Sarah's Key

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB () Roger Ebert (2 ½ Stars) Fr Dennis (3 ½ Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1668200/
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/REVIEWS/110729982

Sarah’s Key (directed and cowritten by Gilles Paquet-Brenner along with Serge Joncour based on the novel by Tatiana De Rosnay) is a French-English language film (appropriately subtitled) about an American-born journalist Julia Darmond (Kristen Scott Thomas) living in Paris with her French husband Bertrand Tezac (Frédéric Pierrot) and their daughter, about 12-13 years old.  In the midst of writing about the 60th anniversary of the infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of Paris’ Jews during the Nazi occupation, she discovers that the apartment that she and her husband inherited from her husband’s parents and were in the process of remodeling had belonged to a young Jewish family, the Starzynskis, prior to the round-up.  Investigating further, she discovers that while parents, Mme and M. Starzynski (played by Natasha Mashkevich and Arben Bajraktaj) had subsequently died in the Holocaust, their two children 12-year old Sarah (played by Mélusine Mayance) and 4 year old Michel (played by Paul Mercier) never appeared on any deportation list and therefore could have survived.

What to do?  With Julia’s mother-in-law very ill in an assisted living facility, she tactfully broaches the matter with her father-in-law Édouard (played by Michel Duchaussoy) who tells her a part of the story.  He had been a young boy when his family had moved into the apartment sometime soon after the Starzynskis had been deported and, yes, 12-year old Sarah, along with and older French peasant couple had come back to the apartment some time after that, with Sarah hysterically screaming for her brother – Just prior to their deportation, Sarah had hidden and locked her little brother in a false compartment behind a wall BUT COULD NOT COME BACK TO GET HIM OUT WHEN THE REST OF THEM WERE TAKEN AWAY BY THE AUTHORITIES. 

The movie’s about the repercussions of this 60+ year old secret playing out in the lives of several families to the present day. 

I’m from a central European (mostly Czech) background.  So I too grew-up with the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin being persistent if unwelcome guests at pretty much every family gathering when I was young.  So I know something of historical tragedy fatigue.

Still, this is a French take on a truly awful chapter in our shared history.  Each culture has a need for a national catharsis, and each culture has something to offer to others through its stories and its willingness (or unwillingness) to face the past.  The particular horror in this story was first that it was the French police who carried out the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of Paris’ Jews (at the German occupiers’ behest) and second that there were French families who benefited from the confiscations.  Still these stories/tragedies with local variations played-out across Europe to this day.

[A recent Czech take (lighter but its way similarly challenging) on the Nazi Occupation / Holocaust years was a movie called Musíme si Pomáhat, which played with English subtitles under the title Divided We Fall but the title translates better to the plea, "We have to help each other," about three acquaintances, one ethnic-Czech, one ethnic (Sudeten) German and one Jewish living on the same apartment block in Prague during the years surrounding the war.  Did the three help each other?  Could they have done more?  How well did the country as a whole do?  And is there some shame that the _only_ one of the three who'd be left on that block today would probably be the ethnic-Czech?  Again, each country/ethnicity has its stories to tell and its own shame to exorcise.]


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The Guard

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1540133/
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110803/REVIEWS/110809995

The Guard (written and directed by John Michael McDonagh) runs like a rural Irish inversion of the famed Eddie Murphy movie Beverly Hills Cop.  Thoroughly competent/professional African-American FBI man Wendell Everett (played by Don Cheadle) comes to rural Galway in the western reaches of Ireland to work with Irish local and national authorities to intercept an anticipated half-billion dollar drug shipment.  When he arrives, to his horror, he’s forced to team-up with an amiable but thoroughly “unprofessional” seeming rural cop (member of the Irish Garda) named Sargent Gerry Boyle (played by Brendan Gleeson).  After a disastrous initial meeting at a briefing on the matter, Everett is shocked to find that on the first day on the case together, Boyle notes that it’s his day off and proceeds to take it.  To Everett there’s "not a minute to spare," to Boyle there’s nothing that could possibly happen that could not wait until the next day.  And so it goes...

At one point an exasperated Everett says to Boyle: “I just don’t know if you’re just really, really stupid, or if you’re really, really smart.” [Those who see the movie, will note that my phraseology is sanitized for the readership here ;-)]

It turns out, of course, that Boyle knows quite well how things go in western Ireland, and in a climactic scene near the end when Boyle and Everett find themselves taking on the drug-smugglers themselves, Everett asks, “Should we call for back-up?”  Boyle answers quite sadly and  knowingly, “There will be no back-up.”

Such it _also_ is in rural western Ireland (and in much of the rest of the world): All the authorities knew, more or less, where the shipment was probably going to come.  And all the authorities _also knew_ (and quite well) to stay far, far away from it ... (Honestly, that was one of the best, most gut-wrenching dialogue exchanges in a police drama that I’ve seen since similar scenes in the Kevin Costner/Sean Connery film The Untouchables or, for that matter in the closing scene in the Harrison Ford/Brad Pitt, New York/IRA drama The Devil’s Own).

And Everett’s comment “I just don't know if you're really, really stupid, or really, really smart,” resonates to the very end.

Parents should be warned that there is a good deal of bad langauage and other crudity in the movie that isn't for little kids and that Boyle is certainly not a paragon of moral virtue.  But he does take his dying mother to Confession...  And again, _so it goes_ in this movie: The humor, even when it is crude, is _gentle_ and based on what I've learned over the years of Ireland / the Irish (I am 75% Czech and the remainder Russian/Ukrainian...) it's very, very Irish ;-).


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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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