The November Man [2014]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (O)  RE.com (2 Stars)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
ChicagoTribune/Variety (A. Barker) review
RE.com (M. Zoller Seitz) review
AVClub (J. Hassenger) review


The November Man [2014] (directed by Roger Donaldson, screenplay by Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek, based on the novel by Bill Granger [IMDb]) makes for a potentially very interesting post-Bond spy-thriller for ex-Bond actor Pierce Brosnan who not only stars in the current film but was also one of its producers.

As I watched the film, the question that I kept asking myself was why?  Why did Pierce Brosnan clearly want to do this film?  To be sure, I found the film to be neither "great" (I've generally found the James Bond movies, including the latest, starring Daniel Craig, Skyfall [2012] far more entertaining) nor certainly "awful" (as I found the latest "Jack Ryan" movie Shadow Recruit [2014] to be).  It just seemed to me that Brosnan was trying to remind us of something that generally isn't present in either the James Bond [IMDb] or Jack Ryan [IMDb] franchises: the spy "game" is an ugly business -- people, including innocents, do die and even the assassins doing the killing live terrible, incomplete lives, in which they are constantly looking over their backs.

Interestingly, I haven't yet found in interview where talking about the current film Brosnan opines as much, even if in the film's dialogue itself it is clear that this very ugly side to the "spy game" is very much at the film's center.  In the film, Brosnan plays a veteran Cold-War trained CIA assassin named Devereaux ("French" meaning roughly "(of) those who devour ..."), who among other things is tasked with mentoring a younger, post-9/11 CIA recruit named Mason (played by Luke Bracey).  And it's clear that Devereaux is conflicted in this task.  Throughout much of the movie Mason appears to have "a complex," believing that Devereaux doesn't think that he's up to the job.  Instead, Devereaux appears to be trying to dissuade Mason from pursuing this line of work to begin with: "You can either be a man or a killer but not both," Devereaux tells Mason at one point, "because one will eventually extinguish (devour...) the other."

For a reviewer with my line of work, I'm a Catholic priest after all, one can not but take note of (and even _applaud_) that kind of introspection regarding pursuing, after all, a "career path" IN ASSASSINATION. 

But how does the rest of the movie play out?  Here IMHO it's a rather a mixed bag:

The film is certainly current, set largely in the Serbian capital of Belgrade (the original novel was set in Berlin) involves intrigues surrounding both the post-Cold War Balkan and Chechen conflicts.  There's a Russian general named Arkady Federov (played by Lazar Riskovwki) who's now looking to run for Russian President.  Since he was involved in various massacres in Chechnya, he's looking to eliminate anyone-and-everyone who might embarrass him when he makes his run for the Presidency.  Then there's a worker at the UN Refugee office in Belgrade going by the name of Alice Fournier (played by Olga Kurylenko) who knows "a thing or two" about Federov's sordid past.  So much of the film plays around protecting her from all sorts of shady people who appear to want to put a bullet in her head.

But the film's use of technology seems kinda silly.  As in the laugh-out-loud ridiculous scenes in the recent Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit [2014 the CIA is portrayed driving around a "discrete" NYPD-style "surveillance van" through the streets of Moscow in the case here even followed "at rooftop level" by a 3-4 foot CIA operated unmanned aerial drone.  Come-on, these things eventually have to land _somewhere_, and after 2 maybe 3 uses, the Russian FSB would certainly be there waiting for it (and for the "nice CIA folks" "handling" the goofy machine).

Then it would be hard to imagine that the authorities in either Moscow or Belgrade would be able to "keep quiet" the various gratuitous open air shootings / high speed chases portrayed in the film.  This deficiency in the film is not exactly "uncommon" in the genre.  One thinks here of not only various crowded street shoot-outs in the various James Bond [IMDb] films (Venice seemed to be a particularly popular venue for those sorts of things in the Bond films) but also of the Bourne movies (particularly The Bourne Ultimatum [2007] that featured an extended and very complicated sequence in and around London's Waterloo Stationq which if it had occurred in reality would probably have been impossible for the authorities to expunge from public memory). 

Yet, Cold War intrigues and War on Terror intrigues have taken place all across Europe ranging from terrorist bombings / anti-terrorist bombings to political / espionage / counter-espionage assassinations to "renderings" ("trade speak" for abductions of terrorist / espionage suspects).  These have had to have led to a psychic toll on Europeans and contributed to their cynicism with regards to viewing the United States.  I've wondered in fact if various right-wing or otherwise "anti-government" "militia groups" across the Western United States with their talk of "black helicopters," "abductions" and "secret bases" have more in common to various left-wing or otherwise anti-American groups in Europe, with their own lore of "CIA renderings" and other "unsolved crimes" than one would initially think ... So while these often crazy shootouts portrayed in these films on the streets of European cities may be exaggerations, they MAY actually express a reality that the average American could only imagine on the pages of a spy-novel or on the screen of a film like this one.

All this again brings me back to my original question: Why did Brosnan _choose_ to make a film like this?  Was it simply because it seemed like a "cool project" to work on, or to perhaps return a sense of "reality" to the James Bond genre of spy-thrillers ... a reminder that the "License to Kill" business is not exactly a pretty (or moral...) one. 

In any case, this is something that wouldn't be bad for viewers of this film (and the next spy-thriller) to consider as they watch buildings blowup and the bodies of "evil henchmen" or even "passerbys" be shot-up or otherwise mangled in various terrible ways.... "License to Kill" is a sordid business indeed.


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The Forgotten Kingdom [2013]

MPAA (UR would be R)  TVSA.za (3 1/2 Stars)  Iol.co.za (4 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing

TVSA.za (T.Bang) review
Iol.co.za (T. Owen) review
citipress.co.za (P. Mabandu) review

IndieWire (V. Martinez) review
Orlando Weekly (B. Manes) review

The Forgotten Kingdom [2013] (written and directed by Andrew Mudge), a movie filmed in South Africa and Lesotho using entirely local actors and actresses recently closed the month long, ever popular 2014 (20th) Annual Black Harvest Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. The film is also now available for streaming using the Amazon Instant Video service for a reasonable price.

The film tells the story of an initially directionless 20-something youth named Joseph / Atang Mokoenya (played by Zenzo Ngqobe) who at the beginning of the film was living in a small apartment in a tenement in Johannesburg ("Jo-berg"), South Africa.  He's informed by some of his friends that his father (played in flashbacks throughout the film by Jerry Phele), living in a shack in the Soweto neighborhood at the outskirts of town, was very ill.  Receiving the news as more an imposition on his time (not that he'd have much else to do with his time ... as he was unemployed and not particularly concerning himself with looking for work) than a concern, he sighs, rolls his eyes and decides to (eventually) go out there.

When he arrives, he's chewed-out by a neighbor-woman for being such a typically uncaring grown child of a sick parent.  Seething, but trying not to show disdain now, he endures her lecture and then proceeds to his father's shack, only to find that he's not answering when he knocks on the door.  Removing a plank from a window, her crawls in, and discovers, of course, that his father is dead.

Since the father wasn't terribly old, about 50 or so ... the assumption is that he probably died of some AIDS related illness.  This in part, but certainly _only_ in part, explains some of Joseph's disdain for his father.  Contracting HIV/AIDS remains a cause for shame in South Africa.

Some of Joseph's similarly listless, directionless friends from Jo-Burg arrive.  One of them goes over to a local tavern to get some beers.  Together they pull off a few planks from Joseph's dead father's shack to light a small bonfire, and together they toast with _some_ (but certainly not a lot) of respect the memory of Joseph's dad.

It is now that somebody asks Joseph what he's going to do with his dad's body.  Joseph shrugs not really knowing the answer.  However, someone then, a neighbor perhaps, informs him that Joseph's dad was prepared in this regard for his demise (as well as for his well-predicted assumption that his son wouldn't have a clue what to do ...).  As such, the father had paid the local undertaker for a respectable casket and transport ALONG WITH AN ACCOMPANYING TICKET FOR HIS SON to his home village in Lesotho.

Now Lesotho is small mostly mountainous kingdom in Southern Africa that due to its very inaccessibility had always kept its independence through the whole of the Colonial and later Apartheid Eras.  It was just "too far away" and didn't have much to offer in terms of minerals for the white settlers / colonial powers to bother with conquering.  So except for Anglican / Catholic missionaries the people of Lesotho were left alone (and the legacies of both the Catholic and Anglican missionaries were also portrayed in a generally benign way in the film as well).  Lesotho, for the most part, would seem to be as "forgotten" a Kingdom as the title of the film proclaims.

But Joseph's dad, being from there, did not forget.  And if not really in life then at least in death, Joseph's dad reminds him of his roots (and early childhood there) as well.  Indeed, the neighbor who tells Joseph of his dad's already purchased funeral plans reminds Joseph that his Lesothan name was actually Atang.

Wonderful.  So Joseph (er Atang), unemployed anyway, takes his dad's body back to Lesotho for burial.  And this is when the story, of course, really begins:

Since Joseph-Atang had little except for a generic set of friends "of the street" back in Jo-Berg anyway, he "lingers" in Lesotho for a while after his dad's burial.  It's not that Joseph-Atang suddenly "fell in love" with the remote country of his birth.  He did not.  It's just that _nothing_ in Atang-Joseph's life had much of a direction to it.  So there was no particular reason for him to rush back home now.  And he stays long enough to run into a childhood friend, a school teacher, named Dineo (played by Nozipho Nkelemba) who remembers him and he takes a liking to (and she to him).  And so he decides to stay for a bit longer than he thought he would before.

Now Dineo's father (played quite well by Jerry Mofokeng) sees the recently arrived (but apparently penniless) "city slicker" Atang hanging around his daughter suddenly.  And so he decides to scare him back to Jo-Berg: "Hey you, if you respect me and my daughter then do the right thing and marry my daughter.  And my bride's price (for her hand in marriage) is no less than ..."   Since Dineo's father _was right_ about him (at least initially), and Joseph-Ateng was indeed penniless, Joseph-Ateng "snapped out of his spell" and got on the next bus back to Jo-Berg.

BUT ... on the way back to Jo-Berg, he perhaps realizes that in Dineo HE FINALLY HAS SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR.  So HE DOES GET A JOB in a number of the mines in area ... and eventually returns back to the Lesothan village of his birth to pay the bride's price for Dineo ... only to find her and her father / sister GONE.

Where'd they Go?  Well Atang knew that Dineo's sister was ill (again in some stage of HIV/AIDS).  That's why Dineo, healthy, had stayed on at home ... to take care of her.  Again, HIV/AIDS remains a cause of shame for a family.  SO when it became impossible to hide his other daughter's illness, Dineo's father MOVED THE WHOLE FAMILY ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS CLEAR TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE KINGDOM to "protect" them (and himself...) from "gossip."

The rest of the movie then is about Ateng-Joseph along with an orphan boy (played by Lebohang Ntsane) from the village of his birth (who reminded Ateng-Joseph a lot of himself when he was the boy's age) crossing the mountains of Lesotho to return to his, now, Love.

It makes for a very nice story.  The last part of the film, shot in the mountains of Lesotho, is absolutely beautiful.  And the story also touches on universal themes.  Indeed, in the past year, I've three movies from three continents -- the Argentinian/Bolivian film La Paz [2013], the Indian film The Lunchbox [2013] and this one from South Africa / Lesotho -- in which the central (or otherwise key) characters only found peace by leaving their largely meaningless existences in Buenos Aires, Mumbai, and (now) in Johannesburg and finding starting new lives in the mountains of Bolivia, Bhutan and now Lesotho. 

I appreciated the film further because my (United States) Province of the Servite Order founded and has maintained the Catholic mission to KwaZulu (Zululand) which borders Lesotho (and one of our Italian Provinces was responsible for the Catholic mission to nearby Swaziland.  The film, beautifully shot, particularly in the latter two-thirds of the film, when the story takes place in the Lesothan countryside can help viewers appreciate the rugged beauty of that part of the world.

Overall, great film!  And, again, it's available for streaming for a reasonable price on Amazon Instant Video.


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A Most Wanted Man [2014]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  ChicagoTribune (3 Stars)  RE.com (2 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. McAleer) review
ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
RE.com (B. Tallerico) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

Set post-9/11 in the dreary German port-city of Hamburg in autumn/winter, A Most Wanted Man [2014] (directed by Anton Corbijn, screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on the novel by John le Carré [IMDb]) is a deliberately slow-burning post-9/11 spy story about Western intelligence's attempts to penetrate its Muslim immigrant community (9/11-mastermind Mohammed Atta as well as several others among the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Hamburg previously) an unassimilated community (due to cultural differences and exacerbated by previous racism) that seemed to the Authorities to be about as opaque as the city's sea of grey, featureless concrete and steel buildings and infrastructure and whose intentions were as unknowable yet as threatening as the ever-present storm clouds overhead. 

What to do?  How to get insight into a community that perhaps would never be particularly open / talkative and which after 9/11 would reflexively seek close itself off even more tightly?

Enter Günther Bachmann (played with magnificent precision by the tragically recently deceased Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who _patiently_ heads a clandestine squad from German intelligence, tasked with finding a way into this community using (surveillance?) methods that (as he somewhat proudly proclaims) "the German Constitution would not allow."  His mantra is: "You need a minnow to catch a fish, a fish to catch a barracuda, a barracuda to catch a shark."

So we see him mostly handling "minnows," in particular a Jamal (played by Mehdi Dehbi) the twenty-something son of a prominent Muslim university professor named Dr. Faisal Abdullah (played by Homayoun Ershadi) who by all accounts _seems_ very clean, an upstanding, if articulate, if then also quite measured leader of the local Muslim community in Hamburg.  The question on Bachmann's mind and on the minds of his superiors in German intelligence back in Berlin AS WELL AS THE CIA hovering in the periphery is: Is Dr. Abudullah _really_ a good guy or is he just being really careful?  In the words of Martha Sullivan (played by Robin Wright) a CIA agent who had worked with Bachmann (in Lebanon) before (and whose work, again back in Lebanon, she had ultimately betrayed before): "Dr. Abdullah seems like a good man, but every good man has a little bad in him, and that little bad in this case may get a lot of people killed."

How to get into the head of Dr. Abdullah?  Well, that's why Bachmann and his team recruited (actually more like "squeezed") Abdullah's son Jamal.  But even a 20-something son doesn't necessarily know all that his old man is doing.

So enter, by luck enters a similarly young, angry, less cautious half-Chechen, half-Russian Issa Karpov (played by Gregoriy Dobrygin).  He arrives in Germany in search of money had been laundered away in Germany by his a-hole of a father who had been a former KGB intelligence officer during the Cold War.  Apparently Issa's Russian KGB father had a rather "unequal relationship" with Issa's Chechen mother.   However, Issa grew-up knowing enough about both -- enough to hate his father and yet know a fair amount about what he did in his job, including that he hid some money apparently in Germany AND enough about his mother to feel more close to her and to her Chechen people -- to come angrily to Hamburg with an admittedly half-baked but somewhat understandable "plan": Get a hold of his father's stashed-away money and put it in the service of the Chechen cause.

Now obviously Issa didn't come to Hamburg, wide-eyed and flailing a gun or Molotov cocktail in his hand demanding of passerbys: "Where's my dad's ill-gotten cash and how can I get a money order out to my Chechen friends in the Caucasus?"  However, he did talk loudly enough to enough people that his presence came to be known by Bachmann and his people.  And he talked loudly enough that his presence came to be known by Germany's robust and well meaning human-rights establishment (seeking to say "Never Again" to anything smacking of the human rights trampling Nazi-era Gestapo or the Communist-era Stasi...) Among them was an idealistic young lawyer named Annabel Richter (played beautifully by Rachel McAdams) who seeks to protect Issa from "the likes of" Bachmann and his squad.  Sigh ... Bachmann dismisses Richter when she first enters the scene in hopes of "protecting" Issa: "So you're a human rights lawyer?  You're nothing more than a social worker for terrorists." 

But Bachmann is not totally unsympathetic to Issa's multi-leveled (and quite personal) predicaments.  However, what he sees in Issa is, above all, his much needed "barracuda."

Can he use the well-meaning Richter and the confused/angry Issa to, with help of Jamal, FINALLY penetrate the inner workings of Dr. Abdullah?  The rest of the story follows ...

This is a very, very well crafted spy-story and will be appreciated by those viewers who do like nuance.  The end may disappoint some viewers (including myself actually) but the overall story is far more sophisticated than the average "chase scene" heavy / "shoot-em up" spy-thriller. And that is something to applaud.  Good film!


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Half of a Yellow Sun [2013]

MPAA (R)  ChicagoTribune (3 Stars)  TheGuardian (2 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing

ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
NYTimes (B. Kenigsberg) review
TheGuardian (P. Bradshaw) review
Variety (G. Lodge) review
HollywoodReporter (L. Felperin) review

Vanity Fair / Ebony (J. Miller) Interview w. Thandie Newton
Essence.com (Y. Sangwani) Interview w. Anika Noni Rose
TheSource Interwiew with AFI Fest director J. Lyanga

Half of a Yellow Sun [2013] (directed and screenplay by Biyi Bandele [IMDb] based on the award winning novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) set in the context of the 1967-70 Nigeria-Biafran Civil War following Nigeria's independence in 1960 has been compared to Gone With the Wind (film) and Unbearable Lightness of Being (film).  The film played recently at the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago.

The film tells the story of twin sisters, the more idealistic Olanna (played by Thandie Newton) and more practical / social climbing Kainene (played by Anika Noni Rose) from an upper-class / educated Nigerian family who reached adulthood just as Nigeria gained its independence (from Britain) in 1960.  Olanna moves out to a university town in northern Uganda with her lover Odenigdo (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), an young, rather radical sociology professor.   Kainene, in contrast assumes responsibility for the family's commercial interests which were located in the coastal, oil rich, south-eastern part of the country from where their family was originatate.  She also takes on a (white) British expatriate writer (and married man) named Richard (played by Joseph Mawle) as her lover and after he divorces his first (white) wife, he becomes her husband.

Now the Big Question debated in intellectual circles across Africa in the early years of the post-Colonial era regarded how Africans should view the boundaries of the new African nation states, which had, after all, still been imposed on these African states (and the peoples living within them) by the exiting European colonial powers.  Odenigdo, firebrand that he was, advocated the position that often heard at the time, that "the only truly indigenous, pre-Colonial political unit in Africa was the Tribe," that both "the national boundaries of the emerging post-Colonial States as well as even the concept of 'Race' were concepts imposed on Africans by the (European) Colonial Powers." 

Hence, though initially teaching in the above mentioned university town located in Northern Nigeria, he becomes an ideological advocate of the secession of the south-eastern region of Nigeria where his tribal roots were from.  When this region does secede, the region declaring itself the Republic of Biafra and taking on a flag which included an emblem of a (rising) "half sun" from which the current film and the novel on which it is based derive their name, he becomes an enthusiastic defender of the move.

All good in theory, 'cept ... it turned out that the south-eastern region of Nigeria was ALSO the most oil rich region of the country at the time.  Hence the Nigerian state (and the rest of Nigeria) had not merely ideological reasons for fighting to keep the nation together (the majority view among intellectuals across Africa came to be that however inappropriately drawn the boundaries of the newly independent nation states of Africa may have been, _changing them_ now would plunge the continent into chaos) but also obvious economic ones: Allowing south-eastern region of Nigeria to secede would economically damage the rest of the country.

So when Biafra declares its independence, Odenigdo and Olanna along with their emerging family (rather complicated actually as Odenigdo had a child by another woman) move rather enthusiastically down to Biafra to "build up" the new country.   In contrast, Kainene felt more or less dread.  Why?  Well she had previously managed "the family's" commercial interests there quite well and her personal life was clearly _not_ organized along "tribal lines" -- she had married James, outside of her tribe, indeed outside of her race, after all.  Yet she was also Biafra's dominant tribe, so what could she (and the rest of the family) as ideologically "unconvinced" as they were, do ... but "go along."

The rest of the story ensues ...

Since Nigeria's national boundaries remain what they were at independence and there no longer is a secessionist Republic of Biafra, one can assume how the story has to play out.  Still it makes for a fascinating modern post-colonial African tale, told by modern Africans themselves.

EXCELLENT AND THOUGHTFUL (if appropriately R-rated) FILM! 

For those interested in this part of recent African history, the film is now available for streaming at a reasonable price on various services including Amazon Instant Video.


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Calvary [2014]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L)  ChicagoTribune (3 Stars)  RE.com (3 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (4+ Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
RE.com (G. Kenny) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review

Calvary [2014] (written and directed by John Michael McDonaugh), released in the United States three weeks past, is obviously a film that I took my time to see.  Despite quite good reviews, I dreaded seeing a film about a "'good priest' 'martyred' for the 'Sins of the Church.'"  It seemed like an unbearably pompous cliché.  It didn't help matters for me that I was told by a community member who doesn't go to the movies that if he did that THIS would be the movie that he'd go see.  With limited time -- I was about to go visit relatives overseas -- I chose to see the much lighter but certainly _not_ pointless, 100 Foot Journey [2014] instead.

... But over the past weekend, I was reminded by my dad to go see the current film anyway.  And for the credibility of my blog, I knew I had to.  And honestly was I surprised / impressed when I did.  By midway through the film, I was wondering if the Church, which, after all, has been forced in recent years to face terrible sexual scandals within its ranks, _even deserved_ such an eloquent defense of its work and mission as that presented in this film. 

In the film's opening scene, Fr. James (played by Brendan Gleeson), parish priest in a small coastal town near Sligo, Ireland, is hearing confessions on Sunday morning.  A "penitent" comes into the Confessional and declares to the priest "I was seven years old when I first tasted semen." (Extended Pause). "What do you have to say to that Father?"  (Pause as well). "Certainly a startling opening line," replies the priest.  Indeed.  The voice on the other side of the Confessional screen continues, telling the priest that he had been raped repeatedly, twice weekly, orally and anally, by a priest for four years, from age 7 to 11, until the priest presumably moved on to another parish.  He tells the priest that this was long ago and that the offending priest himself was now long dead.  What then to do?  The voice says that actually even if the offending priest was alive it would make little sense to kill him.  "What would that do, to kill a bad priest."  Instead, he tells Fr. James, that he's decided to kill a good priest, him. "THAT," he says, "will draw notice."   But he tells Fr. James that he's thought this through.  He wants to give Fr. James a week to "get his matters in order."  Still, he tells Fr. James to meet him THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY MORNING on the beach outside of town, where ... he would shoot the priest dead.

The rest of the film runs like a combination of High Noon [1952] and Graham Greene's celebrated novel The Power and the Glory, it counts down the days ...

What does Fr. James do with his final days?  WHAT HE'S ALWAYS DONE.  He administers the Sacraments.  He makes a number of pastoral calls.  There's a case of domestic violence that he has to deal with, an older recluse waiting for death who muses about suicide.  At the nearby hospital, he anoints the dying husband of a French tourist brought into this state as a result of a car accident.  He even visits a notorious if confused inmate at the local jail.  Fr. James' own life is a little more complicated than most as he entered the priesthood AFTER his wife had died.  So he has to also deal with the depression and listlessness of his twenty-something daughter.

So he goes about his work.  But there are also regular reminders of the Sentence that has been put on him by the anonymous "penitent" who he had encountered in the Confessional.  On Wednesday, the Church suddenly burns down.  A day or two later, Fr. James finds his beloved dog with his throat slit ...

Saturday comes, and Fr. James' associate, a younger priest "skips town" upset after an argument with Fr. James the previous ngiht.  Besides, he notes, "There's no Church (building) anymore ..."

Fr. James?  Though he toys with the idea of "skipping town" as well ... (not much of a spoiler alert), he, of course, DECIDES TO STAY.  Sunday comes ... mid morning comes ... Fr. James picks himself up and heads off to the lonely, rocky beach ...

In my college years, I remember remarking out-loud, when the celebrated and quite "scandalous" for the time Thorn Birds [1983] miniseries was playing: "Why do they only make films about priests that do terrible, scandalous thngs?  Why don't they make a movie about a priest simply doing 'priestly things'?"  One of my then similarly college-aged room-mates laughed: "Not THAT would be one boring movie." ;-)

Now as _this film_ progressed, I realized, yes somewhat awestruck, that THIS WAS THE FILM THAT I HAD BEEN ASKING FOR back then.

Honestly, WHAT A FILM!  And even if it _is_ clouded over by the Sin of the sexual abuse scandals of the recent years, HOW ELSE COULD A FILM ABOUT THE PRIESTHOOD BE MADE TODAY?

And yet, honestly, what a beautiful portrayal of the SIMPLE and HOLY work of this HUMBLE village priest for the sake of often difficult, uncomprehending perhaps even "ungrateful" people (but how could one be grateful/ungrateful for something one does not understand?).  And yet not without total incomprehension.  The French (!) widow (talk about a modern "Samaritan or Syrophoenecian Woman" of our time) of the tourist killed in the car accident understood.

Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.  (John 6:67-68)

Excellent, excellent film!


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Tenderness (orig. La Tendresse) [2013]

MPAA (UR would be PG-13)  LaCroix (3 1/2 Stars)  LeFigaro (3 1/2 Stars)  LeMonde (2 Stars)  Fr. Dennis (4 stars)

IMDb listing
FrenchFilmSite listing
Alociné.fr listing*

LaCroix.fr (C. Renou-Nativel) review*
LeFigaro.fr (M. Tranchant) review*
LeMonde.fr (I. Regnier) review*

Variety review
HollywoodReporter (S. Dalton) review

Tenderness (orig. La Tendresse) [2013] [IMDb] [AC.fr]*(written and directed by Marion Hänsel [IMDb] [AC.fr]*) is a gentle French-Belgian-German co-production that played recently at the 2014 Chicago French Film Festival held at the Music Box Theater on Chicago's north side a festival cosponsored by the French Diplomatic Mission to the United States.

The film's about a long divorced Belgian couple, Frans (played by Olivier Gourmet [IMDb] [AC.fr]*) and Lisa (played by Maryline Canto [IMDb] [AC.fr]*), who receive word that their college aged/20-something son Jack (played by Adrien Jolivet [IMDb] [AC.fr]*) had an end-of-season skiing accident somewhere in the French Alps.  As is often the case, initially it was not clear how bad the accident was.  In any case, however, it was necessary for both to go down (together) to the alpine resort town where their son had the accident to pick-up Jack as well as his car/belongings to bring him/his stuff home.

This is then the setup to a lovely "road trip" of sorts (it's about 8 hours driving from Brussels to the French Alps) about the ties (and love/tenderness) that remain even after definitive separation/divorce.

The dialogue is priceless.  As the two begin their journey (Frans is remarried, Lisa is not) it's pretty obvious why the two came to part ways: He's a perfectionist, she's more adventurous / relaxed (even if perhaps somewhat forgetful as well).  He's a miser, driving 20 minutes out of his way into Luxemburg to save a few Eurocents on a liter of petrol.  She just shakes her head, when they arrive at the "cheap gas station" and ... it's closed ;-).  But they are both gentle enough to not kill each other on the road.  And by the time they arrive they've come to an accommodation with each other to the point that Jack's girlfriend Alison (played by Margaux Chatelier [IMDb] [AC.fr]*) comments about how surprisingly good (dare one say "in love") they seem to be with each other.

Honestly folks, this is GREAT AND GENTLE FILM that "the French" could make in a way that "Anglo-Americans" could not.  For 40-something couples married, remarried or divorced, this would make for a fascinating piece for reflection.


* Reasonably good (sense) translations of non-English webpages can be found by viewing them through Google's Chrome browser. 

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The Giver [2014]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-II)  ChicagoTribune (2 Stars)  RE.com (2 Stars)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. McAleer) review
ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
RE.com (S. O'Malley) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review


The Giver [2014] (directed by Phillip Noyce, screenplay by Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide, based on the novel by Lois Lowry [IMDb]) plays like a somewhat updated and somewhat softened (suburbanized) version of George Orwell's 1984: Human attempts at "Climate Control" have instead totally devastated world.  A remnant of civilization has survived by, in fact, radically "doubling down" on this program of "Precision" and "Control" to the point that truly everything in the remnant society from language to even perception has come to be controlled by a self-perpetuating group of "experts" that specially breeds and forms its successors.  Essentially, society has become a well-manicured "ant-hill" where every "ant" knows (and is actually quite content in) his/her place.

And it doesn't necessarily look bad.  All looks quite clean and in order in society (everybody appears to do his/her job, and apparently does said job _well_).  It's just that everything is also quite bland.  All members of the society are required to take medications assigned to them each day, which among other things eliminate even the perception of color.  So we are presented with a society living in what looks like a very well-manicured suburb, but everything is grey (think here of Pleasantville [1998]).

Growing-up in this society are Jonas (played by Brenton Thwaites) and his friends Fiona (played by Odeya Rush) and Asher (played by Cameron Monaghan) who are finishing their equivalent of their "high school years" and are about to be "sorted" (think here of the recent film Divergent [2014]).

The annual "sorting ceremony" of "graduates" both into and out of life is quite dramatic.  The somewhat "ancient looking" if also somewhat "wise-looking" _Matriarchical_ (think here interestingly of the recent children's animated film Mars Needs Moms [2011]) Chief Elder (played by Meryl Streep in a truly unforgettable whig) arrives _remotely_ to the ceremony in the form of a GIGANTIC HOLOGRAM (is she even alive??).  And at the ceremony, the young approaching maturity are "given their tasks" (and assigned specialized training ... think of both university and of "ants" again), the old arriving at retirement age are "released to elsewhere" (wherever "elsewhere" may be ...).  

At the ceremony, all are the young approaching maturity are given their tasks ... Fiona is assigned to essentially nursing school/child care training, Asher to military flight training (practical/functional fields...).  Only Jonas doesn't seem to be assigned initially to anything.

Oh dear, what does that mean? (shades of Divergent [2014] again).   Actually, in the society at hand, having not been selected for any of the more immediately practical/functional tasks is not necessarily a bad thing: Jason's been chosen for a far more _special task_.  Told that he's been determined to have the aptitude "to see beyond," he's assigned to specialized training to become a "receiver of memory" (societal memory) under the special tutelage of the current "Receiver of Memory" (played by Jeff Bridges) who then becomes "The Giver" of such Memory to Jonas. 

Make no mistake, in a totalitarian society (and that is what is being portrayed here), Jonas' is an appointment to an elite position.  As a "receiver of memory" in training, Jonas is introduced to memory of that which existed BEFORE the (totalitarian) society came into being.  Thus he is INTRODUCED by "The Giver" to such experiences as TASTE, COLOR, EMOTION including PAIN.  And here Jonas comes to the crossroads that the previous "Receiver of Memory" ("The Giver" training him) arrived at when he was being prepared for his position ... should a society perhaps "safe" and in a sense "perfect" be allowed to continue if the cost of its continued existence is SO HIGH.  Jason's mentor had clearly proven to frightened/weak to change things.  But Jason doesn't have to choose the same way as his mentor ("The Giver") did ...

The rest of the story follows ... it's honestly not a bad story, and offers viewers / readers much, much to think about.  To some extent, the current film has been adopted by the American Right but truth be told,  at least the current installment (it's based on part one of a quartet of books) is far more independent than that.  Good film!


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