Father, Son and Holy Cow (orig. Święta Krowa) [2011]

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

IMDb listing
Filmweb.pl* listing

Father, Son and Holy Cow (orig. Święta Krowa) (2011) [IMDb] [FW.pl]* (directed and cowritten by Radek Węgrzyn [IMDb] [FW.pl]* along with Cezary Iber [IMDb] [FW.pl]* and Rogerto Gagnor [IMDb][FW.pl]*) is a film that one would probably expect to play at a festival like the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago.  At the surface, it's basically a comedy that takes place in the Polish countryside.  However, as is often the case with seemingly "simple films" like this, there's more going on in the film than may initially meet the eye.

The story is about a late 50-something / early 60-something widower named Bognan (played by Zbigniew Zamachowski [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) who returns to his mother (played by Elżbieta Karkoszka [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) still living in his home town, a small village by the Baltic coast, soon after the death of his wife, Izabela (played by Lucyna Malec [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) presumably of cancer.  Bognan and Izabela had grown-up together in that small town before leaving it for the fame and fortune of the outside world.  Izabela had become an accomplished classical singer, Bognan was her accompanist on the piano.  They had spent much of their adult lives living in Berlin, GERMANY and traveling around Western Europe.  The two had daughter named Anna (played by Agata Buzek [IMDb] [FW.pl]*), who appeared in her late 20s/early 30s, who was following in her parents' footsteps and had become an accomplished classical singer with a (married) lover in Berlin as well.

It's clear that the link to their country past (dare one say "buran" past) was tenuous.  Near the beginning of the film, Bognan arrives in his home town with an urn with his wife's ashes and _disperses_ them, alone, on the beach where the two had spent a good part of their youth, dreaming of getting the heck out of there and on to adventures in the larger world.  So as we watch Bognan disperse his wife's ashes, it's clear that when the two had left their village they didn't merely leave it behind but also largely their faith and the other aspects of their "non-avantguard" past.  But now Izabela had died, and Bognan, not knowing what exactly to do, comes home for a while to reorient himself.

Well mom was ready for him ... with some chores ... ;-).  Among them were fixing the roof on the barn and taking care of the cows.  During the course of his new routine, he comes across a young Paweł (played by Antoni Pawlicki [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) a late-20 something / early 30-something young man (unmarried) who runs the local grocery store and spends his mornings running around the nearby farms collecting the produce for the day (milk, eggs...) that he sells then at his store.  On one hand a happy-go-lucky guy, on the other he seems like a "lost soul" / "walking anachronism" even if he is always full of ideas trying to make his still rather traditional existence more modern and in with the times:  On his van he writes "Pawłowski & Sons" even though there are _no sons_ to speak of, explaining that "it's a marketing ploy" giving people the impression that his business has a future.  Also talking to Bognan, and finding out that he's a musician he tells him that he read somewhere that playing music to cows makes them produce more milk.

Buran thinks Paweł's off his rocker, but depressed himself, he sets up a gramophone and plays Mozart into the the countryside one afternoon.  And low and behold, he finds that his cows _do_ produce more milk, and in particular _one_ cow that he recently bought for his mother produces far and away more than the others.  Paweł comes by the next morning and sees all the milk that Bognan's cows, including the "miracle cow," had produced.  Asks Bognan, what he played.  He answers "Mozart" and thus begins a new marketing gimmick for Paweł as he begins to sell "Mozart's Milk" to the people of the town.  Beyond being a lot of it, the milk is also really, really good!

But the cow begins to mean more to Bognan than just a cow that produces exceptional quantities of exceptionally good milk.  The cow seems kinda temperamental and one afternoon escapes through a hole in the fence (that Bognan hasn't gotten around to fixing...) and so Bognan finds himself chasing said cow, Klara, all over the countryside until ... she leads him to the place where he had dispersed his wife's ashes.  At this point, Bognan becomes convinced that ... this cow ... who he only purchased for his mother after his wife's death is somehow his wife "in another form" (her reincarnation I suppose).  So he starts to treat her well, as if she was his significant other / girlfriend.  And wants, in fact, to hold a "coming out party" with "his cow" for his family and friends.

Well, of course, both traditionalist (and very Catholic) mom and eyes-rolling, very secularist daughter, Anna, with "other issues going on" are appalled.  Bognan's mother tries to get the local priest (played by Andrzej Mastalerz [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) to "do something" about this new found threat that she calls "zoophilia."  To the film's credit, the priest looks like he'd really not like to get involved _but_ his parish _depends_ on "old ladies" like Bognan's mom.  So he trots out there and tries to "do something" even as he knows the situation is absurd and he probably figures that he won't move Bognan anyway.  Indeed, Bognan tells him and other detractors: "There are more things in heaven and on earth than can fit in your (or any) philosophy."  And continues with his project.  For her part, Bognan's daughter, Anna, finding herself pregnant by the married (to another woman) lover that she has, thinks her father has gone nuts, but eyes-rolling, decides to drive-out (from Berlin...) essentially to "assess the damage."

Much then plays out ... Among the things that play out is that the cow becomes much more like (though far differently than Bognan first understood it) to his wife than he had initially thought.  It becomes clear that the cow produced all that milk, surprisingly/uniquely _delicious milk_ and was also so temperamental because ... she was ill.  It turns out that Klara the cow (like Iza his wife who had died) had cancer.  And so Bognan then has to confront the reality of his wife's death in the slide toward death of this cow...

[There is actually a fairly strong hint in the film here that Anna had actually assisted in helping to speed Iza's death much along the line of what the vet was telling Bognan to now do with the cow.  YES assisted suicide is _against_ Catholic teaching ... but then it was also obvious that Bognan, Iza and their daughter Anna had not exactly concerned themselves much with Catholic teaching ... though Bognan's mother certainly did.  The juxtaposition of Klara the cow and Iza, Bognan's wife, becomes an interesting and _not_ altogether straightforward comparison:  When Anna assisted in prematurely bringing about the death of her mother (even at her request) did she treat her mother "with kindness/compassion" or simply "like an animal"...?]  

Finally, there's the inevitable encounter between the simple but happy but also desperately trying not to be obsolete/useless unmarried 20-30 something country bumpkin Pawel, and the eyes-rolling sophisticated 20-30 something unmarried Anna who had gotten pregnant by an already married man who _won't_ marry her.  What's gonna happen there?

Much still ensues ... and without spoiling much, the characters do find a way in the end to patch together the  conflicting strands of tradition and modernity.  Yes, it would appear that "There is more under heaven and earth that can fit under [_any_ one] philosophy ..."


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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Lincoln [2012]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  Roger Ebert (4 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert's review
 
Lincoln (directed by Steven Spielberg screenplay by Tony Kushner based in part on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin) is one of the best American films of the year and will earn a whole host of Oscar nominations including best film, best adapted screenplay (Kushner), best director (Spielberg) and best actor in a leading role (Daniel Day Lewis who plays President Abraham Lincoln [IMDb] in the film) as well as nominations for various other artistic/technical aspects of the film including best makeup, costume design and art direction.

Despite being a historical "biopic" about the towering figure of Abraham Lincoln, the film is IMHO remarkably timely because it's also largely about the "nuts and bolts" of the political process in a democracy.  That is, the film's about the Lincoln Administration's effort in the closing months of the American Civil War (and right after his reelection in 1864) to collect the requisite 2/3 of the votes in the House to pass what became the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which after being ratified by 3/4 of the States came to outlaw slavery in the United States.  And collecting the votes was _not_ an easy task.

Though the Republican Party of the time was abolitionist (indeed largely founded to promote the cause of slavery's abolition) the Democratic Party of the time was "the party of compromise."  Indeed the American Civil War was precipitated by the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States (the first Republican ever to be elected to the office).  And though the Southern States seceded from the Union as a result, Democrats in the still unionist North remained substantially represented in the Congress and they always counseled moderation to end hostilities between the unionist North and the secessionist South and _perhaps_ restore the union afterwards through some sort of a compromise regarding "States' Rights" / Slavery.

With the fortunes of the war (after 3 grinding years) turning decidedly in the North's favor by late 1864, Lincoln won re-election in November 1864 and the balance of power in the U.S. Congress shifted decidedly in the Republicans' favor.  HOWEVER, since there was a fear that the American Civil War may actually end before the inauguration of the new Congress (in February-March 1965) it was decided by the Lincoln Administration to push through the 13th Amendment through Congress _before_ the inauguration of the new Congress.  This meant cutting deals with the Democrats who had in the outgoing Congress enough votes to block the measure.

Thus the Lincoln Administration faced a very similar "vote counting" (and arguably "arm twisting" / "vote buying" ...) challenge that has characterized getting anything done in Congress in the United States over the last 20 or so years. (Indeed a year ago, I reviewed a fascinating documentary called How Democracy Works Now on the contemporary political process in the United States where the overwhelming lesson was that of counting (and more to the point, getting) the votes: "to get anything done in the U.S. Congress today, one has to get 60 votes (out of 100) in the Senate.")   In Lincoln's time, the challenge was getting 2/3 of the votes in the House.

How would one do that?  How would one get members of the opposing party to vote with you?  Well Jesus himself told his disciples: "I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves" (Mt 10:16).  And in the film, Lincoln himself admonished an abolitionist purist (played by Tommy Lee Jones) appalled by his Administration's "vote buying" tactics telling the purist: "A compass is certainly valuable in navigation, but it can only tell one which direction is north.  It can not tell one anything of the mountains, swamps, rivers and gorges that may separate one from one's goal.  So what good is it to head purely in one direction if we only end up in a swamp?"  So basically the film advocates a "whatever it takes" approach (hopefully within reason) to get a noble goal accomplished. (And yes, the opponents of a noble cause can also employ similar tactics to block the effort).

In any case, one gets the sense that resolving even something as unambiguously clear (today) as the question of abolishing slavery was difficult to push through Congress (even _after_ hundreds of thousands of deaths on the battle field in service of resolving the question).  Can we therefore be surprised that our times may be difficult and "full of noise" as well?

Finally, does this film deserve an "R" rating?  To be honest except for a few bad words and a couple of relatively short battle scenes (the story took place in the context of the American Civil War after all) I honestly don't understand why this film got an "R" rating rather than being rated "PG-13."  On the other hand, the dialogue itself is rather complex and I don't think that children younger than 7th or 8th grade would really understand it.  Still, sometimes the rating system doesn't make sense.   So parents, if you have a child who's in junior high or high who's interested in seeing this movie, then please don't hesitate to take him/her to it.  The film is excellent and certainly one of the best of the year.


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The Totentanz. Scenes from the Warsaw Uprising (orig. Taniec śmierci. Sceny z powstania warszawskiego)[2012]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis 4 Stars

Filmweb.pl listing * 

The Totentanz. Scenes from the Warsaw Uprising (orig. Taniec śmierci. Sceny z powstania warszawskiego) [FW.pl]* [2012] is an excellent historical film that writer/director Leszek Wosiewicz [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) has been taking to various international festivals over the past several years and the writer/director is still tweaking.  He came to the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago with two versions.  The version that I saw was the one that he took to the 16th Annual Shanghai International Film Festival, which he told us was more technique driven.  A second more character driven version was to be shown here later in the week.

Growing up, I always associated Polish cinema with basically the war, the war being World War II.  And since it took until the fall of Communism in 1989 to begin telling the stories of the war period (and of the subsequent Communist era) in freedom, it was perhaps inevitable that the stories of the past would finally have to come out and explode onscreen in the years following.

So even today it's almost impossible for me to imagine a festival like the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago to arrive here without a substantial number of films shown still dealing with various aspects of World War II or the subsequent Communist era.  This would seem to me to be simply inevitable, cathartic and over time redemptive.  Life across Eastern Europe (and then Poland in a special way) was simply awful (approaching the very border of "unbearable") from onset of World War II in 1939 (which began with the Nazi _and_ Soviet invasion of Poland) to the fall of Communist totalitarianism fifty years later.

Then among the various massacres, betrayals and tragedies that occurred over the course of those years, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 led by the non-Communist/British leaning Polish "Home Army" of partisans and the subsequent Nazi leveling of the city to cruelly beat down the Poles _one last time_ while the British/Americans found that they could do next to nothing and the Soviet army resting (after a major offensive) on the other side of Vistula River from Warsaw (and thus could have done something) _chose_ to do next to nothing, was a tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions.


It is in the truly Apocalypse in the making rubble strewn streets and gutted buildings of Warsaw during the uprising that Leszek Wosiewicz [IMDb] [FW.pl]* tells his story.  And he doesn't pull any punches.  The overwhelming message of this film would seem to be that in wartime "moral clarity" is for simpletons and idiots.  The story is told entirely from the perspectives of the terrified and often pragmatic/scheming civilians hunkering down in the tunnels and basements of Warsaw while the uprising that _they_ didn't call for (but was now being viciously put down) took place all around them.

At the beginning of the film, the 30-something mother of one of the film's principal protagonists declares to the others hiding around her in some basement somewhere in Warsaw that "raped or not raped" she's going to flee the city.  And put the exclamation point on her declaration: "And if you think I'm going to resist (being raped) no I'm not.  For what?  Just to get a bullet in my head?"  Yet, there's her 14-15 year old son Marek (played by Rafał Fudalej [FW.pl]*).  What to do with him?

She tries to dress him as a woman but realizes that this will be hopeless.  The two part with Marek deciding that he's going to try to find his dad who's something of a "big shot" among the resistance leaders somewhere in the center of town.  Trying to reach him is something of a suicide mission, but Marek's mother (played by Małgorzata Sadowska [FW.pl]*) knows that _she can't save him_.  Perhaps (if he can get to him) his father can.  So he and another adolescent boy Tomek, a boy scout (scouts like Tomek had been used by the resistance leaders as message couriers during the uprising) set out to reach the resistance headquarters in the center of town, while Marek's mom sets out to flee the city.

In the course of their journey through mountains of rubble and crushed / gutted buildings with occasional German Stukas bombing overhead, they come across a young woman named Irena (played by Magdalena Cielecka [FW.pl]*) who's about to be hung by a group of terrified Polish civilians who are convinced that she's a German spy.  "Wherever you arrive, the bombs arrive soon afterwards," an angry/terrified middle aged woman in a torn, mud-covered frock accuses her.  The others already have a noose aaround her neck when Marek steps forward and declares that he knows her and that she's innocent.  Actually, he didn't know her at all, but even in the chaos he apparently couldn't bear to watch a small mob of terrified civilians put a young woman to death.

And it turns out that Irena isn't all that innocent.  A lifelong resident of Warsaw, she's nevertheless ethnic German.  But she's looking for her 10 year old half-Polish/half-German son, who apparently is running around as a courier for the resistance as well.  This is because his step-father, lifelong Warsawite and ETHNIC GERMAN AS WELL who Irena had married "to make her son 100% German" ACTUALLY CHOSE TO SIDE WITH THE POLES in the war and as a (now underground) officer in the Polish Army was again a significant member of the resistance.  (Who would have imagined...?)

So she is walking among the rubble-strewn streets and gutted basements of Warsaw looking for her son _playing everybody_ trying to find him and then hoping also to get out of the city (in her case presumably with the German army to whom she feels closer).  It is her "playing" (or "dancing with") everybody (saying what she has to say, doing what she has to do) gives the film its name "Totentanz" / "Taniec śmierty" ("Death Dance").

Much obviously ensues.  How does it turn out?  Well ... guess.

I found the film both jarring and brave and then a reminder that "from a distance" on a nice neat map somewhere war perhaps can make sense.  However from the level at which this film was made, from the perspectives of the civilians trapped in the horror, it honestly made no sense at all. 


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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Lose to Win (orig. Nad Życie) [2012]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
Filmweb.pl listing*

Lose to Win (orig. Nad Życie) [IMDb] [FW.pl]*(2012) directed by Anna Plutecka-Mesjasz [IMDb][FW.pl]* written by Patrycja Nowak [IMDb] [FW.pl]* and Michał Zasowski [IMDb] [FW.pl]* is a truly remarkable/compelling _pro-Life_ biopic (subtitled) about the life and death in 2008 of Polish volleyball star Agata Mróz-Olszewska [PL-orig] [Eng-Trans] that played recently at the the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago (Nov 2-16, 2012).

Agata Mróz [PL-orig] [Eng-Trans] (played in the film by Olga Bołądź [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) had played on the Polish national women's volleyball team which won the European championships in 2003 and 2004.  She also played professionally (not shown in the film) in both Poland (from 2004-2006) and in Spain (2007) participating on championship teams in both countries.  In 2007, she was forced to quit volleyball due to illness (leukemia).  Shortly afterward, she married her sweetheart Jacek Olszewski (played in the film by Michał Żebrowski [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) back in Poland.  Six months later, while awaiting a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant, the couple announced that they were pregnant.  Here Agata decided to suspend treatment for her leukemia (including the search for a bone marrow transplant) while she sought to bring her child term.  The child, Liliana, was born healthy if prematurely 4 months later.  Immediately afterwards, Agata underwent the requisite chemotheraphy and died a few months later of an infection, despite being in prescribed isolation, while her immune system was recovering from the chemotherapy.

The question that Agata faced when she first found out that she was pregnant was, of course, whether or not to have an abortion.  She was gravely ill, most of the medical team treating her cancer counseled against her suspending treatment to try to bring the child to term.  (And even from the perspective of Catholic teaching, most moralists would take the position that she would have the right to pursue treatment for her cancer even if this would result in the death of the unborn child).

Postponing treatment did put her in significantly greater risk of dieing of leukemia before the child was born.  She died after having given birth to her (healthy if premature) child.  However, she didn't really die as a result of her pregnancy or of her postponing of her cancer treatment.  Instead, she died as a result of an infection that she would have been susceptible to _in any case_ as a result of cancer treatment.  That is, she could have aborted her child and then died of the cancer/infection caused by the treatment _anyway_.  Her legacy now is her child that she did bring to birth, and in their child, Jacek has some lasting remembrance of his/Agata's love.

Agata's case _does_ give us much to think about:  If one is staring at death anyway, why not take the chance of leaving something that would survive us after we're gone.  I do think that I understand why she made the brave choice (for the life of her child) that she did.


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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Skyfall [2012]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  Roger Ebert (4 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB review
Roger Ebert's review

Skyfall (directed by Sam Mendes, written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan, characters based, of course, on the James Bond series of books by Ian Flemming [IMDb]) had much to live up to.  After all, this film comes out on the 50th anniversary year of the release of first James Bond [IMDb] movie, Dr. No [1962].

Over those five decades, the character, played by numerous actors [IMDb]-- Sean Connery (1962-1967, 1971, 1983), George Lazenby (1969), Roger Moore (1973-1985), Timothy Dalton (1987-89), Pierce Brosnan (1997-2002 ), and most recently Daniel Craig (2006-2012) -- has inspired the imagination of action film lovers the world over (heck even the CNS/USCCB routinely gives this certainly violent (he has a "license to kill" after all ...) and legendarily promiscuous character's films A-III ratings rather than the L's or O's that it would certainly give "lesser characters" ...), and endured several crises.  In the later Roger Moore years, the question was raised whether a womanizing James Bond could really work in a post-Feminist world of gender equality.  Part of what makes the current film, Skyfall, as good as it is, is that it confronts head-on another threat to James Bond's continued "relevance":  In a world of computer hacking / cyber terrorism and "signals intelligence" is there really a need for a British secret agent "out in the field" "with an exploding pen?" ;-).  This question is directly asked in the film by the film's new "Q" (played by Ben Whishaw as a "fresh out of college, computer whiz" ;-) who clearly still "kinda likes" James Bond but also appears to find him "a bit of a dinasaur" and certainly "a distraction" to following "the bad-guys" through computer hacks in the cyber shadows of the internet.

Indeed, the chief "bad guy" in this film, IMHO the _best_ in years, is an exotically accented, creepily bleached blond computer hacker named Silva (played by Javier Bardem) out to wreak personal revenge on "M" (played in fascinatingly "motherly" fashion over the past several James Bond films by Judy Dench).  Bardem's "Silva" obviously evokes the bleach blond, exotically accented wiki-leaks founder Julian Assange who the American comedy show Saturday Night Live has pegged _for years_ as a villain cut from a James Bond story but existing in real life ;-).

The film therefore begins with James Bond and a young protege' whose first name is Eve (played by Naomie Harris) involved in a spectacular chase scene on the streets and rooftops of Istanbul (It must have been rather chaotic in Istanbul in recent years as a similar chase scene was recently featured in Liam Neeson's Taken 2 ;-), with the two chasing (with real-time coordination with "M" and her advisers back at MI6 HQ in London) a man with a stolen hard-drive containing the names of all of British Intelligence's "embedded agents" across the Middle East.  The sequence ends with Eve on direction from "M" taking a shot that hits James Bond instead of the man with the hard drive and the villain gets away.  So how cut out is Eve for "field work" when she ends up shooting her partner instead of the bad guy?  That becomes one of the subplots that runs through the rest of the film ... ;-)

However, the main thread deals with following the hard drive (and its contents) to the villain who contracted it, and ... with some justification the story then treks to some stock/updated "James Bond worthy" exotic locations centered in China including Shanghai, Macao, Hong Kong.  China is of course notorious for its computer hacking and (by reputation) the home of all kinds of potentially murky criminal organizations that again would be worthy of a James Bond plot.  Then all three cities -- Shanghai, Macao and Hong Kong -- have enough ties to a not exactly savory colonialist past to offer plenty of fodder for conspiracies that are truly global in proportion.  (Remember SPECTRE of the Ian Flemming's original James Bond books which was made up of  creepy cat-petting "industrialists" hatching their dasterdly plots from spectacularly exotic, cliff-side chalets perched high in the Swiss Alps ;-).  The same exotic cat-petting creepiness could now be replicated in the upper tiers of some of the spectacularly tall and exotically shaped skyscrapers dotting the skylines of cities across all of East Asia).   

So of course, much ensues ... including a subplot involving James Bond and an exotic South Asian looking woman (Is she supposed to be Chinese, Indian, Malay, Franco-Vietnamese...? played by Bérénice Marlohe) who comes to make for a new interesting / poignant take on the series' "Bond Girl" phenomenon).

After a devastating cyber attack on MI6 itself, "M" finds herself under ever greater Parliamentary scrutiny led by "a civilian overseer" named interestingly "Garth Mallory" (played by Robert Finnes) who plays an increasing role as a the film progresses...

Finally in this film, released for the 50th anniversary of the anniversary of the release of the first James Bond movie, Dr. No [1962], we're treated to some of James Bond's "back story" during the course of the film.  Where did he come from?  What was some of his childhood like?  To be honest, I found this part of the film weak and rather unnecessary (and for this reason give the film 3 1/2 stars rather than the 4 that most critics do).  Still with Judy Dench playing the "M" character in a somewhat "motherly" fashion (NO she's _not_ his real mother ...) I suppose an exploration of James Bond's "early years" become fair (if IMHO unnecessary) game...

All in all, this is a very good James Bond film, that both excites and leaves one with a good deal to think about.  I would have played with the last 20 or so minutes of the film differently.  But that's just one person's opinion and I thought that the rest of the film was truly excellent and in any case _most worthy_ of the franchise's 50th anniversary!


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Man at War (orig. Wirtualna Wojna)[2012]

MPAA (UR would be PG-13)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
Filmweb.pl* listing

Man at War (orig. Wirtualna Wojna) [2012] [IMDb] [FW.pl]* written and directed by Jacek Bławut [IMDb][FW.pl]* that played recently at the 24th Polish Film Festival in America / Chicago (Nov 2-16, 2012) is a remarkable documentary produced for HBO-Polska [Eng-trans] that follows a transnational (American, Polish, German and Russian) group of enthusiasts of the IL-2 Sturmovik World War II combat flight simulator video game (played in multi-player fashion over the internet) on a virtual bombing raid from England on Hannover, Germany.  The raid was chosen because the father of one of the American players had been shot down during the actual raid during World War II.

The groups participating in the raid included:

(1) The 302nd VAW (virtual air wing) of the U.S.A.A.F., a group of American enthusiasts that included the man (a still quite active/robust senior) who lost his father in the actual raid).  The members of the 302nd VAW all fly (virtual) P51 Mustangs.  The group was led by a Commander (thin, white haired/mustached, smartly dressed in a USAAF WWII era wing-commander's uniform) who serves as a Deacon at his local parish somewhere in California on Sundays. Others in his group include a 30-something musician from Arizona, a young man who's played these kind of war simulation games since childhood and whose best friend had just come back from serving in Afghanistan (and interestingly the Afghan War vet didn't really want to play this kind of games anymore but still hung around as his friend participated in the raid simulated here) and a Cuban-American teenager who just loved this game and was playing it from his parents' new home in Miami. 

(2) A Polish group of enthusiasts which flies both B-17 Bombers and British Spitfire fighters.  One of the Polish enthusiasts noted that they all could fly fighters but some actually enjoyed flying the bombers apparently because it was kinda cool to drop bombs on Nazi Germany ... One of the Polish players was also still smarting that one of the German players had shot him (his avatar) the last time they played after his plane had already been shot down and he was coming to earth in his parachute (which would be a virtual war crime ...).  So he was looking for revenge.

(3) Two, very _well organized_ :-) groups of German enthusiasts, one group actually meeting _together_ in a large room with a dozen or so computers strewn across a series of tables, each computer outfitted with the requisite joysticks and headgear) flying either ME-262s (the Nazi era jet fighters) or FW-190 propeller driven interceptors. One of the Germans, an otherwise animal/bird lover and soft-spoken architect, had made a wooden replica of the FW-190 cockpit in which he sit (in uniform, goggles on, pet crow sitting on his shoulder) while playing the game.

Finally, (4) there were a number of Russian enthusiasts flying WW-II Yak fighters and Sturmoviks, who were participating _not_ that the Russians would have participated in the actual raid being simulated here, but because the Russians invented the game and as one of the cute, smiling / giggling 20-something wives of the young Russians enthusiasts playing the game put it, "My husband is a nut.  He plays this game every night from midnight to all hours in the morning and then comes to bed telling me that he once more successfully 'defended the motherland from the Fascist invaders!'' 

It all made for a fascinating film.  The American who lost his father in the actual raid that this "rally" was to simulate had a couple of his twenty-something grandchildren sitting on the steps next to his computer watching him play (yes, they appeared as "excited" as one would imagine watching their grandfather playing a video game.  At least they didn't roll their eyes too much ;-) ;-) The game gave him the opportunity to tell the story of his father's time of service in England.  The German architect/bird lover told the camera crew that he honestly doesn't consider himself to be much a patriot, saying that it's "really hard" to be particularly patriotic in Germany as a consequence of this war, but that he really liked to fly the planes.  And the German enthusiast who had shot the Pole in the last game even after the Pole had bailed out of his plane mentioned with IMHO _sincere sadness/remourse_ that his grandfather had actually found himself in one of the "Special Units" (Einsatzgruppen) that was sent to Russia to kill Jews following the Nazi invasion, a unit that he said was responsible for the execution of some 30-50,000 Jews. "It's hard to admit such things," he said, with his head down and in an otherwise uncharacteristically soft voice.

The game itself was rather "slow" at the beginning.  The simulator required that the American and British (flown by the Poles) planes actually take-off from England and fly to Germany for the raid.  The Germans too had to take some time to ascend to the altitude.  But once they spotted each other "all chaos broke loose" and probably an even greater chaos than would have been expected in the actual raid, because in the virtual raid presumably even "the Russians" were there and many of the Poles flew planes (Spitfires) that would not have been there in reality because of fuel/range considerations.  But what the heck, this is _also / above all_ a video game.  So for 10 minutes the virtual sky over Hanover was filled WWII planes of all kinds and _no pilot_ was safe even after bailing out.

So what would be the value of a game like this?  One could easily criticize the game for its violence and arguably for allowing those with a predisposition to still hate another country to continue to do so.  Yet, one gets a sense that there is a certain camaraderie being built here even between former (and present) adversaries.  And actually, it _may_ help the players (and viewers here) appreciate the horror that the real conflict was.

In any case, I found the film to be absolutely fascinating!


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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Brooklyn Castle [2012]

MPAA (PG)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing

Brooklyn Castle (directed by Katie Dellamaggiore) is a nice, feel-good documentary about the value of extracurricular programs in our public schools.

The origin of the chess program at Brooklyn's I.S. 318 Middle School was something of a lark.  Some 15 years ago, teachers noticed that there'd be an interest in organizing a chess club at their school.  When they took the students from the chess club to a tournament, they found to their amazement that their students _won_, trouncing their opposition.  Then the teachers found that their kids could qualify for a "National" tournament.  They applied for the funding arguing that it'd be a good experience for the kids (remember this is an inner city school) to have the experience of going to another part of the country to compete in the tournament.  They got the funding and when their students arrived at the tournament THEY WON AGAIN.

Thus began a veritable "Chess Dynasty," where this lowly Brooklyn school won "Nationals" 10 years in a row and where, smiling from ear to ear, the Principal recalling the story "the geeks became the jocks" of the school.

Brooklyn Castle follows then I.S. 318's 6th-8th grade chess teams through (I believe) its 2009-2010 season.  And there is something very endearing watching a team of African-American and Latino kids and even one white kid with ADHD from the inner-city just _wiping the tables clean_ of their opponents in "Regionals", "State" and "Nationals" in ... Chess ;-).  One of the 8th grade girls even won a 4 year full ride scholarship when she reaches college age to the University of Texas in Austin for winning the girls' 8th grade National Chess Championship.   

Fascinating film ;-).


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