Contraband [2012]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1524137/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv004.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/REVIEWS/120119998

Contraband (Universal, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski, based on the film Reykjavik-Rotterdam by Arnaldur Indriðason and Óskar Jónasson) is a so-so crime thriller largely about the wages of sin.  In as much as it focuses on this theme, it's probably a worthwhile movie even if near the end the film, (spoiler alert) its makers chose to go, IMHO inappropriately, the way of the "happy Hollywood ending."

Even if as Christians, we actually dogmantically believe in the ultimate "happy ending," IMHO it just doesn't fit well here or at least not as "easily" as it plays out in this film.  Nevertheless, the first 90% of the movie is definitely a cautionary tale almost counting-out the reasons why one shouldn't get involved in crime: (1) things rarely go as planned, (2) one signs away one's life when one gets involved in this way of life, (3) innocents inevitably get involved, and (4) it is really really hard to walk away from the consequences of one's past.  These are all very good things to remember when one's tempted to "step off the reservation" and walk-over to "the dark side."

Very good, so how does this particular story play out?  Substituting New Orleans and Panama City for Rotterdam and Reykjavik respectively, the film begins with Andy (played by Caleb Landry Jones) the young "loser" brother-in-law of former smuggler turned-legit Chris Farraday (played by Mark Wahlberg) finding himself "way over his head" trying to run a bag worth of drugs into the country on a New Orleans bound freighter for a coked-up two-bit low-life mobster named Tim Briggs (played by Giovanni Ribisi).  When the huge container-ship freighter gets boarded by customs officials as it approaches New Orleans, Andy panics and throws the bag containing about $700,000 worth of cocaine into the Mississippi River.

All things considered, it's actually a petty amount but $700 grand is far, far more than most regular people have and so Tim Briggs trying to enforce discipline threatens to kill Andy, and more to the point, Andy's sister, Chris Farraday's wife, Kate (played by Kate Beckinsale) along with her and Chris' two small children unless he gets paid for the lost coke.  That of course, forces Chris along with Chris' former smuggling buddy Sabastian (played by Ben Foster) "out of retirement" to try to "fix things."  Much ensues ...

As the movie plays out, one's reminded of arguably much better films like The Firm [1993] and Shawshank Redemption [1994].  However, what I found intriguing about Contraband is precisely that it is about dark pasts and the film's obvious reminders (over and over again) of how hard it is to simply walk away from such pasts in the future.  The Firm, after all was about a young lawyer who simply, perhaps too naively walked into the wrong Firm when he took his first job.  In Shawshank Redemption, the lead protagonist got drunk and in a fit of passion _may_ have killed his wife after catching her with another man.  Here Chris Farraday had been a criminal who had _luckily_ never gotten caught, and now was being sucked "back into the business."  Thus Farraday is far less sympathetic of a character than the principal protagonists of either of the other two films.  And yet one does feel for him as he tries really, really hard to walk (and remain) away from crime and become (and remain) legit.

Indeed, the film uses the device of having one of the main characters, Faraday's buddy Sebastian, going to AA meetings, presumably fighting alcoholism to draw the comparison between addiction to alcohol and being trapped in a life of crime.

I applaud this comparison and wish to extend it one step further: Thanks to the relatively awful recent film The Devil Inside, I've had to talk to young people at my parish about the topic of demonic possession again.  And this time I suggested that one good thing about this recent movie was that it implicitly raised the point that the people who one should really be really be worried about are not the tormented, contorted, strange language speaking people usually portrayed by films about demonic possession.

Rather, one should be concerned about mass murderers and so forth. And I suggested to at least one group of young people since that movie came out that someone like Saddam Hussein could perhaps have been considered as having been "demonically possessed."  True his head was never known to have been "spinning around" and all that.  However, he did "cross a line" at some point in his life (he chose to send a person or two to their deaths to amass more power) and it proved to be a trap -- In order to continue to live, Saddam came to be forced to continue to kill more and more people.  How's that for "surrendering one's soul to the Devil," becoming "possessed by the Devil" and remaining so trapped until one's death?

I submit that this movie about Chris Farraday is much the same,even if Chris had been a much smaller criminal than Saddam Hussein.  Still it proved far harder than Chris would have thought for him to walk away from his previous life of crime.

So even though (spoiler alert again...) the film ends in a needlessly "tidy" way, for most of the film Contraband gives the viewer plenty of material to reflect about should one be tempted to enter into a life of crime: It's really, really easy to fall that kind of life (to fall into Sin).  It's much, much harder to be able to get-out.


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The Iron Lady [2011]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB ()  Roger Ebert (2 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1007029/
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/REVIEWS/120109984

As a Chicagoan, hence living in the 3rd largest city in the United States with a metropolitan area population of 8-10 million and a long tradition in the arts, theater, science and architecture, the first thing that I'd have to say about The Iron Lady (directed by Phydilla Lloyd, screenplay by Abi Morgan) is that I find it stunning that this movie about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played in her adult and older years by Meryl Streep) certainly one of the best of the year was withheld by movie execs and distributors from Chicago audiences until two weeks into the new year.  This is emblematic of an arrogance by media elites on both coasts that only breeds resentment in self-evidently huge and well-educated media markets in places like Chicago and Atlanta that is really to the movie industry's detriment.

My protest stated, let me then go on to say that I found this film to be excellent and one that could be understood by film audiences on multiple levels not the least of which on a life history / family dynamics one.  For whatever one may think of Margaret Thatcher's politics, the movie asks us to look at her legacy (and really anyone's legacy) from the perspective of her (and again, really everyone's) destiny: We will all grow old and we will all eventually die and the details of the "battles of the past" will fade.  As such, anyone with an aging parent will probably be able to relate to this film.  The parent who seemed so large, so awesome, perhaps so frustrating, so "in the way" when one was younger does get old, does get more feeble, yes, does begin to "fade away."

One could not have been an adult, young adult or even teenager in the English speaking world in the 1980s and into the 1990s without knowing who Margaret Thatcher was.  Yet today, 20-30 years later?  She largely falls into the category of "not yet dead," that is, older, necessarily more reclusive with each passing year, no longer relevant in any serious way except in the context of the past and the past's setting of the stage for our present.

Yes, on a more propagandistic level, some of the lines Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher is given do have a resonance with American political discourse today, notably the movie's Thatcher's concern that Britain would go broke unless it cut its spending, that taxes killed jobs, and that Europe's more social democratic model would not necessarily be appropriate or even beneficial to Britain and its destiny.  These are certainly lines voiced in American political discourse today by many on the Right wing of America's Republican Party today.  Yet, IMHO drawing absolute analogies is almost always a bad idea -- Britain is more European than the United States and the United States is both larger and more diverse and frankly with a different history and a different set of demons than Britain faced in the 1980s and/or faces today.

Perhaps what is more interesting is the film's portrayal of how Margaret Thatcher came to her convictions, and like convictions held by anyone, they came personal/family history -- Margaret Thatcher was born and raised a grocer's daughter (a daughter of a truly small businessman) at a time when doors were opening for women in England (and across the world) which would were unimaginable before.  So the grocer's daughter was able to go to Oxford, something unimaginable to most women (and to most men) of generations previous to hers.

Thus this movie about one of the most political of figures in the latter part of the 20th century becomes (through extended flashbacks) largely about her relationships with her doting and supportive grocer father Alfred Roberts (played by Iain Glenn), her less supportive housewife mother Beatrice (played by Emma Dewhurst) and especially her husband Denis Thatcher (played by Jim Broadbent).  (Margaret and Denis in their younger college/young adult years are played by Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd respectively).  Stopping-in throughout the movie to "look-in on" the aging but still largely but diminishingly independent Margaret Thatcher is her middle-aged daughter Carol Thatcher (played by Olivia Coleman).  What middle-aged adult today could not relate to this kind of reflection on an aging parent or mentor figure?

Thus even though Margaret Thatcher (and certainly Streep's Margaret Thatcher) would resist such humanization of her persona, the film actually makes one appreciative of how the Margaret Thatcher of history came to be, and serves as a reminder to all of us that no matter how powerful or important any of us may become in our prime, we all live on a conveyor belt of time and all of us will eventually fade from this Earth, remembered ultimately only by God.


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Haywire [2011]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1506999/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv007.htm
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120118/REVIEWS/120119992

It is mid-January and generally speaking two kinds of movies are generally playing or released into grudgingly second-tier markets like Chicago at this time: (1) movies that were released by film makers before the end of the calendar year in the premier/prestige markets of New York and Los Angeles and/or some "upper tier" European capital like London, Paris (and progressively going down the list ...) Berlin or Rome because the film makers believed they had a product that could do well on the awards circuit -- Academy Awards, British Academy Awards, The Golden Globes, The Directors' Guild Award, The Screen Actors Guild Awards, etc, etc, and (2) basically filler, that is, movies that aren't going to win or be nominated for awards but also are not expected to be "box office smashes" that tend to be conserved until the summer.

I mention this because Haywire (directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Lem Dobbs) is both a relatively good "action" movie but one that has only an outside chance of getting a nomination or two (cinematography, editing?) and one of two action movies released this week starring women as the action heroes (the other being Underworld: Awakening).

In the story, filmed in a definitely stylized way, Mallory (played by, I'm told, mixed-martial arts, MMA star Gina Carano) ia an agent working for an elite "private security firm" along the lines of the Bush/Cheney era Blackwater Services.  (Yes, it's a murky business and Blackwater itself has undergone several name changes during the past several years, currently calling itself Academi).  Mallory's firm gets contracted by Coblenz (played by Michael Douglas) apparently a high level US intelligence officer to do "a job" in Barcelona.  Nominally, the job is to find apparently a Chinese dissident of some sort hiding there.  It becomes clear, however, that everybody is playing everybody.  Coblenz is playing the private firm, represented in negotiations with him by "Kenneth" (played by Ewan McGregor).  Coblenz' Spanish contact Rodrigo (played by Antonio Banderas) is playing him and the firm.  And ultimately, Mallory's being played by everybody.  Who can she trust?

That's of course the key question being asked in this movie and what makes the movie "relatable" to the general public: We may not be "special agents," but in our current, increasingly privatized economy with specific "jobs" being "compartmentalized" and then "outsourced" from one firm to another, to a third, and back again, it's often hard to make sense of who's in charge of what and to what end.  So Mallory represents the "everyday Joe" (not unlike the Steven Segal character in the action classic Under Siege [1992]) though, interestingly enough "Joe" is now cast as "Jane."

Now much has been and will be written about the psychological significance of casting the lead character as a woman and whether or not it panders to a "fanboy" (a male dominated video-gaming) audience.  Indeed, Roger Ebert begins his review bringing up this question, though he evokes Sigmund Freud.  I would invoke Carl Jung's concept of the anima/animus instead.

According to Carl Jung's theory on the matter within the psyche every male or female there is a weaker opposite gender persona that needs to be recognized and appeased and indeed helps us to relate better to members of the opposite sex in the external world as well.

As I wrote in a comment relating to my review of Sucker Punch [2011] (also released around this time of year, though last year), that I don't see it necessarily negative for younger, mostly male, video-game enthusiasts to "let their animas out to play" and watch, smiling ear-to-ear a woman-action hero beat-the-daylights out of male jerks who generally oppress them as well.  And I do believe that these films _can_ be positive for young women as well (Haywire actually much more than Sucker Punch, where I do think there were legitimate issues about the setting and the young women's wardrobe) inviting them to "reach out" to their more masculine side and embrace the 'action hero' archetype.

Indeed, women (young or otherwise) who do find it within themselves to "enter into the cave" of men's video-gaming often find the experience surprisingly fulfilling as well and not simply in terms of the games themselves (which I certainly would not want to defend each individually here) but mainly in terms of the young men that they would have perhaps previously dismissed that they would meet.

Young men are being told all the time to "reach out to their more feminine side" in order to be able to relate better with young women.  A movie like this can be an invitation to young women to "reach out to their more masculine side" to do the same.

Parents should note that there is a good deal of stylized violence in this movie.  As such it is not really for kids.  However, with parental approval it may not be bad even for teens.  Again, this is not a spectacular movie but it is actually quite (and surprisingly) good.


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In the Land of Blood and Honey [2011]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714209/
CNS/USCCB review -
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120104/REVIEWS/120109995

In the Land of Blood and Honey (written and directed by Angelina Jolie) is an excellent film that (1) needed to be made, (2) needed to be made _by a woman_, (3) needed to be made by a _prominent woman_ (like someone like Angelina Jolie), and one that despite all this will probably be seen by not nearly enough people and after its run in the theaters will probably be shown only at the occasional human rights gathering.  That of course is a shame and yet also probably human nature.  But one should be grateful to Angelina Jolie for deciding to make the film at all.

What is the film about?  It's a film with a cast almost entirely composed of Bosnian actors about the war which raged in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia, and it highlights a particularly awful aspect of that conflict: the all routine, indeed systematic, practice of rape of Bosnia's women by the armies during the conflict.  I say routine/systematic because when women are rounded-up en masse and then taken _to headquarters_ to both serve (cook/clean for) and "service" (be raped by) the soldiers/officers then rape becomes not merely an "isolated" crime perpetrated "by a few bad apples," but de facto standard operating procedure.

The focus of this movie (as was always the case even during the conflict) was on the Bosnian Serb army and I know that Serbs have _always complained_ that abuses of all kinds (including rape) were being perpetrated by all sides in the conflict.  Nevertheless the point is made in this film that women were being raped en masse during this conflict and that, it is / ought to be recognized for what it is (or ought to be) -- a war crime.

To Angelina Jolie's credit, she also does a very good job at presenting the "other" (Bosnian Serb) side.  The entire world has looked at the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s solely in terms of what was happening _at that time_.  And yes, the Bosnian Serbs were conducting horrific atrocities at the time.  But the Serbs were _not_ looking at this war in isolation.  They were remembering both hundreds of years of previous oppression under the Turks (Moslems) but also _far more recent_ atrocities committed against Orthodox Christian Serbs by Catholic Croatians and Bosnian Muslims _in service of the Nazis_ during World War II.  One of the main characters of this film, remembered _his mother and older sisters_ raped and killed by Bosnian Muslims serving the Nazis during World War II.  So to Angelina Jolie's credit, she was sensitive to the complexities in that war.  And I do understand that just because one's mother and sisters were raped and killed fifty years ago AND THERE WAS NEVER A REAL ACCOUNTING FOR THAT CRIME 40-50 YEARS AGO, shouldn't give one the right to send out one's sons and grandsons to rape the granddaughters of the perpetrators of those crimes.  But one gets the sense of some of the layers of injustices that occurred in the region.

Then as one of Slavic descent (Czech, Russian and Ukrainian) myself, I am sensitive to the question of how these crimes (and they are crimes / WAR CRIMES) are portrayed, because these were crimes perpetrated by Slavs who have historically been looked at in Germanic ("Aryan") / Anglo-Saxon ("WASP") circles as being "at the lower end of the 'white race.'"  So I myself would find offense if these crimes came to be portrayed in a racial manner, that is, in terms of "those semi-animal Slavs," continuing then: "We Anglos/Americans are far more civilized about these sorts of things.  We _pay_ (cash on the barrel...) for _our sex_ during war time."

Indeed, one "good" thing that one could say about American involvement in its various wars in the Middle East over these past few decades is that it's put something of a damper on the "brothel" mentality that has accompanied U.S. military adventures since WW I: "How do you send Johnny back to the farm after he's seen the lights of 'gay Paris'?" (WWI), "The problem with the Yanks is that they're overpaid, over sexed and over here" (WW II), the summarization of the entire history of the Philippines since Magellan as "400 years in the Convent (under the Spanish) 50 years in a whore-house (under the Americans)," to say nothing of American behavior during Korea and Vietnam where after a long hard day of napalming the enemy, American fighting men would come back to the brothels around base to be serviced by the girls provided (eminently for cash...) by "Mamasan..."  

So sexual exploitation/coercion comes in many forms and no particular army looks particularly good.  Still one has to start somewhere and certainly Serb behavior during the wars in former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s helped give Rape as a War Crime the attention that it deserves.  And Abu Gharib notwithstanding, even American/Allied behavior during war time has probably improved as a result. 

Great, but then how does Land of Blood and Honey tell the story?  The film follows a would be couple from Sarajevo, Ayla (played by Zana Marjanovic) a young artist from a secularized Bosnian-Muslim family and Danijel (played by Goran Kostic) from a blue collar Serbian family working as a police officer.  The film opens with the two meeting happily at a Sarajevo dance club on an early date.  Everyone's happy, everyone's dancing.  A bomb goes off and those carefree days come to an end.

The film resumes four months later ... By this point the civil war is in full swing.  Ayla's / her sister's apartment block is stormed by Bosnian Serb soldiers.  They round up the people.  They separate the young from the old and then the young men from the young women.  The old are allowed "to stay."  The young men are escorted down an alley and summarily shot (yes, that's what happened to the young men at the time) and the young women put on a bus to be transported to "HQ" to serve as slaves sexual and otherwise to the officers/troops.  A young woman didn't quite understand what her role would be.  So she's dragged in front of the others by one of the soldiers, her panties torn off and raped against a table in front of the others, in case the others didn't get the point.  They did.  And so it was...

It happened though that Danijel was serving in the same unit (now as a junior military officer) as this was taking place.  So he was able to exert his influence to protect Ayla from the others.  They then become, _in a sense_, "lovers" throughout the war.  But it's unclear to everybody, from them themselves, to the other soldiers, to Danijel's father Nebojsa (played by Rade Serbedija) a senior officer in the Bosnian Serb army (and the one who remembered his mother and older sisters being raped by Croatian / Bosnian Muslim soldiers collaborating with the Nazis during World War II), to the viewers, what exactly Ayla's and Danijel's relationship was.  Was it / could it possibly be "love" under such circumstances?  Or was he just using her?  And was she simply doing what she felt she needed to do to keep alive?  Could either really trust the other under such circumstances?  Perhaps most tragic: in a fratricidal conflict like this, could this awful kind of relationship so horribly flawed/contrived/ambiguous be "as good as it gets?" ...

Perhaps only someone like Angelina Jolie could tell a story like this, and IMHO I do believe she did an excellent job.

Note to parents:  This is an R-rated film.  There are many examples of disturbing violence throughout this film.  There is also a good deal of nudity, though interestingly enough generally not linked with the various scenes involving rape.  Rape was generally portrayed violently and yet left largely to the imagination.  The nudity involved more the relationship between the two principal protagonists of the story.  In any case, there's probably little reason unless one happened to be somehow more directly involved in the conflict (or one similar it) to take a minor to this picture.  Minors probably wouldn't understand it anyway though young adults would: Imagine if your life depended on a guy who you barely knew and who you went out with only a few times "before the war."  Or imagine if you found yourself in a position with quite literally "life and death power" over someone who you only dated a few times prior to this whole conflict who in other circumstances you might have even graciously broken-up with but now "break-up" would mean _her certain death_ ...What a truly awful situation.


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The First Rasta [2010]

MPAA (unrated)  Time-Out Chicago (3 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1789024/

Time-Out Chicago Review
http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/film/15063863/the-first-rasta-film-review

One of the joys of following films is that one occasionally runs into documentaries like this one, The First Rasta (written and co-directed by Helene Lee along with Christophe Farnarier based on the Helene Lee's book by the same name) about Leonard Howell (1898-1981) the founder of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica and beyond.  It was picked-up by Facets Multimedia here in Chicago, itself a real gem for movie lovers.

As I would imagine most Americans who've lived in or near big cities, I've run into the occasional Rastafari during the course of my life with his/her distinctive hair and colorful garb.  Most music lovers would also know of a link (of some sort) between Raggae music (popularized by Bob Marley) and the Rastafarian movement but perhaps little else.  The joy of finding and watching a film like this is that it gives the viewer in a relatively short space of time a context and an appreciation of what Rastafarianism has been about.

Leonard Howell was born into a fairly successful black family in Jamaica, nonetheless found himself getting into trouble with the authorities fairly early in life and as a result he was forced off the island to find work in Panama.  From there he became a seaman working on any number of the transport ships that were plying the seas at the time.  The documentary points out very nicely that these ships were "the agents of globalization at the time" and that they transported "not only cargo but also ideas."  Working on these ships were often the disenfranchised of the world of the time (as well as anarchists and bolsheviks) and from Kiel/Hamburg to Odessa/St. Petersburg sailors became the triggers of Revolution. (I honestly, never had made that connection before).

Among the places that Howell spent a good deal of time in during his travels was New York and thus the black culture of Harlem of the time as well as its various Afrocentric movements.  Being Jamaican in origin, Anglican (Christian) birth, he also had contact with the Indian (Hindu/Muslim) diaspora in Jamaica.  Finally after the rise of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia to the Ethiopian throne (the Ethiopian kings tracing their lineage back to the Biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba), Leonard Howell became the founder of the Rastafari movement which venerated Haile Selassie I (Ras meaning "Head" or "Duke" in Ethiopian and Tafari being Haile Selassie I's title before becoming Emperor) as Jesus incarnate for black people.

I honestly never knew of the connection between Ethiopia and the Rastarfarian movement though the colors that I've seen Rastafaris wearing over the years now make immediate sense to me as they are the colors of the Ethiopian flag.  Then Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia some years afterwards takes on an even more tragic dimension:  Ethiopia was a country that Africans and their descendants around the glove were coming to see as having a special significance and now it was suddenly and tragically brought low by the caprice of two-bit European despot, who governed, actually, from all places ... Rome (of Biblical significance as well).

In any case, Leonard Howell, founded basically a Hindu/Gandhi-style Ashram called Pinnacle in the hinterlands of Jamaica as the first Rastafarian community venerating Haile Selassie I as Jesus incarnate in this world along the lines of the occasional incarnation of a God in Hindu belief.  The ethic of the Pinnacle community was simple and self-sufficient living, perhaps made easier by smoking lots and lots of pot, but actually having ideals very similar to those espoused by M.G. Gandhi at the time.  Indeed, Bob Marley's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" gains a whole new meaning in a messianic 'God is indeed among us' context.

I loved this documentary!  No I would not encourage "smoking lots and lots of pot" :-) as a means of arriving at happiness as this would obviously go against my own religion's teachings :-).  However thanks to this documentary, I honestly "get" Rastafarianism in a way that I never would have understood it before.  And I certainly understand / sympathize with the African diaspora's need at the time for hope and an affirmation that Africans like _all people_ are loved by God.

Previously, Spike Lee's film Malcolm X about the life of Malcolm X popularized understanding of the origins of the Black Muslim movement in the United States, which asked basically the same question: Why would blacks want to venerate a Christian God if popular (white) Christianity of the time would cast black people (and really all people "of color") as by definition inferior to them?  I think that most reasonable people would get it: Either God is the God of all, or God isn't really worthy of being called God, or at minimum each race therefore has a right to search and venerate its own God. (But I would insist that of those "racial gods," none of them IMHO would be worthy of wasting time worshiping).

Helene Lee's The First Rasta helps one understand the origins and philosophy/theology of Rastafarianism in this context as well: If the Christian God is presented as somehow being "the white people's God" then there has to be a God for black people as well.


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The Devil Inside [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (O)  Fr. Dennis (0 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560985/
CNS/USCCB review-
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv001.htm

The Devil Inside (directed and cowritten by William Brant Bell along with Mathew Peterman) is a hard-R movie made in the fake "documentary" style of the Paranormal Activity series only (and perhaps inevitably) adding perennial public fascination with Catholic exorcism to the mix.

To understand the movie's concept, therefore, think of the fake but well crafted Paranormal Activity series mashed with last year's Hollywood produced film The Rite (which starred Anthony Hopkins and was based on a book by the same name about an actual Catholic exorcist).  In this movie therefore, one gets to see well staged and (for effect) grainy "amateur" footage of some really bloody crime scenes and well as really sordid (bones cracking, vomit and menstrual blood covered people and objects flying) but ultimately fake exorcism scenes.  All that was needed was "amateur 3D" which no doubt, will come in 3-4 years ...

This of course works really well for an audience of young people coming to the film to be entertained by being thrilled (in this case being made "really, really scared") -- the same reason that people pay to "bungie jump" or go to "really scary haunted houses" around Halloween-time or go on roller coaster rides at amusement parks.

As I was watching this film and thinking of its fake though thoroughly sordid terror, I thought of the cave men, who "back in the day" (the stone age...) probably got their thrills going into, well... caves ..., to poke hibernating bears to see if they could wake them up and then would "run like heck" out of the caves before the bear took a swipe at them, mauled them, or even ate them.  Entertainment of this kind has probably been with us for a very long, long time...

Beyond the sordidness of the blood (often menstrual blood) and vomit covered contorted bodies splayed about throughout the film, even the more immune Catholic would eventually find offense in the persistent, every 5 minutes or so, criticism of the "official" Catholic Church: that is out of touch, that it wants to "keep these things quiet," "doesn't want to help people" and so forth.

But given that film's the two "rogue" 20-something priests as well as the film's "documentary makers" all come to rather awful ends in this film ... oh dear, I may have "spoiled" the film to some ... the "official Church" may actually come-out looking better than one would have expected.  The two "rogue" if certainly sincere priests clearly didn't have a clue of what they were dealing with ...

As such, there is a place for _respect_ and silence.  And often (certainly not always...) silence is honestly the most prudent and respectful course to take.

What to say to parents?  I don't see any conceivable reason why a teenager would "have to see" this film, and I certainly would not want to be the parent enabling my kids (and/or their friends) to see it.  Finally, the film is definitely not in any way, shape or form for pre-teens (it really is a graphic, sordid hard-R of a film).

But if in the end, if your teen finds a way to see this film on his or her own, you can just smile and tell them "You know of course that the movie's a fake" and walk away.  Teens generally hate fakes ... ;-)

ADDENDUM:

An interesting exercise could be to go see the film Contraband [2012] released a week after this film and compare it to this one.  While not about "demonic possession" per se, Contraband makes the point of just how hard it is for someone to leave a life of crime after one has entered it.  Could this be, in effect, a far more subtle yet far more serious form of "demonic possession" than the head-spinning, vomiting spewing variety in which such possession has over the centuries been portrayed?


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Miss Minoes [2001]

MPAA (PG) Roger Ebert (2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMdb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0279231/
Roger Ebert's review -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111221/REVIEWS/111219996

Miss Minoes [2001] (directed and cowritten by Vincent Bal along with Tamara and Berny Bos based on the children's novel Annie M.G. Schmidt) is a lovely, award-winning Dutch children's film (dubbed in this version into English) with a definite European sensibility about a cat, Miss Minoes, living in a small Dutch town who finds herself turned into a woman (played by Carice van Houten) one evening.

Why did she turn into a human being?  Well, she drank from a barrel of apparently hazardous chemicals inadvertently dropped from a truck after making a hard turn as it sped through the town one evening.  The same device (accidently dropped or otherwise improperly handled hazardous or radioactive cargo) has been used in countless Japanese and American horror movies to explain the creation of monsters (think of Godzilla [1954] or The Blob [1958]).  In this case, a barrel of hazardous chemicals turns a Dutch cat into a person.

The human Miss Minoes (who we see only after she's found some rather simple/sensible clothes to wear, it's a children's movie after all ;-) is able to speak human language (Dutch in the original, English in this version) but she also retains the ability to communicate with other cats as well as other feline mannerisms: Until she runs into Tibbe (played by Theo Maassen) a hapless local journalist about to lose his job, she continues to feed herself by happily rummaging through garbage cans looking for scraps of food, especially fish; when she sees a dog, she jumps for a tree; and she spends much of her evenings on the village's rooftops.

Indeed, when Tibbe runs into her first, she's stuck in a tree after a dog (now much smaller than she) still reflexively scares her and causes her to scamper to the top of one.  Later in evening when it's raining, she climbs down from what turns out to be Tibbe's apartment's rooftop and enters his room through a left-open window.  When she enters, what does she do?  Well she dashes straight for Tibbe's garbage can in the kitchen looking for food.  What an odd person!

But Miss Minoes finds that she can help Tibbe in something.  Threatened with being fired from work unless he comes up with a good story to print in the newspaper the next day, Tibbe asks Miss Minoes if _by chance_ she knew of something interesting to write about.  Well, who knows a town better than a neighborhood cat, especially a cat who knows and gossips with all the other cats in town? ;-).  So she saves him and they make a deal.  She gets to stay in his place and eat, and she becomes his assistant giving him stories to write about.

Initially, Tibbe doesn't fully understand that Miss Minoes is/was really a cat.  That's left up to the precocious daughter, Bibi (played by Sarah Bannier), of the land lady to figure out.  But Tibbe actually doesn't care.  He's just happy that his fortunes at work soon change, and _everybody_ wonders where the heck he's getting the information that he's getting about what's happening in the town.  Much ensues. 

Among that which ensues is Miss Minoes' managing of a rather complicated situation with the other cats.  A lot of them don't like that "now suddenly she's a human."  Some think that she's become something of a snob, "too good for the other cats."  Others don't understand why she'd want to be a human at all.  After all, as far as they are concerned, it's _cool_ to be a cat.  Why would one want to give that up?  But after she proves that she can still sing the "great cat anthem" (a loud persistent meowing that all the neighborhood cats promptly join in, driving all the neighborhood humans crazy), they come to agree that Miss Minoes "is still a cat" ;-). 

And by the end of the film, it becomes clear that _no one_ should ever want to diss or otherwise mess with the neighborhood cats.  They may act all cute when _they_ want to.  But no person really knows what's going on their heads.  And (of course) the cats like to keep it that way!  The mystery of the truck rolling through town with those hazardous chemicals gets figured out.  And the cats in their cute feline way exact their revenge.

But what now about Miss Minoes?  Will she go back to being a cat or will she stay human now?  Well, rent or see the movie ;-).

ADDENDUM:

At the beginning of my review, I mentioned that I thought that the movie had a definite European sensibility.  As I watched the seemingly innocuous cats decide to come together and ever so cutely but firmly (as if with "paws of iron" .. ;-) take-down the one responsible for the hazardous chemicals passing through the town, I could not help but think of a very cute (and in its time well known) post-WW II Czech silent animated short called "Zpoura Hracek" (The Rising of the Toys).

In that Czech animated short, a Gestapo agent snoops around a humble toy-maker's shop to see if he was doing anything subversive and finds to his chagrin that he walked into the wrong toy shop!  The toys themselves rise to chase him out ;-).  Did the Dutch film-makers in 2001 (or Annie Schmidt the children's book writer) know of this 1946 Czech animated short?  Did the Czech film-makers base their short film on a story already existing before?  I don't know.  But I would imagine that there were plenty of other variations on the theme playing throughout Europe in the decades in between and perhaps even before.


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