50/50 [2011]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1306980/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv119.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110928/REVIEWS/110929987

50/50 (directed by Jonathan Levine written by Will Reiser) is based on Will Reiser's true experience of surviving cancer.  Reiser was a producer of the rather irreverent Da Ali G Show and yes there is a (necessary) wit that remains present throughout this film.  I say necessary wit because the story on the face of it is so awful that without a sense of humor it could become truly difficult to bear.

The movie begins with Adam (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a mid-20 something writer for Seattle Public Radio giving his artist girl-friend Rachel (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) her own drawer in his dresser where she could start keeping her stuff.  When he tells her this, she smiles happily, "We're getting so domestic..."

But alas things are going to get far more complicated than either ever could have imagined very quickly: Adam, who's fit, jogs, eats right, etc, has nevertheless felt a nagging back-pain for a while and decides to go to a doctor to check it out.  After conducing an MRI, thinking that the doctor, Dr. Ross (played by Andrew Airlie) is just going to give him some medication and perhaps suggest some exercises, Adam initially doesn't even hear him when Dr. Ross tells him in a dispassionate, clinical tone that Adam has massive malignant tumor growing along and amid his spine and that he would need immediate chemotherapy to at least try to reduce the tumor to a manageable size prior to attempting to remove it through surgery.

When Adam checks the type of cancer on Web MD, he finds that if caught prior to metastasis, the prognosis for recovery is "50/50" (hence the title of the film).  After metastasis, the odds fall to below 10 percent.  Wow.  How'd, Adam contract this cancer anyway?   Dr. Ross tells him that his cancer is "interesting" clinically because it seems to be caused by an extremely rare genetic mutation.

So here's Adam, mid-20s with a brand new live-in girlfriend with his whole life ahead of him finding-out that he has a cancer that, even if he does everything right, could kill him with the same odds as a coin toss.  What to do?  Well he's got to tell his friends and loved ones.

It's not easy.  Put yourselves in Rachel's place.  Whatever one may or may not say about her and Adam's decision at the beginning of this story to start living together, imagine making the decision of entering into a serious relationship and almost immediately afterwards finding that one's partner has come down with a serious life-threatening and certainly life-altering condition.

Adam's best friend Kyle (played by Seth Rogan) is also knocked off of his feet.  He and Adam are in their 20s.  They're not supposed to have a care in the world.  This is their time to be alive, their time to set the direction for their lives.  And suddenly here is his best friend telling him that may die, and knowing that even if he does, it won't even be quick.  Rather, it will be a rather long agony in which one will watch him waste away ... slowly.

Then there's poor authentically saintly-martyr mom (played by Angelica Houston).  She's already taking care of dad (played by Serge Houde), who's already run through all the "easy" stages of Alzheimer's disease.  As a truly good mom, she'd cut herself up to take care of everyone.  But how?  She can't.  It's impossible.

And there it is.  What a movie.  How do they all do?   And how do "clinical" Doc Ross and "fresh out of grad school" counselor Katherine (played by Anna Kedwick) score?  Well, it's kinda a "crap shoot" again, as the title of the movie goes ... "50/50."  Some step-up, some do not, most initially don't really know how.  It's a learning process for everyone.  Anyone who's ever had to deal with tragedy among friends or serious illness in the family would certainly appreciate this.

This is the second movie in several weeks to come out which is about cancer and tragedy, the other being Restless.  In neither movie is there a single mention of God.  Yet, honestly this movie seems so much better and more honest than the other one (which with its needless invocation of "Darwin" of all things almost feels anti-God, where such "theological parlor games" become all but beside the point in the face of such tragedy).

In 50/50 we're watching a young person who would have had everything going for him, who suddenly, and seemingly utterly randomly (due to an "extremely rare genetic defect") finds himself wounded/struck down before us.  In the face of such horror/tragedy, it's best to do what Job's three friends did for the first seven days (prior to opening their mouths to speak...) after meeting their stricken friend.  For those first seven days they kept their MOUTHS SHUT, tore their shirts and just _sat with him_ in his pain (Job 2:12-13).

50/50 is appropriately rated R (not for minors and not for the squeamish) but not for any "graphic" reason, rather simply because of the theme.

And yes, I do hope that Reiser and his movie get nominated for best original screen play.


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Restless (2011)

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1498569/
CNS/USCCB review -
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110921/REVIEWS/110929996

Restless (directed by Gus Van Sant, written by Jason Lew) is a teen/young adult oriented movie about death.  That may seem initially like a rather grim subject matter.  But when one thinks about it, a fair number of teens with the world in front of them and also having some experience of tragedy, do at times ask or even focus on "big questions:" what's the meaning of it all? why death? why even the unfairness of death/tragedy?

In the past, elders would sit the youngsters down and basically tell them "listen up, this is how it is" (and proceed to give them a lesson on the traditional, received truths of one's religion or culture).  Restless, in line with much modern culture, seems to take the opposite tack of having the young people involved simply assemble their own stories and understandings of these questions without much/any reference to traditional systems of belief.


I "get" that this is part of a continued reaction to past more authoritarian approaches to religion and the general forming of the young. I also "get" that tragedy often leaves any ready-pat explanation "wanting" (witness, indeed Job's complaint in the biblical Book of Job).  And also there's something fresh/innocent about young people batting around troughts / ideas as they struggle to make sense of their lives (and sense of tragedies that they encounter in their lives).

That be said, there's also something (and I believe that teens would understand this, as I mean it exactly in exactly the way they would say it) arrogant about simply ignoring the received wisdom of thousands of years of traditional culture (no matter what traditional culture it may be).  Because people are people and the same struggles and basic questions that confront us today, have confronted us since the beginning of time.  As the Church began its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) at the end of the Second Vatican Council (1965):  "The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the [people] of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts." Why?  The Council writers continued: "For theirs is a community composed of [people]. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for [everyone]. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds. (GS #1)"  Perhaps summarizing this, though she would have never sat down to read The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, my own mother used to smile and remind me when I was being arrogant and rolling my eyes as a teen: "Son, there's nothing new under the sun." (Eccl 1:9).

So I do believe that there is lost when we choose to totally ignore the received wisdom of the past even as we try to defend the dignity of the present (both have their place).  And so I do feel that this movie (and other movies like it, that needlessly choose to pick a fight with religion) do fall shorter than necessary if only if they made a little better peace with the received wisdom of the past.

Very good then ... let's get to the movie ...

Enoch Brae (played by Henry Hopper) is a teen who's gone through a lot.  He lost his parents in an accident which had left him in a coma for three months.  Ever since then, he hasn't been the same.  Taken care of by his mother's sister, he's been thrown out of school for violently acting out.  Since then, he's taken to crashing other people's funerals -- he's always respectful but what the heck is he doing there? -- and hanging-with an invisible friend (a ghost?) named Hiroshi Takahashi (played by Ryo Kase) who he found at his bedside when he came out of his coma.  Hiroshi had died as a Japanese Kamikaze pilot at the end of World War II.  Together, they play the boardgame Battleship and Hiroshi always wins ;-).

At one of the funerals that Enoch crashes, he catches the eye of another teen, Anabel Cotton (played by Mia Wasikowska).  She finds it odd that he crashed her friend's funeral, but she saves him when a funeral director catches him and tries to expel him from the premises.  Anabel and Enoch then hit it off.

Anabel has her own issues.  She's dying of cancer.  So the two have death / near death in common.  Since Enoch had been clinically dead for several minutes and then in a coma for three months, Anabel asks Enoch what it was like.  He tells her about his invisible/ghost-like friend Hiroshi...

The banter through most of the movie is very much like that of typical teens, full of exaggerated certainty and innocence.  It's Halloween time (much of the movie's filmed in Portland Oregon).  So it's rainy, the leaves are falling, and there's a good amount of fog.  Enoch and Anabel decide to go trick-or-treating together.  He dresses (surprise) as a Japanese kamikaze pilot, Anabel to fit the theme as a geisha girl.  Hiroshi hands around as well.  At another time, the two, Anabel and Enoch play-out (and record) her "death scene" so that they "would be ready" for the drama when it comes.

Among the conversations that the two have, Anabel declares her love/fascination for Darwin.  "Why Darwin?" asks Enoch. Well she tells Enoch because "He was the smartest man in the world and saw the world for what it really is."  Enoch, unimpressed asks "What about Einstein?"  She let's the question go.  She simply likes Darwin.

This is the part of the movie that I found most irritating.  Why Darwin?  It's almost certainly a F-U a certain type of (Fundamentalist) Christianity that would insist on knowing all the answers and the movie's about two teenagers putting together from all but whole cloth their own answers.  (And here I'd note that the famous or infamous, depending on where a Catholic stands, the Second Vatican Council was exactly about trying to balance both the received faith of the past with experience of the present ...).  And so Anabel is dying, but somehow finds comfort in Darwin.  How?   None of us has a clue...

Near her death, Hiroshi starts acting as something of a guardian angel.  He was there to accompany Enoch in his trauma.  Now Anabel starts to see him as well, as death approaches her.  When she starts to see him, he's no longer in his Kamikaze uniform but dressed in a tuxedo and top hat (formal dress in Japan in the 1930s) ready to take her on her journey...

The imagery is lovely.  In the end, the story doesn't fall too far from the traditional religious apple cart.  I just found the reference to Darwin in an otherwise lovely (and sad) teenage story both needless and needlessly provocative. 


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Abduction

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-III) Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1600195/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv117.htm

Abduction (directed by John Singleton and written by Shawn Christensen) is a teen-oriented spy / conspiracy thriller about a teenager named Nathan (played by Taylor Lautner).  About to enter his senior year in high school, he has "some issues."  On the one hand, he's seeing a psychologist, Dr. Bennett (played by Sigourney Weaver) because of anger issues.  On the other hand, he's a star on the wrestling team and his father, Kevin (played by Jason Isaacs), seems obsessed with raising him to be a tough guy able to physically defend himself in almost any situation.  The result is that most of the other students in school are kinda scared of him, including cute cheer-leading neighbor Karen (played by Lily Collins) who liked him before, ages back in 8th grade, but just finds him a bit too weird/dangerous now.

What's going on in Nathan's head?  Well he keeps having a recurring nightmare about a dark haired woman, who looks completely unlike his blonde haired mother, Mara (played Maria Bello), but still kinda feels like a mother figure taking care of him.  In the dream, his peace is disturbed when a cloud of gas enters the room, and the dark-haired mother figure collapses even as she reaches out to him (or is she pointing?). Nathan saves himself  by hiding under a bed.  Recalling to Dr. Bennett this recurring dream, Dr. Bennett tells him "Well, sometimes it's best not to dig too deeply into these things." (!!) What kind of a psychologist is this woman?? ;-).  And there it is, something is deeply wrong here.

Both Nathan and the audience begin to get some answers when Nathan (and Karen) are given an assignment in their sociology class to write a report on missing-children hotlines.  To their surprise, one of the missing-children's sites showing a computer generated picture of what a child abducted years back could look like today looks just like Nathan.  Nathan recognizes even more.  In the "last seen" picture of the little boy, the boy in the picture is wearing a shirt that he recognizes (down to a stain on a shoulder) that his mother had kept (along with some other toddler/baby stuff of his) in a box in the garage.  What's going on?

After "sleeping on" this strange news, and talking about it the next day to one of his few buddies in school (who points out another oddity in Nathan's life: why does Nathan have only 1-2 pictures from when he was a baby/toddler when almost everyone else has hundreds?) he decides to ask his mother Mara about it.

She starts to cry saying that she knew this day was going to come and to asks him "just understand that the story's complicated."  She doesn't even start to give an explanation when a Slavic-sounding hit team breaks into to the house and ma, suddenly nearly as good a martial arts expert as dad, defends herself for at least a while, before succumbing.  Dad just coming home from work is killed as well.  Nathan, with all the starnge martial training that he received from his dad is able to take down the head of the hit team, even as Karen comes to the home ringing the door bell (to work on "missing children" project).  Nathan grabs her and they run through the house to the back, even as they hear a bomb ticking.  They jump into the pool in the backyard as the entire house blows up (with even the dead/wounded hitman inside).  What the heck just happened?

Soon Nathan and Karen running away from the still burning ruins of Nathan's house, soaking wet from jumping in the pool, when a car pulls up next to them.  The door opens.  Inside is Dr. Bennett.  She tells them to trust her and jump in.  They do.  Soon the three are being chased as well.  Again, what's going on?   She tells them a bit of situation, obviously that Kevin and Mara weren't Nathan's parents, that the dark haired woman in Nathan's dream was Nathan's actual mother and that Nathan's father was a CIA agent as was Dr. Bennett.  Beyond this, she tells them that the situation was very complicated, to not trust anyone (including even herself).  Finally, she gives Nathan an address where he would get more answers.  Then she slows down the car and orders the two to jump-out (into a sloping wooded ravine) before speeding away.  The rest of the movie follows ...

As in most movies of this kind, the audience is invited to "go for the ride" and to render its judgement about whether or not the movie ultimately makes sense, whether all the loose ends in the story tie together.  And I'd like to let the readers here who go to see the to decide this for themselves.

This movie also plays on a fairly popular premise in American movies over the last 20 or so years, the premise being "an ordinary person" turns out to not be not that "ordinary" after all.  Rather he/she turns out to be quite extraordinary.  Consider in the classic movie of this type, Under Siege (1992), actor Steven Seagal is first introduced as a lowly cook serving on an American battleship.  When the battleship is (quite prepostrously) taken over by a group of foreign sounding "terrorists," the "lowly cook" reveals his true identity.  He's actually a former Navy Seal (who for whatever reason decided walk away from the Navy Seals even if not from military life altogether).  Once he drops the "lowly cook" vaneer the "terrorists" don't stand a chance.   The same formula was used more recently in a fun Disney animated film The Incredibles (2004) where an ordinary, even boring, family turned out to be extra-ordinary (I loved The Incredibles ;-).  Finally, most recently the same formula was invoked in the recent Liam Neeson movie Taken (2008), where "dad" or even a "overly protective dad" turned out to be much more than just a hopelessly boring, "out of it" father, but rather a former CIA assassin who ends up killing half of France to save his daughter after she gets abducted by some really bad sex-trafficking mafia toughs.  So here too, in Abduction, Nathan turns out to be far more than "just a teen with anger issues."  He finds himself (and soon to be his girlfriend) caught-up in one heck of a conspiracy, one heck of a "first date" as he tells Karen near the end of the film.

Yes, it's kinda narcissistic.  And I do believe that a good part of Christianity and especially Catholicism is about declaring that "ordinary" is good (Bl. John Paul II wrote a beautiful reflection on St. Joseph, noting that next to nothing was known about him other than that he was "a carpenter" and "a just man" noting that to God, who entrusted his only Son, Jesus, to his care, that _was enough_).  And in my life as a Catholic priest, I have buried hundreds of good, _ordinary_ people.

Still as a teen oriented movie, I see a value to it.  Teens, as people who "have their whole life in front of them" have a right to dream.  Also, I do believe that budding relationships are (and ought to be) built around some kind of a story / adventure.  When people ask "How did you meet?" it's nice if there's a story there.  So even if the movie's certainly a bit exaggerated, I do think it makes for a nice teen-oriented film.

Note to parents: there are some (and repeated) references to some early, probably somewhat sexual exploration between the two characters Nathan and Karen.  What it actually was, is left unclear.  So parents ought to probably note this ("Ahem ...") but then probably leave it alone, or use it as an invitation to talk about such matters.  Certainly it should be made clear to all young people that at 8th grade (and really through all of high school) children are still not ready (at all...) to have kids themselves.  So "exploring" too much is really not a great idea.  Instead it'd be better to seek a "great adventure" like perhaps in this film than "doing something stupid in the boat house" that one would quickly regret even the next day.


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Moneyball

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  Roger Ebert (4 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv115.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110921/REVIEWS/110929999

Moneyball, directed by Bennet Miller, screenplay by Steven Zaillen and Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin, based on the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the remarkable 2002 season of the Oakland A's.  That year, with the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball, they set an all-time Major League record of winning 20 straight games and advancing the same distance in the playoffs as they did the previous year (despite having lost their three best players from that previous team to higher paying franchises). 

How can a relatively poor team in a relatively small TV market compete big-pocketed teams like the New York Yankees?  Well there have been relatively small market teams like the Oakland A's, the Minnesota Twins, and especially the Saint Louis Cardinals (in decades past, I would have included the Pittsburg Pirates on that list) who have managed to consistently assemble competitive, even top teams on a relatively shoe-string budget.

It seems however, that there were two things that made the 2002 A's special: (1) They really were gutted by free-agency after the 2001 season and (2) the general manager Bille Beane (played by Brad Pitt) decided to take a radically different approach to rebuilding the team.  Beane decided to take a full-bore leap into  computer analysis of the game and a search for the kind of players he needed to win (and could afford).  In the movie, he announces this decision to his shocked team of talent scouts, telling them "we're going into card counting," while presenting to them a decidedly unathletic Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) whose computer wizardry was going to assemble a winning team for them on the budget that they were stuck with.  No more hunches, no more intuition, just a full-bore leap into computer statistics.

Now for those who don't necessarily know much about baseball, it is a sport that lends itself to such statistical analysis.   There are 162 regular games in a Major League season.  In each game, each starter is going to be at bat 3-5 times, facing dozens of pitches per game.  Starting pitchers will probably throw 100 pitches a game.  Each one of those pitches is analyzable -- type (fastball, slider, curve ball, left handed, right handed, etc), speed, ball, strike, location within/outside the strike zone.  Everyone of the batter's at-bats is similarly analyzable (what pitches he hits, what pitches he tends to miss, if he hits the ball where does it go).  Baseball is statistician's dream.  Yet despite this and perhaps because of the huge number of compilable statistics, the game has generally remained a game of hunches that have kept talent scouts employed for over 100 years.

In 2002, Beane and Brand attempted to say "no more."  The only statistics that the two chose to consider were the percentage of times a player at bat got on base (one needs to get on base to score...) and how much the player was being paid.  If the player was being underpaid, they sought to buy his contract.   As Brand put it in the movie, they were trying to assemble a team out of an "island of misfit toys."

This produced some very interesting challenges:  For instance, the two sought to purchase the contract of a washed-up catcher (because he had a phenomenal ability of getting on base).  But A's already had a good catcher.  So they tried to teach him to play a position, first base, that he had never played.  To attempt to do that in major league professional sports was, to say the least, stunning.  So the manager, Art Howe (played magnificently by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who was never really on-board, tried really hard to make his own sense of the players that Beane and Brand were sending him, to their enormous frustration.  It was only after Beane, as general manager began to trade the players that Howe was playing instead of the players that Beane and Brand were sending him that Howe began to manage the team along the concept that Beane and Brand had envisioned, and it was then (at least according to the movie) that the Oakland A's began to turn their season around, and then go on that spectacular Major League record breaking 20 game winning streak.

Kudos to the director and screen-writers for making a movie largely about baseball statistics exciting.  Then again, Aaron Sorkin, wrote the Oscar winning screenplay for The Social Network that made computer code exciting as well.  So he has some experience in the matter.

Annother aspect of this film that I found fascinating and worth reflecting on was the brutal "perform or you're gone" aspect of professional sports.  As general manager (the one who hires and fires players), Beane didn't even go to the games because he didn't want to even get to know the players.  It's harder to fire or trade people that you know.  In the movie, he started teaching Brand how to fire players, telling him to just tell players being traded: "[Sir], you've been traded.  This is the number of the transition person who'll help you make the needed arrangements.  He's a good guy. Thank you for your service to the team. Good luck in the next phase of your career."  Beane explained that saying anything more would just prolong the agony, asking, Brand, "Would you prefer to just be shot in the head and have it over with, or shot five times in the chest and still have to bleed to death?"

The firing scenes of this movie are something that tens of millions of Americans can relate to these days as a result of their being "let go" from their own jobs.  In Moneyball, those players being fired were actually being traded (though inevitably to other parts of the country, causing a good deal of dislocation in their lives and the lives of their families).  Still, these were highly paid individuals who at least in the short term were not going to feel financial pain.  In real life, layoffs/firings cause real pain.  Still there always is a "performance" aspect to work.

So for those interested, the firing scenes in Moneyball become an interesting invitation to perhaps read (or reread) Pope John Paul II's (now Blessed John Paul II's) famous encyclical letter On the Dignity of Human Work (Laborem Excercens).

All in all, the movie is enjoyable for anyone who's ever been a fan of professional baseball.  There is nothing in the movie that would be problematic for kids (except that it might prove to be a little boring for them).  And the movie does offer viewers the opportunity then to reflect on the nature of work and the justice of the economic system in which we work.  


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Killer Elite

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1448755/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv116.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110921/REVIEWS/110929995

Killer Elite (directed and screenplay cowritten by Gary McKendry along with Matt Sherring based on the based in truth novel The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes) is the story of a hit team hired by an Omani sheik seeking to avenge the deaths of three of his sons at the hands of British SAS agents in a clandestine "dirty" war fought at the end of the colonial era in the 1960s over control of Oman's potential oil reserves.  Oman today remains (on paper) one of the poorest and least open countries in the oil rich Persian Gulf region.

In the story taking place in the early 1990s, a shadowy former mercenary assassin named Danny (played by Jason Statham) after what he had hoped would be his retirement, is sucked into "one last job." He receives a letter at his ranch way out in the outback of Australia with a photo of his former partner Hunter (played by Robert DeNiro) being held hostage with the request Danny fly out to Oman to work-out his release.  When Danny arrives in Oman, he is taken to the dying elderly sheik who gives him the assignment of assembling a hit team to assassinate the three SAS agents who assassinated his three sons during the dirty war fought in Oman in the 1960s.  Specifically, he wanted Danny and his team to (1) find the three men responsible for his sons' deaths, (2) record the three men's confessions, (3) record their deaths, and (4) make each of the killings look like an accident.  After receiving the record confirmations of the three agents' confessions and killings, the sheik would let Hunter go free and pay the two $6 million for their troubles.

What a seemingly impossible assignment!  Yet after initially trying (and failing) to simply overcome Hunter's guards and spring him free, Danny leaves Oman to set about assembling his team.  By casing the right pubs and talking to the right spooks, Danny and his team are soon able to identify the three former SAS agents responsible for assassinating the Omani sheik's three dead sons.  And they come up with ingenious ways of both extracting confessions and then killing 2 of the 3, each time making their deaths look like an accident. (By the time they get around to dealing with the third former agent, they realize that they probably won't be able capture that agent in order to extract a confession.  However, they remain that they could certainly kill him in a way that still looks like an accident.  And they figured that as long as the former agent was dead, the Omani sheik would accept the results as completed by the team). 

However, the team soon finds out however that these three former SAS agents weren't exactly living "naked," that is, without protection.  Danny's team soon catches the radar of a shadowy ODESSA-like organization of former SAS officers, who called themselves the The Feathermen for their desire/ability to keep a light profile even as they continued to profit on various dirty enterprises that they entered into while still serving in the SAS.  The principal man responsible for the security of the other "Feathermen" was a man nicknamed Spike (played by Clive Owen).  At first Spike, didn't understand who hitting them and why.  However, after receiving a report of the untoward death of the second agent, he has a pretty good idea who'll be the third (hence why Danny's team also "simplifies" their plan for assassinating the third agent.  However, by now Spike and his team is going after Danny's team as well).

All this makes for a fascinating spy story, invoking images of the Bourne Identity and Mission Impossible novels and movies as well as the real-life story of the Israeli hit-squad sent-out to assassinate the Palestinians responsible for organizing the Black September terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Games, immortalized in the movie Munich (2005).

What makes this movie, Killer Elite, all the more fascinating is Ranuel Fiennes' claim that the story is based on truth.  Discussing this story in community here, we were joking that this movie would probably prove rather popular among Catholics in Northern Ireland who don't particularly have a great love for the SAS given that it was notorious for all kinds of similar shenanigans during "the Troubles" of the 1960s-80s there.

Certainly between Munich (2005), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) another movie based on a book claiming to be based in fact, Unknown (2011) a more fictionalized thriller but invoking former assassination squads existing on both sides of the Cold war and even The Debt (2011) a movie reminding one of various Mossad operations in the past, one gets the sense that a lot more has been going on in the world (in regards to intelligence operations) than many of us may have previously thought. 

Interestingly enough, one of the themes of this particular movie, Killer Elite, was the desire of Danny to "find a way out" of that way of life.  In the movie, we never really find out how Danny and his partner Hunter first got involved in such undercover, assassination work.  However, we could perhaps sympathize with Danny's desire to get out.

This is the second recent Hollywood film to touch on this topic of wishing to extract oneself from a life of crime, that is, sin, the other recent film being Drive.  These may serve as a good reminder to all of us, that whenever we flirt with Evil (sin), we may find ourselves in a situation from which it becomes very hard to extract ourselves.  The Sacrament of Reconciliation _does help_ by righting ourselves at least with God.  There still may be people that we may have hurt and other damage for which we will need to pay.  But righting ourselves with God becomes an enormous (and truly helpful) first step in being able to face the further challenges ahead.


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Dolphin Tale

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1564349/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv113.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110921/REVIEWS/110929998


Dolphin Tale, directed by Charles Martin Smith, screenplay by Karen Janszen and Naomi Dromi, is a nice family feel good movie based on the true story of a dolphin named "Winter" at the Clearwater Marine Acquarium.

The story begins with Kyle Connellan (played by Austin Stowell) a former high school swimming star, who's since enlisted in the Army, saying goodbye to his quiet 11 year old cousin Sawyer Nelson (played by Nathan Gamble).  Kyle's being shipped off to Iraq.  Sawyer's been withdrawn since his father left him and his mother Lorraine (played by Ashley Judd) five years back.  Kyle asks Sawyer to promise him that he'll do more than tinker around with his electronic toys in the garage.  Sawyer half-heartedly promises to do so.  Sawyer's mother is also concerned for Sawyer because he doesn't talk much to anyone and his grades are suffering in school.

One day riding his bike along the beach in Clearwater, Florida on his way to summer-school, Sawyer spots an old man trying to help a dolphin who had washed-up on shore.  The dolphin had gotten hopelessly tangled in the lines that had suspended a crab trap.  With help of Sawyer's cell phone the old man manages to call a marine animal rescue unit, headed by Dr. Clay Haskett (played by Harry Connick, Jr) and his assistant Phoebe (played by Austin Highsmith).  Together with Dr. Clay's more talkative 11 year old daughter, Hazel ("like the eyes") Hasket (played by Cozi Huehlsdorff), they take the dolphin to the Clearwater Marine Animal Sanctuary.  There Hazel names the injured dolphin "Winter" because every dolphin she's named after a time-of-year "turned out okay."

But Winter's not okay.  Her tail had been cut by the crab-trap lines and had become infected.  Eventually, the tail has to be amputated.  In the meantime, quiet Sawyer begins to ditch summer school in favor of visiting the dolphin, who takes a liking to him because apparently he was the first to begin freeing her from the crab trap's lines.  Sawyer's ditching of summer school at first irritates both his mom and his teacher, Mr Doyle (played by Ray McKinnon).  However, his mom comes to appreciate that this is the first time that Sawyer's become interested in anything outside of his electronic gadgets since his father (and her husband) had left them.  So against Mr. Doyle's advice, she lets Sawyer go to the sanctuary rather than to summer school.

The story gets more complex as two things happen:  First, Kyle comes home injured from a blast in the war.  He didn't lose a limb, but one of his leg is damaged enough that he will need a brace to walk on it again.  When he returns home, it is he who doesn't want to talk to anybody, preferring to retreat back to the local VA hospital rather than visit with his family and friends at a "welcome home party" that they organized for him.  Second, while Winter has relearned to swim (sort of) without her tail, it becomes clear that the side-to-side (rather than normal up-and-down) motions of her tail are causing damage to her vertebrae and if she continues to do so, she will slowly driver herself into paralysis and death.  It is Sawyer, who visiting his injured cousin at the VA hospital who puts two and two together asking Dr. Cameron McCarthy (played by Morgan Freeman) who fits various injured vets with their prosthetics and braces, "a stupid question": Could he design a prosthetic tail for the dolphin?  Seeing the child's sincerity, Dr. McCarthy decides to take-up the challenge.

The rest of the movie follows ... An aspect of this movie that I found very touching was that as both Sawyer and Dr. McCarthy encounter apathy or even opposition to their project (What's the use?  It probably won't work.  And she's only a dolphin...) repeatedly everyone is reminded that to all kinds of people with disabilities or in need of prosthetics themselves, Winter has become a hero.

In one case, a mother shows-up one evening after closing time with her daughter to the sanctuary and asks if her daughter could see Winter.  The sanctuary's already closed, and other things (including financial matters) are on the staff's minds.  So they're not thrilled.  But the mother insists, saying that ever since her daughter found out about the dolphin on the internet, it's all she's been talking about.  So they had driven 10 hours from Atlanta (to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area where Clearwater is) to see the dolphin.  The staff relents.  The mother then opens the door of her van and we see that her cute as can be 10-year-old daughter too needed a wheel chair and had lost a leg as well.

Obviously the whole story ends well and yes the movie is rather formulaic in parts.  Still, I do believe it is a really nice "feel good" movie and a reminder to us all that we all contribute to each other's lives.  Kyle encouraged Sawyer to "get out of his shell" at the beginning of the movie, even as he was heading off to Iraq.  In part because Sawyer followed Kyle's advice, he was ready to help Kyle in a surprising way (having befriended a disabled dolphin) when Kyle came back injured from the war.

Hovering over the whole story are also two "grandparent figures," Morgan Freeman's character, Dr. McCarthy already mentioned above and also Hazel's grandfather Reed (played by Kris Kristofferson) who use their life experience to encourage the youngsters in their dreams and at times gently chastising (in Catholic speak, "guilting"... ;-) the parents into believing more in the value of the "stupid ideas" that their children keep coming-up with.

It's just a lovely family movie all around.  There's very little that any Catholic parent would find problematic in this film.  Some of the more spiritual musings in the movie, may feel to some to be "new agey."  You may well be right, but just let it go.  Dolphins are God's creatures and throughout history people (even the most hardened of sailors) have always marveled  how they love to play. 

Note to those interested: Winter's official website at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Clearwater, FL is www.seewinter.org

Straw Dogs (2011)

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0999913/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv112.htm
Roger Ebert's reveiw -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110914/REVIEWS/110919991

Straw Dogs, directed and current screenplay by Rod Lurie, based on the earlier screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpath based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon Williams, is a relatively high browed reworking of a well-worn story-line, most recently featured only 3 weeks ago with the release of the certainly far lower-browed Shark Night.

What do I mean?  City-dwellers, Amy Sumner (played by Kate Bosworth) and her screenwriting husband David Sumner (played by James Mardsen) come to Amy's hometown in the Missisippi delta to take-up residence father's home left to her after his death.  They mean to keep it as something of a "vacation retreat."  When we see first them speeding along a 2 lane highway cut through a bayou, cypress trees to their left and to their right, they're in David's silver Jag convertible.  David's enthusiastically tapping on the steering wheeling listening to his favorite avant guard jazz, Amy's blonde flowing hair blowing to the back as they race through the Spanish moss covered woods with the top down. They'll fit in just fine ...

The main watering hole in town turns out to be a bar and grill, adorned with the requisite high school football trophies and photographs.  A big confederate flag covers the wall behind the bar. They come-in to meet-up with Charlie (played by Alexander Skarsgård) a local who the two had hired to along with his crew to repair the roof on the barn adjacent to Amy's father's home.  The barn had been damaged by a recent hurricane.  Looking-up at all those football pictures gracing the joint, David spots a picture of Amy in her old cheerleading outfit and Charlie next to her in his high school uniform.  This will be just great ... David asks Amy about this.  She says not to worry.  Besides Charlie while clearly wanting to reduce David with his jaguar hood ornament on his car to ashes with his eyes, manages to keep his composure, smile and be nice.  Before leaving the place, Amy's asked by at least one waitress (a former classmate?) whether the town remains "good enough for her" now that she's a "big Hollywood star."  She responds with a smile and some humility that she was in only a few episodes in some TV show.

The next day, the two are woken-up at dawn by Charlie and their crew, as they come-up to start work on the roof while it's still not unbearably hot blasting heavy-metal music as they do.  David, in his slippers climbs up the ladder to the roof and asks them if they need to come so early and if they must be so loud.  Charlie reminds David that it gets quite hot in southern Mississippi during the day and that this is how things are done "down here."  But he does ask the crew to turn down the music.  A first confrontation has been averted.

But things don't get better in subsequent days.  Amy, an actress after all, wishes to keep fit.  So while her husband works on his screenplay (on all things, the Battle of Stalingrad) inside, each morning, with the crew already sweating on that roof, she goes out jogging in her rather short running shorts and tank top, coming back quite sweaty after her jog through the late-morning southern Mississippi heat and humidity.  One of the guys reminds Charlie that she once was his girlfriend ...

And so it goes.  The guys of Charlie's crew just come to hate David.  They invite him one day to go hunting with them.  They dress him up in an orange reflector hunting jacket and give him a rifle.  With a shot that good ole Francis Macomber of Hemingway's tales would be proud of, David actually finds and shoots a deer, only to find that he was ditched by Charlie and his crew.  They prove to have other plans on their minds.  So while David's out flailing around with the gun he hardly knew how to shoot, walking in an orange flack jacket along a country road hoping that someone would give him ride home, Charlie and one of the other guys from his crew go back to Amy and David's house _to rape Amy_.  (Yes, this is not a pretty tale).

So after a number of other things that pass (yes, it does actually still go down-hill from there...), David and Amy find themselves surrounded in that house at night with Charlie and his crew outside wanting basically finish them off.  There's actually another reason that they are all there at the house with David and Amy inside, but the explanation would actually distract at this point.  But this is where the Stalingrad motif kicks really into play.  Sometime earlier Charlie and his crew did ask David why he wanted to write (of all things) about a battle won "by a bunch of Godless communists."  He told them that it was a story of the triumph of the human spirit (with or without God), that those people found themselves utterly cornered and even though at one point they had lost 90% of their city, they found within themselves something that they themselves didn't think that they had in them in order to win and by doing so they changed history...

And there's then the purpose of this higher browed version of the low-brow and arguably bigoted "red neck menace" tale where we're told, "Ya just can't trust dem hicks, with deir shotguns and Confederate flags on deir trucks."  It is (or will be) Stalingrad all over again "when we finally decide to deal wit dem ..."

We're a polarized country now, and becoming more polarized each year and with each election.   But I don't see how movie after movie about how bad "hicks" are helps anything.  Instead, how about listening to a Carrie Underwood or Brad Paisley album instead?  It would seem like a much more positive way to go, because "hicks" are human beings after all.  And I just don't see what can possibly be gained my making fun of them or _anybody_ else.

And to make the point, let me suggest a number songs ...

Carrie Underwood, "All American Girl"

Brad Paisley, "Welcome to the Future"


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and remind the older American folk like me of songs that we all grew-up with like

Lynard Skynard's, "Sweet Home Alabama"