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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