Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame (orig. Di Renjie)

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1123373/
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110921/REVIEWS/110929994

Detective Dee and the Phanton Flame, orig. Di Renjie (directed by Hark Tsui, written by Kuo-fu Chen and Jialu Zhang based on the original story Lin Qianyu) is an expertly filmed, Mandarin language, English subtitled film about a popular/larger than life Chinese official named Di Renjie who lived at the time of the Tang Dynasty during the reign/regency of Wu Zetien (690-705 AD).  Wu Zetien was arguably the only female Emperor in the history of China.

My only substantive complaint about the movie would be that I do believe that this movie should have been dubbed into English.  Visually the film was so good, that it was a shame that one had to be distracted from the film by having to look down to read the subtitled.  However, if one likes history, sword and sorcery fantasy (though this movie was based at least in part on history) or martial arts (ie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)) then one would probably like this film.

Indeed, the film's a reminder that Chinese young people are among the most avid players of internet based fantasy role playing games in the world today, testified to by Chinese World of Warcraft fans having created a full-length animated film (using the game itself as its set) called War Against Internet Addiction to protest Chinese internet censorship ;-).  All this is to say that Detective Dee was almost certainly not intended to be "an art film," but rather a Chinese "Indiana Jones meets King Arthur" film intended for popular, indeed world-wide appeal.  And with the exception of the lack of dubbing, I do believe it largely even spectacularly succeeds.

So what is the movie about?  Set just before the coronation of Wu Zetien (played by Carina Lau) the builders of gigantic female statue of the Buddha just outside the Imperial palace are horrified when a number of those in charge of the statue's construction die of apparent spontaneous human combustion.  Were they struck down by supernatural forces for disturbing (attempting to steal) a number of the mysterious amulets that had been placed in a repository at the base of the statue to protect the workers building the statue during its construction as assistant to the (deceased) lead foreman Shatuo Zhong (played by Tony Leung Ka Fai) believes?  Or was there a more mundane reason for their deaths (assassination by opponents of Wu, about to become the first woman emperor of China)?   In any case, after a mysterious appearance of Wu Zetien's Buddhist spiritual advisor (appearing to her in the form of a talking deer) she is told that the best person to put on the case would be Di Renjie (judge or detective Dee, played by Andy Lau).

There is a small problem, however, Di Renjie was jailed by Wu Zetien after the death of the previous emperor as a possible opponent to her.  For his part in treason, he had been blinded and was working now as one responsible for the burning of old official government correspondence after it was deemed no longer important to keep.  What good would a blind "detective" be?  To find out, Wu sends her trusted female assistant Shangguan Jing'er (played by Bingbing Li) to find Di Renjie and see if he could really be of assistance.  Jing'er finds that Di Renjie was much smarter than even his opponents had taken him to be, that he had managed to dodge his blinding sentence and that had actually taken the opportunity to read all those documents that he was responsible for burning.  So he was more than ready (and informed) to take-up the case.

Many adventures ensue.  The culprits for the spontaneous human combustion assissinations turn out to be phosphorus eating fire beetles.  By the end of the film, the conspirators are uncovered by the good judge/detective Di (and Di and Wu also find a way to make peace with each other, even if Wu had sent Di to prison to be blinded so many years ago).

Why would Di do that, accept a peace with someone who had sought to hurt him, indeed blind him before?  It would seem because he never took his sentence personally.  Indeed, one could say that there's a lot of recent Chinese history embedded in this story as well -- Di, a court official and intellectual, having been sentenced to be blinded and forced to burn books, only to be asked to come back and help the Empress (and the nation) in time of need.  

Aall this is done in good humor and with a lot martial arts tumbling and Chinese style magic -- those fire beetles, acupuncture, amulets and so forth.

I found the movie very entertaining and visually stunning.  I just wish that I didn't have to keep dropping down to read those subtitles. 


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Ides of March

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv122.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111005/REVIEWS/111009992

Ides of March (directed and cowritten by George Clooney along with Gregory Heslov and Beau Willimon, based on Willimon's play Farragut North) is a well-written and reasonably well executed hard-boiled political/campaign thriller that, possessing much of the dynamics and cynicism of the 1920s-40s, feels like a movie that we've seen or read before but nonetheless updated quite well to the present time.   The movie reminds us that in our political campaigns there is the rhetoric and then there is the skullduggery of the campaign that makes one wonder if the rhetoric means much of anything at all.

Liberal Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (played by George Clooney) is leading in the race for the Democratic nomination for President.  The only rival left to beat is the more conservative Arkansas Senator Pullman (played by Michael Mantell).  The two meet at the beginning of the movie in a debate held in Ohio two weeks prior to a primary to be held there, which Gov. Morris' campaign, led by campaign manager Paul Zara (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and #2 man, campaign press secretary/media strategist Stephen Myers (played by Ryan Gosling) believes should seal the nomination for Morris.

But there are both some problems and some loose ends to tie-up.  First, Senator Pullman's campaign, led by hardened strategist/manager Tom Duffy (played Paul Giamatti) is not giving up.  Second, a defeated but still influential candidate, North Carolina Senator Thomson (played by Jeffrey Wright), with his 300 delegates, is trying to use the clout that he has to squeeze promises out of both of the remaining campaigns.  Third, there's the press to both use and keep at bay, represented by "Times Reporter" Ida Horowitz (played by Marisa Tomei).  Horowitz, like most reporters following a campaign has seen it all and actually would like to see the "horse race" continue for a few more weeks both because "it would sell more papers" but also because "it would simply be more exciting."  Finally, there are "the little people."  But these "little people" are not the "little people" that most viewers would initially think of .  The "little people" are not the voters.  Instead, they are the campaign volunteers, represented by 20-year-old campaign volunteer Molly Streams (played by Evan Rachel Wood).  And Molly's a rather strange "little person."  She comes across as somewhat naive (she is only 20 after all).  But above all, she's connected.  She's not working for Sen Morris out of much conviction.  Instead, she's involved in the Morris campaign as a campaign volunteer (manning the phone banks, perhaps helping to manage _a bit_ the local volunteers) because she happens to be "the daughter of the Democratic Party National Chairman." Above all, she seems simply to be there because she's mesmerized by the power of the "big-shots" around her.

Indeed, while most of the characters in the film from Governor Morris himself, to campaign manager Zara (and his rival in the other camp Duffy), to even Molly "kinda believe" in the campaign, the only one that the viewer would recognize as _truly believing_ (in the campaign) is Stephen Myers.  No, he was never a total "pie in the sky" dreamer and he's excellent at what he does (preparing Gov. Morris for his debates, handling the press).  However, it's clear that Myers was working for Gov. Morris because he believed in him and the rhetoric of his speeches.  The others _kinda_ believe the rhetoric of their campaigns too.  But they are not so married to it as Myers is.

So what happens when the campaign inevitably gets messy?  Well that's the rest of the movie.  Interestingly enough, though Gov. Morris (and most of his campaign) is presented as emphatically secular -- at the debate at the beginning of the movie, Gov. Morris simply tells the voters, "If you think I'm not Christian enough or religious enough, then just don't vote for me" -- religion and the basic moral demands associated with it never really disappear in the movie.  Instead, they hover at the edges and arguably offer a greater challenge to the political figures (Democrats) of this movie than if religion had been at the center of their campaigns.  It would seem therefore that the movie reminds viewers that rejection of religion does not free one from basic moral demands.  Whether one is a believer or not, corruption remains corruption and sin remains sin.


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Courageous [2011]

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (A-II) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review

Courageous (directed and co-written by Alex Kendrick along with Stephen Kendrick) is a well-written, well-produced "indie" production of an Evangelical stripe. Its principal production company is Sherwood Pictures a ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church of Albany, Georgia.   With the success of previous pictures like Facing the Giants (2006) and  Fireproof (2008), Courageous was picked-up by TriStar pictures, resulting in a fairly wide distribution (1161 movie screens nationwide).  According the website www.rottentomatoes.com it grossed $9 million in its first weekend (#4 in the box office that weekend) earning $7,800/screen, which turned out to be nearly double the screen average of next nearest competitor with a similarly wide distribution (that being Lion King 3D).  All this is to say that the good Baptists at Sherwood Pictures are on to something, that it's working and finally that larger distribution companies like TriStar are noticing.

This is not to say that this is a perfect movie.  A police drama set in rural Albany, GA, one can't help but notice that pretty much all the criminals in the movie were big, burly and _black_ drug-dealing gang-bangers (even though one of the police officer heroes in the movie, along with his family were also African American).  Then this production coming from a Baptist Church could not bring itself to make the Hispanic family in the movie Catholic.  So there were a lot of crosses in that family's home (but no crucifixes to say nothing of a picture or two of the Virgin).  There is also one scene in which a gold bead chain graces a corner of a mirror in the house.  But alas, the producers of the film couldn't bring themselves to make that bead chain a Rosary... (Again, the Baptists were the ones who footed the bill for this movie.  I understand that.  Still for a Catholic, the Hispanic family's house decor looked rather odd and, indeed, diminished ...).

On the flip side, how many Hollywood produced police dramas -- since in fact, the Andy Griffith Show -- bother to focus much at all on the families of the police officers?  Given that I live and work in a parish at the south eastern edge of Chicago where we have over a 100 police families in the parish, many heavily involved in such parish activities as childrens' athletics and the family and school association, that most of this movie's "drama" (and it's _nice_ if sometimes _sad_ drama) focuses on the kids and families of the police officers, promises to make this movie _a hit_ within a John Candy / Everybody Loves Raymond parish community like mine.

So what is the movie about?  It's about a group of cops working for the Albany Police Department.  There's Adam Mitchell (played by Alex Kendrick) and his partner Shane Fuller (played by Kevin Downes).  There's Nathan Hayes (played by Ken Bevel) recently transferring in from Atlanta, and just finishing his rookie year David Thomson (played by Ben Davies).  There's also the struggling family of Javier and Carmen Martinez (played by Robert Amaya and Angelita Nelson).  Adam hires Javier to help him put-up a shed on Shane's recommendation.  Actually Shane had recommended a different Javier, but by "luck" Javier was walking by Adam's house praying for a job, and Adam thinking that Javier was Javier, called him over "by name." And so there it was, a small miracle that helped Javier and Carmen out immensely. 

Now Adam had some problems at home, small problems, but problems that ultimately matter.  His son, Dylan (played by Rusty Martin) a high schooler, is infatuated with running.  He's trying to get his father to run with him in an upcoming Father-Son 5K.  But Adam tells his wife, Victoria (played by Renee Jewell) that he's over 40, that he's just too old for that sort of thing.  (A short time later, he finds himself in a chase on-foot of a couple of the above mentioned, drug-dealing gang-bangers, and perhaps some jogging probably could have helped...).  But it's obvious that the apple of Adam's eye is his 11-year-old daughter Emily (played by Lauren Etchells).  Still, when enthusiastic Emily wants to dance with him outside on a lawn in front of a bank (while they are waiting for Adam's partner to make a deposit), he's too embarrassed to dance with her like that.  When tragedy does strike midway through the movie, Adam starts asking himself what kind of a father he was.  He's assured by his partner that he was "a good enough father," to which Adam responds, "I don't want to be just a good enough father.  I want to be better than that ..."

The other men, Shane, Nathan, David and even Javier (who they adopt into their group), all have their own "father issues."  Nathan too, who grew-up never knowing his dad but now has a 15-year-old daughter is also concerned about how he is doing.

So the rest of the movie becomes a reflection on fatherhood.  There is some language that would probably make some people grit their teeth -- I'm not sure how many American women today, for instance, would wish that their husbands saw their roles as "protecting and providing" for them.  On the other hand, I would believe that most women would want their men to step-up and do their share (perhaps in the first step, to marry them ... or at least pay child support if their marriages/relationships fail...).  So the movie certainly does focus on issues that matter.

As such, I would recommend this movie, not to defend traditional language for its own sake, but to point out that the problems presented in the movie are real.  Indeed, Adam's greatest transformation in the movie isn't that he becomes more protective (though certainly that language works very well when it comes to Nathan's relationship with his 15-year-old daughter).  Instead, Adam's greatest transformation came when he simply started to jog with his son.  And one wonders, if the Biblical Adam spent more time with Cain "out in the fields" if things would have turned out better there as well (Genesis 4:1-16).


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Dream House [2011]

MPAA (PG-13) CNS/USCCB (L) Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1462041/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/11mv120.htm

Dream House (directed by Jim Sheridan, written by David Loucka) is a movie that could perhaps be described as The Shining (1980) meets Inception (2010) where the audience is challenged to figure out what in the story is "real" and ultimately invited render judgement as to whether the movie makes sense at all.

The movie begins with Will Attenton (played by Daniel Craig) packing his things on his last day at work as an editor at a New York publishing company.  He has quit his job in hopes of pursuing his dream of writing of a novel (rather than just editing them).  As he leaves the building, his former boss (played by Jane Alexander) indicates that she's proud of his decision telling him that she always believed that he had more talent being "merely an editor."  She also gives him a card with a phone number on it, telling him that his (new) house in "Franklin County" will need some work and that whoever it is on the card is a good man.  Will smiles, takes the card and heads to the train station to take the trip home to the suburbs, where ever they are.

When he arrives at the train station, no one's waiting for him.  But he runs into a neighbor who takes him to his home.  There Will's wife Libby (played by Rachel Weisz) and two cute as can be little girls, Trish, 7 y/o (played by Taylor Gaere) and Dee Dee 5 y/o (played by Claire Gaere) are busy painting the house and waiting for their dad, who'll now be able to spend far more time with them than before.

It seems like an idyllic situation, but things soon start going wrong.  The little girls start seeing people trying to peer into the house.  Then one night, Will and Libby are awakened by ruckus coming from the basement.  A group of teens, in gothic garb, have apparently broken into the basement and created a something shrine there, with candles and spray painted graffiti.  How is that possible?  Will chases them out but one of the girls tells him that the house had been the site of a notorious murder 5 years back.  Will tells his wife and she's shocked that no one told them anything about this when they had bought the house.

The next day, the girls overhear a neighbor girl, Chloe Patterson (played by Rachel Fox) on their porch talking to someone on her cell phone saying "Everyone who moves into this house dies."  When Will hears this he goes across the street to talk to the neighbors and yes to complain about what their daughter had said, because it scared his kids.

When he gets to the neighbors, he encounters a something of a fight.  Chloe's father, Jack Patterson (played by Marton Czonkas) is there to pick her up, and he's complaining that his ex-wife (or soon to be ex-wife) Ann Patterson (played by Naomi Watts) doesn't have her ready.  Seeing Will, Jack sneers and making it clear that he's annoyed that Will's there.  In another encounter sometime later, Jack makes it clear that he thinks Will is some kind of a dangerous man.  Yet when Will talks with Jack's ex-wife (or soon to be ex-wife) Ann and at another time with Chloe, they treat him nicely.  At the same time, the "idyllic house" in which Will and his family have moved into becomes more and more run-down with each scene.  What's going on?

Well the story gets more interesting when Will and his wife Libby start looking through some of the clippings and microfilm left strewn around in the basement by those teens in their "shrine."  Apparently, a family of four with two little girls had lived in the house before and one evening the wife and the two daughters had been killed.  The husband, grazed in the head had been taken away to a psychiatric institute, incapable of standing trial.  And the whole family looked just like theirs.  Will finds a clipping in a recent newspaper that the father, a Peter Porter, had recently been released from the psychiatric institution "for lack of evidence against him" and had been moved to a half-way house.  He looks up the half-way house, doesn't find Porter, but he does find a picture of him and his family there.  So who is he, really?  Will Attenton or Peter Porter?

Well he goes to the psychiatric institute and discovers that both the patients and the staff know him (as a patient).  Even his own boss, who encouraged him at the beginning of the movie regarding his writing ability is there, though now she's a resident psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Greeley.  She begs him to voluntarily institutionalize himself now telling him that he's "not fit to live in the outside world."

Will leaves the psychiatric institution and goes home.  He is now convinced that he's probably Peter Porter but when he comes home, his family (and especially his wife) simply don't believe that they are dead.  Stranger still is that that despite him having been locked-up in a psychiatric institution, both Ann and her daughter Chloe continue to treat him sympathetically.  Indeed Chloe, becomes convinced that Will/Peter really can see his former family and asks him (since she would have been the same age as his daughters when they had been murdered) to tell his daughters how much she misses them.

How to resolve all this?  Well the movie makes an attempt to tie it all together.  Is it convincing?  I'd leave that up to those who decide to see the movie.  I'm not sure it does succeed in tying everything together and many of the major critics have chosen not to review the film...

Still there are some really heart rending scenes in the later stages of the film, which if one likes to occasionally cry at the movies give one plenty of opportunities to do so.  For at the center of the story (or "the story") is a terrible tragedy in which an apparently happy little family is suddenly violently cut-down (how ever it may have happened and for whatever reason/reasons it may have happened) and the only survivor is forced to continue his life alone without the others.  And that is certainly very, very sad indeed.


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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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