Final Destination 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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The Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADDENDUM -

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


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The Devil's Double

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Life in a Day [2011]

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

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

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

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

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

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


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The Change Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Rise of the Planet of the Apes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan [2011]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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