years older than him anyway.   Gen. Cypher, reluctantly agrees.  But when they set-off on the "routine (training) mission," he asks his son to basically just strap himself into his seat in the interplanetary transport that they are traveling in with his gas mask on -- basically to out of the way -- while all goes according to plan ... until, of course, it does not.

The transport finds itself running-into a freak meteor-shower and is so damaged that it needs to crash land on the nearest hospitable planet available -- which turns out to be Earth, abandoned and quarantined by humanity some 1000 years previous (for reasons mentioned above).  The crash landing results in killing everybody on the ship except for the always heroic Gen. Cypher Raige (though he suffers two broken legs) and his 14-year-old son Kitai, who though a Ranger cadet, had been ordered by his heroic father to just sit in strapped in his seat with his gas mask on, had as both a "good cadet" and a "good boy" (if somewhat disappointedly/resentfully) ... "followed orders." ;-) 

Now decorated Gen. Cypher is forced to entrust his 14 year old son Kitai, cadet though he was, to traverse 100 km of uncharted wilderness (again, Earth had been abandoned by humanity for 1000 years) to retrieve a distress beacon that was located on the other end of their ship that had broken apart in pieces as it entered Earth's atmosphere, so that a rescue ship could be summoned to save them.  Much ensues ...

A fair amount of the critics reviewing the film complain about the stiffness of the performances of Gen. Cypher and his son.  Yet, I return to my belief that, while perhaps the stiffness is exaggerated a bit (for effect), any military family would understand.  This is to say that the IMHO stiffness in the performances of the two Smiths playing their roles was INTENTIONAL.  To support this view, I'd point out that, in contrast to Gen. Cypher who almost never smiles in the film (except in flashbacks involving his beloved and deceased older daughter Senchi) and Kitai, who's so much of a basket-case (if a heart-rending one) throughout most of the film, first trying to prove himself to his father and then plunged into a mission that was for real on which both his and his father's survival depended, that he had no time to smile, THE KEY WOMEN in the film, both wife/mother Faia and daughter/sister Senchi are portrayed as nothing but ever smiling/nurturing LOVE.

There are things that I would wonder about in the plot construction of the film.   I'm not sure why Earth had to be "abandoned" a 1000 years before the story was to have taken place with the father's/son's craft then crashing back on this "abandoned Earth."  Perhaps any "Earth-like planet" would have sufficed. 

Then the hideous monsters who "smelled our fear" who both existed on humanity's new home planet and then Kitai had to confront on Earth anyway (as it was part of the "cargo" being carried on the transport that carried father/son and the other Ranger trainees on their otherwise "routine mission") were certainly "over the top."  (Why do all of Hollywood's space aliens these days seem to look like hideous monsters bent on destroying us?)

Still I suppose, poor 14-year-old Kitai finds himself on a mission requiring him to confront truly "the sum of all (his) fears" -- (1) new fears - he has to traverse 100 km of, to him, utterly unknown terrain to save both him and his father, (2) old fears - he has to eventually confront a hideous monster (again somewhat inexplicably carried on the ship that crashed then with him and his father on Earth) of the same species that killed his older sister back on his home planet (a monster that could literally "smell" his fear), and (3) even more ancient fears - he finds himself on a planet that may be utterly new to him but that's filled with the consequences of mistakes made by his ancestors 1000+ years before.  So it all makes for one heck of a parable if at times a rather crowded one.  And it's one that I'd recommend to families with fathers who have been military heroes / otherwise "heroes on the force" and children trying really, really hard to become just like them.



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Pietà [2012]

MPAA (UR would be R) Chicago SunTimes (3 stars)  AVClub (C)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
Chicago SunTimes (B. Stamets) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

Pietà [2012] (written and directed by South Korean director Ki-Duk Kim) is an often brutal (definitely hard-R) yet not without its point, award winning film that IMHO probably appropriately (certainly it was worthy) though somewhat amusingly won both "The Golden Mouse" (for the best "small film") and "The Golden Lion" (for best film, period) at the Venice International Film Festival last year (2012).  It played recently at Chicago's Facets Multimedia and is available at Amazon Instant Video.

Set in a grimy oil, pipe and rust covered section of an ultra-industrialized, scant tree to be found, South Korean town where an entire neghborhood of tiny "mom and pop" machine shop businesses are stacked one next to another all presumably competing with each other to survive, the setting has an intentional "post-Apocalyptic" (but emphatically "post-Apocalyptic NOW") feel to it.  Overcast, less rainy but certainly colder, imagine the setting as Ridley Scott's Bladerunner [1982] but covered in snow and set in South Korea today rather than in some near or more distant future.  This is the second such "post-Apocalypse NOW" film that I've seen in the last couple of years, the other being an arguably "lighter" film named Viva Riva! [2010] by Congolese director Djo Munga in which that film's hero "Riva" enters Congo's capital of Kinshasa with a truck full of stolen petrol (gasoline) and is greeted by the local inhabitants from the mob to the local bishop ;-) as a hero torn out of a Madmax [1979] / Road Warrior [1981] story. 

Both this current film, Pietà [2012] and Viva Riva! [2010] along with Filipino film Graceland [2012] that played here and I reviewed recently serve as reminders to me (and which I share with readers here now) of the oft expressed view of a lot of the Asian and Latin American friars of my (Servite) Order with whom I studied at my Order's international college in Rome that Americans (and really Westerners in general...) simply don't have a clue about the struggles of life in the poorer countries of the world today, again "not in some distant Apocalyptic time in the future" but today.

Trying to appreciate this in earlier years, I led several groups of Americans from Servite apostolates in the United States to places like the Servite Mission in the Acre/Amazon region of Brazil and another Servite Mission in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico.  But I also tried to explain to both our guys on the ground there and others who we met through them in both places that the vast majority of Americans really couldn't afford to go on trips like this either.

Indeed, a good part of my reasoning in creating my blog (and then choosing to operate it in the way that I have -- lets face it, there are _a lot_ more reviews of "small international films" reviewed on this blog than one would probably initially expect to see on movie blog from the States -- was to offer Catholics (both American and non) as well as other readers of the blog an opportunity to "visit" other countries / realities otherwise beyond their/our reach at least through the movies (and then where possible through movies made by people from the places where they are set).  Most American Catholics can not afford to spend $1500-2000 to visit the Servites in the Philippines (or to visit the Servite Sisters in South Korea).  But for $7-8 they can at least download a film recently reviewed here from each of these places through Amazon Instant Video and perhaps better understand the "joys and sorrows" of our brothers and sisters living there ;-).

But to return then to the current film ... Pietà [2012] is set in this rundown district of an industrial city somewhere in South Korea today where the families owning these little "mom and pop" machine shops, one stacked on top of another, are all trying to eek out a means to survive.  In this environment when times get hard, people go into debt.  So the story focuses on Gang-Do (played by Joeng-jin Lee) a 20-something enforcer for a loan-shark/mob operation.

The scam that the local mob had set-up was the following:  They would loan the owners of these tiny metal shop operations who had fallen into hard times $3000 to pay off their debts but they also insist that they sign a disability insurance policy worth $30,000 to get the loan.  Then, if they couldn't pay back the $3,000 loan IN ONE MONTH'S TIME, the amount that they would owe would jump to $30,000 and an enforcer like Gang-Do would come by to MUTILATE the owner (cut off his arm, crush his leg, what-have-you...) so that the mob could collect the $30,000 on the insurance.

The beginning sequence of the film shows Gang-Do stringing up and torturing the owner of one of these small machine shops who was already in a wheel chair (apparently someone who had already been mutilated once for failing to pay back a previous loan ...).  Satisfied that he's performed enough damage on the owner of that machine shop so that his bosses could collect their insurance money, he returns then to his home, a dingy all metal and plastic apartment.  Inside the apartment, there's a metal stove, a metal table, a couple of chairs, a small not particularly algae filled fish-tank and a tiny one person bed.  Oh yes, and on the wall over the table is a single (on wood) painting of a nameless and topless young woman.  When he comes home, he takes off his coat.  Takes out his dagger, throws it at the wooden painting, PIERCING HER HEART ... and then he crashes on the bed.  The next scene shows him masturbating (under the covers) still half asleep as his cell-phone vibrates a few times, apparently sending him a few more names and addresses of shop owners to shakedown and mutilate.

Such then is Gang-Do's life -- and the viewer gets to "see" (or at least hear...) a few more times what becomes a sad, sad variously desperate symphony (if not a cacophony) of differing reactions of the owners (and often their loved ones...) when he as a veritable "Angel of Death" comes by to collect "his Master's due."

Yet one day, an older 40-something woman shows up (played by Min-soo Jo).  She starts following Gang-Do from a distance and she follows him all the way home.  Who is she?  She introduces herself with a pleading apology, "I am your mother, who made you into who you are, because I abandoned you when you were born."  "Yeah, right."  He enters his dingy apartment, leaving her outside (in the snow), throws his dagger into the heart of the topless young woman's picture hanging on the wall again, and goes to bed.

The next morning ... she's still outside.  He brushes her aside and continues in his work.  She follows him ... if at a distance.  When one of the shop-owners that Gang-Do is shaking down, spits on him, she enters the shop and SLAPS THE SHOP-OWNER and says: "How dare you talk to my son that way!  If you want to spit on someone then spit on me.  I'm the one who made him this way..."  Gang-Do proceeds then to throw the shopowner off of some balcony or something (high enough to severely injure him, but not enough to kill him ...) but at this point the woman has Gang-Do's attention.

At the end of the day, he takes her home.  Still not convinced who she is, even though she's protesting that she's his mother, he proceeds to do what would certainly be the most depraved act in the whole film.  Yes, he violates her.  Note that this as well as the other scenes in the film are shot with some discretion.  The camera always turns away or otherwise the viewer is shielded from what happens, but the viewer is also left with no doubt whatsoever about had  happened.

Yet this scene becomes a turning-point.  Her sobbing (rather than anger) afterwards do seem to convince him (finally) of the truth of what she was telling him.  Having violated her and witnessing her reaction to this, he (finally) opens up his life to her.

What now?  Well this is just the set-up for the second half of the movie... ;-)

Throughout the rest of the film, the viewer is left to wonder about the identity of this woman.  Is she really his mother?  If she is, then it becomes clear that she's more than just that.

Alternatively is she supposed to be MARY?  Well if she is supposed to be Mary, then BESIDES Gang-Do HAVING VIOLATED HER (even though he was an utterly inhuman thug at the time...) she'd be certainly MORE THAN JUST HIS MOTHER.  SHE'D ALSO BE THE MOTHER OF HIS VICTIMS.

Yet, once she has his confidence, the woman (finally) begins to increasingly aggressively reprove Gang-Do for his previous crimes AND (finally) show obvious concern for his victims.  Indeed, the question arises: In the traumatized, certainly fallen, arguably hellish setting of this film, was she actually one of the mothers of one of his victims, who insinuated herself into Gang-Do's life (even at such a great cost to her) so that she could then avenge the death her (other) child?

But returning to the question of whether she was supposed to be a Marian figure in this film:  Mary would have to be the Mother of both the Oppressor and the Oppressed.  How would that play out?  And how could both Justice and Reconciliation be accomplished?

The scenario presented in this film is clearly an extreme one.  The viewer may not even like the way the writer-director resolves the situation in the film.  Yet the film does raise interesting questions to the viewer.  If Mary would be "The Mother of All Her Children" (again of both the Oppressor and the Oppressed) and people at times do truly awful things to each other, what would a reconciliation between her estranged children look like?  And if some of those children were already dead, would such reconciliation even be possible in this world?  Do we really still live "in Exile" in a "Valley of Tears?"

As a final note, South Korea is actually one of the most Christian / Catholic countries in East Asia (18.3% Protestant, 10.8% Catholic in 2005 according to S. Korean gov't statistics cited in wikipedia).  Additionally, the Catholic Church in Korea has had a storied 250 year indigenous history complete with martyrs.  I make note of this to remind readers that writer-director Ki-Duk Kim was not approaching this film "randomly."  The imagery is obviously very, very strong but it's also obviously informed:  In one of the more amusing scenes in the film, after Gang-Do finally starts believing the woman who was claiming to be his mother and lets her stay in his home, one morning while he's still sleeping, she takes the Dagger that he keeps throwing into the Heart of the picture of the topless (abused) Young Woman that he has hanging on his wall, then pulls-out Gang-Do's pet eel (a "small serpent" after all) from his fish-tank, chops it up (against his previous objections) and serves it to him later for breakfast ;-).   Only an informed Catholic could come up with a scene like that ;-)


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Epic [2013]

MPAA (G)  CNS/USCCB (A-I)  RE.com (2 Stars)  AVClub (C)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
RogerEbert.com (M. Zoller Seitz) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky) review

I admit that I approached the children's animated film Epic [2013] (directed by Chris Wedge, screenplay by a veritable army - James V. Hart, William Joyce, Daniel Shere, Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember) somewhat skeptically.  I found the title of the film somewhat pretentious.  After all, how "epic" could a battle between little green "leaf men" and darker, cellulose-devouring "insect men" all playing out in a forest grove next to the house of the main human protagonists in the story be?  And then how many films does this setup to the story remind you of?  Let's see: Ants [1998], A Bug's Life [1998] and more recently The Secret World of Arrietty [2010] and Rango [2011].  (I'm told that the story also follows the essential plot-line of the Japanese Studio Ghibly animated classic Spirited Away [2001], which now I'm going to "have to see" as well ;-).  Then the flying battle scenes involving the green leaf-men saddled on hummingbirds and the beetle/insect-men saddled on bats and ravens, already shown in the film's previews, more or less obviously pay homage to Avatar [2009], all the more so since Epic is intended to be primarily seen in 3D.  So if nothing else, Epic's makers set themselves up for one heck challenge -- meeting a truly "epic" set of expectations ;-).

How do they do?  Well approaching this movie skeptically, I decided that I was not going to pay full-price to see this movie and then definitely not see it in 3D.  (Note to parents, having seen the movie now, while the film works perfectly well in 2D and I've always considered 3D to be largely a "price-gouging gimick," if you "get stuck" seeing this film in 3D, you could probably have done worse.  A lot of the scenes are crafted in a way that the 3D would probably look pretty cool.  But I do sympathize with you: paying $4/ticket per kid for the 3D glasses could well be a deal-breaker and the cheaper 2D (which I saw) works perfectly fine as well).

But returning to the question at hand, I found myself LIKING THIS FILM and actually QUITE A BIT ;-)  Then also, since I saw it as a matinee, it seemed rather clear to me that the kids watching the film along with their parents/guardians clearly enjoyed the film as well, responding to things in the film that I would not have caught (or found as funny ;-) otherwise.  But I'd generally get these 'added' gags (if sometimes a little "after the fact" ;-) saying to myself, "Okay, if I were a 4-6 year old, I probably would have found that funny too" ;-).  Specifically the human family's older "three legged dog" (which anyone who's ever had an older dog would appreciate) was JUST ADORABLE ;-) ;-).  What a reminder that you don't have to have a dog-show quality dog "with papers" at home to have a pooch more than worthy of your love.

Then for older kids and adults the fundamental set-up to the story told to us by the narrator at the beginning is immediately graspable: "If you look at a forest, it may seem initially that not much is going on.  But if you look more closely it becomes clear that there's a constant battle taking place between the forces of Life and the forces of Decay."  And there you have it.  Even without the "leaf-men" and personified beetles, dandelions, water lilies and snails/slugs, I will never look at a forest grove the same way again ;-).

So this "battle between Life and Decay" is taking place in the little forest grove by the house of the human family involved, and the father (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) had become absolutely obsessed with it convinced that there are "little people" on both sides of this struggle who were involved in it who we can not see only because their being smaller results in their experience to time being much, much faster than ours.  So over time, he's setup all kinds of microphones and security cams all over that little forest grove in an attempt to prove that all these "little people" running about (and battling each other) actually exist.

Well, any family or community that's had to deal with a middle aged man becoming seemingly obsessed with some crazy quest (like perhaps even dealing with a middle aged priest who decided a couple of years ago to "start writing a film blog" ;-) could probably relate.  And yes, taking obsessions "a bit too far" does have consequences.  In the case of the human family in this story, the father's obsession with proving the existence of these "little people" cost him his marriage.  His wife had left him, taking their daughter with her.  Indeed, the film begins with the daughter, Mary Katherine (voiced by Amanda Seyfried) who as a teenager now calls herself "M.K." for short, returning back to her father after the tragic death of her mother.  And yes, she was not looking forward to this as she was convinced that her dad was self-absorbed/crazy.  (As is now the formula that works in stories like this - the story is both entertaining/funny, but it is also rooted in some aspect of painful/relateable reality).

It turns out, of course, that the father is not altogether crazy.  (At least in the story) he's actually onto something.  There really are these little people in two camps (representing Life and Decay), who really are battling it out in the midst of that small grove of trees.

Now according to the story, each of these two camps is led by a leader, a Water Lily Queen named Tera (voiced by Beyoncé Knowles) and a Dark Lord named Mandrake (voiced by Christoph Waltz).  The two forces exist generally in equillibrium.  Whatever Mandrake's forces kill or reduce to decay, Queen Tera is able to regenerate.  However, once every 100 years or so, on the night of a summer solstice falling on the same day as a full moon, the Queen is obligated to go to the water lily patch and pick-out a pod that would bloom into her successor.  Mandrake and his forces see this as the opportunity for them to strike, steal the lily pod from the queen before the rising of the full moon and claim it for themselves (giving birth to a Dark Prince instead of a new Life Giving Princess). 

Well, good old M.K., who after coming to stay with her father had become even more convinced that her father was crazy, walks into the middle of this attempt by the "forces of decay" to steal this "lily pod" from the Queen Tera just after she picked it, and the pod ends up in M.K.'s hands.  Then to her amazement, she sees a dying little Lily Queen (Tera) on the ground, who tells her that she's entrusted to bring this pod, yet to bloom, "to the sanctuary" so that it would become the new Lily Queen.  As Queen Tera dies, M.K. magically shrinks to the size of these little people and soon encounters the Queen's guard that of course is distraught over this despicable attack on/murder of their Queen and the attempted abduction of her future successor.  Much, of course, ensues ...

And by the time that the Dark Lord Mandrake sends out a huge swarm of bats to "block out the light of the full moon" thus coming quite close to forcing the birth of the Queen's successor to "take place in darkness" (which would have resulted in the birth of a Dark Prince rather than a Princess of Life), I do have to admit that the story had become worthy of its "Epic" title ;-).

I also have to say that if all the talk of "solstices" and "full moons" may sound a bit, well, "pagan" ... the creators do such a good job with it by the end -- the pod about to be born is put on an appropriately "epic" stone altar recalling something from Celtic/Stone Henge times ... that I honestly did not mind. 

Indeed, the scene reminded me that one of the items on my "bucket list" is to one day to be able to go to England or Ireland to visit one of those old Celtic sanctuaries where light enters through a specific stone lined portal/window on the occasion of one or another of the solstices (and I'd happily "settle" on witnessing something similar among the Mayan ruins in Guatemala/Mexico).  To a priest of _any_ religion, this kind of stuff is simply really, really "epic" / "awesome" ;-)

So it should be clear then that the story became satisfactorily "Epic" / "awesome" for me.  And once again, I write this with some happy surprise ;-)  Further, I do believe that the film really had "something" for just about everybody from the little ones to teens to parents/elders.  And yes, be assured that daughter M.K. and dad reconcile and gain mutual respect for each other by the end.

So all in all folks, I really do believe that the film is quite good and (surprisingly) meets my expectations of a film bearing such an initially rather audacious name ;-)   Good, err "Epic" job folks ;-)  Good job ;-)


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Frances Ha [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L)  RE.com (2 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (A-)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. McAleer) review
RogerEbert.com (G. Cheshire) review
AVClub (B. Keninsberg) review

Frances Ha [2012] (directed and cowritten by Noah Baumbach along with Greta Gerwig) is IMHO a well written, well acted bitter-sweet comedy about "growing-up" ... after college ... on one's own in a big American city today.  The film is set as a matter of course in New York, but with adjustments the story could easily play-out in Chicago/Los Angeles or Boston/Philadelphia, Seattle/Portland or Miami for that matter, basically any major U.S. city with a relatively vibrant theatrical / artistic community.

The story follows Frances (played by Greta Gerwig) who we meet as an apprentice dancer at a New York dance company. When we meet her, she is living with her best friend from college, Sophie (played by Mickey Sumner), in a shared apartment in Brooklyn.  Sophie is working her way up (with apparently some success) from her presumably entry-level position at Random House (the famous publishing firm) in Manhattan which she landed some years before.

There is a sort of "are they or aren't they" vibe about their relationship, an ambiguity that may distress some viewers, but one that I believe many/most college age+ young adults would probably comprehend.  That many/most college aged young adults would understand the situation may in itself distress some readers here. But 25 years ago, when I was in grad-school, these kind of ambiguous relationships were already going on (And how would I know that?  Because I personally knew a couple of women who lived in exactly this still ambiguous sort of way).  My sense would be that these kind of relationships would be even more common now than back then.  Now why would such relationships be ambiguous?  Well, given both the age and the stakes for the people involved, why would one be surprised?

But I'm getting away from the point ... The point is that the relationship between these two women in the film is ambiguous.  And I give the film-makers a lot of credit for making it so (because it's honestly more real that way).

Indeed, at the beginning of the film BOTH Frances and Sophie actually have boyfriends.  However when Frances is asked at the beginning of the film by her boyfriend to move-in with him, she declines telling him that her and Sophie's apartment is nice, that the lease is going to come-up for renewal in a few months and that she "wouldn't want to put Sophie in a bind afterwards."  Frances' boyfriend takes her response to be effectively a "kiss-off" line (However one slices it, she's appears to be telling him that there isn't a future in their relationship) and so the two break-up.

Two weeks later, guess what happens?  Sophie tells Frances that HER boyfriend, Patch (played by Patrick Heusinger), who works on Wall Street had asked her to move-in with him to HIS new apartment in the swanky/cool Tribeca neighborhood of New York and that she accepted his offer.  NOW Frances is left to fend for herself ... (To be clear here as well, Patch was a serious boyfriend ... the two, perhaps to Frances further dismay, get married soon afterwards...).

What does Frances do?  Well, she crashes for a time with two friends (though both male now) still from college, Lev (played by Adam Driver) and Benji (played by Michael Zegen).  However, the new problem is that their apartment is more expensive than the previous one that she shared with Sophie, and even though they're dividing rent three ways, Frances can't fully cover her share.  No problem, come the Christmas season, she tells the two that she'll be dancing with her company "like every day" and that ought to bump-up her income.  Just there comes a problem ... come October, she's told by her Dance Company's boss Nadia (played by Britta Phillips) that "though her performances are good," the Company "won't be needing her" for the Christmas shows.  What does that mean?  Well Nadia doesn't outright fire her (though what does it mean to be "not needed" in what would have seemed to have been the busiest time of the year for the Dance Company...?)   Instead, Nadia tells her to "come back in February and we'll talk about your future."

What the heck to do now?  Well, she can't afford to stay with Lev and Benji  -- Incidently, again neither of two is gay.  Living in New York as unattached late 20-somethings, they're simply roommates. Lev seems to be more successful in both work and with women and is seemingly leading a somewhat "revolving door" / "one night stand" lifestyle.  Benji on the other hand, is a "struggling writer" and like Frances also "clinging to a dream" that may not be altogether realistic.  In any case due to his insecurity in his work life Benji declared himself (at least temporarily) "undateable" and declares Frances to be the same -- With Christmas rolling around with no income and not wanting to mouch off of her two friends, she heads back home to Sacramento, California to be with her parents.

HOWEVER, Frances doesn't give up.  After all, her Boss at the Dance Company did tell her to "come back in February."  So come mid-January, Frances is back in New York, now in another precarious living arrangement, living this time (at least temporarily) with Rachel (played by Grace Gummer) who is an actual (paid) member of the Dance Company that Frances had been an apprentice for. Why?  Because "in 5 weeks" he believes that she's gonna be working there too.

By now, the reader could guess what happens ... Nadia wanted to talk to Frances in February about Frances' "future" at the Dance company but not about her dancing for the company ...

What now?  By now, the reader ought to have a pretty good idea of the trajectory of this film.  So I'm not going to say anything further except (1) what's remarkable about Frances' character throughout the story is her undaunted optimism in face of a seemingly unending avalanche of disappointments/failures and, (2) SINCE THIS IS A COMEDY, AFTER ALL, IT HAS TO END WELL ... and so it does, though not without a lot of further pain.  However, as everyone who's passed through young-adult age would know, "growing up" and finding one's footing in life, almost always involves a good deal of embarrassment and pain.

Still, I have to say that I've grown to really like Greta Gehrig's characters.  I've seen her starring now in three films -- Damsels in Distress [2011], Lola Versus [2012] and now Frances Ha [2012] -- and I love the cheerful earnestness and the optimism of her characters in face of seemingly overwhelming challenges/disappointments to the point that she reminds me of the comical optimism of a lot of Woody Allen's roles in his films of yesteryear.  I'm not sure how Ms Gehrig would respond to having her roles/style compared to Woody Allen's, but I do mean it as a compliment!  ;-)

Finally, I find it fascinating that while her films certainly don't evoke religion in any explicit sense at all, at least two of her films, Lola Versus [2012] and the current one, strike me as having some more-or-less obvious religious undertones (if not overtones ;-):

In Lola Versus [2012], she plays a doctoral student (a lit major) who was dumped by her fiance' three weeks before their wedding (and for no apparent reason other than perhaps sheer panic on his part).  Yet, despite that disaster in her life, she has to continue with her studies and make a proposal to her Doctoral Board for her Dissertation.  The proposal she gives would be one that ANY Judeo-Christian theologian worth his/her salt would understand: She wanted to study THE SILENCE, THE PAUSES in Poetry, "the commas" as it were.  Someone of my background can not help but think of Book of Job (Job 2:13) or the Prophet Elijah's meeting God in the "silent sound" on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19:11ff).

In the current film, in the midst of all her disasters, Frances is asked at an otherwise rather awkward dinner party what she really wanted in life.  She answered somewhat similarly as above, that ultimately all that she really wished for was the assurance of a simple glance, perhaps at a party, perhaps from a distance, from a friend, a glance "that would not even have to have a sexual meaning" but simply one that would indicate to her that "all is okay."

Folks, Matthew effectively began and ended his Gospel with his understanding of the meaning of the whole of Jesus' incarnation, life, death and resurrection, the assurance that "God is with us ... always, till the end of the age." (Matt 1:23, 28:20).


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The Hangover Part III / Fast and Furious 6 [2013]

Last year there was also a weekend, perhaps even the same one (the one falling around Memorial Day), when I honestly couldn't justify spending the money or even the effort to go out and see the weekend's new "main attractions" and yet feel obligated, again like last year, to write something (and _not_ altogether negatively) about them ;-)

The Hangover Part III [2013]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L)  RE.com (1 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (C)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (K. Jensen) review
RogerEbert.com (O. Henderson) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

The Hangover Part III [2012] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Todd Phillips along with Craig Mazin, characters by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) is the third installment in the franchise about a group of "regular guys" (if they weren't sooooo.... stupid) 30s-ish in age, generally vulgar/immature-ish in attitude from Southern California who by this installment have come to call themselves "the wolf pack."  Playing the four are Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha and Zach Galifianis. 

The shtick in the series is that these four find themselves falling into some truly unbelievable situations (in good part due to their stupidity) and then have to struggle to find their way out.  The formula has been wildly popular.

I saw the first film when it came out in 2009 (back before I began my blog) and found it to be basically funny/stupid (stupid-funny...) and already _somewhat_ "immature" (basically along the lines of Animal House [1978] but for 30 year olds ...).  What honestly surprised me was the film's remarkable popularity in my parish.  It seemed to me that just about everyone across all our various ethnic lines from (honestly) pre-teenagers to seniors (! ;-) had seen the film (often as families) and almost everyone of them talked about the film as if it was the greatest thing to come out in a long-long time.  When a film that, let's face it, is kinda/rather vulgar -- "Honestly, you took your kids to see this?"  "Yes, (with all sincerity) why not Father?"  "Did you see the final credits?"  "Yup, what of them?" ;-) --  is THAT popular, someone like me CAN'T HELP BUT NOTICE and then scratch my head and try to figure-out "why?"  What is it about these films that makes them so popular?

The answer that I came up with is that these film "work" because they portray "regular people" behaving stupider indeed MUCH stupider than we generally do.  Hence we laugh at the nerdy / generally straight-laced dentist (played by Ed Helms) getting SOOOOOO DRUNK in the first film that during the course of the evening he pulled out his own front tooth (with a pair of pliers...) without having ANY recollection the next day of him doing so.  (How drunk would you have to be to do that and then not remember doing so? ;-)  In the trailer to the current film, we see the stupidest of the characters (played by Zach Galifianis) happily speeding along on the freeway, driving home a giraffe that he had bought from a carnival somewhere ... only to "accidently" knock its head-off as he drove his car/trailer under a bridge (How stupid would you have to be to do that? ;-) ;-) -- It is funny ;-) -- just really, really, really stupid funny ;-)

One can't help but laugh at both of these gags and there are plenty of others just like them in the films.  Indeed, my favorite gag in the first movie was when the characters in the story get into trouble with the police for having _stolen a police car_ the previous night (Again how impossibly drunk would you have to be to not remember stealing a police car? ;-) After much talking/apologizing and noting that actually "no harm was done," the police allow them to go free if they did them "a favor."  What was the favor?  The police had a class of grade-school kids at the Police Station on a field trip and the cops thought it kinda cool to taser the three of them in front of the class as part of a demonstration! ;-)  My gosh, as a 10 year old, I would have found THAT DEMO to be WAY WAY COOL ;-)  And even now, I can't stop laughing just thinking about it ;-).

So as crude as the Hangover films have been, they've honestly been very, very funny showing "regular people" doing unbelievably stupid things.  It allows one say: "I may have done some pretty stupid things in my life, but at least I've never done anything that stupid." And since all of us find ourselves having done some really, really stupid things in the course of our lives, being reminded that we could still have been stupider can be a relief ;-)

Fast and Furious 6 [2013]

MPAA (PG-13)  RE.com (2 Stars)  AVClub (B)

IMDb listing
RE.com (S. Boone) review
AVClub review

Fast and Furious 6 [2013] (directed by Justin Lin, screenplay by Chris Morgan, characters by Gary Scott Thompson) is the other blockbuster film released this weekend that I nonetheless couldn't get myself to spend the money or effort to see.  However, like the latest Hangover installment that I discussed above, my inability to get up and go see the film does not mean that it is necessarily bad.  Indeed, the whole Fast and Furious franchise is "geared" ;-) torward teens and perhaps even pre-teens and is a celebration of raw, thundering, leave half the tires on the pavement behind you, wheel screeching/supercharged POWER. (And that in itself is not necessarily bad, as a celebration of POWER can be actually a celebration of BEING ALIVE, of having THE POWER TO ACT).

And I get why that would be attractive to teenagers/young adults really of both sexes.  For guys there's something really really cool to be driving a thundering, smoke/fire breathing MONSTER that's already SHAKING IN IDLE let alone when one puts it in gear.  After all, ballads were written not for MEN who slew "wombats or weasels" but for MEN who slew Bears, Lions and DRAGONS.  No one gains esteem for "taming a chevette."  Yet BRONCO BUSTING and even MECHANICAL "BULL RIDING" with the attendant chaos / danger can be positively inspirational.

Similarly one can smirk at some of the somewhat sexist imagery in these films -- the Chicago Tribune's critic for this film noted that Warner Brothers must have gone through its entire annual budget for "tank tops" in the making of the film ;-) and I understand that criticism as well.  Yet to be kinder and perhaps to understand better what's going on, women are generally more responsible than men _anyway_.  So there's not necessarily a great deal of attractiveness for a young woman to find a similarly (or even more) responsible guy.  Yet the guy who knows how to TAME / CONTROL POWER can be _very attractive_.  So that there would be young women, perhaps a bit more scantily ("attractively") dressed than the average, congregating around events involving men showing-off their skills at taming thundering, fire-breathing mechanical monstrosities actually makes some real primal sense. 

And then add a few women who decide to give it a try at TAMING / CONTROLLING these monstrocities as well, HOW COOL IS THAT? ;-).  For guys watching this, it's akin to "allowing their Jungian animas out to play" and for women doing this, it's their embracing of their own "inner superhero" (Jungian "animus").

So this then would be the set-up for the films of the Fast and Furious franchise and it makes a lot of sense.  And if the plots are kinda flimsy -- in the case of the current film featuring among other things a high speed chase on a freeway WITH A TANK and the bringing down a MILITARY TRANSPORT PLANE taking off on a runway with only a "really fast" indeed super-charged vehicle armed with HARPOONS ;-) -- then let's remember that plot here is really beside the point ;-).

So I get the attraction, but at almost 50, I honestly just can't get myself out to see this one ;-).  But power-on folks, power-on ;-)


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Star Trek Into Darkness [2013]

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

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
RogerEbert.com (M. Zoller Seitz) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

Star Trek Into Darkness [2013] (directed by J.J. Abrams, screenplay by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof inspired by the legendary television series [IMDb] by Gene Roddenberry [IMDb]) is a second prequel to the current reboot of that original series.  Hence I have to hand it to the film-makers: They have really found a way to bring back all the characters of the original series (though played by a new set of actors) and yet offer story-lines that are both updated (to contemporary concerns) and fresh/new.

The film-makers do so precisely by making "prequels" to the original series.  Hence we see the characters of the original series when they were younger than in the original.   This offers the current film makers all kinds of possibilities, including, most obviously, the possibility of changing the new series' style.  All the characters are younger, hence their personalities are still somewhat "in flux" (as opposed to who the characters become in the original series that we know and love, that was filmed "way back" in the 1960s).  And since the characters are younger, the pace of the story-telling can also be much, much faster, indeed more frenetic, than it was ("became" ;-) in the original.  If the characters in the original series were all already in their late-20s or even 30s-early 40s (hence "established"/"settled"), in these new films, they are "still young" in their early / mid-20s when their personalities were still "being established."  And understanding this IMHO makes these new films then a lot of fun ;-).

I mean, Spock (played in the new films by Zachary Quinto) being in a relationship (!!) with Uhura (played in the new films by Zoe Saldana, honestly an inspired choice of casting) could ONLY work (and then work surprisingly well ;-) when the two characters were "young" ;-) ;-).  Then Kirk (played in the new films by Chris Pine) is, yes, brash and one can imagine how he would become the Kirk played by William Shatner of the original series, but Pine's Kirk is still, well, young ;-).  Bones McCoy (played in the new films by Karl Urban) is also younger than in the original series but already beginning to take on the mannerisms of the Bones McCoy of the original series: "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a ...." ;-).  The other new casts Anton Yelchin as Chekov, John Cho as Sulu, Simon Pegg as Scotty are also fun (Yelchin's Chekov is just adorable ;-).  And with this film ENDING with this crew JUST BEGINNING their "five year mission to explore new worlds ..." they could still go 2-3 more movies before they start running into the timeline of the original series, all this boding quite well for the new franchise ... if some of the technical issues (see below) can be resolved.

But let's then get to the film at hand.  Set sometime in the 23rd/24th century (some 200-300 years in our future), the key to this film (the second in the reboot) is actually the second Star Trek movie with the original cast, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [1982].  The current film riffs repeatedly on the story / themes in the 1982 film.  To give one (and only one) example: Early in the film, Kirk disobeys Star Fleet regulations to save Spock's life a decision which Spock does not understand.  After all the regulations were clear and well thought out and he was more than willing to die for the sake of the good, well thought-out intent of those regulations.  Kirk, on the other hand, just wanted to save the life of a friend even if doing so broke regulations and even if it cost him with Star Fleet (it does ... if temporarily).

That incident partly sets the tone of the film.  The other event helping to set the tone is an apparent terrorist attack in London and followed by another one on Star Fleet HQ in San Francisco itself with the perpetrator escaping to an uninhabited/desert part of the Klingon home planet (that is to a 23th/24th century interstellar Afghanistan or the "tribal region" of Pakistan).  Kirk, who had been demoted following his "violating regulations" in the incident that saved Spock's life, now finds himself in command of the Starship Enterprise anyway, and is tasked by Starfleet to fly to the "neutral zone" between "the Federation" (comprising primarily of Vulcan and Earth and various other allied civiliations) and the Klingon empire and after locating (romotely) the perpetrator of these two terrorist attacks, to fire a single presumably cloaked/stealth photon torpedo (a 23rd/24th century cruise missile) at the perpetrator to simply kill him (a la the U.S.'s drone strikes in Afghanistan/Pakistan in recent years ...).

Well, Kirk and the Enterprise set out on the mission and ... much ensues ... Among what ensues revolves around resolving the question of who exactly is the villain who the Kirk / the Enterprise are being tasked to kill and what would have been the villain's motives for those two "out of the blue" terrorist attacks that he perpetrated against Earth / Star Fleet, all making fodder for a rather good film ...

Now regarding technical matters (which are not necessarily all that good) ... Much has been written about the frenetic pace of the new Star Trek films.  Yet, once one understands that the characters in the reboot are all "young," I do believe that the faster pacing becomes appropriate.  I have bigger questions with the 3D which frankly I found to be quite lousy and then honestly with aspects of the ending.

At the end of the film, Kirk is heard waxing eloquently at a 9/11 style commemoration "of all the events that took place in the previous year," happily proclaiming at the end that the Starship Enterprise, which had been almost destroyed during the course of the film (it's almost always destroyed in the course of any given Star Trek film...) was about to be recommissioned.  Given all that we see happen in those events being "commemorated,"  I do believe many inhabitants of 23rd/24th century Earth would find Kirk to be something of an idiot: "Yippie, your ship's about to be recommissioned, BUT ..." (On the other hand between the Present and the 23rd/24th century in which the Star Trek series is to take place, Star Trek's original story assumes that the Earth would have been rocked by at least one or two nuclear wars.  So perhaps the inhabitants of Earth of the 23rd/24th century would be more accustomed to "mega-disasters" than perhaps we would be today... Still, I found Kirk's speech at that commemoration to be uncharacteristically tone deaf).

All in all when the film focuses on the characters, it is quite good.  However, next time, I do wish that either the film-makers really go "all in" on the 3D and make it good (the current film was one of those that was "converted to 3D" after the fact) or just keep it 2D.   The clunkiness of the film's 3D was disappointing and then when one realizes that one's PAYING EXTRA for this effect really quite maddening.  I only saw the 3D version because of time constraints.  Even going into the film, I would have preferred seeing the 2D version. And after seeing the rather clunky 3D version, I was really quite irritated for having been forced into seeing it in 3D.  As as result, while I'd give the film 3 stars for the sake of the characters / story, from a technical point of view the film really deserves only 2 or 2 1/2.


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