Letters to Santa (orig. Listy do M) [2011]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
FilmWeb.pl* listing

Letters to Santa (orig. Lysty do M)[IMDb][FW.pl]* (2011) directed by Slovenian director Mitja Okorn [IMDb][FW.pl]* screenplay by Karolina Szablewska [IMDb] [FW.pl]*, Marcin Baczynsik [IMDb][FW.pl]* with collaborating input of Sam Akina [IMDb] arrived at the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago (Nov 2-16, 2012) as far and away the most successful Polish language romantic comedy of all time and the longest running movie in Poland since the release of the Titanic (1997) [wiki.pl][eng-trans].

The film's success was certainly the result of Poland's film industry's willingness to take risks, among them being its willingness to hire a young Slovenian director (rather than a Pole) for the film (and a Slovenian who himself was finding his options limited in his home country) and then, as this Slovenian born director, Mitja Okorn [IMDb][FW.pl]*, explained after a screening of the film here at the festival, to take his advice and send the script to Hollywood for significant rewrite prior to filming.  Both of these decisions could have initially felt to be "ego bruising" but they clearly paid off.  In an interview with Gazeta.pl [Eng Trans], one of the film's stars Maciej Stuhr [IMDb] [FW.pl]* noted that the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk after having the film himself after it had been released declared it to be "the first (truly) successful Polish romantic comedy."  And yes, many Polish language reviews [wiki.pl][eng-trans] call the film a Polish romantic comedy along the lines of Love Actually [2003] and Notting Hill [1999].

That popular, critical and even political praise be said, the film, which if it was released for popular distribution in the United States would certainly be R-rated (like many recently American rom coms have been, including No Strings Attached [2011] and Friends with Benefits [2011] reviewed here) AND then built around four couples'/families' celebration of _Christmas_ in contemporary Warsaw is not without its issues / risks. I did ask the director during the Q/A following the screening of the film here, what the Catholic Church had to say about the film.  I actually did not mean it to be a particularly problematic question but was honestly interested in his response (in good part because I'd have no doubt that the CNS/USCCB's media office here in the United States would have given the film an "L" (limited audience) or more likely an "O" (morally offensive) rating as it gave the two recent American romantic comedies mentioned immediately above).  (I apologized to him afterwards saying that I really didn't mean to put him on the spot, just was interested).

I've generally taken the view that rom-coms tend to have have a "Wouldn't it be nice?"  daydream/Beach Boys quality to them and that while certainly the CNS/USCCB has its place in calling films on their portrayal apparently consequenceless pre-marital sex that if one sees these films along the daydreamy lines of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and then watches them play through, that these films often come to the conclusions of Catholic Teaching anyway, notably that there is really no a such a thing as a consequenceless sexual relationship.  And in the tradition of the Anglo-American rom-coms, this film, Letters to Santa (orig. Lysty do M)[IMDb][FW.pl]*, ends by-and-large with an affirmation of family and marriage.  Still, I can't help but feel somewhat queasy about this particular film centering itself around the celebration of Christmas and I did find a number of informal concerns raised among lay Catholics as to whether the film would be appropriate for teenagers [Pl-orig] [Eng-trans] (I agree for reasons below that the film definitely isn't for young teens) and then a lament of a similarly blogging Catholic priest in Poland, Fr. Raphael Sorkowicz SChr [Pl-orig] [Eng-trans] over the _generally_ religionless nature of the film.  (The film _does_ feel more like New York than Warsaw).

And yet then the film was enormously popular in Poland, and certainly _not_ because it was some kind of an "anti-Christian secularist attack" on Christmas, but almost certainly because it was a remarkably well written, crafted and acted film.

So let's keep the number of screen portrayals of drunk/promiscuous "Saint Nicholases" to a minimum -- and let's remember that in Central/Eastern Europe, with the exception of the now thoroughly discredited Communistic "Ded Maroz" (Grandpa Frost), there presently really is no equivalent to the thoroughly secular "Santa Claus" of the United States.  When one shows (as this film does) a man dressed-up as Saint Nicholas having "bedboard breaking sex" with a woman (who's cheating on her husband besides...) it really approaches portraying the actual Saint doing that with that woman ... and hopefully one would see the obvious disrespect with that -- and focus on what I'm positive that Polish audiences (and really audiences throughout Central Europe/the Slavic world) would prefer, some really well crafted Brigid Jones, etc type romances instead.

Director Mitja Okorn [IMDb][FW.pl]* has clearly shown film makers across Central Europe / the Slavic world how to do this.  Honestly, let's now see a whole wave of well-crafted but also more positive rom-coms come out of this ;-)

* Running the FilmWeb.pl links through Google's Chrome browser allows automatic (machine, about 60-70% correct) translation of the Polish sites cited here.  Note that at the time of the writing of this review FilmWeb.pl had a somewhat annoying advertisement page at its gateway that appeared to defy getting around if one sought to use Google's translate.google.com service using the Firefox or Microsoft Explorer browsers.



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The Other Dream Team [2012]

MPAA (NR)  Dave Hoekstra/Chicago Sun Times (4 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
Dave Hoestra's review

The Other Dream Team (directed and cowritten by Marius A. Markevicius along with Jon Weinbach) is a documentary that tells the story of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team.  While certainly all the United States and much of the rest of the basketball following world was focused on the truly _epic_ "Dream Team" that the U.S. sent to Barcelona Olympics that year (it was the first U.S. Olympic Basketball Team made up of professional athletes, and to this day it was probably the best basketball team to ever play in the Games), there was this "other story" taking place.  And the stories were actually interrelated. ;-)

The stories of the _two_ dream teams were interrelated because of what happened at the previous Olympic Games (in Seoul, South Korea).  In Seoul, the U.S. Olympic Basketball Team still made up of college all-stars rather than professional athletes was defeated in the gold medal game by the Soviet Olympic team.  U.S. disgust at being forced by antiquated Olympic rules to field "college all stars" rather than truly its best athletes to play arguably "America's Game" led to the fielding of the legendary 1992 "Dream Team" made-up of truly the best American basketball players of the age.

But that was really only 1/2 the story.  The other half took place on "the other side."  Who were the stars of the 1988 Soviet Olympic team?  It turned out that 4 out of 5 of the starters of that Soviet squad were LITHUANIANS.  (Lithuania, which along with the other "Baltic states" of Latvia and Estonia had enjoyed a brief period of independence in the 1920s-30s, had been occupied and absorbed back into the Russian dominated Soviet Union by Stalin in 1940).

In 1988 few would have honestly imagined that the world would so remarkably change by 1992.  Yet, in 1989 the Berlin Wall will have come down and one by one the Soviet Union's satellite countries in Central Europe would assert true independence.  But what of the Baltic states which had been absorbed into the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) itself?  Lithuania became the first of the Soviet Republics to assert _its_ independence.  And the journey was rocky.  Lithuania did not become truly free (and receive formal international recognition of being truly free) until the aborted coup against Soviet premier Gorbachev in 1991 which resulted in the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union soon afterward.

This documentary therefore presents the story of the 1992 Lithuanian basketball team and its country helping to explain how this small country became a basketball powerhouse in its part of the world, and how the team helped solidify its country's new found independence in that heady time approaching the 1992 Games.

It turns out that Lithuania already had formidable basketball tradition prior to the Soviet Occupation:  In the 1930s, Lithuania had hosted (once) the European Basketball Championships and won the European Championships _several times_.  In such a heady, winning atmosphere, basketball had captured the imagination of the Lithuanian people and basketball courts appeared in playgrounds across the country.  The country's love of the game continued during Soviet Occupation and Lithuanians remained good at the game.  Games between Kaunas' (Lithuania's second city) Žalgiris team and Moscow's "Central Red Army" team (basically the Soviet Union's "New York Yankees," or since we're talking basketball here, its "Los Angeles Lakers" ...) became epic.  And Kaunas' Žalgiris often cleaned the "Central Red Army's" clocks.  Lithuanian prominence, even dominance, in Soviet basketball became the reason why the Soviet national team came to be dominated by Lithuanian basketball players from, you guessed it ... Kaunas.

In the late 1980s, another interesting development started to take place: The NBA led by, of all teams, the Portland _TRAIL BLAZERS_, began to toy with the idea of "drafting" Soviet (meaning largely Lithuanian) basketball players to play in the NBA.  In 1986, the Portland Trail Blazers drafted Arvydas Sabonis, who became the star of the 1988 Soviet Olympic team.  He was not allowed to play for Portland until 1989.  In 1987, another Lithuanian player, Šarūnas Marčiulionis, was drafted by the NBA's Oakland, CA based Golden State Warriors and became the first Soviet (er Lithuanian) player to play in the NBA.

Šarūnas Marčiulionis years with the Golden State Warriors became important to the story of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic Basketball team because during his time playing for the Bay Area team, he came to know the legendary Bay Area rock band, "The Grateful Dead," several of who's members, including the legendary Jerry Garcia, turn out to have been avid basketball fans (and also unconventional "kooks" :-) who always liked an underdog ;-).  In the chaos of Lithuania's new found independence, it was the Grateful Dead's "opening of its check book" that financed Lithuania's Basketball team's participation in the 1992 Olympics.  And returning the favor, Lithuania's Basketball Team, which won the Bronze medal that year (after beating the Former Soviet Union's "Unified Team" in the bronze medal game), showed up to the medal ceremony dressed in the Grateful Dead provided "Lithuanian Colored Tie-Dye" t-shirts ;-).  Indeed, for a country that had been effectively "dead" for 40 years, the symbolism and humor was remarkably appropriate ;-).

Anyway, I found this film to be a joy to watch and probably would entertain both world basketball fans and history geeks ;-), for it is a celebration of both freedom and universal human aspiration to be recognized for who one is.  So good job folks, good job!\


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The Man with the Iron Fists [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (O)  Roger Moore (1 Star)  AV Club (B)  Fr Dennis (2 Stars - with an explanation)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Moore's review
AV Club's review

Conceding everything in the somewhat uncharacteristically brutal review by the CNS/USCCB's media office (John Mulderig certainly is at least partly right and his review is worth the read), I'm still left with a somewhat different impression of The Man with the Iron Fists (directed, starring, and cowritten by rapper RZA [IMDb] along with Eli Roth and affiliated in some but unclear way with Quentin Tarantino [IMDb] who's made a career of making similarly striking if ultraviolent movies and is now old enough to have become something of a "mentor" figure for younger movie makers choosing to go down a similar path).

That impression is not borne so much of the film itself but of my waiting in line, actually to buy tickets for the first showing of another film, Flight [2012], which was opening on the same night.  Ahead of me at this South West Suburban theater just outside of Chicago was a fairly large group of smartly but not overly expensively dressed young Asian college students, both men and women, rattling away in what I assume was Chinese (I'm guessing Mandarin though it could have been Cantonese) all there to see The Man with the Iron Fists.  And it impressed me that if a group of smiling Chinese young adults was going out of their way to see the first showing of an American made martial arts film (filmed in Shanghai and with a lot of Chinese and Chinese-American actors) that the film would not necessarily be that bad.

Hence as I sometimes do, I looked-up the youth oriented AV Club (the "serious side" of the satirical Onion newspaper) to see what it had to say of the film, and found, lo and behold that the reviewer gave the film a "B" (out of an A-F scale).  This is rather impressive actually given that the AV Club tends to be notoriously tough in its reviews (very, very few films get an "A-" to say nothing of an "A").  It will interest me what reviewers in Hong Kong and even China will have to say...

The Man with the Iron Fists is, of course, a genre film, coming out of the tradition of Hong Kong action (martial arts) genre, popularized in the United States by the legendary Bruce Lee [IMDb] and later by the Hong Kong born martial arts/comedic actor Jackie Chan [IMDb]. (The IMDb maintains a truly impressive list called "250 best martial arts films" that could definitely be of interest to some readers here). While having roots in the historical situation / chaos of 19th century / early 20th century pre-Communist era China, like the American Western which technically is rooted in the post-Civil War, late 1800s chaos of the "Wild West," the martial arts genre has, of course, gained a "life of its own."  And just like some of the most outrageous novels about "The Wild West" (capturing its "spirit" if not necessarily reality...) were written in places like Italy or Germany, it shouldn't surprise anyone too much that American born directors like Tarantino [IMDb] (or rappers like RZA [IMDb]) would find the still relatively tame martial arts classics like Fist of Fury [1972] or Enter the Dragon [1973] fascinating and subsequently take the genre in all kinds of "creative" directions afterwards. After all, Jackie Chan's [IMDb] movies (even when still made in Hong Kong) do so similarly (though certainly _more humorously_).  Indeed, Jackie Chan [IMDb] did with martial arts films what Clint Eastwood's [IMDb] "spaghetti westerns" did with the Classic Western.

All this is to say that film goers may not particularly like (or even be revolted by) the particular/peculiar ultra violent take that Tarantino [IMDb] or RZA [IMDb] would bring to the "martial arts movie," and yet still go to see it and then judge the film according to the conventions of the "traditional martial arts film" set in crime ridden, "opium den" laden "China" of the late 19th / early 20th century (before the Communists effectively brought an end to the chaos of the "War Lords" era).   

So then, having seen this film, set somewhere "in the provinces" of China in the latter part of the 19th century, I do have to say that the gratuitous gore in the film "distracted."  The film would have been far better, far more entertaining without it.  One could have even kept the the Russel Crowe character, Jack ("but you can call me Ripper") a Britisher, introducing himself as someone "who's on vacation" (but is actually a hired agent working for the Emperor and his forces), _without_ needlessly _lingering_ on _all_ that he does with his monstrous knife.  (Yes, he had a huge knife, yes he used it to cut, indeed gut, people.  But do we really have to see him truly split a man and his _still beating heart_ in two?  Parents especially, you get the picture...).

Now one could also object that a good part of the film took place in a brothel called "The Peach Tree" (run by a Madam named "Blossom" played by Lucy Liu).  But here I would note that there was actually no nudity in the film (as is the case in most westerns) and yet to make a martial arts film set in 19th century China without a brothel/"opium den" would be somewhat akin to making a western without a saloon and at least a hint of the brothel no doubt sit above it.  In both cases without the presence of a brothel, the story would probably be largely devoid of women.  (One could actually make an interesting pro-Christian and specifically pro-Catholic appeal here.  In the past, in places like the Far East when families could not afford the young girls that they had (as in other places in the world, girls tended to need dowries to be married off...), for better or for worse, the families would often sell the girls to brothels.  And yes, some of these girls perhaps proved "lucky" and were subsequently sold or otherwise "moved up" to be concubines to some fairly important officials perhaps even the Emperor.  But for the most part, they would have ended up in some "Peach Tree" somewhere (or become part of the "human trafficking" system that exists to this day).  In the Catholic West and later in more Catholic places like Vietnam, a lot of those girls would have been given instead to Orphanages and would have ended up joining Convents.  One would imagine that becoming a nun would have been a far better alternative to becoming a prostitute (in Japan a Geisha girl) or a concubine).

Anyway ... if one can get past the needless, lingering, blood-splattering violence of the film, it can actually make for an interesting if still "romanticized" genre-period piece.  Since "Flight" was a significantly longer movie than "The Man with the Iron Fists" was, I don't know what the Chinese young people who went to see this film thought of it, but I would have been interested.  Perhaps I'll find a review from Hong Kong, Taiwan or China to post here some day...


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Wreck-It Ralph [2012]

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

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert's review

Wreck-It Ralph (directed by Rich Moore, screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston with additional input by John C. Reilly) is IMHO the best original animated feature to come out of the United States since I began my blog (admittedly only two years ago).  It is the first such American film that's not a sequel that could be put in the same league as animated features like Finding Nemo [2003], Wall-E [2008], Kung Fu Panda [2008], Up [2009], How to Train Your Dragon [2010] or Despicable Me [2010].  Honestly, while it's been only two years that I've been writing this blog, I've found them, by and large, absolutely dismal when it comes to children's animated films.  Yes, there was the remake of Winnie the Pooh [2011] last year and the adaptation of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax [2012] this year.  And there was The Secret World of Arrietty [2010] (which actually came from Japan's Studio Ghibli) and there was Toy Story 3 [2010] that came out in the summer before I started my blog.  But my gosh SINCE THEN it's been awful: Mars Needs Moms [2011],  Hop [2011], Hoodwinked 2 [2011], even Happy Feet 2 [2011].  So I found Wreck-It Ralph, perhaps a younger more straight forward distant cousin of Tron [1982, 2010] a breath of fresh air.

What's it about?  Well like those Tron movies, Wreck-It Ralph takes place inside the world of video games specifically within the video games of one arcade.  Kinda like in those Tron movies, the characters (if not the programs themselves, as in the more complicated Tron movies) in those video games are imagined to be alive inside those games.  And once one makes "the leap" that the characters in video games are "alive" and living in those video games then one can imagine the stories that can ensue ...

Wreck-It Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) is the villain in a video game called "Fix-it Felix."  Ralph is a big lumbering blue collar "King Kong" like character who climbs a big multi-story building and breaks things, while Felix (a "Super Mario like character is voiced by Jack McBrayer) is the hero that the building's residents (called "Nicelanders") call to fix the things that Ralph breaks.  When Felix fixing everything and catches up to Ralph, the Nicelanders cheer and throw Ralph off the building into a giant puddle of mud (and the game presumably proceeds to a new level ...).

Well after 30 years of this, Ralph is tired of being "the bad guy" and feels unappreciated.  To his horror, he finds that he's not even invited to the "30th anniversary party" that the Nicelanders throw in honor of Felix (for keeping their building in tip-top shape for 30 years, despite the best efforts of the evil and destructive Ralph).  When Ralph confronts the Nicelanders about why they never invite him to anything, they tell him that they'll _never_ honor him unless he "wins a medal" for something.  But he can _never_ get a medal for anything in this game because he's programmed to break things while Felix (who keeps winning medals) is programmed to fix them.

So one day, Ralph decides to travel down the electrical wires that do (kinda) connect the video games to each other, to go to "Grand Game Central (station)" and "jump" games, to see if he could find a more rewarding destiny elsewhere.

He first jumps into a game called "Heroes Duty" where he joins a platoon of scifi warriors led by Sgt Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) tasked to destroy an invasion of "sci-birds," to climb up to their nest and destroy their eggs before they hatch a new generation of them.  He actually succeeds in reaching the nest and is solemnly awarded a medal which he hopes to happily take home to the "Nicelanders" so that they would finally respect him.

However ... as he sets out to go back to Grand Game Central again, he gets grabbed by one of the remaining "sci-birds" and who carries him off wildly through Grand Game Central and all the way to another game called "Sugar Rush" a very, very pink and sugary auto racing game (apparently designed to appeal to little girls).

There in the midst of the "Sugar Rush" video game, the "sci-bird" crashes (in a puddle of milk chocolate) and there Ralph, trying to regain his bearings and take his medal back to his home video game enounters another kind of "misfit" character: She's a cute little girl character named Vanellope (voiced by Sarah Silverman) who nonetheless is not allowed to "race" in the "Sugar Rush Game" because ... "she's a glitch" (every so often her character seems to sparkle and fade in and out on the screen).  The other characters in her game are terrified that if she's ever allowed to race the humans playing the video game would see her do that (suddenly "fade in and out") and think that something was wrong with the video game and _shut it off_ effectively killing all the game's characters or at least making them "refugees" reduced to hanging around Grand Game Central in hopes of some day getting a new gig ...

In the meantime, the previously happy-go-lucky Fix-it Felix as well as those "Nicelanders" (who previously hated Ralph for constantly trying to wreck their building) find themselves in an "existential crisis" of their own.  Without Ralph there to break their building, there's no reason for Felix to Fix anything and hence kids coming to play the game suddenly find themselves "confused." ("Hey what's the point of this game ... where's the guy who breaks things?")  Seeing something wrong with the game, the arcade owner put the dreaded "Out of Order" sign on the game and the "Nicelanders" find themselves quivering in fear that unless Ralph comes back the arcade owner is going to "unplug" their game as well.

But no fear, "Fix-it Felix," who actually never had anything against Ralph, just saw both him and Ralph simply "doing their jobs" sets off to find Ralph in the midst of the other games of the arcade.

Much of course happens.  And all things end up happily.  We find out, among other things, that cute little Vanellope wasn't initially "a glitch" that someone (some sinister character...) "messed with her programming" ("Ooo...").  Then between "The Destroyer" (Wreck it Ralph) and "The Fixer" (Fix it Felix) the two find that they are able restore order to both the world of "Sugar Rush" and even to Sgt Calhoun who also we're told wasn't _always_ the "blood and guts warrior that she is now" but, in fact, had "the saddest back story of any video game character ever" ("awww..." ;-( 

Again, it all ends well and I honestly marvel at the film's creativity!  Once more, IMHO this is the best _original_ children's animated film to come out of Disney, et al, in years. ;-)


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Flight [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (O)  Roger Ebert (4 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert's review

Flight (directed by Robert Zemekis and written by John Gatins) surprises.  While Parents _please note_ that this film is definitely deserves its R-rating (definitely _not_ for your little kids and can't think of a reason why a high school aged teen under 17 would "need" to see this film) IMHO it makes for a _very interesting_ adult parable about God's will and our participation, both chosen and unchosen, in it.

The film's about an arrogant, supremely competent (and hard drinking/hard partying...) middle-aged commercial airline pilot named "Whip" Whitaker (played masterfully by Denzel Washington).  The opening scene has the 6:30 or is it 7 AM alarm go off at his Orlando area hotel suite, bottles and drugs strewn around, still similarly buzzed/hung-over flight attendant Katerina Marquez (played by Nadine Velazquez) lying at his side.  They have a 9 AM flight to get to ...

No problem, she showers, puts on her clothes, he does a line or two of coke and ... in the next scene, there's Captain Whitaker in a trench coat with "appropriate"/studied seriousness/"sobriety" doing his pre-flight ground inspection of the plane (in a driving rain).  And when he enters the cabin, Katerina's there, smiling, welcoming him on board: "Hello Captain..."  The chief flight attendant, Margaret Thomason (played by Tamara Tunie), like Whitaker, also middle aged, and who it becomes clear as the film progresses has known Whitaker for some time (and yet is also a good "chat buddy" with Katerina) clearly knows what's been going on between "Whip" and Katerina, but just slightly rolls her eyes and continues on with the "professional tasks" at hand (as do the others ...).

Whitaker's co-pilot, Ken Evans (played by Brian Geraghty), is much younger and "greener" than he is.  They appear to meet on this flight for the first time.  It's clear that Ken isn't much impressed and may even be frightened by Whitaker.  We find out more about his impressions later in the story.  Yet even at this first glance, it's fairly clear that Ken would have probably preferred to be flying with (and really flying "under") just about anybody else.  But ... we all know that often "we don't get to choose who we fly with ..." (both literally and symbolically).

The plane takes off from Orlando in a driving rainstorm.  Whitaker does some rather unorthodox flying to get them out of the storm and into a patch of calmer air.  Throughout the flight, it was fascinating to me how Whitaker disdained, even _hated_ "autopilot" (and convention in general ...) preferring, even _insisting_ to fly the plane, "his plane" manually.

Once out of the storm's way the flight continues normally toward its destination, Atlanta, a little less than an hour's flight time away.  THEN some minutes prior to beginning normal descent SOMETHING TERRIFYING goes wrong with the plane.  A loud thud is heard, suddenly the plane's controls seem severely damaged and the plane goes into an increasingly steep dive.

Anyone who's seen the advertisements to the film will know that WHITAKER miraculously is able to bring the plane down safely -- into an open field -- with minimal loss of life.  Only six people died on the plane, four passengers and two flight attendants (with a MINIMAL SPOILER ALERT one of them being Katerina).  Captain Whitaker's a hero.  But it's also clear that he had been drinking.  Blood tests taken during his time in the hospital make it clear that he had a 0.24% blood alcohol level in his blood stream at the time when the samples were taken and that he also had traces of cocaine in his blood stream.  To give one perspective as the Pilots' Union lawyer (played by Don Cheadle) points out to Whitaker, having a 0.08% alcohol level would convict one of drunk driving of an automobile in the States and here he was flying a plane with over 120 people on board with a level of 0.24%.  Finally, it's clear that from a strictly causal point of view, his toxicology readings at the time of the accident HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with the cause of the plane's catastrophic failure.  Indeed, his "unorthodox", arguably "beyond good and evil" GOD-LIKE disdain for conventions/rules SAVED all but those six victims on that plane.  With this in mind, the rest of the film unspools giving viewers _much_ to think about:

(1) Can a "miracle" be performed by someone patently unworthy of performing it?

(2) What the heck is God's will in an event such as this?  Even in this "miracle," where 115 or so "souls" were saved from death by Whitaker, 6 people died and many others were injured.  The far more God fearing co-pilot tells Whitaker (after the copilot had recovered from his coma) that his legs were crushed, that he'll probably never walk again and that he'll certainly never fly again.  And yet he had absolutely no doubt that it was God's will that Whitaker DRUNK AS HE CLEARLY WAS was on that plane and saved him/the other others from death on that day.

(3) Can even a "miracle worker" _earn_ his salvation?  Yes, Whitaker was a hero / "miracle worker" but the fact remained that he was a mess ...

WHAT A GREAT STORY!


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Land of Eb [2012]

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

IMDb listing

Land of Eb (directed and cowritten by Andrew Williamson along with John Hill) which played recently at the 48th Chicago International Film Festival (Oct 11-25, 2012), is a gentle if sad story about family of immigrants from the Marshall Islands headed by grandfatherly Jacob (played by Jonithan Jackson) trying to make a life for themselves in the Kona District of the Big Island of Hawaii with still some hope of being able to send some support to their relatives living closer to home.

The story of Jacob and his family is one that many immigrants could certainly relate to.  They are "making do" in their new land.  They own a piece of land on that Big Island of Hawaii and are growing some coffee on it.  The adults also work various odd jobs (including harvesting the coffee of other farmers/planters on the island).  They have a house, one which one would imagine would be typical of the poorer strata of people living in rural Hawaii.  And they have a pickup truck and a couple of other older functional cars that help the various members of the family eek out the existence that they have.  The adults work, try to instill values in their kids.  THEY ALL GO TO A LOVELY CHURCH built and maintained by other Marshallese/Pacific Islander immigrants like themselves.

But they also struggle -- with a certain degree of racism against them (people try to cheat them, make occasionally make fun of their accents) AND with, well, consumerism.  As "functional" (even Spartan) as their existence would initially seem, it becomes clear that Jacob has become something of a "gadget guy."  He has a ham radio, which he, no doubt, bought initially with the intention of communicating with his far flung relatives closer to home.  Except, it becomes clear that he doesn't necessarily talk to them all that much on that radio, though he does use that ham radio talk to others (other enthusiasts).  Over the years, he's also bought all kinds of (relatively) inexpensive video equipment.  He's also built a number of "booms" and other cinematographic equipment himself, making it clear that he used to have some ambitions in utilizing all that equipment to do some film making/story telling.  We also see him trying to talk to some customer service agent somewhere in hopes of getting himself connected to the internet out there in the rural Kona District of the Big Island of Hawaii.  That however appeared to be "a bridge too far."  And indeed, most of these projects appeared to have become beyond his reach, because as the story progresses, we find that Jacob has come down with cancer.

So what now?  Unable to really help his folks back in his home country, and unable to realize those personal projects that he had embarked on in his new existence, he just struggles now to focus on providing for his immediate family living with him on the Big Island of Hawaii.  And he does manage to tell his granddaughter the story of The Land of Eb after which this film is named:  

Once upon a time a famine stuck the island where a young boy and his mother had lived.  And so the mother sent him out to a reef to dive for some clams so that they would have something to eat.  Well he spent the whole day diving, and sure enough by the end of the day, his boat was almost full of clams.  HOWEVER, he was he hungry.  And so he ended up eating almost all the clams and returned home to tell his mother that he found none.  He did the same for some time, each time returning home with next to nothing for his mother.  Finally, one day he had an accident and never returned.  And the entire village laughed at him because he was the only one who ever dove into "The Land of Eb" where there were enough clams for everyone and yet was somehow never able to provide for his mother.

IT'S A SAD STORY THAT ANY IMMIGRANT FAMILY WOULD CERTAINLY UNDERSTAND ...
My own folks were (Czech) immigrants as well ...

ADDENDUM:

What would a Marshallese family be doing in Hawaii to begin with?  Well aside from the lure that Hawaii (part of the United States) would probably have on Pacific Islanders in any case, the Marshall Islands were the site of massive post-World War II nuclear tests conducted by the United States.  As a result of the radioactive fallout, many of Marshall Islanders were evacuated from their ancestral homes to become refugees.  Earlier in the year, I reviewed another film on the topic, a documentary called Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Project 4.1, which was about the plight of Marshallese Islanders who have been moved back and forth over decades as a result of many of their home islands having been contaminated by the tests.


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Flower Buds (orig. Poupata) [2011]

Unrated (would be R)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CSFD listing - [CZ, ENG trans]

Flower Buds (orig. Poupata) [IMDb][CSFD, Eng trans] is an award winning Czech film (w. Eng subtitles) written and directed by Zdeněk Jiráský [IMDb][CSFD, Eng Trans] which played recently at the 48th Annual Chicago International Film Festival (Oct. 11-25, 2012).  Back in the Czech Republic, it won 4 Czech Lions [Eng Trans] (the nation's equivalent to the Oscars) including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Actor in a Leading Role.  At the Chicago Int'l Film Festival it won the Silver (2nd Place) in the New Director Competition.

What's it about?  Well the film's really a devastating indictment of the state of the family in Czech society today.  Every single character in the story except for 2 Vietnamese immigrants (more on the two below) is portrayed as being a real mess.  Yet as hard as it is for someone like me (of Czech descent still very much in contact relatives and "the old country") to watch a film like this, it is a testament to the cultural critical, indeed prophetic role that the artistic community _can play_ in a society.  When there is a problem in society, it is often the artistic community that finds itself calling attention to it and often to the initial upset of the society in general.  No one likes to see/hear bad news.  Yet how can problems be confronted (or one can live honestly) unless they are faced? 

The American observer may find it utterly surprising that in contemporary Czech society the _artistic community_ has been consistently challenging society to recover at least a basic sense of personal morality including (and perhaps _especially_) a basic sense of sexual morality.  Why?  Because the current state of personal morality in the Czech Republic (and throughout much of Europe and especially in post-Communist lands) has been appalling.  Thus then this film, set in December (in the days/weeks leading up to and following Christmas) in a small industrial city (the towns of Kladno or Zlín come to mind) in the contemporary Czech Republic.

The father of the family in the film, Jarda (played by Vladimír Javorský [IMDb][CSFD, Eng Trans], begins the story working as a railway switch operator outside a large industrial plant.  However, he spends much of his time (alone) sitting in his booth, building model cars, boats, etc out of matches (basically a "hard" but certainly _not_ particularly meaningful activity...).   He also has a massive gambling addiction spending much of his time in the evenings in the local bar feeding money that he no longer has (he borrows from the bar owner) into slot machines.

Jarda's wife, Kamila (played by Malgorzata Pikus [IMDb][CSFD, Eng Trans]) works as a street cleaner by day and is part of a local synchronized gymnastics group calling itself "Poupata" or "Flower Buds" (from which the film takes its name).  The group represents a vestige of past "glory" when such groups would be organized to come together both first under the pan-Slavic nationalistic Sokol movement and later during the Communist era by the government sanctioned the Spartakiad movement to enormous regional even national gatherings where all these little groups would "exercise together" performing all kinds of often spectacular stadium-sized synchronized feats.  In this film, however, all that we see is a group of 30-40 women calling themselves "The Flowerbuds" meeting together to practice at a local and rather rickety/delapitated gym.  And how do they finance their activities?  Well, the 30-40 local women (many like Kamila in their 40s and even 50s) shoot an annual erotic calendar...

Their son Honza (meaning "Johnny" played by Miroslav Pánek [IMDb]) who looks like a student or a recently graduated student, in any case unemployed and not particularly looking for work, makes some extra cash by growing marijuana hydroponically with a couple of his buddies in a tarp covered chamber hidden under a viaduct somewhere.  Their late teenage daughter Agata (played by Marika Soposká [IMDb] [CSFD, Eng Trans]) also possibly graduated but also certainly unemployed and also not particularly looking for work finds herself pregnant presumably by one of Honza's friends but it becomes clear as the story goes on that she's not entirely sure by whom ... And tragically it turns out that Agata is actually "the brains" and even arguably _the conscience_ of the family..

So who the heck among all these people is actually working?  Kamila (the mother) is, and then there are the two Vietnamese immigrants that I mentioned above and promised to return to here.  Their names are Hue (played by Thi Min Ngygnen [CSFD, Eng Trans]) and her husband Long (played by Kim Son Ngygnen) and they live on the floor below the Czech family.

What the heck would Hue and Long be doing in the Czech Republic to begin with?  Well, there is actually a sizable Vietnamese minority living in the Czech Republic as a consequence of the Vietnam War.  Communist Czechoslovakia actually provided a fair amount of the weapons to the Communist combatants in the war presumably in good part to give the Soviet Union deniability "We're not providing weapons to the Vietcong, the Czechs and Slovaks are..."  The U.S./the West did similar things as well.  Western backed insurgencies during the Cold War tended to use "Belgian," "Israeli" or even "South African" weapons.  Anyway, the North Vietnamese had no way to pay for the weapons that they received other than ... sending their own people to places like Communist Czechoslovakia to work Vietnam's debt off.   After the fall of Communism, these Vietnamese de facto indentured servants had no place to go.  So a large number (most?) of them stayed.  An excellent article regarding relations between Communist Era Czechoslovakia / the post-Communist Era Czech Republic and Vietnam can be found here [Cz-Orig][Eng-trans].

Now in a place like the Czech-lands where ethnicity pretty much defines national identity, one would expect racism to abound.  Ask a Gypsy in the C.R. and he/she will _definitely_ tell you that it does.  However, as in the States, the Vietnamese have proven _so hardworking_ that the Vietnamese have earned near universal respect of the Czech populace.  Yes, one does hear ethnic slurs in reference to the Vietnamese in the Czech Republic, the principal one being "Rákosníci" which means "straw heads" (or more literally "straw people") for the characteristic pointed straw hats that Vietnamese peasants were known to wear back in Vietnam.  BUT when year after year the children of Vietnamese immigrants seem to outscore Czech children in pretty much every category of learning including Czech language/history ;-), the Czechs who do generally consider themselves a good-natured lot and being a small country always having sympathy for the underdog find themselves in admiration of this surprising Vietnamese minority among them.  (I know this from my own relatives who live in the Czech Republic... who often would shake their heads in disbelief when trying to explain the historical accident of why Vietnamese immigrants live among them, but have almost universal praise for their hard work, honesty and achievement).

So it does not surprise me greatly to see a Czech film about contemporary life in the Czech Republic where arguably the only "good people" in the entire film are the Vietnamese (even as the Vietnamese immigrants admit that they hate the snow ... ;-).

This then is the setup of the film.  Much of course happens.  It certainly does not portray contemporary life in the Czech Republic particularly kindly.  But then the film is clearly intended to serve as a mirror to the Czech people of today with some pointed questions as to why contemporary life in the C.R. seems so often to be so morally bankrupt/hopeless.   And as one in my profession I can't help but find that Confession to be laudable.  After all, there's the saying I've learned here in the United States: "The first step out of a hole is to stop digging." 

So good job director Zdenku and the rest of your crew / cast.  Good job! And let's all hope that the movie makes a positive impact both in the C.R. and beyond.


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