We Need to Talk About Kevin [2011]

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

IMDB listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/
Roger Ebert's review -


We Need to Talk About Kevin (directed and screenplay co-written by Lynne Ramsay along with Rory Kinnear based on the novel by the same name by Lionel Shriver) is a fictional account of a mother's reflections on her teenage son's becoming the perpetrator of Columbine-style school massacre.  

In the book, it's clear that the mother, Eva (played in the movie by Tilda Swinton), had been ambivalent about having the child.  In the movie, her ambivalence is not as clear, but it's clear that she herself thought that she had her own problems.  In both cases, however, it's obvious to the reader/viewer that from pretty much the time that Kevin was a toddler something was very wrong with him.  He seems aloof, developmentally slow (starts talking fairly late, and certainly takes his time and fiercely resists getting potty trained), and he's mean.  Eva sees this but as is often the case the other parent/her husband, Franklin (played in the movie by John C. Reilly), does not.  A manipulator from almost before he could walk and certainly from before he could really talk, Kevin plays the two parents off against each other.  What a nightmare ...

And it doesn't get better.  As Kevin grows up (Kevin's played as a toddler by Rock Duer, as an 6-8 year old by Jasper Newell and as teenager by Ezra Miller), he hones his skills of playing-off his parents (and other adults) against each other, being mean to animals and to his developmentally normal little sister (played by Ashley Gerasimovich) but never quite mean enough to finally force the hands of his parents and the other adults in his life (mostly at school) to actually do something until one day he locks the student body of his high school in the gym with bicycle locks he bought over the internet (he told his parents that we was "going to make a killing with them (they think selling them) at school") and starts picking off his classmates, one after another, with a cross bow.

What went wrong?  Both in the book and in the film, Eva, in part, blames herself, in the book because she knew that she never really wanted to have children (Kevin) to begin with, in the movie because she knew that she wasn't altogether psychologically fit herself when she had him.  Did Kevin know from early on that she never really want him (the book)?  Did Kevin inherit her psychological troubles (the movie)?

To some extent the reader/viewer could ask whether that inner angst of the mother is really relevant (other than being melodramatic) here.  Perhaps better questions could be asked: What can society do to identify psychopathic youths before they do it harm?  Can a pattern of uncalled-for / gratuitous meanness become seen as a symptom worthy of flagging someone as a potential danger to oneself and society and worthy of progressively more attention/supervision by parents/teachers/law enforcement authorities?

Yes, psychopathy like other neurological conditions (autism comes to mind) would probably exist on a scale.  Still a consistently mean child, even for the sake of the child (to say nothing of the larger society), would deserve to be supervised/watched (and not just by the parents but by society, mostly at school) to make sure that others (innocents) don't end up being killed by that child as/when he or she grows up.


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Safe House [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L) Michael Phillips (2 1/2 Stars) Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Michael Phillips review

Safe House (directed by Daniel Espinosa, written by David Guggenheim) is a post-9/11 post-Bourne Identity spy thriller (hence with the fundamental theme of "who can you trust?") that aside from being set in Cape Town and then the countryside of South Africa, doesn't really add anything particularly new to the genre.

Still, like a dream/nightmare that repeats itself until it dissipates or gets resolved, these kind of spy thriller paranoid action films like this seem to "work" today.  Safe House has a 70% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes website and three weeks out, it's still in the top 5 at the box office and it's grossed some $97 million. 

So what's the film specifically about?  Matt Weston (played by Ryan Reynolds) is a rookie/tenderfoot CIA operative with a rather boring "doing one's dues" initial assignment: He's the "manager" of a "team of one" (apparently just himself) project: maintaining a CIA safe house in Cape Town, South Africa, should the need ever arise that it'd be needed.  In other words, he's the "groundskeeper" of one of those "undisclosed locations" / "secret prisons" made famous (or infamous) during the G.W. Bush Administration.

It's pretty boring work.  Six months into the assignment, he's had no "house-guests," and about all he has to show for his time in Cape Town is that he's found a French girlfriend, Ana Moreau (played by Nora Arnezeder), who he can't be honest with about what he really does for a living.  All he can do is be "vague" about his work and promise her that his "work" may take him to Paris "one day."  She likes that promise but it's pretty clear that he doesn't have a chance at getting that kind of an assignment since Paris would probably be a rather prestigious CIA posting.  And what has Weston been doing?  He's been playing "cleaning lady" / "maintanence man" in a "stainless steel basement" of an outwardly utterly nondescript-looking building in Cape Town that inside/underground opens up to a compound filled with jail cells and interrogation rooms and all sorts of wild electronic gear.  But the compound NEVER, EVER GETS USED because NOTHING EVER "HAPPENS" IN SOUTH AFRICA ANYMORE.

So Matt spends his time listening to "French language tapes" and trying to get his former mentor David Barlow (played by Brendan Gleesan) stationed at CIA headquarters in Langley to get him the hell out of this spick-and-span but half mothballed dump in Cape Town and on to Paris.  But Barlow has no reason to promote Weston because HE HASN'T DONE ANYTHING to justify promotion.  Life can suck ...

Well be careful what you wish for ... One day, a rogue former CIA agent, Tobin Frost (played by Denzel Washington), walks-up to the gate of the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town, and to everyone's -- Matt's, Barlow's and Matt's immediate superior (but still way out in Langley) Catherine Linklater's (played by Vera Farmiga) -- surprise Matt's gonna get an actual "house guest."  Why?  Well, Frost had been supposedly one of the CIA's top agents, and then 10 years ago he suddenly "walked off the reservation," sold all kinds of secrets to all kinds of people, often enemies and potential enemies of the United States. Yet NOW for some reason, he "waltzed back" to the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town apparently asking for the U.S. government's assistance.  The obvious question reverberating among the good folks in the U.S. spy/diplomatic community is WHY?  Why the heck would he come back?  And given his past selling of U.S. secrets left and right to all kinds of people, the folks at the CIA are "mighty angry about it."

So when the CIA's "team" comes to Matt's stainless steel basement safe house with Frost in chains and a hood they're not particularly interested in being "nice" to Frost.  Yes, they want answers, eventually, but they also want payback.  So they bring out the water and the towels, and it becomes "water boarding time."  But while the interrogation team is "not yet torturing" ("approaching the line of torturing") Frost, a second team comes in and shoots-up the place, killing everybody but Matt and Frost, who manage to get away.

The quick thinking, CIA veteran turned fugitive Frost had convinced the rookie Matt Weston that it "would look really bad" (presumably on his next performance evaluation) if Weston's "house guest" turned-out to be killed.  So Weston gets Frost out of the building (at least still in handcuffs...) and, rookie that he is, "calls Langley for directions ..."

Much ensues and eventually we get an explanation for "what the heck just happened" and indeed why someone like Frost would have "gone rogue" and arguably betrayed his country after doing so. 

There will be folks who will not like the explanation.  But anyone who knows a little about the power of keeping things secret would certainly suspect that this power could be used to cover-up all sorts of things, many of which would have very little to do with actual "national security ..."

Anyway, there's not necessarily anything new in this film, except perhaps the rather comical portrayal of the quite boring life of a spy-agency "safe house" operator.  (In the film, Frost and Weston make their way to another CIA "safe house," this one out in the South African countryside that makes Weston's old gig "in the city" positively thrilling ...).

Still, we live in a world now of  "secret prisons" in "undisclosed locations" and super-trained, super-compartmentalized special forces units trained to perform missions (and do them on faith...) that we can only imagine.  Add then the temptation to sin, that is to use all that secrecy and power for less than virtuous ends ... and well ... that combination offers a plenty of fodder for a lot of films just like this.


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84th Academy Awards (2012) - Hooray for Nostalgia!?

IMDb listing
Previous/Other years


Billy Crystal Rules!  Say what one wants, he delivers.  From the very first sequence where he passes through a montage of scenes from last year's top pictures, most nominated, some like Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 4, not, he was a hit, in great form and carried this through a great show.

Hollywood's surprising conservatism that I commented on in my review of the last year's Academy Awards, came through again.  Martin Scorsese's 3D wonder Hugo came into the Awards show a favorite to win the top awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best (Adapted) Screenplay and Best Cinematography.  Yet it walked away with only technical awards as well as Cinematography (arguably "technical" in this case as well).

In contrast, the darling of the Oscar's this year was the well deserving film The Artist, a technically perfect nostalgic look back on Hollywood's Silent Screen era.  The picture won Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius) and Best Actor (Jean Dujardin).

And Nostalgia arguably factored in pretty much all of the other prestigious awards:

Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Beginners.  He was certainly excellent, won on merit.  But it also felt like a "lifetime achievement award" as well.  Plummer is 82, only 2 years younger than the Oscars themselves.

Octavia Spenser won Best Supporting Actress for her role in a film that was arguably anachronistic.  It was said about The Help when the came out this past summer that while the topic itself was nice, it was yet another story written by a white woman about race relations in the South.  Yes, this worked well in the 1930s with the celebrated Oscar winning screen adapation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and even in the early 1960s with the similarly celebrated Oscar winning screen adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird.  But this is 2011/12.  Yes, Octavia Spenser, African American, was the only one who won an Oscar for The Help, a screen adaptation of the book by the same name written by Kathryn Strocket.  But the Association of Black Women Historians rightly asked last summer how long will it take before a story written by a black woman about race relations in the South will get such Oscar buzz?

Meryl Streep, universally acknowledged as the best actress of our time and possibly of all time, won her third Oscar after being nominated and then snubbed 14 other times (Yes, she's been nominated for the Academy Awards 17 times) because, yes, she's the greatest but also because she played here the role of the towering (and now aging...) British figure of the late 20th Century, Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Nostalgia is written all over this award...

Finally Woody Allen received the award for Best Original Screenplay for his film Midnight in Paris which was precisely about an American screenwriter of today (played in the film by Owen Wilson) nostagically looking back at Paris of the 1920s. 

I suppose that story-telling is always going to be largely based on nostalgia (And at its base that's what Hollywood does -- tell/sell stories).  And, it's not easy (and certainly would be limiting) to come up with compelling stories about about times, places and people who haven't existed yet.

Still I do find it fascinating that there was such an uproar last year over the Oscars' young hosts (Anne Hatheway and James Franco).  And then there was an almost counter-revolution in the Oscar balloting last year when a story about a dead stuttering English King (The King's Speech) won all the major awards, vanquishing the modern retelling True Grit (whose star was no longer the venerable John Wayne but a spunky young actress named Hailee Steinfeld playing a teenager) and the ultra-cutting edge films like The Social Network and Inseption.

This year, the Oscars' counter revolution was complete with the "resurrection" of Billy Crystal as host, something that to Crystal's and the show's producers' credit the show's initial sequence joked about.  And one must admit that Crystal was good!

Further to Meryl Streep's and Woody Allen's credits, both have become quite famous for working with and mentoring new talent.  Anne Hatheway (The Devil Wears Prada), Amy Adams (Doubt, Julie and Julia), and Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia!) have all gotten to work with and learn from Meryl Streep.  And the list of young actors and actresses that Woody Allen has worked with over the past decades is simply too long to list here but they have included Mira Sorvino, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johannson, Javier Berdem, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, et al, et al.

So even though the same names often do pop-up over and over again, there are folks like Streep and Allen (and I do suspect Crystal) who do seek to "share the wealth" (or at least share their knowledge).  And any young person picked to host the Oscars in coming years ought to view both last year's and this year's shows and seek to learn from them.  And until then, I return to saying Billy Crystal simply rules The Oscars.  There's simply no one in these last 20 years who's been as good as he's been in hosting the show.


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My 2012 Oscar Picks

IMDb listing

Previous/Other years
 

I've been somewhat ambivalent this year about giving Oscar predictions because I really did see a lot of movies this past year and thought a lot of films and performances were very good and deserved praise.  So I even created a "Denny Awards" to underscore the films and performances (male and female) that I thought deserved recognition.

On the other hand, the annual Oscars is one of the largest shared experiences in the United States.  So I'm quickly typing a list of Oscar picks now and will be better about this next year.

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
WILL WIN - Christopher Plummer (Beginners)
SHOULD WIN - Christopher Plummer
DESERVING OF A NOMINATION - John Hawkes (Martha Marcy May Marlene) 

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
WILL WIN - Octavia Spenser (The Help)
SHOULD WIN - Octavia Spenser
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter), Judy Dench (J Edgar)

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
WILL WIN - Jean Dujardin (The Artist)
SHOULD WIN - Jean Dujardin
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Dominic Cooper (The Devil's Double), Leonardo DiCaprio (J Edgar), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), Antonio Banderas (The Skin I Live In), Martin Sheen (The Way)

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
WILL WIN - Viola Davis (The Help)
SHOULD WIN - Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady)
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Khomotso Manyaka (Life Above All)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREEN PLAY
WILL WIN - The Artist
SHOULD WIN - The Artist / Midnight in Paris
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Future, Another Earth, Take Shelter, The Way

BEST ADAPTED SCREEN PLAY
WILL WIN - Hugo
SHOULD WIN - The Descendants
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Higher Ground, Carnage

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
WILL WIN - Hugo
SHOULD WIN (AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED) - Melancholia (!),
DESERVING OF NOMINATIONS - Take Shelter, The Skin I Live In, Like Crazy

BEST DIRECTOR
WILL WIN - Martin Scorcese (Hugo)
SHOULD WIN - Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) / Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
DESERVED OF NOMINATIONS - Pedro Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In), Clint Eastwood (J Edgar)

BEST ANIMATED PICTURE
WILL WIN - Rango
SHOULD WIN - Rango
DESERVING OF A NOMINATION - The Adventures of Tintin

BEST PICTURE
WILL WIN - The Artist / The Help
SHOULD WIN - The Artist


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Russian Reserve (orig. Русский заповедник) [2010]

MPAA (Unrated)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing

Russian Reserve (orig. Русский заповедник), directed by Valery Timoschenko is a Russian documentary which played recently at the at the Peace on Earth Film Festival held at the Chicago Cultural Center between Feb 23-26, 2012.  The documentary is about a Russian Orthodox priest, Fr. Victor Saltykov living in a remote Russian village, which he notes is statistically "the poorest village in the Russian Federation."  Yet it becomes clear that seen through the right lens, it is an absolutely idyllic place to live -- fields, orchards, lakes, rivers, a nice white Russian Orthodox church in the center of town.

Many thoughts came to my mind as I watched this film.  

I recalled, for instance, that the Servites, members of my religious order, from my Order's Mexican Province, made a similar choice some ten years ago to accept a missionary assignment to one of the poorest municipalities in all of Mexico -- in Acatepec in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico among the Tlapaneco (Mephaa) people living there (video presentation of the Servites in Acatepec (Tlapa), Guerrero; interview, in Spanish, of Fr. Ruben Torres, OSM, one of the founders of the Servite Mission there).

I recalled my trips (3 each) to both the Servite mission in Acatepec as well as to the Servite mission in Acre, Brazil (in the Amazon) [2].

And I recalled my Slavic roots.  My dad's mother was from a similarly idyllic little town, Obdenice in southern Bohemia (Czech Republic).  My mother's father was Russian from the Kuban region of Russia.  

The spirituality of the Russian Orthodox church is very well expressed in this film.  It idylizes the life of the poustinik or pilgrim/hermit, who gives up everything to follow Christ.  He/she lives simply, in the countryside, depending quite literally on what God gives him/her.  A great book on the subject is Catherine De Hueck's Poustinia.  Another great book is an anonymous text coming from 19th century Russia called "The Way of the Pilgrim."

In the film, Fr. Viktor, besides sacramental functions, tends cows, tends bees, instructs visitors how to cultivates potatoes.  He notes that he has a special house setup for city dwellers coming out to visit him, noting that it takes a few days for "city dwellers" to get used to village life.  With a smile he further notes that he had a couple visiting him some years back in which the wife initially demanded that her husband take her back home when they arrived.  "Now she's the happiest (repeat) visitor here ..."

One then also recalls the Leo Tolstoy and the Tolstoyan Movement, recalling that even Mahatma Gandhi was influenced by this movement to celebrate simple, agrarian life.  

At the end of the film, Fr. Viktor, who saw his little community (and others like it) as "little Noah's arks," summarized his philosophy in this way:

You don't have to save Nature, because it will outlast us,
You don't have to save the Church, because it will save us,
You don't have to save Russia, you just have to love it,
You don't have to save "the village,' you just need to live in one.

What a great and thoughtful film from a part of the world that most Westerners would know next to nothing about.  

ADDENDUM - 

The two books that I referred to above are both available on Amazon:

Catherine de Hueck-Doherty, Poustinia
Anonymous, The Way of the Pilgrim  


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Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1 [2011]

MPAA (unrated) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing

Nuclear Savage (directed by Adam Jonas Horowitz) is a pointed and poignant documentary about the pacific islanders of the far-flung Marshall Islands where the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the late 1940s-though the 1950s.  The documentary played recently at the Peace on Earth Film Festival held at the Chicago Cultural Center between Feb 23-26, 2012.


The accusation of the documentary is that the U.S. government purposefully used these Pacific Islanders as de facto human guinea pigs to the study the effects of nuclear contamination on people.

The accusation is based on a protocol (Project 4.1) written-up six months prior to a massive nuclear test (Bravo) in the Marshall Islands.  The protocol outlined a procedure of how to study the effects of radioactive contamination on people.  Six months later, the Bravo test did, in fact, contaminate the Rongerik Atoll of the Marshall Islands along with its residents.  The U.S. Navy then took its time, several days, to evacuate the residents of this Atoll by which time the residents were already thoroughly contaminated by the radioactive fallout.

The U.S. government has always maintained that the contamination of the Rongerik Atoll and its population was "an accident," the result of a sudden change in wind-direction in the hours just before the test.  The islanders and their advocates have maintained that by the U.S. weather service's own records the U.S. government knew of the change in wind direction and made the decision to go along with the test anyway.

My own sense would be that while _perhaps_ the irradiation/contamination of the residents by the blast was nominally "an accident," it was one that was more or less obviously foreseen by the U.S. government that eventually there would be such an "accidental exposure" of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and hence why the government already had a protocol to "study the victims" of such an "accident" even before it occurred.  That is to say that even if the islanders had not been irradiated and contaminated by that particular nuclear test, then probably _others_ would have been irradiated/contaminated by another one...

In any case, the effects of the irradiation and contamination were devastating.  Surviving islanders interviewed in the film described bouts with cancer, leukemia, and horrendous, horrendous birth defects -- "My first child was born looking like a sack of grapes.  My second was born without muscles or bones.  He was like a jellyfish.  Both died within a day of birth," reported one woman.  Another reported giving birth to a child whose appendages "looked more like the fins of a sea turtle than arms or legs."  Another reported giving birth to a "child who you couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but had a tail."  All died early.

Worse, in 1957, the evacuated residents of the Rongerik Atoll were forced to return to live on the island even though the government knew it remained highly contaminated. And the cancers/birth defects continued.  The Islanders were finally evacuated in the 1980 a second time -- by Green Peace -- but as of 2011 they were being forced (under the current Obama Administration)  to once more return to their island to live there or risk have their compensations cut off.  Needless to say ... the Islanders don't want to go back.

What a nightmare and what terrible things happen when sin occurs "far away," "in darkness," when "no one is looking".

A note about the title, Nuclear Savage.  The title is taken from actual language used by U.S. scientists in 1950s era newsreels describing these poor people who had their islands blown-up and contaminated by American nuclear tests while _nobody_ except Christian missionaries actually cared about them.

Indeed, most of those "Savages" (1) contaminated by the Bravo test and evacuated sometime afterwards, (2) forced later to return, (3) evacuated once more, and now (4) being forced to return again to the contaminated Rongerik Atoll WERE CHRISTIANS ALL ALONG.  Among the ruins on the contaminated and abandoned island are the ruins of a Christian church and a Christian cemetery....


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Tyler Perry's Good Deeds [2012]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1885265/

Good Deeds (written and directed by Tyler Perry), is a very well-written/crafted movie, both gentle and pointed, that's certainly about our times but which chooses to be positive. 

The film is about two people: Wesley Deeds (played by Tyler Perry) and Lindsey Wakefield (played by Thandie Newton).

Wesley is a 30-something gentleman, 5th generation Ivy League graduate, who now heads his family's investment business from its high rise headquarters in San Francisco's business district.  He has both the temperament and the capability to lead the company well and thus be a good steward of the family's fortune for another generation.  But he's also unhappy.  A good son to his mother Wilemina (played by Phylicia Rashad), a good future husband to his fiance Natalie (played by Gabrielle Union), and a good/competent leader of his family's firm, he's nonetheless going through the motions.  He's good because he's always met expectations, done what he's supposed to do (and done so quite well).

Lindsey turns out to be a cleaning lady in the Deeds' high rise.  Behind on her rent, behind on her bills, alone, with an 7-8 year old daughter Ariel (played by Jordenn Thompson) in tow, she's constantly fighting to "keep it together" even as she's obviously terrified that she's one step away from final disaster. 

Even though Lindsey works for Deeds, the two "meet" for the first time when Lindsey cuts off Wesley in the Deeds' Building's parking garage to park in his reserved spot right by the elevator.  Wesley is annoyed.  His more problematic and certainly more hot-headed younger brother Walter (played by Brian White) is furious.  Lindsey, ever in defensive mode, doesn't care, calls both names and runs up to the building's maintenance office to pick-up her check.  She needs the check to cover her rent.  From this initial encounter, much ensues ...

There are many things to like about this movie.  Yes, the dialogue remains at times a little "stiff/unnatural"  It's obvious that the characters represent "types" rather than complex individuals.  Yet, Perry uses his characters and his film with purpose.  He's both challenging his viewers (and perhaps even the larger society) and doing so in a positive way.

It becomes obvious in the film that Lindsey had no idea of who she was actually working for.  When she runs into Wesley sometime later, having been transferred to the evening shift (Wesley habitually stays late working in the office), she has no idea that he actually runs the firm.  She assumes that "Deeds" who owned the firm had to be some "old white guy."  When she starts getting to know Wesley, it doesn't even enter into her head that she's talking to the CEO of the firm and that he's not even a "flash in the pan" / "upstart" but had inherited the firm from his father who inherited it from his.

On the other side of the coin, at a time when so much anger is being expressed at "the top 1%," both in film (Inside Job, Margin Call, Tower Heist, In Time, Man on a Ledge all good to very good films BTW...) and in society (with the Occupy Wall Street Movement), rather than condemning "the 1%," Tyler Perry (himself a theater mogul) offers "the 1%" a good example in Wesley Deeds.  Wesley uses his money and his power to get involved in Lindsey's life.  And as he does so, he finds himself.  He becomes "Good Deeds."

What a nice, nice film!


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