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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Courage (orig. Wymyk) [2011]

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

IMDb listing
FilmWeb.pl* listing

Courage (orig. Wymyk) [IMDb][FW.pl]*(2011) is a feature length drama that's played at the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago (Nov 2-18, 2012) that's actually a very simple but IMHO very Polish parable about courage (and its opposite, cowardice). Uncompromising courage was a hallmark of Polish character through-out the most of the 20th century.  It sustained the country in face of often horrific suffering during both the Nazi and Communist eras.  But it's now been a full generation since the end of the Communist era.  Hence this film is a post-Communist re-visitation of the theme.

The story is of two brothers, Alfred (played by Robert Więckiewicz [IMDb][FW.pl]*) and Jerzy (played by Łukasz Simlat [IMDb][FW.pl]*).

Jerzy had spent some time in the United States, returning to Poland with his two small children Piotrek (played by Aleksander Stefanski [IMDb][FW.pl]*) and Natalka (played by Weronika Kosobudzka [IMDb][FW.pl]*) after his wife died.  Alfred, in the meantime stayed in Poland, childless, with his wife Viola (played by Gabriela Muskała [IMDb][FW.pl]*) running the family business (which appeared always to have been an electronics business but had morphed at some point into a small cable TV / internet provider) for Jerzy and their parents Stefan (played by Marian Dziędziel [IMDb][FW.pl]*) and Anna (played by Anna Tomaszewska [IMDb][FW.pl]*).

It's clear from the onset that Alfred has some resentment toward his brother Jerzy the "big shot" who had come back from the United States.  He had held the family business together and yet now, after years being away, Jerzy was starting to assert himself in their family partnership.  Worse, dad Stepan, seemed to respect Jerzy more than Alfred.  Perhaps "distance had grown the heart fonder" for this son who had been away.  Perhaps it was that Stepan had respected Jerzy's willingness to risk going to America.  Perhaps it was that Jerzy had produced grandchildren.  Perhaps it was simply that Stepan (and Anna) had felt sorry for Jerzy for having lost his wife.  IN ANY CASE, it was clear that Stepan wanted the "American" Jerzy to have more of a voice in their business than when he had been away and Alfred who had stayed back in Poland the whole time resented this.

However, things come to a sudden and critical turn one morning when Alfred and Jerzy found themselves heading on a train to the center of town (to deal with some tax issues).  They already had some trouble getting to the train station as Alfred's own "show-off" muscle car broke down before they got to the station.  So they had to run to make the train.  Inside the train however, an incident develops.  A young woman is harassed on the train by a group of hooligans.  Jerzy (understand that he's in his late 30s or 40s) wants to get-up and do something.  Alfred (who actually appears to be in better shape) tries to convince him to let it go.  Jerzy can not and tries to stop the hooligans.  And ... the rest of the movie unfolds.

It's really hard go on at this point SPOILING it a bit.  But I suppose one could say that, all things considered, things were easier for Jerzy.  He had made a decision, after all.  Things were much more complicated for Alfred, however, on account of his hesitation.

The question the film leaves the viewer is: Can one's life come to be defined by a single situation that one found oneself facing?  And if that's the case, what would one prefer to do?  Be brave and quite possibly lose or be cautious and ... and have to face the consequences of one's "inaction" as well?

Again, this would seem to be a _very_ Polish question ;-)


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

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

IMDb listing
FilmWeb.pl* listing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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The Other Dream Team [2012]

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

IMDb listing
Dave Hoestra's review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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The Man with the Iron Fists [2012]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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