Life, Above All

MPAA (PG-13)  Roger Ebert (4 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1646111/
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110831/REVIEWS/110839993

Life, Above All (directed by Oliver Schmitz, screenplay by Dennis Foon based on the novel Chanda's Secrets by Allan Stratton) was South Africa’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2010 Oscars where it made to the short list of candidates but not to the final list of nominees.

It’s about a 12 year old girl named Chanda (played by Khomotso Manyaka) taking care of her mother Lillian (played by Lerato Mvelase) and her younger half-brother and sister living in a small village outside of Johannesburg.  As the movie begins, Chanda’s infant sister Sara had just died.  Her mother is seemingly paralyzed by grief.  So it’s left to Chanda to skip school to go to the funeral parlor to make arrangements for the funeral (and make excuses for her mother as she does so).  Thanked by her neighbor (grandmother?) Mrs Tafa (played by Harriet Manamela), Chanda is reminded “your baby sister died of the flu, just like my son was killed when they tried to break into our house.”  Why was she reminded of that? “Remember this Chanda, because people talk....”

What’s the big secret?  Well, as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Chanda’s mother probably has AIDS.  Chanda’s father (her mother’s first husband) who died some time earlier probably had AIDS as well.  Chanda’s step-father, Jonah (played by Aubrey Poolo) reduced to being a drunk, is sickly as well (even as Chanda’s much younger brother and sister revere him, because he is their dad). 

Finally, Chanda’s mother’s family isn’t helping.  Why?  Because they’re still angry at Chanda’s mother for having left with/married Chanda’s father rather than the man that they had arranged for her to marry.  As far as Chanda’s mother’s family understands it, Chanda’s mother had all this coming to her.

What a sad, sad story this is!  I suspect that part of the reason why it didn’t make it all the way through the Oscars nomination process (or received more notoriety than it has) is because the story could be perceived as “a downer” perpetuating an image of Africans/the poor as simply victims to be pitied and perhaps “helped.” 

Yet I do believe the movie is more than that.  First, the movie portrays a remarkably strong 12-year old, who despite her age, calmly and kindly takes care of the people who need her from her mother, to her half-brother/sister to even her (orphaned and at times wayward...) best friend Esther (played by Keaobaka Makanyane), all of whom would have been utterly lost without her. 

And I would submit that many/most of us would not have to dig all that far to find similar stories in our families’ pasts.  My own grandmother (back in Czechoslovakia) had been taken out of school when she was 10 ostensibly to take care of her mother when her mother fell ill (Her mother lived for another 35 years afterwards).  A number of years ago, I buried an 87 year old man who came to Chicago from Mexico _alone_  when he was 13, found a job and brought a good part of his family here.  Last year, I buried another elderly woman this time from Poland, who came to Chicago as a 17 year old during World War II by way of Eastern Poland, the Soviet Union, Iran, India and (via a Polish-American relief organization) Mexico before coming here.  After finding a job here, she was able to bring her younger brother and sister to Chicago (from a refugee camp in India) by the same route (They never saw either of their parents again, though their mother made it back to Poland after the war).  The stories of a lot of our immigrant parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are filled with suffering _and overcoming suffering_ not unlike the story of Chanda.

The story of Chanda is also one of _choosing loyalty to those who needed her_ rather abandoning them to neighborhood gossips who preferred to talk about theor sufferings rather than helping them.  One of my favorite quotations from the writings of Pope John Paul II is “Justice will never be fully attained unless people see in the poor person, who is asking for help in order to survive, not an annoyance or a burden, but an opportunity for showing kindness...” (Encyclical Letter Centisimus Annus, #58). 

As such, Life, Above All is more than simply a movie about misery.  Instead, in the tradition of great compassionate “realist” movies of the past, ranging from Italy’s Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri Di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) to Brazil’s Walter Salles’ Central do Brasil (Central Station) to indeed, South Africa’s Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, Life, Above All is an invitation to enter into Chanda’s world and to hopefully _see ourselves_ in her.

ADDENDUM:

I would be remiss to add that my own (USA) Province of the Servite Order has been responsible for the Servite Order’s mission in the KwaZulu-Natal State of South Africa and that in recent years one of the primary ministries of that mission has become its uNkulunkulu uNathi AIDS Project.


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The Debt

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

IMDb Listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226753/
CNS/USCCB Review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv102.htm
Roger Ebert’s Review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110830/REVIEWS/110839999

The Debt (directed by John Madden, screenplay cowritten by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan based on the 2007 Israeli Film Ha Hov by Assaf Bernstein and Ido Rosenblum) is a post-Holocaust / Mossad espionage thriller with a surprisingly universal theme that transcends both WW II/recent history and even the spy-thriller genre.

In the story, a team of agents from the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad composed of Stephan Gold (played by Marton Csokas), Rachel Singer (played by Jessica Chastain) and David Peretz (played by Sam Worthington) are sent to East Berlin in 1964 (after the building of the Berlin Wall) to abduct and bring back to Israel for trial an infamous Nazi war criminal named Dieter Vogel (played by Jesper Christensen).   Dieter Vogel, was said to have managed to change his identity and find work as a gynecologists at an utterly non-distinct clinic in East Berlin under the name of Dr. Bernhardt had been wanted as “the Surgeon of Birkenau” for a sadistic series of medical experiments that he was to have conducted on Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz-Bierkenau concentration camp.  The scenario in this thriller was a conflation of the actual abduction and bringing back to Israel for trial of Adolf Eichmann and the search for Dr. Joseph Mengele who, in fact, had conducted horrific medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with the addition of a complex Cold War twist.  After abducting Dr. Bernhardt/Dieter Vogel, the team had to smuggle him from Communist East Berlin past the Berlin Wall to West Berlin (under Western Allied control) and then back to Israel. The story also resonates well with another true Israeli operation dramatized in the movie Munich (directed by Steven Spielberg) about an Israeli hit squad was sent out to assassinate the Palestinians responsible for the abduction and killing of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

The mission in the fictional scenario of The Debt doesn’t succeed as planned.  But rather than face possible sanction by Mossad and admit failure to both country and their families, prior to returning to Israel the three decide to spin the mission into a success – after successfully abducting him, they were unable to get Dieter Vogel over the East Berlin border _but at least he was dead_.  (Was he dead?  They weren’t sure. But they were sure that neither Vogel nor the East German government would want to admit that he was still alive).  So they come back to Israel and become heroes.  The abduction plan didn’t come out as planned but at a time when Israel desperately needed heroes -- a few years before the impending 1967 Six Day War that _changed everything_ in the Middle East -- Israel and the Jewish people were given heroes in these three's apparent success and appeared once again to have been successful in avenging past Nazi-era crimes.

Flash forward 30 years to 1994  Rachel (now played by Helen Mirren) and Stephan (now played by Tom Wilkinson)’s daughter had just launched a doting book about her parents’ glorious exploits, and David (Ciarán Hinds), who never was comfortable with the lie and (perhaps above all) with the adulation that the three had received on account of the lie, returns into the other two’s lives (after many years away) with news that a Ukrainian journalist claims have interviewed an elderly man in a nursing home outside of Kiev who claimed to be “The Surgeon of Birkenau.”  What to do now? 

The rest of the movie about resolving that question...

I found the movie to be surprisingly universal in scope.  Sure most of us (or our parents) never were Mossad agents trying to bring former Nazi War Criminals to justice.  However, our lives (and our pasts) are generally more complicated than how our children (or the outside world) would understand them and our parents’ lives were generally more complicated than how we understood them certainly as children.

[Another great literary/cinematic expression of the actual complexity of a person’s life vs the way the outside world may see it could be found in Michael Ondaatje's book (and the movie based on it) The English Patient.  In that movie, on one level all that the audience saw of “the English Patient” was a man almost completely covered (head-to-toe) in bandages.  But the person _under those bandages_ had once lived a _full and even scandalous life_, this story making-up much of the rest of that film.  Milan Kundera also played with the theme of the difference between the actual history of our lives and the way others remember them already _somewhat_ in his book Unbearable Lightness of Being but _especially_ in his subsequent book Immortality].

So a good part of the drama in The Debt becomes how to shield one’s daughter from the reality that her parents weren’t as great as she thought they were (or how to somehow break this to her).  It becomes a great story, that most of us already “of a certain age” could certainly appreciate ;-)


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One Lucky Elephant [2010]

MPAA (unrated)  Roger Ebert (3 stars) Fr. Dennis (3 stars)

IMDb listing
Roger Ebert’s review

One Lucky Elephant (directed by Lisa Leeman and written by Cristina Colissimo) is a documentary ten years in the making about circus producer David Balding’s 10 year quest to find a permanent home for Flora, an african elephant who he had adopted when she was an infant.  He had made her the star attraction of his circus, and who at 18 years of age was beginning to show signs (by occasional acting-out/aggressiveness) that she was done with being in the circus.  And so he began to look for place for her to stay, preferably among other elephants, and preferably with a lot of space available.  After trying several zoos and other sanctuaries, he settled on an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee at a cost of eventually being banned from visiting Flora after leaving her there.

The movie raises all kinds of questions about human-animal relationships, and how to understand the relationship between David and Flora.  Was it fundamentally affectionate or was it fundamentally abusive? 

If not for David, Flora could have been dead, left as an orphan to die, or could have been “adopted” by a far more abusive owner.  On the other hand, she could have perhaps been placed immediately into an elephant sanctuary around other elephants (either in Africa or in the United States or another Western country). 

Then to train Flora for the circus, she had to be “broken” at a relatively young age.  This was done in a way that one “breaks” a young horse, and few people would see the “breaking” of a young horse to be fundamentally evil.  All kinds of horse-owners love their horses and are convinced that their horses fundamentally like them.  Even dogs are “trained” when young in order to serve as better pets and most mature to be happy as pie.  Further, Asian countries have used (trained) elephants for labor and even warfare for millennia.  So while the documentary this “breaking” of Flora as a young elephant to perhaps have been fundamentally abusive, I honestly don’t know.

Finally, it is clear that elephants are intelligent.  Would it not be worth it for the sake of better understanding animals (and life forms of all kinds) to find ways to communicate with them? 

Any number of methods could be employed I suppose, from observing plant/animal behavior in the wild, to placing electrodes on test subjects and measuring physiological response to various stimuli (from benign to harmful), to (as has been done in primate studies) teaching the animals a sign language so that we could communicate with them and they with us.   

Non-invasiveness, and seeking to minimize pain/harm to the test subject (be it a plant, dog, chimp or an elephant) would seem to be a key criterion in ethically studying them. With regard to higher animals, since young primates have been taught sign-language, perhaps a sign language of sorts could be taught to elephants as well.  (One thinks of the horse, Mr Ed, who would could pound his hooves to count out numbers...). 

But since ‘breaking” of young horses has been something that has been done for millennia without any clear indication that this was fundamentally harmful to the horse (and has presumably been done with elephants in several Asian countries for millennia as well), I would not dwell on this being necessarily or irredeemably evil.  Even (human) children are “raised’ (disciplined at times to be civilized) so that they can function effectively in society.  HOW an animal is “broken” could be a fair issue, but that it is “broken” in order to become open to study and communication with us ought not to be necessarily seen as wrong.

Anyway, this movie certainly invites one to ask a lot of questions about our relationships with the other plants and animals which we share this world, and how to honestly label our relationships with them.


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Shark Night

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (O) Fr. Dennis (0 stars, like other movies of this type, it _sort of_ “has a message,” but the message condemns itself)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1633356/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv104.htm

Shark Night (directed by David R. Ellis, cowritten by Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg) is a movie that can be read as a gigantic F-U to “red necks.”  Indeed one of  the buffoonish (when not bigoted) red neck characters goes by the name of Red (played by Joshua Leonard).  What to make of a movie that's so slanted/insulting to an entire group of people?  And what to make of the movie’s taking such pleasure in portraying violence (the videotaping of a whole slew of people at least appearing to be eaten by sharks?)

Well, it has long been noted that slasher movies are rarely kind to “country folk” especially its males.  One thinks of Deliverance (1972), the rape revenge fantasy I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).  

I’ve read an explanation of this phenomenon some years back, in a book by Carol Clover a professor of Film Studies, yes entitled, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film (1993). (I had read this book while studying another aspect of these films -- that often the person who finally defeats "the monster" is a woman, usually the easily identifiable "good girl" (Virgin) in the movie.  Being from a Marian Order and in Catholicism, Mary (the Ultimate Good Girl) is portrayed as "crushing the head of the snake with [her] heal" (Gen 3:15) in the iconography of the Immaculate Conception and remembering these films from my teenage/young adult years, I found this phenomenon interesting and found it further interesting that someone had actually studied the "final girl" phenomenon, if not linking it in anyway to Mary/Catholicism).

Anyway the author, Carol Clover, noted that Americans, especially American city dwellers have always feared (and grudgingly respected) “the people of the land.” The original “people of the land” in the United States were the “red skins” (Native Americans) who white European-descended Americans so feared that they largely wiped them out.  Those “red skins” were replaced “red necks,” who “more civilized Americans,” living in cities, and with better educations _continue_ to fear, look down upon, but also depend on for survival.  For who raises the food that we eat?  Who slaughters the cows and chickens to bring meat to our tables?  Who fixes our cars when the break down, especially when they breakdown on a deserted road, far from home?  In recent years, frankly, who largely fights our wars?  (And finally who sends them there to fight, kill and die?)   

This fear, grudging respect and _certain_ dependence on the _quite literally marginalized_ country-dwelling Americans by richer, more educated, more connected, city-dwelling folks forms a good part of the sub-text of these stories, Shark Night being no exception.

The other sub-text to this particular story is certainly the polarization that exists in our political system, divided _in good part_, actually, between city and country.  For there are two groups in this movie that come to a clash: 

On the one hand, there is a group of “pampered” and (if their banter is to be believed) sexually promiscuous, but also multiracial/diverse, tolerant, fairly well educated college students represented here as coming from Louisiana’s Tulane University. In the movie, they go on a weekend trip to (finally) visit the (turns out palatial) country home of a classmate, Sara (played by Sara Paxton).  Since this movie is set in Louisiana, this palatial home turns out to be on an island in the bayou.  Note also that since Sara was going to college (to a _private_ university) this indicated also that although Sara’s family was also “from the country’, it had to be somewhat rich, represented by that palatial home, exaggerated perhaps, but in its exaggeration actually making the point.

On the other hand is a group of “red neck” males that Sara grew-up with (and _left behind_) centered around a _former boyfriend_ named Dennis (played by Chris Carmack), who didn’t have the opportunity or resources “to leave the swamp” like Sara did.

Notable are two “insights” in this movie: 

The first is that the richer, more diverse group appears capable if at least superficially (without having to experience the marginalization and hardships...) to appreciate the beauty of “simpler” country-living (smiling, drinking beer, enjoying the fresh air and general tranquility of the water...) and is even capable of reaching out and incorporating the marginalized “red-necks” from the other group “so long as they don’t get too crazy...” (The college students initially trust the country-dwelling rednecks, initiating conversations with them, sharing their beer with them ...) 

The second “insight” is that technology and the internet are reaching everywhere.  So “on their own” those “poor, dumb, red necks” had “come up with a sure-fire plan” to make a whole bunch of money on the internet – selling video of people, preferably young, good looking people _being eaten by sharks_.  (What a hoot! ....) Sure this is really, really _evil_ but given that “shark week” is so popular on cable television ... it ought to finally make them a boatload of money. 

And there you have it...  

The challenge proposed by this film to society (if “society” is willing to watch a movie this and then tries to figured out what it’s trying to say) is to _finally_ figure-out how to welcome/include/incorporate _everyone_ in itself including the marginalized people (“red necks”) of the country before these marginalized people do something so evil on their own trying to catch-up that it destroys (in this case, _literally consumes_) everyone.

Am I reading _way too much_ into this film?  Consider that the plot of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie was about a family that had worked at a slaughterhouse/meat processing plant for generations.  When the plant closed down, the family, which knew only how to slaughter cows (hammer to their foreheads) and cut them up (with chainsaws), started to do that to people.  The idea of these simple, if obviously deeply troubled/resentful, “red necks” in this movie of mounting cameras on sharks, “like the folks filming the penguins did in the March of the Penguins...” and then filming the sharks attacking people, is of the same class of boneheadedness.  And Shark Nigh is of the same (slasher) genre as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was. 

Can one recommend this movie to anyone?  Obviously not to kids.  Then just because a movie can be made, doesn’t mean that it should.  Whatever “message” expressed in this movie, could have _certainly_ been expressed in a less violent way.  Indeed, this movie is but _one notch_ below the boneheaded scheme of those “boneheaded red necks.” Shark Night presents “a simulation” of young people being chewed-up by sharks, not the real thing.  Wow, what a difference.  So yes, this is a movie that perhaps “has a message” but it’s a message that condemns itself.   


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Brighton Rock (2010)

MPAA (unrated) CNS/USCCB (L) Roger Ebert (2 ½ Stars) Fr Dennis (3 ½ stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233192/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv101.htm
Roger Ebert’s review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110824/REVIEWS/110829996

Brighton Rock (screenplay written and directed by Rowan Joffe) is an update of the Graham Greene's 1938 novel by the same name.  A 1947 film version also by the same name with the screenplay having been co-written by Graham Greene had also been previously made.

The current version, sets the movie in 1964 when Brighton near the Cliffs of Dover and other coastal beach communities  in southeastern England had been rocked by nihilistic youth riots between rival gangs of Mods and Rockers, later immortalized in the British rock band, The Who’s, album/musical Quadrophenia.  To some extent, the timeless battle between good and evil, present in the hearts of the characters populating Graham Greene’s novel, now takes place in a town distracted and temporarily consumed by battles between two rival groups of young people arriving from other parts of England both of which could largely care less about questions of “good and evil” and whose divisions coalesced around simply rival Mod and Rocker visions of style.  That in itself becomes an interesting point of reflection.

Current viewers will probably come away appreciating that Graham Greene wrote at a time when the Catholic Church was certainly far more confident (and perhaps more respected) than it is today, and when it was considered possible, indeed _even probable_, that a “bad boy,” in this case in the person of petty but ruthless gangster Pinkie Brown (played by Sam Riley) could really be what he both appeared to be and even what he professed to be, that is, truly Evil.  Compare this to the contemporary Twilight series in which “bad boys” presented as vampires (traditionally _bloodsucking vampires_) are “re-imagined” as having been “misunderstood.”

Indeed, it might not be bad for any family in which their teenage daughter is dating a gang-banger or thug, to have her watch this film.

I say this because in this tale, thirty-one year old petty gangster Pinkie (the name more of a loser than a truly strong guy) begins to hit-on and eventually marries seventeen-year-old (a minor) Rose (played by Andrea Riseborough), a waitress in a Brighton coastal tea-house who otherwise would have just been at the beginning of her life.  He does so simply because he realizes that Rose _could_ have been a peripheral witness to a murder that he committed.  Early in the film while on a short break from her waitressing job and thus finding herself walking on Brighton’s pier, she had briefly talked to the man who Pinkie ended up murdering a few minutes later below the pier.  However, she talked to the victim long enough that she probably could have identified him and _perhaps_ could have added that he appeared to be rather agitated, fearful that something terrible might soon happen to him. 

Pinkie pursues his plan up to actually marrying Rose (civilly) with the sole purpose of _making sure_ that Rose _as his wife_ could by British law _never be compelled_ to testify against him.  His deceitful plan is all the more galling in that early in his pursuit of Rose, he notices by the medallion that she was wearing that she was “Roman” (Catholic) and so he plays-up his own Catholic upbringing to “disarm her” emotionally and get her to trust him. 

Ida (played by Helen Mirren), Rose’s middle-aged boss at the tea house and something of a woman of the world (who it is suggested may have even had an affair with the young hood that Pinkie had murdered) doesn’t buy any of Pinkie’s charms and tries to warn Rose to stay away from Pinkie but of course to no avail.

Rose marries Pinkie.  Since Rose is underage and couldn't do so without parental permission, Pinkie has to literally buy off Rose’s rather worthless dad, which he does in a terrible, gut-wrenching bartering session.  Where’s Rose’s Catholicism in all of this?  Well she’s in love ... and she simply can’t believe that Pinkie could be that Evil.

Indeed, Pinkie _even taunts her_ as they go to the judge to get married, telling her that they are (that _she is_) committing _a mortal sin_ by getting married before a judge.  (As all this drama plays out, there are gangs of smartly dressed Mods on motor-scooters and black-leather jacketed Rockers on motorcycles battling it out on the coastal drive in Brighton ...).   And she marries him anyway.

How would God resolve such a mess, punish the guilty and render mercy to the innocent?  That’s what the rest of the movie is about.

Parents, there is plenty of violence and harsh language throughout this film.  The consumation of Rose’s and Pinkie’s marriage is not dwelled upon, but enough is implied that one would imagine that the consumation was rather depraved.  So the film is definitely not for young kids.  But it may make a very good discussion piece for parents with older more troublesome teens where parents may have to play the role of Ida in this film to step-in and at least to plead: “Honey, this is _your life_ that you're playing with.  Don’t let someone no good for you screw it up for you.”


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Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

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

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert’s review



Don’t be Afraid of the Dark (directed by Troy Nixey, co-written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins, based on the 1973 movie by the same name by John Newland and Nigel McKaend) is one of an IMHO surprising number of horror genre films that have been released in recent weeks.   Indeed, so large a number of such films has been released in these last four weeks – Final Destination 5, Fright Night, this one, Shark Night, Apollo 18 – that I asked the good people reading the IMBb website’s message boards, if they could tell me why this would be.  After all, this is the late summer, not a few weeks before Halloween.


The consensus from the IMDb readers seems to be that “the late summer” is an “off-season” in the movie business.  All the major summer block busters have been released (and the “Oscar Season” films are generally released late in the year, around December).  So this is actually a fairly good time to release pictures that one’s had “in the can” (in production) but has less confidence in.  The bigger complaint on the IMDb Horror genre board has been that these recent movies have been lackluster and have lacked originality.  Indeed, all of these movies except possibly Apollo 18 have been remakes or sequels, which is not a good sign.  Still there are only a limited number of story lines available to any genre.  So beginning with that limitation, the challenge to genre-film-makers is to add enough variation, originality or otherwise pizzaz to make their new film compelling.  One gets the sense that star Katie Holmes excluded, the makers of this film, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, were largely just going through the motions.

At its base, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark is a “haunted house” story.  A story teller then is faced then with the task of deciding what/who is going to "haunt" the house and give a plausible explanation as to why.  Finally, as it becomes clear to the characters in the story that “there are problems with the house,” the story teller is given the task of giving a plausible explanation as to why the characters just don’t leave.  Usually, the explanation offered is incredulity --“Honey, there are no such things as ghosts / monsters” -- or some financial reason – “Honey, we put so much money into this damn house” (Ametyville Horror) or “Honey, we came here so that I finish this ($%#!) book, and if I don’t finish it we’ll be broke” (The Shining). 

The makers of this film do take a decent stab at fulfilling these plot necessities.  Alex (played by Guy Pierce) a New England architect with an ex-wife in California buys an old Rhode Island mansion that had once belonged to a 19th century naturalist and painter of wildlife named Blackwood (played by Garry McDonald).  Blackwood is loosely based on the historical 19th century naturalist and wildlife painter John James Audobon, only much creepier. 

What makes Blackwood creepy?  Well, the naturalist paintings of wildlife back then were often rather creepy in themselves.  Remember this was _before photography_.  So wildlife painters were tasked with making photograph-like sketches/paintings of rather rare birds and other wildlife that were precise enough to be used for _scientific_ study.  That made for fairly stiff, rather lifeless drawings.  But at that time, the middle of the 19th century, this was the best available technology (a person with a sketch pad and some drawing pencils) available to communicate what one observed in the field.  Now add to this, the surprise/”horror” that Blackwood encountered when he discovered some really strange creatures living in the crevices under his Rhode Island home... We’re also told in the story that “no one really knew how Blackwood (and his young son) died.”  They just seemed to have disappeared...

So it is Blackwood’s mansion that architect Alex purchases for renovation, and because of the current housing/real estate crisis it’s extremely important for him to do an outstanding job in restoring the house in order to “make a name for himself in his profession,” and thus survive financially.  There are simply _not_ a lot of jobs for architects in the United States today.  And this then forms part of the “sub-text” of this story.

The other part of the “sub-text” comes from Alex’s personal life.  He is divorced.  His ex-wife lives in Southern California and needs him to take their 10 year old daughter Sally (played by Bailee Madison) “for a while.”  Alex has the mansion restoration job that he’s undertaken.  He also has a girlfriend, Kim (played by Katie Holmes), that he’s living-with, but since he’s been married/divorced once, he’s not particularly anxious to marry.  Kim herself was a child of divorce (or otherwise from a troubled home), so she’s not anxious to get married either.  But she is desperate _not_ to be “the evil stepmother” to Sally when Sally arrives dressed in a _needlessly heavy_ if still cute “pink winter coat” on a plane from “sunny Southern California” to “dreary New England in November” near the beginning of the film.  Poor little Sally has been uprooted from her home and forced to live in a cold dreary home with her father and his desperate-to-be-liked girlfriend who she hardly knows.  What a nightmare ...

So when Sally “hears voices” from little creatures saying that “they want to play with her ...” initially she _prefers them_ to happy-face balloon-carrying Kim.  The problem is that these little creatures turn out to be really ugly demon-like fairies who live in the crevices under the earth, who once let out demand human sacrifice. 

So problems ensue ...

The film plays out from there.  One can not but _like_ poor “desperately responsible / desperately trying to be liked” Kim.

But there are problems with this film, both technical and moral.  I happen to agree with Stephen King who writes in The Dance Macabre, his "how to" book on horror genre writing/film making, that unless one has a really well-crafted, credibly-looking monster, it’s probably not good put one on the screen.  Indeed, that’s why ghost stories often work so much better when they are told than when they are put on the screen.  I’ll leave it to the viewers to make their own determination if the fairies in this movie were worth putting on the screen.  (I personally was not particularly impressed). 

The second problem is the movie’s choice of explanation of why we don’t see these demonic fairies more often.  In the story, we are told that Pope Sylvester II had made a pact with the fairies near the turn of the first millenium (1000 AD) banishing them to the subterranean crevices but in turn leaving them alone.  However, if at any time they were set free, as apparently inadvertently by Blackwood (or his young son) when building his home in the 19th century, and apparently happens again during the home’s restorarion, the fairies could demand a human sacrifice before returning to their subterranean lairs.

Here the CNS/USCCB rightly asks why poor Pope Sylvester II had to be sucked into this tale.  It turns out that Pope Sylvester II was a remarkably progressive Pope at his time.  Concerned that Christiandom was being outclassed and buried by a far more intellectually advanced Islamic world, he openly called for and collected as much information and knowledge that was available to him and the Christian world of the time, bringing it all back to Rome.  His more conservative critics of the time, frightened by his willingness to collect knowledge even from the Islamic world and his willingness to be open to even occult/magical and pagan texts. (Let's face it, what else would have been available at the time? and how else could you go through what knowledge actually worked and what did not, except through first collecting what's available and then sifting through it and testing it afterward?)  As such, he was accused by his critics of “having made a pact with the Devil.”  But arguably through his openness to the knowledge existing at his time, he saved Christian Europe, bringing to Europe such innovations as Arabic numerals (without which modern mathematics would be simply impossible) and the Abacus (arguably the first counting machine).  Indeed, today’s computer nerds might find it interesting that Sylvester proved so adept at making rapid calculations using the Abacus that his critics used this as “proof” that he simply had to be "in league with the Devil" :-).  Could Pope Sylvester II become the "patron saint of computer nerds?" ;-)

Anyway, Pope Sylvester II was arguably a progressive Christian hero who saved Christian Europe, and here the film makers made him, once again, someone “in league with the Devil.”

I suppose positively, the movie allows (if utterly by accident) viewers to go back to their Church history books (or to google / wikipedia) and learn about this very interesting pope and about the time and challenges in which he lived.

Would I recommend this movie?  It’s okay, not great.  The R-rating is appropriate.  Some of the scenes really would certainly be very terrifying to young kids (I'm not kidding, the fairies are really, really ugly and occassionally they jump out at you). There’s that needless swipe on an utterly undeserving figure in the Catholic Church who had already been much maligned by misinformed/fearful/ignorant critics of his own time.  Finally, perhaps more than many other films, the movie does leave one to wonder whether many modern couples see any intentionality at all in their relationships.  Alex was married once and divorced.  Why?  We don’t know.  In the movie, he’s shacked-up with Kim and neither he nor she seems at all interested in formalizing their relationship with each other with marriage.  And again, we don’t really know why.

In the end, one’s left wondering whether our relationships today are simply unreflected-upon informal contracts of mutual convenience that we can walk away from when we find something better (or just get bored...).  And, yes, that does seem rather dreary and sad...


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Viva Riva!

MPAA (R) Roger Ebert (3 ½ stars) Fr. Dennis (3 stars) 

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723120/
Roger Ebert -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110817/REVIEWS/110819986

Viva Riva! (written and directed by Djo Munga) is an African Academy Award Winning (best director) English-subtitled French language crime thriller which comes from the Congo and is a reminder to me of one of the joys of going to the movies.  For the price of admission or a rental (still on the order of eating at a fast food restaurant) one can be transported for two to three hours to a totally different time and place.   And with the world becoming ever more interconnected, the stories being told in these films are becoming more and more authentic.  For this is _not_ Hollywood or some colonial power going to Africa to tell a story.  This is an African (Congolese) writer/director using African actors to tell a gripping contemporary African tale with both characteristic African humor and style. (The Servite Friars to whom I belong have presences and native friars in Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa (KwaZulu-Natal), Swaziland and Uganda.  Additionally, the Servite Sisters are in various West African countries including Cameroon, Ghana, Togo and the Ivory Coast.  And since our Order has never been particularly large (never more than about 1000 friars world-wide, despite having been around since 1233 around the time of St. Francis), I've gotten to know a fair number of our African friars and other friars from around the Servite world.  And besides meeting at various international Servite gatherings and so forth, like a good part of the rest of the world, a good number of us are on Facebook ;-).  So I'm not kidding when I say that this movie has an authenticity to it that non-African productions about Africa generally do not have).

So then, what is this Congolese story about?  Riva (played by Patsha Bay) is a charismatic and resourceful late 20-something to early 30-something con-man native of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  For perpetually fuel-starved Kinshasa (on account of endemic political instability and civil war), Riva arrives with a truckload of barrels full of high-grade gasoline that he diverted (stole) and smuggled into the country from neighboring, oil producing Angola.  Instantly, Riva becomes the toast of the town, with everyone with some money from Kinshasa’s relatively well-to-do, to the authorities, to organized crime figures to even a local Catholic priest wanting get some fuel from him. 

At a nightclub on the first night after coming into Kinshasa with his truck full of gasoline, Riva spots a stunning young woman named Nora (played by Manie Malone).  Riva’s best friend and partner advises caution.  Afterall, a woman that attractive had to be attached to someone.  And he’s right, Nora is the current girlfriend of local organized crime kingpin Azor (played by Diplome Amerikindra), who doesn’t kindly to the handsome, younger and charismatic Riva hitting on her.  Even Nora initially tells Riva to give it a break, that she’s just not interested in some upstart.  So Riva and his best-friend head off and spend the night at a Kinshasa hotel/brothel run by “Mother Edo” (Nzita Tumba).

The next day, a rather angry Angolan organized crime figure named Cesar (played by Hoji Fortuna) appears with a posse of about five henchman at a border crossing seeking to enter into the DRC.  Cesar and his posse sequester the Commandant (played by Marlene Longange) at the border crossing, tell her that they have her sister in Angola and will kill her unless she helps them find Riva and the stolen shipment of gasoline. 

Much ensues.  Riva does manage to charm his way into Nora’s heart while keeping always a few steps ahead of jealous Azor.  A local Catholic priest takes pity on the woman Commandant and helps her escape Cesar and his henchmen, hiding her in a convent.  Then in the guise of a wronged, righteous and rather well armed nun, the Commandant then sets out to bring _all the evil doers_ in this tale to justice. 

So despite the relatively wild night clubs / brothels and some steamy sex (though always portrayed with some discretion), the story actually ends up playing out as something of a morality tale: 

During the course of the film, we get to meet Riva’s parents, and Riva’s parents are _not_ impressed with his new-found, ill-gotten money no matter how popular he had otherwise become.  And the Commandant turned-nun slowly exacts justice on the various evil doers of the story.  She herself, does not take-down many of them.  In most cases, the various king-pins and their henchmen shoot or otherwise kill each other.  But by the end, though wounded, she’s pretty much the only one left standing.  And Nora’s words, which she told Riva on the night in which she _did_ end-up in bed with him, that “money ends up killing everyone it touches” resonate loud and clear to all.

Yes, this is an R-rated tale, but it is truly well done.  And in the midst of the drinking and sex, guns and strobe lights there is a morality present and presented in a way that one would not necessarily have expected.  This is a movie that is worth seeing (by adults) and it does have a message worth hearing and taking to heart.


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