Meeting Leila (orig. Ashnaee ba Leila) [2011]

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

IMDb listing

Meeting Leila (orig. Ashnaee ba Leila) [2011] directed and cowritten by Adel Yaraghi along with Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian film (in Farsi with English subtitles) that played recently at the 48th Annual Chicago International Film Festival (Oct. 11-25, 2012).

It is about two lonely Iranian 40-somethings, Leila (played by Leila Hatami, who also played recently in the 2011 Oscar Winning film A Separation [2011]) a chemist, and Adel (played by Adel Yaraghi) who works for a Tehran advertising agency.  They meet one winter morning in Tehran when Leila has trouble getting her Volkswagon Beetle up a small hill after a snowfall.  Adel also driving a Volkswagon Beetle courteously stops helps her get her Beetle moving up the slight but irritating incline (anyone who's ever driven a VW Beetle -- it was the car that I learned to drive stickshift on when I was a teenager ;-) -- would know its rather temperamental gearshift ;-).  They exchange phone numbers and apparently hit it off because when we meet them again, it's apparently a year later and it looks like they are going to get married.  Except there's a problem ... Adel's a chain smoker and _really enjoys smoking_, sincerely thinks it helps him in his creative work and Leila, again a chemist, one who _may_ be working in some sort of a pharmaceutical or medical lab, just hates it.  What to do?  Well that's what the rest of the movie is about ;-)

This is clearly a very simple and yet very universal story.  And then there are some fairly predictable as well as surprising elements impinging on both Iran's current cultural circumstances as well as our Western perceptions of them.

Look, my parents were Czechoslovakian who came here after fleeing the Communists.  Czechoslovakia was also in a cultural deep-freeze during most of the Communist Era.  Yes, there was the Prague Spring around 1968 but the cultural flourishing that occurred during that remarkable period before it was crushed by Soviet tanks only makes the point.  And the point is this: the story in this film, as simple, poignant, lovely as it is, is _exactly_ the kind of film that is _safe_ when a creative community is living under the boot of a totalitarian regime.  There's absolutely _no politics_ here (none, zero, nada...), just a story about a woman who'd really like to have her man stop smoking....

And yet, there are also surprises (for the "know it all" Westerner ;-).  Among them are simply that a Westerner gets to see that Tehran has "winter," something that I noted in the discussion that followed the screening of the movie happily surprised me, because most of the time when I think of the Middle East, I think of a "hot dry desert climate." ;-).

But that's really a triviality.  What fascinates me much more about this film is that in many respects this is a very "classically Hollywood/American" film: It's simply the story of one man and one woman, both in their 40s (so both would have had some definite "life experience") with almost no friends and _no relatives_ in the story to speak of.  It's basically Humphrey Bogart [IMDb] and ... Ingrid Bergman [IMDb] / Lauren Bacall [IMDb].  So in the discussion after the film I did ask about that: Would this story be realistic in a place like Iran?  And the answer was that it was basically as realistic as the Humphrey Bogart [IMDb] movie of the 1940s, the implication and _reminder_ being that Iran is a sophisticated place.  For further support in this point, let the reader remember here the occupations of the two protagonists of the story.  He was an _ad man_ a profession as "hip, happening, modern" (and arguably as "artificial") as can be, and she was a chemist.  Neither was simply a "shop keeper" much less a "salt of the earth goat herder" of some sort.  They lived in Tehran, but they could have _easily_ lived in Los Angeles, Paris or New York.

And so I am very happy to have had the opportunity to see this film and then to share it with others here.   None (or extremely few) of us would have the capacity to visit "all the world,"  but with festivals such as these we do have an opportunity to visit the world and to see that we're not necessarily as different as we may at times think that we are. 

Excellent film!


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Xingu [2012]

MPAA (Unrated would be PG-13/R) Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
Adorocinema listing - [PT Orig][ENG trans]

Xingu [IMDb][AC-PT orig][ENG trans] directed and cowritten by Cao Hamburger [IMDb][AC Pt orig][AC Eng trans] along with Elena Soarez [IMDb] and Anna Muylaert [IMDb] is a remarkable Brazilian film that played recently at the 48th Chicago International Film Festival (Oct 11-25, 2012) about three brothers from a middle class family from São Paulo -- Claudio, Orlando and Leonardo Villas Boas (played by João Miguel [IMDb][AC Pt orig][AC Eng trans], Filipe Camargo [IMDb][AC Pt orig][AC Eng trans] and Ciao Blat [IMDb][AC Pt orig][AC Eng trans] respectively) who in the 1940s pretended to be illiterate in order to be allowed to join a Brazilian military expedition into the as of that time largely unexplored interior of Brazil specifically into the region called Mato Grosso.

Despite having good comfortable jobs São Paulo, the three brothers did so for the adventure of it _and_ out of a true respect/fascination with Brazil's indigenous peoples.  When the expedition had traversed a fair amount of the wilds, it made contact with the Xingu peoples in Mato Grosso and the three brothers became instrumental in establishing a remarkable relationship of respect between Brazil's government/military and the Xingu peoples such that the development of the area in the decades that followed actually resulted in the creation of a surprisingly successful Xingu National Park (under the supervision of the three brothers) where the Xingu peoples as well as others from the whole of the Amazon region were able to survive and keep their native ways of life more or less in peace.

(North) American readers will no doubt know of the both the largely tragic history of the Reservation system in the United States as well as Brazil's own often tragic history in this regard.  This film provides an IMHO much needed opportunity for viewers/readers to come to know, evaluate and hopefully learn from what could well be a true and very nice success!  Honestly good job makers of this this film and God bless you! ;-)

ADDENDUM:

My own religious order, The Friar Servants of Mary, as small as it has always been, has actually been very much involved in many of the issues surrounding the Amazon Rain Forest from calling for a 10 year moritorium on logging in the Amazon rain forest to the defense of both the indigenous peoples of Acre state in Brazil and the white/poor rubber tappers (seringueros) sent up to Acre in the 1940s by the Brazilian military during the same time as the three Villas-Bôas brothers joined the expedition that they took part in from São Paulo.  The Brazilian Servites in Acre knew the famed eco-martyr Chico Mendes personally (he was a _parishioner_ of theirs from their church at Xapuri in Acre, and he traveled with the Servites on their "desobriga" trips up and down the rivers of Acre as they did their missionary work.   In recent years, the Brazilian Servites contracted a book written by Brazilian writer Milton Claro to tell the story of "The Amazonia that We Do Not Know" mostly about the remarkable yet largely unknown humble people who inhabit the Amazon region.  I was the book's primary translator into English and since it was always intended for free distribution, I recently put it up on the internet so that people like yourselves could have access to it.  It is a truly remarkable text and there are entire chapters dedicated to the environmental destruction of the Amazon [2] [3], to the lives and challenges of the Indigenous peoples [2] [3] [4] and to the case of Chico Mendes.

Seven Psychopaths [2012]

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

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1931533/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv124.htm
Roger Ebert -
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121010/REVIEWS/121019997

Seven Psychopaths (written and directed by Martin McDonagh) is certainly a strange and often violent movie (the R rating is definitely deserved).  Yet it is often very funny as well as poignant and pointed.  I'd characterize the film as partly Quentin Tarentino's Pulp Fiction [1994] meets the Coen brothers' Big Lebowski [1998] but also reflecting some of the "over the pond" exasperations with "America" perhaps best expressed in my mind by Jon Ronson (who, like McDonagh comes from Britain and who is perhaps most famous for his book/movie The Men Who Stare at Goats [2009] but one who even wrote a recent bestselling book called The Psychopath Test (2012)]).

As such, the principal protagonist in McDonagh's film set in and around Los Angeles is Marty (played by Colin Farrell) a transplant from "the Isles," who, when he is sober..., is trying to write a screenplay called "Seven Psychopaths."  The idea's kinda edgy/cool.  But Marty has writer's block, which causes him to drink all the more.

And in truth at the beginning of the film, he's only been able to come up with one (perhaps one and a half) interesting psychopath(s) for his story: A "Buddhist psychopath" who he imagines as having had been a salutary, patriotic Vietcong fighter who went insane after he found that all his loved ones were murdered by American troops as part the Mi Lai Massacre in 1968.  So impersonating a Catholic priest, he emigrated to the United States and set out to murder in revenge everyone in the unit responsible for the massacre.  And after murdering a couple of them, he gets his big chance to get them all when he finds out that the unit was going to have a "reunion" in Las Vegas ...

But having "a priest" force a "Las Vegas hooker" to strap on a vest made of dynamite that he would detonate as she entered the room with 200 or so veteran members of the unit responsible for the Mi Lai Massacre apparently seemed too improbable/deranged for Marty and so he changes his "Buddhist psychopath" to a "Quaker" one, who exacts his revenge on a savage murderer of his only daughter by simply but _relentlessly_ "following him" (at a respectful, but still plainly noticeable distance) where-ever the murderer went until, the murderer, who himself had a change of heart (in prison) converting to Catholicism and had subsequently lived an otherwise _peaceful life_ even eventually earning parole simply could not stand being tormented by this malevolent yet supremely pacifist Quaker father "psychopath," and commits suicide.

But even with these two strange (if honestly quite fascinating "psychopaths") he had only one, one and a half or perhaps two psychopaths for his story and his goal was seven.  What to do ... besides drink?

Well it turns out that Marty's best friend, Billy Bickle (played by Sam Rockwell) and one who's been honestly trying really hard to get Marty to realize that his drinking is killing him (yes "Bickle" is the last name of the Robert De Niro character in Taxi Driver [1976] ... this point coming from Roger Ebert's review of this film), is running something of a mildly insane/evil scam with an older partner named Hans (played by Christopher Walken): The two kidnap the pet dogs (usually quite small) of rich people and then "find/return" them to their owners for the reward money.  Why would anyone (or any two people) do something so _mildly_ insane/Evil?   Well Hans had spent 20 years in jail ... and his wife Myra (played by Linda Bright Clay) now suffered from cancer.  Where's he gonna get a job with the attendant health insurance with his record?   So the two "steal dogs" of rich people and give them back to them for cash.  (They don't even write ransom notes to the dog owners.  They just wait until the rich people who've lost their beloved pets start posting notes on various neighborhood kiosks promising "reward money" for the return of their dogs).

However this mildly crazy/evil scam goes horribly awry when the two accidentally kidnap the beloved Shih Tzu (yes, it allows the characters in the film to say "shi...tzu" in countless variations during the rest of the film) of an otherwise truly sociopathic gangster named Charlie (played by Woody Harrelson).

Much, often very violently, ensues even as the characters with all their more or less obviously flaws and foibles actually talk about some fairly profound stuff (and Marty tries to get his screenplay together ...).  And yes, the whole story gets "nicely tied together" by the end ;-).

It all makes for a very well written, often funny if often pointedly disturbing story that reminds me of the influences I mentioned above.  Good job, McDonagh!  (I think ;-)


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Paranormal Activity 4 [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2109184/
CNS/USCCB review -
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/12mv125.htm

Paranormal Activity 4 (directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, screenplay by Christopher Landon, story by Chad Feehan) is one of those films that I've found little enthusiasm in seeing and yet I do believe deserves some mention here.  Other films in this category have included Sasha Barron Cohen's The Dictator, the Transformers' series knockoff Battleship and last spring's Silent House which starred Elizabeth Olsen who I generally like but could not bring my self to yet another "troubled/haunted house" film.  And there have been other popular/widely released films movies that I've found to be so uninteresting/unappealing that I've chosen to ignore them completely.

In the case of the Paranormal Activity franchise, I do have to say that I liked very much the first installment (which came out before I began writing this blog).  Like many others, I found it to be a brilliantly made, low budget (horror) film.  But by the end of the second installment and certainly the  third (both of which I did review here) I came to believe that the series had "jumped the shark," (and certainly in terms of filming technique).

I do believe that there are only a few very limited directions in which the series can go.  That is, it can, as the third installment suggests, get "increasingly dark" and I don't have any particular interest in either becoming (or, more to the point encouraging others in becoming...) "zoologists of Evil."  I do think that I have a healthy respect for Evil and don't care to know what "kind of demon" a particular demon tormenting a family would be.     As a priest, I've periodically blessed houses of parishioners concerned about strange things happening in their homes.  Generally speaking that's all that's ever been necessary.  If something really strange was going on (never has) I'd probably recommend calling the Diocese.   Honestly, there's no need to play with these things any more than that.  If one really believes in the existence of Evil / malevolent spirits, etc, then it really makes no sense to "study" or "play with them" unless one just wants to get into trouble.  (These spirits would be far smarter and certainly more Evil than you or I...).

So I'm done folks.  Who knows, maybe the Paranormal Activity series will go into a different direction, that of deciding to make light of itself.  And that would be fine.  However, if it chooses to continue to go in the path of poking ever more deeply into the Occult/Abyss, it will just become increasingly (though unintentionally) vapid or make us "experts" in things that we really _don't_ need to become experts in.

Meaning this as a joke: If at the end of our lives we find ourselves in Hell tortured by demons, will it be particularly helpful to us to "know" what class of demons is doing the torturing?  "Oh by the way, are you related in any way to the demons we saw in Paranormal Activity __?" "Oh no, Hollywood always gets this stuff wrong ..." ;-)


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Student [2012]

Unrated (would be PG-13/R)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2369333/

Student [2012] directed by Darezhan Omirabayev is a Kazakh film (filmed in Russian with English subtitles) that I saw recently at the 48th Annual Chicago International Film Festival (Oct. 11-25, 2012) that sets the story of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's famous novel 19th century Crime and Punishment in contemporary Almaty, Kazakhstan. 

The Raskolnikov character of Dostoyevsky's novel, known in this film as simply "the Student" (played by Nurlan Bajtasov) is a quiet/sullen, shoulder's bent, eyes always looking toward the ground philosophy student who American viewers would probably recognize as a clearly troubled youth / potential "school shooter."  When we meet him, he's already "on the edge."  Working on a film crew, he tries bring "some tea" to the lead actress only to spill the hot water on her.  She, apparently the girl friend of a powerful post-Communist banker, get's upset and when the banker's entourage comes to pick her up after the shoot, she has two of the thugs beat him up for the "insult" he caused.

A few scene's later, he's at a philosophy class, where the lecturer is praising the status of who things are today: "Yes, even Kazakhstan has its millionaires, even billionaires, oligarchs.  Don't resent them, try to be like them.  For 70 years we believed in a system that could life everyone up.  Today we know that we can't prosperity as a herd.  Prosperity is to be fought for by each person's individual's initiative.  Yes, there will be poor people.  You can pity them but don't waste too much time on them.  The law of nature is that the strong survive."

A Friend of the Student asks the Lecturer: "Doesn't it then logically follow in such a Darwinist world that those wishing to be successful would come to murder their rivals."  And there it is, the seed is planted.

Like in the novel, the Student doesn't kill anybody particularly significant.  And just as in the novel, he immediately finds himself needing to kill someone who is completely innocent.  He also has a mother and sister who love him, even visit him, but don't have a clue of what's going on in his head.  There's also a Sonia character that he grows to love.  As the implications of what he had done begin to close in on him in his head, The Student, like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevski's novel begins to lose his grip on reality and to bring himself back, it becomes increasingly clear what he must do.

Readers here who've read the novel we know how it ends and those who didn't should note that Dostoyevsky's novel was written in the 19th century.  As a result, both the novel and this story end better than some of the experiences that we've had in the United States with similarly distressed youth.

All in all, I found Darezhan Omirabayev's adaptation very interesting and I probably would not have made the connection between Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov and various distressed youth ranging from Timothy McVeigh or the school shooters at places like Virginia Tech or NIU.  That's a pretty good insight that comes from the country, Kazakhstan, that Sasha Baron Cohen brutally/gratuitously chose to ridicule in Borat [2005].


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Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica (orig. Era uma vez eu, Verônica) [2012]

Unrated (would be R)   Fr. Dennis (2 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing 
Adorocinema.com listing: [PT-orig] [ENG-trans]

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica (orig. Era uma vez eu, Verônica) [2012] [IMDb] [AC-PT orig.] [Eng-Trans]written and directed by Marcelo Gomez [IMDb] [AC-PT orig] [Eng-Trans] is a Brazilian film that played recently at the 48th Chicago International Film Festival (Oct 11-25, 2012) and could be described as Central Station (orig. Central do Brazil) [1998] meets Gray's Anatomy [2005-] / E.R. [1994-2009].

Recent medical school graduate Verônica (played by Hermila Guedes [IMDb] [AC-PT orig.] [Eng-Trans]) gets a residency assignment at an urban public hospital in her home city somewhere in coastal, north-eastern Brazil.  She lives with her aging father (played by W.J. Solha [IMDb] [AC-PT. orig.] [Eng.-Trans]).  And she also has a lover/boyfriend named Gustavo (played by João Miguel [AC-PT. orig] [Eng.-Trans]) that in truth she's not entirely certain about (and neither is he about her).

The work in the hospital is both challenging and important, hence my references to both the Brazilian film Central Station (orig. Central do Brazil) [1998] and the American television series E.R. [1994-2009] (that was also set in an urban setting in the United States).

However, Verônica is also a young adult trying to make sense out of her life, hence the somewhat "Brazilian Gray's Anatomy [2005-]" feel to the movie, (Gray's Anatomy being an American television series about a group of young medical school graduates).

That being said, someone like me, a Catholic priest from a religious order with a fair number of our priests having worked as chaplains in both Catholic and secular hospitals in the United States, I do have to raise the complaint that both this film and the American teleivion series, Gray's Anatomy [2005-] have presented the lives of recently graduated medical doctors as basically "party time" where the patients actually "kinda get in the way" of their otherwise "dulce vita."

At the end of the film, Verônica buys a house for her and her dad (a point is made that she had already bought a car) and takes a job in a _private hospital_ (where she presumably won't have to deal with that many poor people anymore).  And the film ends with Verônica rolling around with her on-again/off-again boyfriend and their friends at beautiful Brazilian beach somewhere.

That may be "the dream" _both_ in the United States and in Brazil for the past several generations when it comes to "doctors" ... that they simply become very, very rich or otherwise "important."  But that's _not_ what medical doctors used to be.

Medical doctors _used to be_  respected because they _healed people_ at times putting even themselves at risk in doing so.  Today, thanks to the soaps in the United States (and telenovelas in Latin America and elsewhere) medical doctors are generally presented as simply glamorously rich people and working with sick people needing help has become beside the point and even a burden.  

As such, the current film ends rather badly in my opinion.  HOWEVER, this may actually be the intent of the film maker as the title implies that Verônica loses herself.  The title of the film is, after all, "Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica" (or "Era uma vez eu, Verônica" in the original Portuguese).

In any case, medical doctors, whether American, Brazilian, Egyptian, German, Indian, Japanese, or Russian if they are not taking care of sick people, people who need them then they are not really doing their job.

Finally, I would also note that there is "a fair amount" of nudity in this film.  I do hope that those readers who do see it will understand both my noting it and my rather obvious ambivalence to it, because I think that the nudity in the film was both "beside the point" and/or may actually _accentuate it_: Why does one (or should one) become a medical doctor...? To _help people_ or simply to become rich or otherwise "important"? 


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Here Comes the Boom [2012]

MPAA (PG)  CNS/USCCB (A-II)  Michael Phillips (2 1/2 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Michael Phillips' review

Here Comes the Boom (directed by Frank Coraci, written by Kevin James, Rock Ruben and Allen Loab) is a nice, feel good story about a (fictional) Boston area high school biology teacher, Scott Voss (played by Kevin James) who though initially burnt out and depressed, could not bring himself to give-up on the school, teaching, the kids, others and his own life.

Yes, he was getting older, flabby, _wasn't_ exactly "livin' the dream," and yes he was "tired" at the beginning of the film: When a young, bright eyed Filipino girl named Malia (played by Charice) asked him a question about a discrepancy she had found between what their biology textbook said about something and what she found on the internet, he just responded with some iritation: "Malia, it really doesn't matter.  There's nothing that you're going to learn in this class that you're ever going to apply in your real life."  Saddened / deflated, she just slinks back into her chair ...

But after being first struck by the simple goodness and remaining enthusiasm of an older music teacher, Marty Streb (played marvelously by an older Henry Winkler, who people of my generation remember as the young "Fonz" of Happy Days [1974-1984]), and finding out only a short time later at a faculty meeting that "due to budgetary considerations," the (as Voss) similarly frustrated/discouraged/angry/cynical Principal Betcher (played by Greg Germann) was going to "ax all non-essential extracurricular programs" at the school come next year, including specifically Marty Streb's music program, Voss has had enough.

Typical of Kevin James' roles, Voss initially doesn't have any idea what to do.  But upset at the injustice of seeing perhaps _the only teacher_ on the school's staff left with any enthusiasm about what he was doing facing the budgetary chopping block (and there's really even more to it than that, Marty Streb had told him earlier in the day that in his / his wife's old age -- she was 48, he was simply "old" -- they just found out that they are going to have a baby) Voss was just not going to let this stand.  He tells the Principal "we" (meaning the faculty) will raise the money ourselves (meaning, initially certainly that _he_ was going to raise the money himself)" to save Marty Streb's job/program.  Okay, but how?

Initially,  Voss has no idea.  But as he stumbles along, opportunities open up for him.  He decides on a whim to start teaching a night class again (for immigrants preparing to take their citizenship exam).  It seems like a boneheaded, _completely inadequate_ response to the need to raise $55K before the end of the school year.  (For each class he gets paid something like $75).  BUT one has to start somewhere... In the class, he meets an entire classroom full of adults all, like James, basically simple but hard working/good hearted people trying to eek out a living and, in as much is possible, to "do the right thing."

Among the people he meets is a Slavic or otherwise East European exercise instructor / "trainer" named Niko (played by Bas Rutten).  Niko has a good heart but feeling that he had perhaps more muscles than brains, asks James for more (private) help on preparing for his citizenship exam.  It was an additional, small "gig," but what the heck, why not?

Well when he comes to tutor Niko at his place, he finds that Niko and his friends are there eyes glued to the television set to watch a Mixed Martial Arts match.  The match proves to be a monumental disappointment.  One of the two fighters is pinned/knocked out something like 10 seconds. In disgust, Niko exclaims "and he got 10 grand for that" Voss responds: "For losing??" "Yes!  And the winner got 50K!"  Now for Voss who, flabby as he was now, had wrestled in college _that_ was real money!  And the rest of the movie proceeds from there...

The Principal initially thinks that Voss is an idiot.  But Voss doesn't care.  He tells him, "If I had a better plan I'd take it, but I don't.  This is the best that I can do."  And by subjecting himself to getting beaten up, and yes, progressively improving, Voss slowly becomes an inspiration to the whole school, to everyone, to the faculty including another teacher (or perhaps the school nurse) Bella Flores (played by Salma Hayek) who initially considered Voss to be _perhaps_ a "nice guy" but mainly a "going nowhere loser," to the Principal, to his own brother Eric (played by Gary Valentine) and his brother's family.

Voss even rediscovers his enthusiasm for teaching.  He tells students at one point that even on the cellular level (action and inaction) is contagious: A cell that's progressively becoming more dormant (or dying) puts other cells neighboring it progressively to sleep, while a cell that simply comes to "vibrate" awakens and increases the motabolism of the surrounding cells as well.

It all makes for a pretty good lesson!  And what I particularly liked was Voss' (James character's) willingness _to simply begin_ not with a complete plan, but to simply take the first steps into an unknown ... and then discovering that by simply _willing to try_ "opportunities" open up.  IN MY OWN LIFE, I've found this to be true.  And I would maintain that there is even a theological basis for such optimism/initiative: We're told _repeatedly_ in the Biblical Scriptures to (1) "not be afraid," and (2) to say "Yes" to Life and what it brings us.

So good job Kevin James, et al!  Good job!


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