Innocence [2013]

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

IMDb listing
ChicagoTribune (C. Darling) review


Parents should note that Innocence [2013] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Hilary Brougher along with Tristine Skyler based on the novel by Jane Mendelsohn [IMDb]) is a rather mislabeled story.

Okay, yes, it's about a rather innocent 15-year-old girl named Beckett Warner (played by Sophie Curtis) from somewhere on Long Island, who after the rather strange death of her mother (due to an aneurism while surfing) moves with her father (played by Linus Roache) to Manhattan, where he enrolls her in a rather odd/creepy prep school where apparently her mother had also gone.

The school is run by women, all apparently her mother's age (late-30s to mid-40s).  They are all good looking and very competent, like her mother was.  But they all also seem to be rather emotionless to the point of seeming drugged / sedated.  And they all seem to know her father, a writer, from their "book club."

Also despite their quite fashionable attire and quite modern bordering on trendy demeanor, these women running this quite upscale prep-school, that's been "around for ages," seem surprisingly "puritanical," obsessed with blood and protecting their students' virginity.

Well there's, of course, "an explanation" to this. And it's actually a quite amusing one, though it more or less requires a BIG SPOILER ALERT to cuntinue further.

But (PARENTS DEFINITELY TAKE NOTE...) let's just say that the film offers one of the more "original" (unconvincing but _original_) excuses that a young girl could give to her parents for NEEDING to LOSE HER VIRGINITY _QUICKLY_ that certainly I've ever heard ;-)  ...

DON'T READ FURTHER if you accept the warning and don't want to have the film otherwise "spoiled' for you, but its final act really is kinda a hoot.

BIG SPOILER ALERT: "But dad, I HAD to lose my virginity because OTHERWISE the WITCHES who run my school would CONTINUE TO SUCK MY VIRGIN BLOOD TO KEEP THEMSELVES 'FOREVER YOUNG.'"

Unconvincing as an excuse, yes, but certainly quite original ;-).  Would I recommend the film to your teen? Probably not.  But I'm sure that most readers who've read this far will be amused.


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The Remaining [2014]

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

IMDb listing

Nerdrepository.com: Interview with the director


The Remaining [2014] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Casey La Scala along with Chris Dowling) imagines the sudden arrival of the end of the world according to the sequence outlined in the Biblical Book of Revelation

The film begins at a lovely "garden wedding" (but note here, not a _Church_ wedding ;-) of a lovely,  even somewhat sassy couple, Skylar (played by Alexa Vega) and Dan (played by Bryan Dechart) both of whom could have easily starred in some CMT / GAC music video.  They do have someone there to officiate ("Pastor Shay?" played by John Pyper Furgeson, whose character gets more important as the film progresses).  They've written their own sincere if somewhat cheesy vows.

We viewers get to endure then the typical "rites" that go on at the lovely Reception that follows including the "toast" by the Best Man (played by Shaun Sipos) where he talks about "Commitment" to the irritation of his 7-years-and-going GF named Ally (played by Italia Ricci) who then asks, "Why then has HE not proposed (to me) yet ...?" ;-), the "first dance" (that "starts slow" and then "suddenly" becomes a "hip-hop" number, "oh what a surprise" ;-), the "rigged bouquet toss" (all dressed-in-white and sassy Sky knows her BFF Ally's "pain ...").  There's even a somewhat creepy (or simply nerdy...) friend named Dan (played by Bryan Dechart) who's videotaping it all.

And then, as Dan's videotaping Sky's parents' well-wishes to their daughter, telling her (into the tape) that her "wedding was perfect" (even as they note that they still would have preferred a Church wedding ;-) ... SUDDENLY ... both of Sky's parents DROP DEAD (apparently Raptured...) and ... THE END OF THE WORLD BEGINS ...

The rest of the movie follows with many of the torments described in the Book of Revelation, including storms of fire and ice and fearsome flying beasts who sting like scorpions, ensueing...

To the its credit by film's end, it is clear WHY these torments are occurring: It's a LAST CHANCE for those who Remain to choose between God, and ... non-God (unbelief, selfish pride, etc). 

That's NOT an altogether bad understanding of the Book of Revelation whose dream-like, hallucinatory imagery, of course, DEFIES EASY / HONEST interpretation (though certainly, there have been various sects for 2000 years, who've insisted that "they know...").

The Catholic Church has insisted that the imagery present be understood as being BOTH PREDICTIVE of a future time AND ALREADY PRESENT.  That's why ANY TIME can feel LIKE "THE END TIMES."  And let's face it, there have been PLENTY OF TIMES during the Church's 2000 year history, that "THE END TIMES" seemed quite "Nigh" -- during the Roman persecutions of the Early Church, during the Barbarian invasions that sacked the remains of the Roman Empire after it had become Christian, during the Crusades / Black Plague, during the Religious Wars that plagued Europe during the time of the Reformation (culminating in the Thirty Year War in which HALF of Central Europe's inhabitants DIED as a result of the wars), to the wars/plagues of the modern era (WW I, the Spanish Flu, WW II, the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War ...).  Every one of these historical torments had MANY sincere believers believing that The End was Near.

One can ALSO interpret the Book of Revelation as the grand-apocalyptic struggle FOR ONE'S OWN SOUL during _one's own life_.  The struggles, the toils, the failures that occur in one's own life could be interpreted as being as painful as "scorpion bites" or being hit on the head by "hail of fire."

And ultimately, the whole drama centers around the fundamental question: Does one (come to) believe?  If one does come to believe none of these torments ultimately succeed ... and one reaches the blissful peace of the last two chapters of the Book of Revelation (interestingly LEFT OUT OF THIS FILM).  If one continues to struggle, thinking that "one is in charge," well the final plagues wipe everybody out.

Anyway, IMHO this does make for an interesting film.  I would also note here that BOTH fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Protestants arrive at basically the same conclusion: One ultimately has to _submit_ to God (Allah / Jesus).  And I would also note that interestingly enough, though the Muslims DON'T accept Jesus as God's son, THEY DO BELIEVE that it will be JESUS (and _not_ Mohammed) who will come back to earth (as Prophet if not as God's son) to judge it at the end.

Something to think about as one munches popcorn while watching the Final Days play-out on-screen: We often may not like each other, but we all have more in common than we think.


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The Don Juans (orig. Donšajni) [2013]

MPAA (R)  iDnes.cz (4/10)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
CSFD listing*
FDB.cz listing*

CervenyKoberec.cz (E. Bartlová) review*
iDnes.cz (M. Spáčilová) review*
Lidovky (M. Kabát) review* interview w. director*

Expats.cz (J. Pirodsky) review
Variety (R.. Scheib) review

Czech that Film [official site] [2014 line-up at GSFC in Chicago]

The Don Juans (orig. Donšajni) [2013] [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]* (written and directed by Jiří Menzel [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]*) was the Czech Republic's submission for the Best Foreign Language Film competition at the 86th Annual Academy Awards (The Oscars).  On the flip side, the film caused something of a stir (and not necessarily a good one...) back in the Czech Republic where the film scored a 30% from viewers on its CSFD database, the continued sanity of the director (of Woody Allen's age and demeanor) was questioned and the film was even labeled as "possibly the worst Czech film made since the fall of Communism."  In other words, as one of Czech parents, who grew-up on films like Menzel's Oscar-winning (best foreign language picture) Closely Watched Trains (orig. Ostře Sledované Vlaky) [1966] [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]* and Secluded by the Woods (orig. Na Samotě u Lesa) [1976] [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]* (filmed in the rolling Bohemian countryside near the village where my dad's family was originally from) as well as more recently I Served the King of England (orig. Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) [2006] [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]*, I had to see the film ;-) ... and it played recently at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago as part of 2014 Czech That Film Tour cosponsored by the Czech Diplomatic Mission to the United States.

The film then, which runs very much like a contemporary Woody Allen [IMDb] movie (one honestly thinks of Allen's most recent Magic in the Moonlight [2014]), is definitely on the parternalistic / sexist side (and this is exactly what Czech critical opinion, above, was most irritated with).  Yet it does have quite a few, ever-gentle laughs.

Set in a Czech provincial town (one thinks of Český Krumlov, Pardubice or Tábor ) at the center of the film are two protagonists: Vítek (played by Jan Hartl [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]*), male, and Markéta (played by Libuše Šafránková [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]*), female.  He's a bored if still good-natured said-provincial-town opera director.  She's a still quite enthusiastic children's drama coach lifetime resident of the same provincial town.  Interestingly, they are roughly of the same age both presumably in their late 50s to early 60s.  Yet also tellingly, they are NOT romantic interests to each other in this film.  Vítek, bored though he may be with staging "provincial opera," nonetheless "takes solace" in bedding a veritable parade of young soprano women looking for lead parts in his productions.  Markéta, on the other hand, raised a now late 30-something daughter as a single parent, having allowed herself to be seduced by a dashing (then) "leading man" opera singer who passed through the provincial-town (readers, count the years yourselves ...) some decades past.  She doesn't necessarily have regrets, but she does admit that she has had a love-hate relationship with "Donšajni," that is, "Don Juans" in general and then with Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in particular.

Now it turns out that Vítek, whose opera company has been struggling for years, decides to go for broke and stage Don Giovanni at his opera house.  And he even invites the once dashing leading man "baritone" superstar, now thanks to age and attendant wear-and-tear reduced to "bass" voiced Jakub (played by Martin Huba [IMDb] [CSFD]*[FDB]*) to "come back from America" to sing the part of Don Giovanni's great nemisis "Il Commendatore" (Don Pedro) in the opera.  And poor Jakub, who gets a free trip "back to the old country," accepts.  Now who is this once great, now whiskey and cigarettes ravaged Jakub?  I think most readers here will guess ... ;-) 

Much, often very funny ... in a typically light-hearted, Allenesque (the Czechs would add Svěrák-Smoljak-Cimrman-esque), "petite bourgeois" sort of way ... ensues ... ;-)

Folks, this is a goofy movie, but people who've ever liked the stories around "small town theater" would probably very much enjoy this light-hearted Czech-provincial "Baroque" version of Garrison Keillor's "Prarie Home Companion" [2006] ;-).


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

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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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