I posted my first pass at a quickie review of ANGEL-A at A&F, and was pleased to find somebody else who'd seen it that I could have a conversation with - and who'd written a real fine review that's helping me rethink my own. (I'm going to steal that line, "Angel-A comes across as a very personal tribute to the redemptive power of supermodels..." WIWT)
Greg's a very good writer, a key contributor to the relatively new (it started fall 2006) faith and film website Past The Popcorn. A bit more from Greg's PTP bio: "Writer in Residence at Puget Sound Christian College in Everett, Washington. The author of Peter Jackson in Perspective: The Power Behind Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings (Hollywood Jesus Books, 2004), as well as Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter (VMI, 2003), Greg has been an editor at HollywoodJesus.com for several years, and is a member of the Faith and Film Critics Circle."
Here's some popcorn for you to munch, samples from a handful of PTP reviews that happen to have caught my eye - either because they're Soul Food related, or because the review made me want to see the film. The title of each is a link to the full review: click on it and you're there!
After the Wedding
There's More At Work Than What You Think
Mike Smith (20.04.07)
Our father, who art in Denmark, overwhelming is thy wealth. Thy kingdom comes, thy will is done, on earth… But not so much in heaven. Jørgen is a father; he is a wealthy, smart manipulator who apparently has an eagle eye for detail and an uncommon understanding of human nature. He seems to know everything about everyone, and has them and the world under his control. Except for one thing… mortality. But no one in After the Wedding can possibly imagine what is foremost on Jørgen’s mind. They are too caught up in their own guilt, personal struggles, pain, and lives in general to see his plan for what it is: their best chance at new life and peace.
Amazing Grace
Amazing and Graceful, If Not Perfect
Greg Wright (23.02.07)
As a history lesson, Amazing Grace is beyond admirable. As a tract on the evils of the 18th-century slave trade, it’s a powerful indictment and makes a fine companion piece to Steven Spielberg’s 19th-century slave-trade tale from the opposite side of the Atlantic, Amistad. As a portrait of Wilberforce, it’s an Oscar-bait complex powerhouse. As an example of ensemble acting that might be more memorable than anything else we’ll see this year, we couldn’t ask for more. And still, the whole doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts.
Angel-A
Of Schlubs and Gorgeous Women
Greg Wright (22.06.07)
Angel-A appears to be genuinely interested in seeing people lifted out of their circumstances. While at the film’s beginning André seems to operate on the principle that “the only person who can do anything for you is yourself,” he learns (and the film seems to support the idea) that humanity has not been abandoned: that God really does care, and also has the good sense to recruit angels built like (and played by) supermodels. Ultimately, Besson’s is a moral universe in which one’s actions toward others are a pretty good barometer of how one will treat oneself. Very Golden Rule-ish, in a French and earthy fashion. And this is all commendable, and prettily filmed. The wildly prolific producer/writer/director Besson is no hack.
Away From Her
Love, Drama, and Threat of Alzheimer’s
Jeff Walls (11.05.07)
Sarah Polley’s deliberate story-telling is aided by Away From Her’s brilliant lead performances. Julie Christie, one of the most radiant women ever to shine on the silver screen, has lost none of her glow in her older years. As Fiona, the 66-year-old actress steals the light in all of her scenes as she subtly, gracefully plays a woman whose mind is deteriorating. It’s hard to watch, yet impossible to look away as Christie’s Fiona struggles to remember the simple things, such as the word “wine.” Still, as good as Christie is, it is the performance of Gordon Pinsent that is the heart and soul of this moving picture.
Becket
Like a Comfortable Pair of Old Mocassins
Greg Wright (23.02.07)
One of the reasons Becket feels so refreshingly comfortable is that it begs to be talked about in conventional narrative terms. For instance, the “central conflict” is easily identifiable. By today’s standards, though, the pace of the film will seem plodding to most, almost even soporific. The performances will come across as overdone, even hammy. The direction and storytelling will seem positively pedestrian. Still, the two areas where Becket should still work for all audiences, though, are in its dialogue and in its themes. Becket and many of its contemporaries were such fine, fine films.
Beyond the Gates
Staredown with a Tragic Dilemma
Jenn Wright (30.03.07)
As director Michael Caton-Jones presents the terrible history of these appalling events, Beyond the Gates plunges the audience into a palpable abyss of ethical considerations, leaving us with only our ideas and our thoughts and our beliefs to wrestle through. For me, Caton-Jones’ work is the machete that cleaves bone from flesh, separating the sinews into ugly lumps of mere potential strength with no solid support. Ultimately, he presents a painful history, made all the more profound when, at the end, 800,000 people are violently murdered; certain races are saved; and we are left wondering what we would do if we were in Joe’s or Father Christopher’s shoes, and what, if anything, is “right.”
Black Snake Moan
Expect the Unexpected
Michael Brunk (02.03.07)
Despite the heavy setup, there are more than a few light moments to be found in Black Snake Moan. With Samuel L. Jackson in the role of Lazarus, you can expect a healthy dose of his unique wit, and more than a little salty language to go along with it. It’s safe to say this movie has its raw moments as well, and that includes a few fairly graphic sexual scenes featuring Christina Ricci’s Rae. She’s a good match on-screen for Jackson, though. Still, if that’s all the movie had to offer, it would be easy to dismiss. Fortunately, wrapped inside is a touching story of redemption.
Conversations with God
Implications of the Metaphysical
Greg Wright (27.10.06)
Director Stephen Simon brings a marvelous visual eye and narrative pace to Conversations with God. Particularly impressive are the visual conceptions of the film’s opening and closing scenes—sequences whose metaphysical implications are sure to pique the ire of those who don’t particularly buy Walsch’s “God is within you all” line of inquiry—as well as the simple, gritty realism of Walsch’s experiences on the street, which reminded me of Martin Bell’s American Heart (1992) and Tim Hunter’s The Saint of Fort Washington (1993). This ain’t Factotum or Barfly land, which is good, because there’s no hint of ironic self-indulgence or sarcastic humor in Walsch’s Conversations.
Evan Almighty
If You Film It, Will They Come?
Greg Wright (22.06.07)
The narrative tension in Evan Almighty, if you haven’t seen the trailer, comes from wondering whether a flood is actually coming; if you’ve seen the trailer, the tension comes from wondering just how, exactly, Evan and his ark will tie in to Congressman Long’s land use bill. Most of the humor in the scenario derives first from Steve Carell’s comedic physicality, which he invests pretty fully in his portrayal of Evan Baxter; then from Baxter’s reluctance to buy in to the whole “voice of God” thing; next from his transformation from Mr. Primp to Mr. Hairy/Robed Prophet; and finally from the Keystone Kops-lite ark-building sequence. Is the humor enough to warrant a recommendation? Probably, for most audiences.
Fay Grim
Grim Fools and Grimmer Fairytales
Greg Wright (25.05.07)
Hal Hartely’s latest film, Fay Grim, picks up where Henry Fool left off ten years ago—that is, I have to assume it does. While I’m a big Hartley fan (or at least a fan of the artily self-conscious dialogue that he writes) I missed Fool. But all the cast members are back, reprising their roles and extending the story while revising both it and Hartley’s own milieu. In the past, one could never really accuse a Hartley film of being over-plotted; but to be perfectly honest, having just completed my review of the latest Pirates movie, the thought of also synopsizing the equally plot- and exposition-heavy Fay Grim has me a little daunted. It’s that dense.
The Fountain
Clear as Mud, But So Was Kubrick
Greg Wright (22.11.06)
Oddly, The Fountain isn’t about the fountain of youth. It’s about the Tree of Life. Melding tales from Mayan culture, biblical accounts, and related religious traditions, Aronofsky envisions an apocalyptic future which unites and fulfills them all. Ultimately, his film analyzes our perceptions of death, and our perceptions of life. I don’t think it gives anything away to note that, when he finally fulfills his quest, Izzi’s conquistador discovers that eternal life looks nothing like what he expected. The same is true with the space traveler’s quest: does it fail, or does it succeed? That all depends on one’s perspective—a perspective that Tommy sorely needs in order to deal with Izzi’s terminal condition.
Hidden Secrets
The Not-So-Hidden Secret: It’s “Christian”...
Greg Wright (27.04.07)
Sometimes low expectations work in a film’s favor. That’s certainly the case with Hidden Secrets, the flagship release of new film production company PureFlix Entertainment—a film I only agreed to review because it technically meets the criteria for films we review at Past the Popcorn: it’s booked for theatrical release (May 30), and it is potentially relevant to our readership. But boy was my schlock-meter calibrated for maximum sensitivity when I popped the screener into my laptop on a flight down to L.A. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by this idealistic, gentle, somewhat cloistered, but genuinely moving little film.
Into Great Silence
And At Great Length, Too
Greg Wright (30.03.07)
Into Great Silence is indeed a worthy project in documenting monasticism. It takes its time and gives us enough silence to whet the appetite for more—or satisfy us that we’ve had plenty, thanks. It makes no attempt to sugar-coat the experience, clearly depicting the level of self-denial involved. It’s also revelatory in its communication of the role that repetition and structure play not only in monastic life, but in general liturgical faith. Upon reflection, I’m also grateful that the film makes to attempt to either “sell” the audience on monasticism or persuade the audience of the discipline’s merits. Sadly, I grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of anything distinctively Christian about the experience, apart from the sparse liturgy and Scripture.
The Painted Veil
A Fallen View of Redemption
Greg Wright (22.12.06)
The Painted Veil—a project of artistic passion for partners Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, as well as Watts’ prior collaborator, director John Curran—is both maddening and refreshing in its refusal to answer its own questions in the style to which we have become accustomed. There are no pat answers here. The tale of Kitty Fane’s journey toward love, loss, and restoration is both revealing—as the veil of Kitty’s self-absorption is lifted to reveal the truth of life, death, and Walter Fane’s passion—and mystifying. It’s easy to see why Somerset Maugham’s novel has now thrice been adapted to the screen (first in 1934, with Garbo as Kitty, and again in 1957 in the loosely adapted The Seventh Sin).
Pan’s Labyrinth
Great Fantasy, Compelling Hero, Failed Film
Greg Wright (29.12.06)
Young Ivana Baquero is well up to the task of portraying Ofelia, the protagonist of Pan’s Labyrinth, and her performance is another of the film’s strengths. Baquero manages the nuances required for such a complex character, and she never seems overwhelmed either by the special effects, the ghoulishness of her two worlds, or the one-dimensional overacting of her costars. The film also delivers what are probably the best fantasy sequences in recent memory—and that’s saying quite a lot, given the fantasies that have come to the screen in recent years. Specifically, del Toro’s creatures possess the convincing, realistic otherness which was so lacking in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Perfume
So Much Artistry, or So Much Decadent Wallow?
Greg Wright (27.12.06)
The first half of Perfume plays like a gritty and literate commentary on the dilemma of an artist. Is it even possible to capture beauty, to limn truth? If so, how do we go about it? Is it better to be blessed with innate talent, or to learn your craft by discipline? Perhaps some combination of the two? Given that Tykwer has said in interviews that film “is a way to … put [time] in a box”—to capture “the beauty of people”—it’s even easy to read the Paris sequence as Tykwer’s meditation on his own chosen artform, his private film fanaticism.
The Reaping
Once More into the Spiritual Breach
Greg Wright (05.04.07)
The Reaping’s strength is its production design—just reminiscent enough of a backlot set to remind us this is a movie, just otherworldly enough to invoke the metaphysical. And it’s all stunning. After a while, though, it becomes difficult to really care much about what’s real and what isn’t—particularly when filmmaking flim-flammery almost constantly reminds that we are, after all, just watching a movie. I’m pretty sure that director Stephen Hopkins more-or-less buys into the idea of supernatural evil; but it seems here that studio-head queasiness has watered down the director’s potion. And most of the audience with whom I saw the film just wasn’t swallowing it.
Rescue Dawn
Herzog At His Best
Greg Wright (13.07.07)
Rescue Dawn is something of an ordeal for the audience—much as Herzog’s other films before it. Think, perhaps, of a Terrence Malick or Carroll Ballard film tied to a bullwhip or a mace. Think of lyric brutality. And then imagine Herzog thinking, rather dispassionately, that any audience which imagines itself as suffering more than his protagonist—or himself, as an artist—is not much worth worrying about. I’d say that the smart money is that you won’t much care for Rescue Dawn. But if you like cinema that demands a great deal of you, that doesn’t let you off the hook with ten-second character development, a half-hour hook, and three dazzling chase sequences, then this film may just be for you.
Waitress
A Bittersweet, Charming Confection
Jeff Walls (11.05.07)
A humorous, quirky comedy, Waitress is short of great; but it demonstrates some marvelous potential—and director Adrienne Shelly might easily have joined the likes of Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron as one of the premiere female directors if not for her untimely death. Although some major plot points are easily predictable and some editing issues cause the pacing of the film to ebb and flow, for the most part Waitress is a delight, a charming, somewhat whimsical comedy that is uplifting and heartwarming. Adrienne Shelly, high above us, should be proud.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
ANDREI RUBLEV (1966, USSR, Tarkovsky)
ANDREI RUBLEV (AKA “The Passion According To Andrei” 1966, USSR, Andrei Tarkovsky, screenplay with Andrei Konchalovsky)I'll never paint again. Because it's of no use to anyone. That's all.
This film doesn’t pander. It barely accommodates. You can watch for an hour, you might even make it all the way to the end, without being entirely sure which of the grim Russian monks is the title character. They look all alike, and names are rarely spoken.
As the film opens, a mob tries to prevent a man from taking flight in a hot air balloon made of animal skins. He soars headlong over land and water, experiencing a view of the world unavailable to the violent crowd left behind him on the ground. A dizzying, perhaps disastrous, descent to the earth. Then in slow motion, a horse rolls on its back, gets to its feet and walks past the deflating balloon. What this incident has to do with the rest of the film is never explained. It might or might not become clear on second or third viewing.
ANDREI RUBLEV could be considered the Mount Everest of spiritual film. It is intimidating, imposing, remote, yet sooner or later every cinephile with an interest in exploring the furthest reaches of faith and art will mount an inevitable expedition. For those who persevere, the film yields an extraordinary perspective on the world below.
The director's quasi-autobiographical film conveys the near impossibility and apparent futility of the artist’s task in the face of suffering and upheaval. Overwhelmed by and even implicated in the horrific violence of Tartar invasions and ongoing bloody clashes between warring Russian princes – the protracted birth pains of modern Russia – the nation’s greatest artist struggles with the legitimacy of his work, questioning whether art-making could possibly serve the glory of God in such circumstances.
Andrei Tarkovsky was himself a Christian, and it is easy to read the film as the testimony (protest?) of an artist believer under the repressive Soviet regime of the early 1960s. Its subtitle suggests his personal identification with the travails of the great Russian iconographer, and may explain why the film was shown only briefly in Moscow in 1966 before being shelved for three years. A single covert out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Festival introduced this austere, obscure masterpiece to the world, and its mystique grew until bemused London audiences were finally able to view a 140 minute cut in 1973. They assumed that this elliptical pageant, moving almost at random through a quarter century of medieval Russian history in a series of barely connected scenarios of brutal violence and obscure theologizing, interrupted by sudden and unannounced fantasy sequences, must have been rendered unintelligible by Soviet censors.
Such challenges did not originate with the bureaucrats. Far more complete versions screened in the ensuing three and a half decades, each successive release only adding to the film’s narrative and thematic challenges. Tarkovsky’s subsequent films all confirm the artist’s lack of interest in conventional narrative and his unwillingness to diminish the mysterious complexities of the images he places on screen. Indeed it might be said that his central preoccupation is Mystery, that he fiercely resists any steps toward simplification or clarity that might diminish his ability to evoke that quality on film. In his aesthetic manifesto Sculpting In Time, Tarkovsky himself writes that his masterpiece “strikes me as disjointed and incoherent.” He calls it “a complete mystery, the riddle of my life.”
It was only during my second viewing that I started even to appreciate this daunting, opaque film. It took a third time through (with two friends who had never met, each of whom counted this their uncontested favorite film) to begin actually to like it. But it was only after working my way through the film scene-by-scene, followed by a fifth complete viewing, that the power of ANDREI RUBLEV truly took hold of me, and I came to share my friends’ enthusiasm. I can't understand why the film didn’t speak to me when first I encountered it, it lives so close to the central concerns of my life. In all its mystery and concreteness, Tarkovsky's masterpiece has become essential to my faith, speaking as no other film does to my understanding of the place of my art in the world, and in the kingdom of God. And in no way that I can express in words, it reassures and strengthens my resolve to face the inevitability of suffering that comes to every human life.
It has been worth so so long and challenging a climb. So difficult a flight. When you get up high enough, there’s a lot you can see.
THE SACRIFICE
Part of the Videomatica collection, Koerner Library, UBC
Saturday, July 14, 2007
AFTER LIFE
AFTER LIFE (“Wandafuru raifu” 1998, Japan, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
What is the one memory you would take with you?
In a worn, empty and utterly ordinary old building someplace between earth and eternity, a dutiful group of caseworkers guides twenty-two people in their transition from life to what lies ahead. Each client has three days to choose one, and only one, event from their lives to accompany them into the after life. Then the staff has three more days to stage and film each of the episodes on a simple soundstage. On Saturday the short films are shown, each client takes their memory and departs for whatever lies beyond the walls of this metaphysical way station. A meditation on the sacredness of the everyday, this exquisite film quietly grounds its otherworldly premise in closely observed quotidian details – including the use of actual documentary interviews – regardless of whether it is considering the making of tea, the making of memories, the making of art or the making of eternal decisions. The literal translation of the Japanese title is “Wonderful Life.”
DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, OPEN YOUR EYES, WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, THE PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK
Available at Videomatica
ANGEL-A
ANGEL-A (2005, France, Luc Besson)
My name’s Angela. I fell out of the sky.
He’s charming in a Euro-schlumpy sort of way, but he talks too much (and lies a lot), and now he’s talked himself into bad trouble with some really bad guys. There’s no way to raise their 30K before they toss him in the river, so he decides to save himself a beating and them the trouble. Poised on the edge of a picturesque Paris bridge, our hero notices an impossibly tall, impossibly gorgeous (apart from the tears and runny mascara marring her impossibly high-cheekboned face) blonde in an impossibly tiny black micro-dress, one pylon down. Once she’s taken care of the mascara problem by flinging herself into the river and having him rescue her, it becomes apparent the whole thing was a set-up: she’s not only figuratively but literally an angel, sent Clarence-like to save him from himself.
Early on it’s a kick: there’s a quirky comic chemistry between the statuesque babe in the little black dress and the charming schlump with the motor mouth. For a while the movie is content to look great and get its kicks riffing on angel movies like WINGS OF DESIRE and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, not taking itself too seriously. But as things progress it tries to dig deeper and... Well, there’s just no depth there to dig. The gospel of this wannabe-spiritual effort is some embarrassingly juvenile “love yourself” psycho-babble folded into a seriously creepy over-ripe romanticism that’s all about rescuing, worshipping and lusting after sexy, fallen angel-whores.
Luc Besson (definitely not to be mistaken for fellow French filmer Robert Bresson) wants desperately to make spiritual films, but this one makes it clear that he’s seriously confused. If, like me, you think this sleek, chic black and white fashion video might be a lot of fun – at least a guilty pleasure – be warned: it’s all eye-candy, zero soul food. The gorgeous angel gets the schlemiel off the hook by schlepping the gangster who’s after him – yech – and drums up the money he needs to pay off the other thugs by having ten or twenty guys pay her a thousand Euro a pop to have sex with her in the bathroom of a club – serious yech. And while the beneficiary may express qualms about her tactics – he’s falling in love with her, after all – the angel doesn’t seem to mind, I’m quite sure Besson doesn’t really mind, and he invites us to figure it’s No Big Deal. I figure it’s repulsive.
A shame about the whole whore thing. Apart from that, this could have had a kinda-dumb-but-cute likeability. No such luck.
THE FIFTH ELEMENT, THE MESSENGER
*
PS I love this post from an IMDb user...
There is, it seemed to me, a big effort to make his film deep considering the discourse. It can be perceptible through the plenty of plays with symbols that are contained in it. The main problem is that by writing such dialogs, certain scenes seem too artificial and often too long. This has to be added to the fact that if you see the film in french, you"ll quickly notice that the dialogs that often concern both J Debbouze and Rie Rasmussen are more than sometimes incomprehensible and require a permanent attention to decipher them."More than sometimes incomprehensible" indeed...
Friday, July 13, 2007
ABOUT SCHMIDT
Short versionABOUT SCHMIDT (2002, USA, Alexander Payne, Louis Begley novel)
It doesn’t matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too it will be as though I never even existed. What difference has my life made to anyone? None that I can think of. None at all. Hope things are fine with you. Yours truly, Warren Schmidt.
Starting with the toast at Warren’s retirement party, an old work buddy paying him tribute with the abrasive wisdom of a half-soused Solomon, this movie resides not only in the heart of America’s Midwest, but at the centre of Old Testament wisdom literature. You can read it in Jack Nicholson's sad-eyed, tight-mouthed, ever-so-weary face: it’s all vanity. A chasing after wind.
Approaching the end of his days – days he’s spent numbering; he’s an insurance actuary – a man begins examining his thus-far unexamined life and wonders if it’s been worth living. And so, in the finest of American movie traditions, he decides to head out on the highway looking for... Well, whatever it is he’s missing. It’s EASY RIDER in a Winnebago (“Born To Be Mild”?), a Bing Crosby / Bob Hope vehicle with no Hope. Call it ROAD TO DENVER, a buddy-less buddy movie.
ABOUT SCHMIDT is a confounding film, as hard to get a handle on as the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, a comparison theologian Robert K. Johnston details in Useless Beauty. We want to believe that if you just do the right thing, set aside your risky, irresponsible schemes and live out the unspectacular kind of charity that begins at home, it’ll all work out for the best. Like it did for Jimmy Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. But Solomon ain’t buying it. Neither are Taylor or Payne.
Some find this director smug, his attitude toward characters condescending, judgmental, mocking: others see affection, sometimes respect, even grace, eventually. The truth lies at neither pole. Payne both criticizes and cherishes, shows the good alongside the bad, tips the scale back and forth with masterful, disorienting precision.
Sometimes the job of the artist is to bring the bad news. Without it, the good can be sentimental and self-deceiving. If something’s rotten in the state of, say, Nebraska, shouldn’t somebody say something?
ELECTION, IKIRU, THE STRAIGHT STORY, MILLIONS
*
Long version, rough draft
ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002, Alexander Payne, screenplay with Jim Taylor from Louis Begley novel)
I am weak. And I'm a failure, there's just no getting around it. Relatively soon I will die, maybe in twenty years, maybe tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too it will be as though I never even existed. What difference has my life made to anyone? None that I can think of. None at all. Hope things are fine with you. Yours truly, Warren Schmidt.
The blank faced, sad eyed, tight mouthed Warren Schmidt might almost be Auden’s Unknown Citizen, “one against whom there was no official complaint / And all the reports on his conduct agree / That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint.” Ah, but in the true sense? “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”
At his retirement banquet a buddy from the old days begins paying tribute with the wisdom of a half-soused Solomon – not the know-it-all wise guy of the biblical Book of Proverbs, but the sadder, wiser preacher of Ecclesiastes. "All those gifts over there don't mean a god damn thing. And this dinner doesn’t mean a god damn thing. And the social security and pension don’t mean a god damn thing. None of these superficialities mean a god damn thing.” The truth of his words is reflected in Warren’s weary face: it’s all vanity.
But when Ray moves on to really does mean something, we begin to wonder if he still speaks the Bible truth. What matters, according to Ray’s living epistle to the Nebraskans, is “the knowledge that you devoted your life to something meaningful. To being productive and working for a fine company. Hell, one of the top-rated insurance companies in the nation. To raising a fine family, to building a fine home, to being respected by your community, to having wonderful lasting friendships. At the end of his career, if a man can look back and say I did it, I did my job, then he can retire in glory and enjoy riches far beyond the monetary kind. So, all you young people here, take a good look at a very rich man.” Warren is also unconvinced: the effort required to muster the requisite smile in response to the oracle’s words exhausts our hero, and he excuses himself to seek out the company of a vodka gimlet in the lonely bar. Approaching the end of his days – days he has spent his life numbering, in his job as an insurance actuary – Warren begins to examine his so-far unexamined life, and wonders if it’s been worth living.
ABOUT SCHMIDT is a confounding movie – as confounding as the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, which theologian Robert K. Johnston finds to be the centre of this film’s power and meaning. What kind of comedy offers a guided tour of the futility of a decent, well-meaning man’s life? What kind of Bible verse goes “In spite of all our work there is nothing we can take with us. It isn’t right! We go just as we came. We labor, trying to catch the wind, and what do we get? We get to live our lives in darkness and grief, worried, angry, and sick.” I don’t recall memorizing that one in Sunday School.
It seems so wrong. We want to believe that if you just do the right thing, if you set aside your riskier, larger ambitions – Warren would have loved to see his smiling picture on the cover of Fortune 500, “Schmidt Int’l blows the bell curve with its out-of-this-world performance” – and focus on the good of others, do the unspectacular kind of charity that begins at home, it’ll all work out for the best. Like it did for Jimmy Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. You’ve got job responsibilities, a family to support, your wife could never handle the strain of risky enterpeneurship, so you settle. I mean, that’s the gospel, isn’t it? Self-sacrifice? Laying down your life, your self-aggrandizing dreams, for others? You go to church, you do it by the book, take on adult responsibilities, you do what makes your wife happy – and then you find it’s left you with this? No job, no hobbies except channel surfing, a wife you can’t stand, a daughter who can’t stand you, and one friend – who you find out has been schlepping your wife. A chasing after wind.
So in the finest of American movie traditions, Warren takes to the open road in search of... Well, whatever it is he’s lacking – in an absurdly oversized Winnebago, the fruit of a dutiful career. Ultimately this is a road movie, the kind of picaresque buddy picture that’s low on plot but big on self-discovery, where a couple of guys (or gals, if they’re named THELMA AND LOUISE) head out on the highway looking for adventure and... Well, self-discovery, America, meaning, friendship. Whatever comes their way. This is ROAD TO DENVER, and Warren plays Bob Hope to... Well, to whose Bing Crosby? Turns out ABOUT SCHMIDT is the saddest thing of all, a buddy-less buddy movie. At the outset, Warren’s only apparent buddy called him a rich man, but it turns out he’s ended up without even George Bailey’s legacy: he has no friends.
Except Ndugu, an African orphan to whom he’s begun sending his dutiful twenty-two bucks a month. He even goes the extra mile, enclosing a personal note. And lacking anybody in his real life to talk to, Warren pours out his heart – wildly inappropriately (“Goddammit if they didn’t replace me with some kid who doesn’t know a damn thing about genuine real-world risk assessment or managing a department for that matter – cocky bastard!”), and bracketed with the conventional wisdom of Warren’s world whose absurdity reveals itself in juxtaposition to Third World realities (“I highly recommend you pledge a fraternity when you go to college”). There’s also delicious irony in the gap between what Warren writes and what we see; after reporting his wife’s passing (“I hope you’re sitting down...”), he observes (Solomon-like) that death awaits everyone, life is short and he’s got to make the best of whatever time he has left – as we see him fall asleep in front of the TV. “I can’t afford to waste another minute.” Fade to black, white title appears: “Two weeks later.” Fade up on the same face, a bit puffier, a bit more stubble, sleeping in front of the same screen, wearing the same pajamas. I love the complexity: it’s an on-the-nose illustration of the gap between Warren’s words and his actions, between his perceptions and reality, a portrait I suppose of self-delusion. But it’s also a terribly sad, completely understandable snapshot of a lonely man grieving the loss of his wife, cut loose from his place in the world. (Don’t let anybody – even Robert McKee – tell you that voice-overs are flaccid, sloppy writing, shortcut explanations of a character’s thoughts. One of the great subtleties of twentieth century fiction is the complexity of the unreliable narrator: in the hands of an Alexander Payne or a DAYS OF HEAVEN Terrence Malick, the dissonance between what’s said and what’s seen is the essence of an artistry that does anything but condescend to the viewer or explain itself away.)
Viewers are as fiercely divided on this film as they are over ELECTION, the director’s other great assault on standard-issue mid-American values, the received wisdom of good old meat-and-potatoes Protestant work-ism. But Rob Johnston maintains that if the attack on dearly held convictions grates on us, it’s meant to – just as the disorienting words of Ecclesiastes are intended to smack us hard, shake loose our well-thought-through answers and confront us with the gap between what we want to think and what we’re afraid to face.
The job of art – heck, the job of prophets, let’s come out and say it – is to interrogate our presuppositions. We take offense when it’s suggested that these things we value are weighed in the balance and found wanting – our jobs, our churches, our families, our inadequate charity, our half-failed attempts to be responsible, to do what’s required of us. Are these things really so bad? No, of course they’re not bad – or at least, they’re not necessarily bad. But what about when they go bad? What if the day comes when all of a sudden they turn out not actually to be enough? It’s those days that draw the attention of the artist, if not the entertainer – those hard questions, the questions maybe without answers. (What answers do you find in Ecclesiastes? It may be there, in fact I think it is – so does Mr Johnston – but it’s damned elusive. No wonder so many artists love that book so.) Perhaps Alexander Payne’s calling is to bring the bad news that must always precede the good – without which the good news is nothing but sentimentality and self-deception. If something’s rotten in the state of, well, Nebraska, isn’t it somebody’s job to point that out? First the tragedy, then the comedy – or in Payne’s case, a whole lot of both, all at the same time.
(A moment’s digression, to talk more about this bad news – the film’s idea of what may be at the heart of Warren’s lostness, and maybe that of a whole culture around him. Let’s take a moment to say just a word about compliance, repression and passive aggression. Could it be that these are Warren’s besetting sins? The fundamental dishonesties, the endless small acts of moral and relational cowardice that have, over time, corroded his soul. Watch as he relates to his wife, watch the veiled resentment as he shrinks, contorts and limits himself to fit her peculiarities and foibles, mistaking preferences for commands, turning her into a tyrant, to the point where he’s become the surly slave, she the caricature of the harsh taskmaster. And it’s not only in his marriage, or his workplace, that he’s shrunk himself too small: watch the man, or what’s left of a man, comply himself to death in a marvelous scene, deleted from the final cut of the film, where he orders breakfast the morning after his transcendent experience on the rooftop of the Winnebago;
I awoke from my night in the wilderness completely transformed. I'm like a new man. For the first time in years, I feel clear. I know what I want, I know what I've got to do, and nothing's going to stop me ever again.So much for good intentions. It’s a brilliant scene, funny, revealing. Even if you don’t recognize the riff on Jack Nicholson’s iconic scene in FIVE EASY PIECES, three decades prior;
Can I take your order?
Um, I'd like a plain omlette, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
Oh. Fine. I'll just have the potatoes.
I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes. Tomatoes instead. A cup of coffeeA scene that spoke the heart of a fed-up generation, mad as hell and not going to take it any more – however immature and petulant, there was something right about that kind of insistence, discontent, resistance. How terrifying to think this later, echoing scene might be an equally accurate summation of the spirit of our corporate times, with people reduced to compliant consumers, sad and ineffectual and more than willing to take whatever “it” is so long as we don’t make a fuss. Suddenly those cattle cars Schmidt keeps noticing look like something more than just local color. So maybe his bland-as-white-sauce probably-Lutheran pastor was right, way back there at the funeral, in spite of all the insipidity: “I want to tell you about anger. Anger is okay. God can handle it if we’re angry at him. And I’ll tell you why....)
and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
What do you mean? You don't have any tomatoes?
Only what's on the menu. You can have number two, a plain omelet. It comes with fries and rolls.
I know, but it's not what I want.
Make up your mind.
I have made up my mind. I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes on the plate. A cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.
I'm sorry, we don't have any side orders of toast. I'll give you an English muffin or a coffee roll.
No side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don't you?
Would you like to talk to the manager?
You've got bread and a toaster of some kind?
I don't make the rules.
I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like a plain omelet and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce, and a cup of coffee.
A number two. A chicken sal san.
Hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee.
Anything else?
Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for a chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken
any rules.
You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
I want you to hold it between your knees.
You see that sign, sir? You'll all have to leave, I'm not taking any more of your smartness and your sarcasm.
You see this sign? (He reaches his arm out and "clears" the table for her. Dishes, menus, cutlery crash to the floor.)
If some find the film offensive for its attack on perfectly good middle class values, others find even more offense in what they take as an attack on perfectly good middle class people. It’s one thing to make fun of a culture, it’s quite another to make fun of people: that’s personal, and mean spirited. Some find Payne smug, his satire vicious (or, even worse, obvious), his attitude toward his characters condescending. But I maintain that the beauty or beastliness of Payne's characters (or of his attitudes toward his characters) is very much in the eye of the beholder: where another sees ugly mockery and harsh judgment, I see an affection, sometimes even a respect, always eventually a grace that’s sublime, amazing, beautiful. The truth lies at neither pole: Payne both criticizes and cherishes, the good right next to the bad, tipping the scale back and forth from scene to scene, moment to moment, with masterful (and disorienting) precision. Which perspective we most readily respond to, and – more importantly, I suppose – which one we decide after more careful consideration ultimately predominates, will always be a highly subjective judgment call that may reveal as much about ourselves as it does about Payne, about Schmidt, or about the Rusks.
Or about Randall. Oh my gosh. The gormless son-in-law to be. To my mind, one of the film’s great accomplishments is the way we swing between loathing and loving this guileless guy. Of course, it’s Schmidt’s movie, and we can never be sure when we’re viewing the overgrown kid through the eyes of his almost-father-in-law – there’s there’s something like the unreliable narrator thing going on even there. And face it, isn’t Randall – a mulleted, mustachioed momma’s boy of a waterbed salesman who approaches you in your moment of grief with a pyramid scheme – your worst nightmare in the potential-husband-for-your-darling-daughter department? Or is he? An unpretentious, earnest young guy who says what he thinks and feels what he feels – and the most important thing he feels is immense, foolish love for your daughter. No wonder she’s drawn to him and his messy, emotive, soulful, sensual family. Tacky be damned! At least they’re alive.
One usually perceptive friend finds the film’s portrayal of John and Vicki Rusk, the welcoming Winnebago neighbors, unforgivably condescending. I see a pretty straightforward picture of just plain decent prairie folk – a lot like many in my immense circle of relatives, truth be told – who may have smile-worthy mid-west accents and less-than-sophisticated conversational strategies (not to mention tastes in decor that, shall we say, I do not share), but who offer open-hearted warmth and companionship to a desperately lonely man. And frankly, Vicki’s perceptiveness (even wisdom) about the precarious state of her new friend’s soul – “I see something more than grief and loss in you. Something deeper. I just met you but my guess is anger. Anger and, I don’t know, maybe fear?” – and her disingenuous willingness to talk with him about these matters of the heart, things that really matter, came as a stunning surprise to me: I was so taken aback by her directness that I was instantly suspicious, fearing an embarrassing scene of heavy-handed evangelism – just as Warren himself assumes that Vicki is driven by some unspoken agenda of her own. Nope. She just cared, and said something. How functional! How human! And how sad that Mr and Mrs Schmidt have so starved themselves of these simple, direct, soul-feeding things that he (and his daughter, for that matter) have become so desperate for a thing like simple friendship and affection. Know what I think? That viewers who believe John and Vicki are being viewed through a directorial perspective of judgment and urbane condescension may be mistaking their own lenses and prejudices for those of Mr Payne.
SPOILER WARNING
And what do you make of that final scene? Maudlin, a tacked-on, unearned – a sentimental reversal, too little too late? Not nearly enough good to counter a lifetime of not good enough? If you’re inclined to think that the filmmakers intend those tears to signal a complete change of heart for old Warren, a new journey into selflessness, then you’ll likely find it unconvincing, a bit of an indulgence in wishful thinking. If you figure the letter is meant to stand as a resounding “All is not lost! You are making a difference in the world, Warren, your life does mean something!” then I’d have to agree – it seems pathetic that an aid agency’s form letter should mark the sum total of all the good this man has ever done.
But I believe this movie’s final moments border on the sublime: that there’s an inscrutability to this man’s tears, and an authenticity, that lift the film to a level of genuine artistry and un-pin-downable spiritual truth. We cannot know precisely why Warren Schmidt begins to weep. Is this grief for a life utterly empty, a recognition the self-serving nature of his own actions in contrast with the deeply self-denying commitment of Sister Nadene Gautier? Is this perhaps the first moment in the film that isn’t tainted with self-deception, passive-aggressive compliance or misguided meddlesomeness – with folly? Are we witnessing the sort of divine humbling that might, just might, be the forerunner to wisdom?
Robert Johnston sees it all coming down to something as profoundly simple, as primal, as human as the recognition that, though his work has been in vain, though all of his strivings have ended up only a chasing after wind, that there remains the ineluctable reality of Ndugu’s painting – of human conection, the “Two are better off than one” that Ecclesiastes also comes down to after all its hard truths.
I see a miracle of sorts, a heart-breaking that isn’t unearned or at all sudden, that follows from this poor man’s terribly long journey from which he returns to an empty home empty-handed, stripped of illusions, and alone. A man who has been reduced to nothing. All the things he has built into his life for security, protection, meaning have been stripped away. He’s concluded that he is of absolutely no value: “What in the world is better because of me? Relatively soon I will die, maybe in twenty years, maybe tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too it will be as though I never even existed. What difference has my life made to anyone? None that I can think of. None at all.” I call that repentance. I call that sorrow. I call that the absolute, destitute poverty of spirit that maybe ushers in the kingdom of heaven, at least according to Jesus.
The note from Sister Nadene, and the painting that comes with it, taste like a banquet to a soul as hungry as this one. It may not amount to a resounding “Well done, good and faithful servant” from the lips of God himself, but who could expect that? It is, at least, a small but genuine “thank you” from one of God’s servants – and that will do for now. (And that voice! The speaker uncredited anywhere I can find. I’ve got to think that’s a real Sister of the Sacred Heart. It rings, it scratches, it resounds with hard-lived authority, experience, sacrifice, humility – the legacy of a life well-lived. Everything that Warren Schmidt’s life, ultimately has not been about. Alas.)
If we exaggerate the value of Schmidt’s tiny act of generosity, particularly in the context of everything else he has and has done (and has not done), we sentimentalize what is after all a very tiny gesture. The hope at the end of ABOUT SCHMIDT is a small, fragile hope. Does 22 bucks a month counter-balance a life that doesn’t really amount to Schmidt? Does his drop in the bucket really buy him anything like the kingdom of God? Will the rich old former ruler sell his Winnebago, give his money to the poor and follow Sister Nadene into happiness and meaning in the African mission field? Seems unlikely. That’s too much to hope for.
But I think a mustard seed-sized hope is just the right size for the small thing that this man’s soul has been reduced to. We can’t know exactly what Warren’s tears are for. Could be any of a number of things. But I suspect they’re at least two things at once. Grief that he’s done so little, has so little to show for it all – that grief that’s called regret, remorse, humility, maybe repentance – grief that his offering is so small, so inadequate. And relief, gratitude, even joy that the little he brought has been received, recognized, appreciated – that it has mattered. That he has mattered. Even just a little.
Not a lot, in the grand scheme of things. What are two loaves and a handful of fishes among so many? It’s not much. Not nearly enough. But it’s a little.
ELECTION, IKIRU, THE STRAIGHT STORY, MILLIONS
Available at Videomatica
Thursday, July 12, 2007
...AND GOD SPOKE
...AND GOD SPOKE (1993, USA, Arthur Borman, Michael Curtis / Greg Malins screenplay)
The subtext here is very important. These people that you're coming to talk to, they don't want to hear anything about any new commandments. I think they're probably quite happy with the old ones.
B movie veterans decide it's time to move on from NUDE NINJA and DIAL "S" FOR SEX to tackle a cinematic treatment of the Bible. They're not clear on just how many disciples there may have been, but what they lack in Biblical knowledge they more than make up for in... Well, confidence?
The ten thousand page shooting script needs a little trimming, and on-set delays force even deeper cuts – "We can't lose Jesus! That's like FITZCARRALDO without the boat!" – but the creative team has confidence in the sheer box office power of their star cameos; Lou "Incredible Hulk" Ferrigno plays Cain, Eve Plumb (only thirty years removed from her groundbreaking work on "The Brady Bunch") is Mrs. Noah, and Soupy Sales’s Moses gives Charlton Heston a run for his money. (Casting is ninety percent of directing. As this movie so painfully demonstrates.)
Note-perfect characterizations and exquisite comic timing from leads Michael Riley and especially Stephen Rappaport make this worth the effort to track down. It falls short of SPINAL TAP but is a rung or two above BEST IN SHOW on the mockumentary ladder: because its comic performances are less broad, its satire is all the more painful.
Available at Videomatica
THE ADDICTION
THE ADDICTION (1995, USA, Abel Ferrara, wr Nicholas St. John)
It's easy to spot in people like me. The cancer's grown obvious. But you're as terminal as I am, you know that? You're as addicted as I am. It's the nature of the organism. Now look me in the face and tell me to go. Look sin in the face and tell it to go. Say it with authority.
Bram Stoker's novel Dracula evokes true horror, a sense of eternal corruption and moral dread. Alas, most films the book has inspired reduce that revulsion at spiritual evil to merely mortal terror. They're nothing but scary action movies, Good Guys In Peril flicks where the threat happens to be neck bites rather than gunshot wounds or chainsaw lacerations.
Sure, the blood-sucking is creepy, and the erotic undercurrent adds a certain repugnance, but for this viewer at least, the real Horror is to be found in the Vietnamese heart of darkness Francis Ford Coppola uncovers in APOCALYPSE NOW, for instance, or in a Holocaust film like Alain Resnais' NIGHT AND FOG.
Abel Ferrarra invokes both of those particular evils in THE ADDICTION, an explicitly theological Horror film that uses vampirism as a stand-in for the contagious and predatory evil that lives in the human heart. He's playing for keeps, he and his screenwriting partner Nicholas St. John, invoking a host of philosophical heavy hitters who've weighed in on the question of evil. ""Sartre, Beckett, Baudelaire - you think they're works of fiction?" The film-makers are utterly serious, linking genocide and wartime atrocities with the more domestic and familiar evils of sexual coercion, inner city decay, disease and contagion, addiction and – yes – intellectual pride. There is nothing arch or cynical about this film: it is in earnest about the wickedness of the human heart. Deadly earnest.
Lili Taylor is very fine as Kathleen Conklin, a Ph.D. candidate who is violently attacked in a New York passageway and, unable to resist her alluring attacker with sufficient conviction, finds herself as suddenly desperate for a fix as any first-time user of crack cocaine. Except for her, the drug of choice is human blood. More precisely, it is the thrill of overpowering another's will with her own. The actress charts the junkie's affectless downward spiral with precision: it is as compelling and horrifying a portrait of addiction as it is of moral decay.
Nicholas St. John is a devout Christian, a dedicated follower of Saint Francis, and the story he tells is resolutely human, his focus uncompromisingly personal. He eschews the usual plot mechanics of vampire melodrama in favor of character study, the machineries of despair. No Van Helsings chase black-caped grad students through fog-bound streets, armed with wooden stakes or expending their last ounce of strength to wrestle philosophy T.A.s into the dawning sunlight. (Not that plenty of plenty of grad students couldn't do with a little exercise and some sunshine, God knows...) His story line is starkly linear, his themetic concern single-minded: indeed, the narrative might feel simplistic if not for the ambiguity of the film's final moments. What exactly has become of Kathleen? The academic and theological references are at times heavy handed, but the film maker's unflinching contemplation of human evil grounds those abstractions in undeniable realities, and if the philosophizing is sometimes rendered artlessly, the film 's visual power more than compensates
Cinematographer Ken Kelsch gives us a seductively lensed black and white world, filled with potent visuals. At one point, bands of brilliant light filtered through noir-ish venetian blinds press down upon Kathleen with palpable weight as the sun rises. At another, the black humor of an initially jokey faculty-reception-turned-nasty culminates in truly disturbing high-contrast shots of feeding that are almost entirely black but drained of all humour, and difficult to get out of the mind's eye afterward. The restricted palette lends congruity to interpolated documentary footage of My Lai and Dachau, and other presumably "real" footage of New York City takes on a particular kind of menace: sunglasses on ordinary pedestrians take on an ominous quality, shielding wearers from the light, suggestive of an omnipresent threat.
And as much as THE ADDICTION is a study of one woman's descent into darkness, the film insists from the start that this taste for evil is common to us all. It opens with images of the My Lai massacre, shown as part of a philosophy lecture. Kathleen objects to the way the trial singled out one man, when an entire nation was guilty. "How did he get over there? Who put the gun in his hand? They say that he was guilty of killing women and babies. How many bombs were dropped that did the exact same thing? How many homes were destroyed? Who's in jail for that? ... I'm only saying, if you're going to prosecute war crimes you better make sure more than one man takes the blame for everything. It's ridiculous." A vampire gets what are practically the film's last words, when she quotes from theologian R.C. Sproule: "We're not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners."
THE ADDICTION is not as strong a work as Ferrarra's other very Catholic exploration of human depravity, BAD LIEUTENANT, though it is better looking. The overt philosophizing can feel a tad sophomoric. Viewers who are put off by that, or who don't buy St. John's central argument about the universality of human evil, are likely to have real problems with the interpolation of Holocaust footage, which could seem gratuitous, or at least unearned. I imagine Jewish viewers could be very troubled by a film that yokes the horror of the Holocaust to the potentially campy mythology of vampirism – especially when the antidote to such evil is rendered in such clearly Christian symbols as crucifix and communion.
But for those of us who see Nazi atrocities, sexual predation and the horrors of addiction issuing from the same dark place in the human heart – every human heart – the film is a stunning reminder of the Bible's uncompromising assertion that the proclivity to evil is common to us all. I left this film deeply shaken, determined to meet the ever-present temptations to spiritual and moral compromise with a resistance far more passionate. "You think that's going to stop me? Collaborator..."
BAD LIEUTENANT
Available at Videomatica
There's a fascinating article about the screenwriter in the summer 1998 issue of IMAGE Journal - "Spiritual Subversion: The Films of Nicholas St. John" by J.A. Hanson - though unfortunately it is not reproduced at the website. But you can order it there, and it's worth it: the entire issue is about film. (Come to think of it, it was poring over that volume of IMAGE that started me beginning the list of films that would have to go in a book such as the one I'm now writing, should I ever decide to write such a book. Cool.)
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES (ATTI DEGLI APOSTOLI, 1969, Italy/France/Germany/Spain/Tunisia, Roberto Rossellini, screenplay with Vittorio Bonicelli / Jean-Dominique de la Rochefoucauld / Luciano Scaffa)
They won’t change the world.
This exceedingly faithful (and strongly Jewish) treatment of the New Testament book of Acts is one of the more accessible of Rossellini’s televised history films, a five-plus hour miniseries that uses long, unedited shots to create a sense of realism and evoke the slower pace of another century. There is something Franciscan in the way Jesus followers “gossip the gospel,” carrying out their evangelism in the doing of simple physical work, isolated from one another, unaware of the impact their words are having in the wider world. Miracles are described but only one or two are portrayed on-screen, and the highly dramatic events of Paul’s journey to Rome are skipped. Naturalistic performances and flat English dubbing may make the film a tough go for many viewers, but its emphasis on the commonplace and avoidance of melodrama add credibility and another sort of appeal – the matter-of-fact beheading of James suggests Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, where “even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course / Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s hourse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
PETER AND PAUL, THE FLOWERS OF SAINT FRANCIS, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW
Matt Page has a very nice piece on the films at his Bilbe Films Blog, and there are great notes in connection to the Rossellini Retrospective that's been touring around.
3 GODFATHERS
3 GODFATHERS (1948, USA, John Ford, Laurence Stallings / Frank S. Nugent screenplay from Peter B. Kyne story)
Set 'em up, mister. Milk for the infant and a cold beer for me.
Nothing to do with Francis Ford Coppola. A young woman dies in childbirth in the desert, and John Wayne and a couple other outlaws who help deliver the child must now risk their freedom to get the child safely to New Jerusalem. Ford coached one of his actors "You're one tough son-of-a-bitch who becomes a half-decent guy after the baby's born," but most viewers will find too much half-decent and not enough tough: it's a sentimental adaptation of Kyne's explicitly religious novella of the same name, very much on the "light dessert" section of the soul food menu – sort of THREE MEN AND A BABY GO WEST with Christmas trimmings. Ford's putative Catholicism comes through in abundant Bible references, but it's mostly just for fun.
THE INFORMER, THE FUGITIVE
Available at Videomatica
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968, USA, Stanley Kubrick, screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke, from Clarke’s “The Sentinel”)
Its origin and purpose is still a total mystery.
In this trippy late-sixties science fiction landmark, encounters with a mysterious black monolith shape humanity’s evolution from caves to outer space. The film’s fans experience religious mystery and transcendence, but I can't join the team on this one. There's no denying the cinematic greatness – I mean heck, it's got classical music and symbolism and stuff – but I'm baffled by the film's appeal for people who actually believe there is Something More. Or, perhaps more to the point, Somebody More. Somebody Who Actually Gives A Damn. Because Art Clarke believes quite the opposite, and 2001 is his manifesto: there's just us, and some Great And Irresistable Drive Toward Perfection. It's closer to Nietsche or mid-century can-do sci-fi Scientism than it is to any idea of a God you or I might find worth worshipping.
But since there are so many fans, here's the estimable Jeffrey Overstreet to make the case: "The film is suggesting that there is intelligence behind humanity’s ascent. Whether that reverberating black square is a deity, an angel, a messenger, or an agent from some manipulative alien race, its influence on humanity and history is great, and it seems to take a personal interest in raising humans to higher levels of understanding."
I pick Option Four: the big black box ain’t nothing but (indeed, it's Clarke’s nothingbutness that galls!) “an agent from some manipulative alien race,” and if characters are moved to awe and worship, that just shows how gullible they really are. "Look at those stupid humans! Guess they need a little more evolving...." Read the book! Arthur thinks religious types are fools.
Gareth Higgins boils it down thusly: "This film ends with a declaration that there is something out there bigger than ourselves." Well maybe. But not much bigger. (And hey, Tarkovsky didn't like it either. Me and Andy, two against the world...)
SOLARIS
Available at Videomatica
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Soul Food snacks in "TimeOut: 1000 Films To Change Your Life"
My movie-pal Jason gave me a terrific book for my birthday, the TimeOut guide to "1000 Films To Change Your Life." Visually lively, with lots of really punchy writing from a broad range of film critics and film-makers writing about movies that move them. They look at films "through the emotions they trigger: the instant, unthinking, gut reactions, the Geiger counter cliks of a movie's power. That's why 1000 Films is shaped by the nine emotions people are most likely to feel at the cinema; there's one chapter dedicated to each. And a tenth chapter, entitled Food For Thought, assesses the thinking responses that are often just a short distance behind the visceral ones."
There are longish survey articles, considering how various emotions are tackled in a variety of films, or surveying the work of a particular film-maker. There are lists (yay!), and brief entries by a whole lot of film-makers who talk about a specific film that changed their life.
They've got lots of pithy things to say about lots of films that I consider Soul Food Movies. Here's a sampler plate...
Time Out: 1000 Films To Change Your Life
Jonathan Romney on “popcorn movies”: It’s an equation that’s been made in countless adverts: cinema as a purely ephemeral delight, an air-light fancy that melts into nothing on the tongue. The association does disservice both to a perfectly nutritious foodstuff and to an art form that – even when not at its intellectual peak – generally demands a more sustained and discerning process of consumption than it is sometimes given credit for. Cinema is not always to be bolted down and forgotten, but sometimes calls for an extended digestion process that only properly begins after the end credits. ... There is, of course, a thoughtful cinema that also fulfills the dietary requirements of the popcorn movie: films that work as genre entertainment, that offer immediate pop-culture pleasures, while leaving enough narrative and theoretical loose ends to chew on long afterwards. (pg 56)
21 GRAMS
Several characters cross paths and exchange fates in a mosaic concocted by director Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, upping the complexity ante on their previous AMORES PERROS. Mathematical and metaphysical preoccupations combine in a theological narrative of American crossed destinies. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
AMERICAN BEAUTY: Stagey direction, clunky symbolism and madly histrionic performances from Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, all in the service of a hackneyed message: suburubia is for hypocrites. Thank you, Sam Mendes. (pg 38) [Note from the chef: let me offset this glib, misconceived attack on one of my favourite films with equally pithy grabs from two Georgia Straight critics’ Top Ten lists for 1999. "A lovely, funny, and strangely sweet film about a depressed Everyman and his masturbatory fantasies, which lead him to a genuine spiritual rebirth" (Ron Yamauchi). "The characters in this suburban nightmare are little more than cartoon critters, but their meltdown eventually reveals a transcendent vision of life" (Ken Eisner).]
The most affecting experience I’ve ever had with a film was when I first went to Romania on a cultural exchange in the early 1970s, at the height of he Ceausescu regime. I’d heard of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV, and I asked my translator if she would take me to see it. Her entire family had been killed by the Soviets, and so she was violently anti-Russian and said she wouldn’t go. But she knew that if I went, she had to go. It was her job. I told her she had to go. We were halfway through this incredible, epic anthem to huymanity and I noticed her sobbing beside me. By the end, she had experienced a conversion: for the first time, she was able to see Russians as human beings. (Richard Eyre)
CLOSE-UP
Not nearly as documentary as it first appears, Abbas Kiarostami’s film is an investigation into the way that we invest our dreams in cinema. Following up the true case of a man who masqueraded as film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami creates a complex panorama of gullibility, social difference and reconciliation. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
Of all Woody Allen’s ‘serious’ (or half-serious) films, this is the most substantial – the Dostoevskian story of a man who commits a crime and gets away with it. Allen ‘remade’ it, after a fashion, in his glib MATCH POINT, but it took older actors with the gravitas of Martin Landau and Anjelica Huston to give it the heft that this uncomfortable moral drama demands. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
One of the simplest and most direct moral comedies by Eric Rohmer, an anatomist of French social mores at their most delicately absurd. A seemingly banal anecdote about a woman trying to go on holiday, THE GREEN RAY really looks into bigger questions – what people want, whether they know what they want, and the role of language as a help and a hindrance in the pursuit of happiness. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
Catholicism hasn’t worked, Judaism has failed him, Krishna didn’t cut it either. For Woody Allen’s despairing comedy writer in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, the answer is Marx. That’s Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo Marx, by the way, since it’s during a matinee of DUCK SOUP that he finally pulls out of an existential tailspin precipitated by a recent medical scare. Watching the inspired tomfoolery unfold in this classic Hollywood comedy of the ‘30s, Allen catches himself laughing, and suddenly, as his voiceover explains, it all starts to make sense: Look at the people up there on the screen, they’re so funny... What if the worst were true, there’s no God, you only go around once, and that’s it? Well, don’t you want to be part of the experience? It’s not all a drag. I should stop ruining my life looking for answers I’m never going to get, and just enjoy myself while it lasts... (Trevor Johnston, pg 8)
I CONFESS
Traditionally regarded as the least entertaining of Hitchcock’s films, this story of a priest facing the death penalty in an oppressively doomy Quebec because of his refusal to break the secrecy of the confessional is th emaster’s most explicitly theological and ethical treatise, and as such sheds its somber light on the philosophical ramifications of the entire oeuvre. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
Take a closer look at Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, one tough movie for much of its running time, since it shows how irrepressibly decent James Stewart has had to sacrifice his own dreams of travel and achievement to sustain his family’s loan company on which the local community depends. Decades of self-denying service lead him to, well, contemplate suicide from a bridge at Christmas since his insurance policy seems the only thing able to rescue the operation from financial doom. Not such a wonderful life then, after all, until Henry Travers’s passing trainee angel shows him the corruption and misery which would have overrun his home town Bedford Falls had he not been born. The climactic affirmation of genuine friendship and mutual reliance is so affecting precisely because it’s so darn hard-won. (Trevor Johnston, pg 12)
Some films present themselves as luxuriating in ideas, yet actually purvey thought as some sort of top-of-the-range consumer item: notably, Godfrey Reggio’s ‘revelatory’ KOYAANISQATSI trilogy, with its Discovery Channel mysticism. (Jonathan Romney, pg 62)
A MAN ESCAPED
Robert Bresson’s portrait of a Reisstance fighter trying to escape from a cell. Minimalist cinema in which every gesture takes on maximum weight – an essay on the phenomenology of things, but also a tribute to the human mind’s capacity for patience, sanity and lucidity. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
Working with his ANNIE HALL cinematographer, the talented Gordon Willis, Allen chose to shoot MANHATTAN in black and white. Its timeless, almost gothic feel is balanced by Allen’s usual innovation of this period. Shooting most scenes in one long take, Willis finds wonderful compositions again and again. The characters wander in and out of shot, and sometimes there’s no one in the shot at all – we just hear them. All of which adds appropriately to the mood of a film which turns out, in a strange way, to be about faith: faith in ourselves and our choices, and faith in the ability of others to see and accept us as we are. (Connor McPherson, pg 27)
Let’s not discount the authentically provocative mind-bending of the first episode (but the first only) of the MATRIX trilogy. (Jonathan Romney, 62)
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (AKA STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN)
Forget Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, here’s a genuine passion transcending the boundaries of this world and the next. The celestial court decides the fate of shot-down air force pilot David Niven and radio operator Kim Hunter as mavericks Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger take the viewer on a stairway to heaven. (pg 13)
THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
By concentrating on close-ups of faces at their most extremely expressive, from ecstatic to agonized, Carl Theodor Dreyer produces a sort of phenomenology of the human face, while dismantling all the preconceptions that already surrounded the historical epic in the silent era. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
There is, of course, a thoughtful cinema that also fulfills the dietary requirements of the popcorn movie: films that work as genre entertainment, that offer immediate pop-culture pleasures, while leaving enough narrative and theoretical loose ends to chew on long afterwards. ... There are boffinish teasers such as Shane Carruth’s hyper-low-budget PRIMER, in which riddles of time, identity and the ethics of technological research are couched in the form of a teasingly fractured weird-science drama. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
You know I have a clip from STALKER in UZAK? Well, the first time I saw a Tarkovsky film was when I was at university in Turkey. It was SOLARIS, and I left in the middle of the film. I thought: “What is this?” But later, I came across the same film when I was in London. I was alone here, hanging out in bookshops and going to the NFT a lot; that’s where I saw the film again. And I couldn’t believe it – I was so impressed by it this time.
For three days the film was constantly with me. This shows that if something is different from what we are accustomed to, it firswt seems almost like an alien; but with time, if you have the chance to go into it, it can open new windows. SOLARIS was so strange for me the first time; but the second time, it was almost as if it made me a new person. It shows something else too: if you’re alone, you are very receptive. You tend to look more deeply into things, and that’s important. Maybe that’s one reason I was able to connect the second time around. The film helped me to understand myself better. (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, pg 73)
There are films that seek to popularize abstraction and yet manage to take wing: withness the imagistic stoner fugue of Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE, with its dreamlike interface between live action and animation.
There are very few movies where I remember how I felt when I left the theatre – how I physically felt after it was over. Seeing WINGS OF DESIRE is the exception. I remember I saw it in a theatre in New York that no longer exists, on the corner of 68th and Broadway, where Broadway and Columbus split. It was playing in a small art-house cinema, and I went to an evening show by myself. It was a transcendental experience. I felt I was a different human being when I left the theatre. I remember how the sidewalk felt under my feet, walking away. I felt viscerally, sensorially changed – all of my senses were different. How things tasted, felt, smelled, how I looked and heard the world, everything had been just slightly altered like I’d taken a very subtle drug that just heightened the senses. And the world was new. It was such a delightful occurrence, and I’ve rarely felt that in my life. It says a lot about what a movie can do. (Holly Hunter, pg 17)
Have a look inside or order yourself a copy at the TimeOut website
There are longish survey articles, considering how various emotions are tackled in a variety of films, or surveying the work of a particular film-maker. There are lists (yay!), and brief entries by a whole lot of film-makers who talk about a specific film that changed their life.
They've got lots of pithy things to say about lots of films that I consider Soul Food Movies. Here's a sampler plate...
Time Out: 1000 Films To Change Your Life
Jonathan Romney on “popcorn movies”: It’s an equation that’s been made in countless adverts: cinema as a purely ephemeral delight, an air-light fancy that melts into nothing on the tongue. The association does disservice both to a perfectly nutritious foodstuff and to an art form that – even when not at its intellectual peak – generally demands a more sustained and discerning process of consumption than it is sometimes given credit for. Cinema is not always to be bolted down and forgotten, but sometimes calls for an extended digestion process that only properly begins after the end credits. ... There is, of course, a thoughtful cinema that also fulfills the dietary requirements of the popcorn movie: films that work as genre entertainment, that offer immediate pop-culture pleasures, while leaving enough narrative and theoretical loose ends to chew on long afterwards. (pg 56)
21 GRAMS
Several characters cross paths and exchange fates in a mosaic concocted by director Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, upping the complexity ante on their previous AMORES PERROS. Mathematical and metaphysical preoccupations combine in a theological narrative of American crossed destinies. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
AMERICAN BEAUTY: Stagey direction, clunky symbolism and madly histrionic performances from Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, all in the service of a hackneyed message: suburubia is for hypocrites. Thank you, Sam Mendes. (pg 38) [Note from the chef: let me offset this glib, misconceived attack on one of my favourite films with equally pithy grabs from two Georgia Straight critics’ Top Ten lists for 1999. "A lovely, funny, and strangely sweet film about a depressed Everyman and his masturbatory fantasies, which lead him to a genuine spiritual rebirth" (Ron Yamauchi). "The characters in this suburban nightmare are little more than cartoon critters, but their meltdown eventually reveals a transcendent vision of life" (Ken Eisner).]
The most affecting experience I’ve ever had with a film was when I first went to Romania on a cultural exchange in the early 1970s, at the height of he Ceausescu regime. I’d heard of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV, and I asked my translator if she would take me to see it. Her entire family had been killed by the Soviets, and so she was violently anti-Russian and said she wouldn’t go. But she knew that if I went, she had to go. It was her job. I told her she had to go. We were halfway through this incredible, epic anthem to huymanity and I noticed her sobbing beside me. By the end, she had experienced a conversion: for the first time, she was able to see Russians as human beings. (Richard Eyre)
CLOSE-UP
Not nearly as documentary as it first appears, Abbas Kiarostami’s film is an investigation into the way that we invest our dreams in cinema. Following up the true case of a man who masqueraded as film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami creates a complex panorama of gullibility, social difference and reconciliation. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
Of all Woody Allen’s ‘serious’ (or half-serious) films, this is the most substantial – the Dostoevskian story of a man who commits a crime and gets away with it. Allen ‘remade’ it, after a fashion, in his glib MATCH POINT, but it took older actors with the gravitas of Martin Landau and Anjelica Huston to give it the heft that this uncomfortable moral drama demands. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
One of the simplest and most direct moral comedies by Eric Rohmer, an anatomist of French social mores at their most delicately absurd. A seemingly banal anecdote about a woman trying to go on holiday, THE GREEN RAY really looks into bigger questions – what people want, whether they know what they want, and the role of language as a help and a hindrance in the pursuit of happiness. (Jonathan Romney, pg 64)
Catholicism hasn’t worked, Judaism has failed him, Krishna didn’t cut it either. For Woody Allen’s despairing comedy writer in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, the answer is Marx. That’s Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo Marx, by the way, since it’s during a matinee of DUCK SOUP that he finally pulls out of an existential tailspin precipitated by a recent medical scare. Watching the inspired tomfoolery unfold in this classic Hollywood comedy of the ‘30s, Allen catches himself laughing, and suddenly, as his voiceover explains, it all starts to make sense: Look at the people up there on the screen, they’re so funny... What if the worst were true, there’s no God, you only go around once, and that’s it? Well, don’t you want to be part of the experience? It’s not all a drag. I should stop ruining my life looking for answers I’m never going to get, and just enjoy myself while it lasts... (Trevor Johnston, pg 8)
I CONFESS
Traditionally regarded as the least entertaining of Hitchcock’s films, this story of a priest facing the death penalty in an oppressively doomy Quebec because of his refusal to break the secrecy of the confessional is th emaster’s most explicitly theological and ethical treatise, and as such sheds its somber light on the philosophical ramifications of the entire oeuvre. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
Take a closer look at Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, one tough movie for much of its running time, since it shows how irrepressibly decent James Stewart has had to sacrifice his own dreams of travel and achievement to sustain his family’s loan company on which the local community depends. Decades of self-denying service lead him to, well, contemplate suicide from a bridge at Christmas since his insurance policy seems the only thing able to rescue the operation from financial doom. Not such a wonderful life then, after all, until Henry Travers’s passing trainee angel shows him the corruption and misery which would have overrun his home town Bedford Falls had he not been born. The climactic affirmation of genuine friendship and mutual reliance is so affecting precisely because it’s so darn hard-won. (Trevor Johnston, pg 12)
Some films present themselves as luxuriating in ideas, yet actually purvey thought as some sort of top-of-the-range consumer item: notably, Godfrey Reggio’s ‘revelatory’ KOYAANISQATSI trilogy, with its Discovery Channel mysticism. (Jonathan Romney, pg 62)
A MAN ESCAPED
Robert Bresson’s portrait of a Reisstance fighter trying to escape from a cell. Minimalist cinema in which every gesture takes on maximum weight – an essay on the phenomenology of things, but also a tribute to the human mind’s capacity for patience, sanity and lucidity. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
Working with his ANNIE HALL cinematographer, the talented Gordon Willis, Allen chose to shoot MANHATTAN in black and white. Its timeless, almost gothic feel is balanced by Allen’s usual innovation of this period. Shooting most scenes in one long take, Willis finds wonderful compositions again and again. The characters wander in and out of shot, and sometimes there’s no one in the shot at all – we just hear them. All of which adds appropriately to the mood of a film which turns out, in a strange way, to be about faith: faith in ourselves and our choices, and faith in the ability of others to see and accept us as we are. (Connor McPherson, pg 27)
Let’s not discount the authentically provocative mind-bending of the first episode (but the first only) of the MATRIX trilogy. (Jonathan Romney, 62)
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (AKA STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN)
Forget Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, here’s a genuine passion transcending the boundaries of this world and the next. The celestial court decides the fate of shot-down air force pilot David Niven and radio operator Kim Hunter as mavericks Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger take the viewer on a stairway to heaven. (pg 13)
THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
By concentrating on close-ups of faces at their most extremely expressive, from ecstatic to agonized, Carl Theodor Dreyer produces a sort of phenomenology of the human face, while dismantling all the preconceptions that already surrounded the historical epic in the silent era. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
There is, of course, a thoughtful cinema that also fulfills the dietary requirements of the popcorn movie: films that work as genre entertainment, that offer immediate pop-culture pleasures, while leaving enough narrative and theoretical loose ends to chew on long afterwards. ... There are boffinish teasers such as Shane Carruth’s hyper-low-budget PRIMER, in which riddles of time, identity and the ethics of technological research are couched in the form of a teasingly fractured weird-science drama. (Jonathan Romney, pg 63)
You know I have a clip from STALKER in UZAK? Well, the first time I saw a Tarkovsky film was when I was at university in Turkey. It was SOLARIS, and I left in the middle of the film. I thought: “What is this?” But later, I came across the same film when I was in London. I was alone here, hanging out in bookshops and going to the NFT a lot; that’s where I saw the film again. And I couldn’t believe it – I was so impressed by it this time.
For three days the film was constantly with me. This shows that if something is different from what we are accustomed to, it firswt seems almost like an alien; but with time, if you have the chance to go into it, it can open new windows. SOLARIS was so strange for me the first time; but the second time, it was almost as if it made me a new person. It shows something else too: if you’re alone, you are very receptive. You tend to look more deeply into things, and that’s important. Maybe that’s one reason I was able to connect the second time around. The film helped me to understand myself better. (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, pg 73)
There are films that seek to popularize abstraction and yet manage to take wing: withness the imagistic stoner fugue of Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE, with its dreamlike interface between live action and animation.
There are very few movies where I remember how I felt when I left the theatre – how I physically felt after it was over. Seeing WINGS OF DESIRE is the exception. I remember I saw it in a theatre in New York that no longer exists, on the corner of 68th and Broadway, where Broadway and Columbus split. It was playing in a small art-house cinema, and I went to an evening show by myself. It was a transcendental experience. I felt I was a different human being when I left the theatre. I remember how the sidewalk felt under my feet, walking away. I felt viscerally, sensorially changed – all of my senses were different. How things tasted, felt, smelled, how I looked and heard the world, everything had been just slightly altered like I’d taken a very subtle drug that just heightened the senses. And the world was new. It was such a delightful occurrence, and I’ve rarely felt that in my life. It says a lot about what a movie can do. (Holly Hunter, pg 17)
Have a look inside or order yourself a copy at the TimeOut website
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
NOT PLAYING: Any Screens
Movie projects in development, in production, in post-production or in limbo – even some that have gone into release but haven’t made it to my town just yet. Maybe someday we'll get to see them.
Slightly updated Aug 23 5 2007
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER
I’m a fan of ELECTION and LITTLE CHILDREN, both based on novels by Tom Perrotta, whose next novel should be coming out sometime this fall. And The Little Miss Sunshine directing duo, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, seem to be taking up the task of directing the adaption of the novel, which Perrotta himself will work on. St Petersburg Times
Here's a synopsis of the movie from allmovie.com: “A divorced and free-spirited sex-ed teacher shoehorned into promoting abstinence by the local religious conservatives falls in love with a born-again soccer coach in a semi-satirical comedy drama produced by Warner Independent Pictures and based on the book by Tom Perrotta.”
BORN AGAIN
"Markie Hancock's artful BORN AGAIN puts the gap between U.S. gays and fundamentalist Christians in first-person terms, as it charts her own gradual, painful drift away from a deeply religious family background. Though voiceover narration occasionally verges on victim whininess, Hancock vividly conveys the depth of her conflicted blood relationships, as well as an eventful life chronicled in homemovies, diary excerpts, interviews and more. ... The filmmaker and her two brothers were raised in a strict evangelical family that set them apart from most of their peers. Calling a desire for her parents' approval "the most primal urge," Markie was a perfect student, acolyte and proselytizer, going as her mother did to a Christian college where freshmen had to sign a pledge not to drink, smoke or dance -- with other vices presumably being too abhorrent even to mention. There Markie was tormented by unrequited love for her female best friend ... she dropped out of theological school and ran off to Europe...where she experienced her first lesbian relationship. ... "Will it always be a betrayal of God, or (my) mother, if I do what I want?" she frets. Finally she came out to her parents. But they and devout elder brother Nathan could only handle her admission by praying she could still change her ways and "return to Christ," so she could join them in heaven. ... But the family members are not depicted as mean-spirited people. The potency of "Born Again" comes from its ability to show how loving family members can nonetheless be insolubly divided by opposing beliefs. ... Helmer's own rhetoric can get a little strident, referring to religion in general as "indoctrination" and "a drug, an addiction" -- as if all practices of faith were cut from the same restrictive cloth as her parents' faith was." Dennis Harvey, Variety. Reviewed at San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, June 23, 2007. (Thanks to PTC for the heads-up on this)
CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT
Anne Rice, the vampire lady? Sting's evocative "Moon Over Bourbon Street" was inspired by her "Interview With The Vampire", so I checked out the novel. The opening chapters struck me as fine literary writing, before the book devolved into something more generic and commercial. Word is she's become a Christian, and all of a sudden everybody seems to be reading her fictionalized recreation of Jesus' childhood years, and declaring it worthy.
Anyhow, there's a film deal now.
(More here)
CONTAINER
Yet another Jesus movie - Mel, what hast thou wrought? Definitely the strangest of the new batch, from Lukas Moodysson. (More here) Updated Nov 21
THE FINAL INQUIRY
PTC: “Just a quick note to say that The Inquiry, AKA The Final Inquiry -- i.e. the film about a Roman soldier who is sent by Tiberius to investigate rumours regarding the resurrection of Jesus -- will not be opening on April 6 2007, AKA Good Friday, after all. The Fox Faith Movies website now says the film is merely "coming soon".”
GOD IS MY BROKER
Variety: "THANK YOU FOR SMOKING exec producer Edward Pressman and associate producer Stephen Belafonte are teaming up for another Christopher Buckley adaptation, a satire titled "God Is My Broker," which is set on Wall Street and in a monastery. Insiders describe the project as a parody of the self-help movement, much the way "Smoking" was a satire of spin. Plot centers on a Wall Street stockbroker who flees to a monastery, only to find monks who are turning their monastery into a corporation.” (Mar 5 2007)
Hollywood Reporter: “Pressman’s 1998 book centers on an alcoholic stock broker who gives everything up and joins a monastery. But when the monks' vow of poverty begins to take a financial toll, the former broker uses his old skills to save them, turning his new home into a frightening parallel of the world he desperately tried to escape.”
THE HOUSE OF NINA
Doug Cummings: “Starring the dependable Agnes Jaoui as the head of a true-to-life French orphanage during WWII that cared for French Jewish children; later it begins to house Eastern European Jews returning from recently liberated concentration camps, and as you might expect there is a lot of psychological scarring on their part, which creates a lot of interpersonal tensions in a time when cultural rebirth is crucial. It was a very personal project for the director (Richard Dembo), who died during post-production, and it's the kind of intelligent, emotionally honest, historically interesting film Miramax/Wienstein should be distributing but hasn't in a long time. Alas, no US distrib or DVD yet (and I don't think the French DVD has English subs).”
THE ISLAND (see OSTROV)
MARY
Bad boy Abel Ferrara's entry in the Jesus Movie Derby that Uncle Mel revved up. Seen on screens big and small in Europe, but nothing outside the festivals here in North America. Check out the whole saga here.
OSTROV (AKA THE ISLAND)
“Swept the Golden Eagle awards in its native Russia two months ago. Now, Variety reports that the film, about an Orthodox monastery, has won some Nika awards too. The pic, about a Russian Orthodox monastery, won prizes for film, director, actor (Petr Mamonov), supporting actor (Viktor Sukhorukov), cinematography (Andrei Zhigalov, posthumously) and sound editing. Industry vets gave warm praise to the Nikas, which was celebrating its 20th anni. Actor-director Andrei Smirnov, presenting Lungin with the director gong, remembered the Perestroika-born event as a "first sign of freedom in the country." (Thanks, Mr Film Chat...
PARADISE LOST
Scott Derrickson is developing an adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost. PTC: "Joining the conceptual team is none other than artist Wayne Barlowe, whose book BARLOWE'S INFERNO has given readers a nightmarish and fascinating look at hell . . . . The painter/illustrator has also lent designs on a number of Hollywood projects, notably Guillermo del Toro's BLADE II and HELLBOY. "One of the first things I did was to go after Stuart and Wayne; I liked Stuart's writing skills and Wayne's visual skills," the director says. "INFERNO was the reason I was so passionate about trying to get Wayne involved, and I knew that if PARADISE LOST was going to work, it'd have to have that kind of visual imagination."
POPE JOAN
Film Comment, May-June 2006: "Donna Woolfolk Cross's historical novel, Pope Joan, has been translated into 23 languages and, in Germany, is number one on the long-term bestseller list. The book tells the tale of a ninth-century Englishwoman who posed as a man to become a monk, and the subsequent road she traveled that eventually led to her securing the title of His Holiness. (The truth of the story remains subject to controversy.) Some may recall the 1972 version of the story starring Liv Ullmann - and now Volker Schlondorff has a film adaptation in development." Years back I read a stage treatment of the story, briefly considered it for Pacific Theatre.
Schlondorff's THE NINTH DAY, about a WW2 priest pressured to stop opposing the Nazis, is now available on DVD.
THE RESURRECTION
I'm pretty qualmy about Tim LaHaye's books ("Left Behind," "Right Behind," etc), so my enthusiasm for Upcoming Jesus Movie Project #387 is a tad muted. But I figure you all deserve to be in the know...
RISEN: THE STORY OF THE FIRST EASTER
In development by Hyde Park Entertainment, who developed Bringing Down the House, Raising Helen, and Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. Film will focus on the Apostle Peter in retelling the story of what happened to the disciples between Christ's resurrection and the day of Pentecost. (Mar 12 2007)
SILENCE
"Scorsese is turning his sights to a story of missionaries in 17th century Japan. "Silence" is a long-cherished project that he hopes to shoot partially in Japan in summer 2008. Although it's a period piece, Scorsese thinks it has lessons for America today. "It raises a lot of questions about foreign cultures coming in and imposing their way of thinking on another culture they know nothing about," Scorsese told The Associated Press on Thursday -- raising his eyebrows just to make the point absolutely clear." Associated Press, May 24 2007
SOLITUDE
Jason Goode writes: " Ron, While you are building your book with reviews of soul food movies, I thought I'd recommend one that you probably haven't seen: SOLITUDE by Robin Schlaht (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281206/). Robin is a
Regina based filmmaker who I got to know while living in Sask and we've been in touch ever since. Solitude is beautiful film about 3 lives that intersect at a Saskatchewan monastery. The film had a great festival life, but it was never released on DVD (perhaps in the future)."
THE SWORD OF PETER
Variety: “Tells the story of the Galilean fisherman who founded the Christian church in Rome. The film explores the early days of Christianity under the reign of Emperor Nero and the burning of Rome in 64 A.D. Billed as GLADIATOR meets THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, pic is produced by de Boer and Fotopoulus' Toronto-based FOS with de Boer set to direct from his own script.” Canadian funding, English language film will shoot in Italy and Israel.” Feb 11 2007
TORTILLA HEAVEN
Opened in March 2007, stateside. Small indie film about the effects on a small New Mexico town that’s turned on its head when the face of Christ appears on a tortilla. (A Tex-Mex HALO?) I’m interested. Review at CT Movies.
untitled Dardenne Jesus film
Doug Cummings: "in his newly published diary, Luc Dardenne mentions a couple of times that he and Jean-Pierre are thinking about making a Jesus film. I don't have it with me at the moment, but he writes something like, 'this would not be the story of his life, but a snapshot of his reality; the faces, places, bodies, and interactions of his world' or somethign like that. He insisted they'd shoot it in Israel."
untitled Hildegaard von Bingen project
Variety and the Hollywood Reporter report that German director Margarethe von Trotta is preparing a film about the 12th century abbess who became world renowned for her medical, botanical and geological writings as well as for the music she composed, which many consider a precursor to opera. Bingen also was a controversial figure, the first woman to write on the subject of female sexuality and, for many, the world's first feminist. (Thanks, Mr Chattaway)
untitled INHERIT THE WIND project
Film Comment, May-June 2006: "The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which substitute science teacher John T. Scopes was basically charged with heresy for teaching evolution to Tennessee high-school students, has been resurrected. Paramount has hired the prolific scribe Ronald Harwood (who won an Oscar not too long ago for his screenplay for THE PIANIST) to create a contemporary Scopes script based on the proceedings of the 2004 Dover Area School District case in Pennsylvania. Siding with blue-state ethos, the presiding U.S. district court judge barred the teaching of 'intelligent design' in the classroom, and accused the thinly veiled creationists of 'breath-taking inanity.'"
untitled USHPIZPIN project
A fan blog for Adi Ran, whose music is featured in USHPIZIN, reports a possible follow-up to that film: “Well, maybe not exactly Ushpizin Part II. But it seems like Shuli and Michal Rand are planning a new film. In a recent interview in Jewish Action, they say: "At this stage we can only say that it will futher expound upon Breslov themes and that it will deal with the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. A name? It is too early for that." (Oct 2006)
untitled Von Trier Dreyer project
Film Comment, May-June 2006: "Lars von Trier is making a documentary about one of his favorite films (no, not THE SOUND OF MUSIC): Danish master Carl Th. Dreyer's 1964 swan song, GERTRUD."
WAR IN HEAVEN
CTM Reel News, April 2007: “With the hyper-violent graphic novel adaptation 300 proving to be one of the biggest and most surprising blockbusters in recent memory, one can't blame Hollywood executives for leaping at the opportunity to repeat the film's success. One such post-300 adaptation comes with an added twist—provocative religious connotations and biblical language. War in Heaven—a graphic novel about Lucifer's rebellion against God—is being rushed into development to quickly capitalize on 300's success. Reports indicate that the "Braveheart-like" storyline follows Lucifer's rebellion against and ultimate rejection from Heaven. Epic battle sequences—pitting Lucifer's minions against God's angels—will include Gabriel, Michael, and others.” One can’t blame studio execs? I sure as heck can. “Rushing to production” are never words to inspire confidence.
WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?
CTMovies: “Reuters reports that the movie—which follows Christian performance artist Rev. Billy and his 35-member choir around the country—is running into trouble because of Billy's forceful anti-consumerism message. He and his choir march into shopping malls and Starbucks, protest in Wal-Marts and Victoria's Secret outlets, and even get arrested in Disneyland. Though the film has the clout of executive producer Morgan Spurlock (Super-Size Me) behind it, it's still proving difficult to market. Says director Rob VanAlkemade, "Major distributors have backed away because Wal-Mart pushes half of their DVDs." Meanwhile, Starbucks has pulled out from sponsoring the Silverdocs festival, which has supported the film.”
THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
Peter Chattaway: "Paramount Pictures is headed to Sunday school with the purchase of the A.J. Jacobs novel The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Obey the Bible as Literally as Possible. The studio has taken the book to Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, which will serve as the producer of the adaptation. Living Biblically will be published by Simon & Schuster in fall 2006. In the book, Jacobs, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, spent a year of his life trying to live, literally, by the rules set forth in both the Old and New Testaments."
Slightly updated Aug 23 5 2007
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER
I’m a fan of ELECTION and LITTLE CHILDREN, both based on novels by Tom Perrotta, whose next novel should be coming out sometime this fall. And The Little Miss Sunshine directing duo, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, seem to be taking up the task of directing the adaption of the novel, which Perrotta himself will work on. St Petersburg Times
Here's a synopsis of the movie from allmovie.com: “A divorced and free-spirited sex-ed teacher shoehorned into promoting abstinence by the local religious conservatives falls in love with a born-again soccer coach in a semi-satirical comedy drama produced by Warner Independent Pictures and based on the book by Tom Perrotta.”
BORN AGAIN
"Markie Hancock's artful BORN AGAIN puts the gap between U.S. gays and fundamentalist Christians in first-person terms, as it charts her own gradual, painful drift away from a deeply religious family background. Though voiceover narration occasionally verges on victim whininess, Hancock vividly conveys the depth of her conflicted blood relationships, as well as an eventful life chronicled in homemovies, diary excerpts, interviews and more. ... The filmmaker and her two brothers were raised in a strict evangelical family that set them apart from most of their peers. Calling a desire for her parents' approval "the most primal urge," Markie was a perfect student, acolyte and proselytizer, going as her mother did to a Christian college where freshmen had to sign a pledge not to drink, smoke or dance -- with other vices presumably being too abhorrent even to mention. There Markie was tormented by unrequited love for her female best friend ... she dropped out of theological school and ran off to Europe...where she experienced her first lesbian relationship. ... "Will it always be a betrayal of God, or (my) mother, if I do what I want?" she frets. Finally she came out to her parents. But they and devout elder brother Nathan could only handle her admission by praying she could still change her ways and "return to Christ," so she could join them in heaven. ... But the family members are not depicted as mean-spirited people. The potency of "Born Again" comes from its ability to show how loving family members can nonetheless be insolubly divided by opposing beliefs. ... Helmer's own rhetoric can get a little strident, referring to religion in general as "indoctrination" and "a drug, an addiction" -- as if all practices of faith were cut from the same restrictive cloth as her parents' faith was." Dennis Harvey, Variety. Reviewed at San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, June 23, 2007. (Thanks to PTC for the heads-up on this)
CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT
Anne Rice, the vampire lady? Sting's evocative "Moon Over Bourbon Street" was inspired by her "Interview With The Vampire", so I checked out the novel. The opening chapters struck me as fine literary writing, before the book devolved into something more generic and commercial. Word is she's become a Christian, and all of a sudden everybody seems to be reading her fictionalized recreation of Jesus' childhood years, and declaring it worthy.
Anyhow, there's a film deal now.
(More here)
CONTAINER
Yet another Jesus movie - Mel, what hast thou wrought? Definitely the strangest of the new batch, from Lukas Moodysson. (More here) Updated Nov 21
THE FINAL INQUIRY
PTC: “Just a quick note to say that The Inquiry, AKA The Final Inquiry -- i.e. the film about a Roman soldier who is sent by Tiberius to investigate rumours regarding the resurrection of Jesus -- will not be opening on April 6 2007, AKA Good Friday, after all. The Fox Faith Movies website now says the film is merely "coming soon".”
GOD IS MY BROKER
Variety: "THANK YOU FOR SMOKING exec producer Edward Pressman and associate producer Stephen Belafonte are teaming up for another Christopher Buckley adaptation, a satire titled "God Is My Broker," which is set on Wall Street and in a monastery. Insiders describe the project as a parody of the self-help movement, much the way "Smoking" was a satire of spin. Plot centers on a Wall Street stockbroker who flees to a monastery, only to find monks who are turning their monastery into a corporation.” (Mar 5 2007)
Hollywood Reporter: “Pressman’s 1998 book centers on an alcoholic stock broker who gives everything up and joins a monastery. But when the monks' vow of poverty begins to take a financial toll, the former broker uses his old skills to save them, turning his new home into a frightening parallel of the world he desperately tried to escape.”
THE HOUSE OF NINA
Doug Cummings: “Starring the dependable Agnes Jaoui as the head of a true-to-life French orphanage during WWII that cared for French Jewish children; later it begins to house Eastern European Jews returning from recently liberated concentration camps, and as you might expect there is a lot of psychological scarring on their part, which creates a lot of interpersonal tensions in a time when cultural rebirth is crucial. It was a very personal project for the director (Richard Dembo), who died during post-production, and it's the kind of intelligent, emotionally honest, historically interesting film Miramax/Wienstein should be distributing but hasn't in a long time. Alas, no US distrib or DVD yet (and I don't think the French DVD has English subs).”
THE ISLAND (see OSTROV)
MARY
Bad boy Abel Ferrara's entry in the Jesus Movie Derby that Uncle Mel revved up. Seen on screens big and small in Europe, but nothing outside the festivals here in North America. Check out the whole saga here.
OSTROV (AKA THE ISLAND)
“Swept the Golden Eagle awards in its native Russia two months ago. Now, Variety reports that the film, about an Orthodox monastery, has won some Nika awards too. The pic, about a Russian Orthodox monastery, won prizes for film, director, actor (Petr Mamonov), supporting actor (Viktor Sukhorukov), cinematography (Andrei Zhigalov, posthumously) and sound editing. Industry vets gave warm praise to the Nikas, which was celebrating its 20th anni. Actor-director Andrei Smirnov, presenting Lungin with the director gong, remembered the Perestroika-born event as a "first sign of freedom in the country." (Thanks, Mr Film Chat...
PARADISE LOST
Scott Derrickson is developing an adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost. PTC: "Joining the conceptual team is none other than artist Wayne Barlowe, whose book BARLOWE'S INFERNO has given readers a nightmarish and fascinating look at hell . . . . The painter/illustrator has also lent designs on a number of Hollywood projects, notably Guillermo del Toro's BLADE II and HELLBOY. "One of the first things I did was to go after Stuart and Wayne; I liked Stuart's writing skills and Wayne's visual skills," the director says. "INFERNO was the reason I was so passionate about trying to get Wayne involved, and I knew that if PARADISE LOST was going to work, it'd have to have that kind of visual imagination."
POPE JOAN
Film Comment, May-June 2006: "Donna Woolfolk Cross's historical novel, Pope Joan, has been translated into 23 languages and, in Germany, is number one on the long-term bestseller list. The book tells the tale of a ninth-century Englishwoman who posed as a man to become a monk, and the subsequent road she traveled that eventually led to her securing the title of His Holiness. (The truth of the story remains subject to controversy.) Some may recall the 1972 version of the story starring Liv Ullmann - and now Volker Schlondorff has a film adaptation in development." Years back I read a stage treatment of the story, briefly considered it for Pacific Theatre.
Schlondorff's THE NINTH DAY, about a WW2 priest pressured to stop opposing the Nazis, is now available on DVD.
THE RESURRECTION
I'm pretty qualmy about Tim LaHaye's books ("Left Behind," "Right Behind," etc), so my enthusiasm for Upcoming Jesus Movie Project #387 is a tad muted. But I figure you all deserve to be in the know...
RISEN: THE STORY OF THE FIRST EASTER
In development by Hyde Park Entertainment, who developed Bringing Down the House, Raising Helen, and Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. Film will focus on the Apostle Peter in retelling the story of what happened to the disciples between Christ's resurrection and the day of Pentecost. (Mar 12 2007)
SILENCE
"Scorsese is turning his sights to a story of missionaries in 17th century Japan. "Silence" is a long-cherished project that he hopes to shoot partially in Japan in summer 2008. Although it's a period piece, Scorsese thinks it has lessons for America today. "It raises a lot of questions about foreign cultures coming in and imposing their way of thinking on another culture they know nothing about," Scorsese told The Associated Press on Thursday -- raising his eyebrows just to make the point absolutely clear." Associated Press, May 24 2007
SOLITUDE
Jason Goode writes: " Ron, While you are building your book with reviews of soul food movies, I thought I'd recommend one that you probably haven't seen: SOLITUDE by Robin Schlaht (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281206/). Robin is a
Regina based filmmaker who I got to know while living in Sask and we've been in touch ever since. Solitude is beautiful film about 3 lives that intersect at a Saskatchewan monastery. The film had a great festival life, but it was never released on DVD (perhaps in the future)."
THE SWORD OF PETER
Variety: “Tells the story of the Galilean fisherman who founded the Christian church in Rome. The film explores the early days of Christianity under the reign of Emperor Nero and the burning of Rome in 64 A.D. Billed as GLADIATOR meets THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, pic is produced by de Boer and Fotopoulus' Toronto-based FOS with de Boer set to direct from his own script.” Canadian funding, English language film will shoot in Italy and Israel.” Feb 11 2007
TORTILLA HEAVEN
Opened in March 2007, stateside. Small indie film about the effects on a small New Mexico town that’s turned on its head when the face of Christ appears on a tortilla. (A Tex-Mex HALO?) I’m interested. Review at CT Movies.
untitled Dardenne Jesus film
Doug Cummings: "in his newly published diary, Luc Dardenne mentions a couple of times that he and Jean-Pierre are thinking about making a Jesus film. I don't have it with me at the moment, but he writes something like, 'this would not be the story of his life, but a snapshot of his reality; the faces, places, bodies, and interactions of his world' or somethign like that. He insisted they'd shoot it in Israel."
untitled Hildegaard von Bingen project
Variety and the Hollywood Reporter report that German director Margarethe von Trotta is preparing a film about the 12th century abbess who became world renowned for her medical, botanical and geological writings as well as for the music she composed, which many consider a precursor to opera. Bingen also was a controversial figure, the first woman to write on the subject of female sexuality and, for many, the world's first feminist. (Thanks, Mr Chattaway)
untitled INHERIT THE WIND project
Film Comment, May-June 2006: "The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which substitute science teacher John T. Scopes was basically charged with heresy for teaching evolution to Tennessee high-school students, has been resurrected. Paramount has hired the prolific scribe Ronald Harwood (who won an Oscar not too long ago for his screenplay for THE PIANIST) to create a contemporary Scopes script based on the proceedings of the 2004 Dover Area School District case in Pennsylvania. Siding with blue-state ethos, the presiding U.S. district court judge barred the teaching of 'intelligent design' in the classroom, and accused the thinly veiled creationists of 'breath-taking inanity.'"
untitled USHPIZPIN project
A fan blog for Adi Ran, whose music is featured in USHPIZIN, reports a possible follow-up to that film: “Well, maybe not exactly Ushpizin Part II. But it seems like Shuli and Michal Rand are planning a new film. In a recent interview in Jewish Action, they say: "At this stage we can only say that it will futher expound upon Breslov themes and that it will deal with the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. A name? It is too early for that." (Oct 2006)
untitled Von Trier Dreyer project
Film Comment, May-June 2006: "Lars von Trier is making a documentary about one of his favorite films (no, not THE SOUND OF MUSIC): Danish master Carl Th. Dreyer's 1964 swan song, GERTRUD."
WAR IN HEAVEN
CTM Reel News, April 2007: “With the hyper-violent graphic novel adaptation 300 proving to be one of the biggest and most surprising blockbusters in recent memory, one can't blame Hollywood executives for leaping at the opportunity to repeat the film's success. One such post-300 adaptation comes with an added twist—provocative religious connotations and biblical language. War in Heaven—a graphic novel about Lucifer's rebellion against God—is being rushed into development to quickly capitalize on 300's success. Reports indicate that the "Braveheart-like" storyline follows Lucifer's rebellion against and ultimate rejection from Heaven. Epic battle sequences—pitting Lucifer's minions against God's angels—will include Gabriel, Michael, and others.” One can’t blame studio execs? I sure as heck can. “Rushing to production” are never words to inspire confidence.
WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?
CTMovies: “Reuters reports that the movie—which follows Christian performance artist Rev. Billy and his 35-member choir around the country—is running into trouble because of Billy's forceful anti-consumerism message. He and his choir march into shopping malls and Starbucks, protest in Wal-Marts and Victoria's Secret outlets, and even get arrested in Disneyland. Though the film has the clout of executive producer Morgan Spurlock (Super-Size Me) behind it, it's still proving difficult to market. Says director Rob VanAlkemade, "Major distributors have backed away because Wal-Mart pushes half of their DVDs." Meanwhile, Starbucks has pulled out from sponsoring the Silverdocs festival, which has supported the film.”
THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
Peter Chattaway: "Paramount Pictures is headed to Sunday school with the purchase of the A.J. Jacobs novel The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Obey the Bible as Literally as Possible. The studio has taken the book to Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, which will serve as the producer of the adaptation. Living Biblically will be published by Simon & Schuster in fall 2006. In the book, Jacobs, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, spent a year of his life trying to live, literally, by the rules set forth in both the Old and New Testaments."
VANILLA SKY / OPEN YOUR EYES
OPEN YOUR EYES (“Abre los ojos” 1997, Spain/France/Italy, Alejandro Amenabar, screenplay w/ Mateo Gil)
VANILLA SKY (2001, USA, Cameron Crowe, from Amenabar/Gil original)
When did you stop caring? About the consequences of the promises you made?
Word was not good about VANILLA SKY, but I went, and as the movie unfolded I found myself baffled: why were my Soul Food movie cronies so cool toward it? This picture was all about the hollowness of wealth, privilege and beauty, about the consequences of thoughtless acts and the wages of narcissism. Mortality, resurrection, the yearning for eternity. Explicit questions like “Do you believe in God?” and implicit ones about what happens when we believe ourselves to be gods.
That was during the film. The morning after, my ardor had cooled. It wasn’t until I tracked down a copy of the Spanish original years later that my fascination revived, and I began to see what had undermined so strong a viewing experience.
The films are very alike. We meet a handsome ladies’ man – Cesar in the original, David in the remake – the child of wealth and privilege. Something of a Richard Corey character, his self-indulgent life takes a shocking turn and he finds himself haunted by terrible dreams. The dream that he’s all alone in the world. Or the dream that his face has been horribly disfigured. The terrible, familiar dream of being imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. Or the dream that he is, in fact, a killer. As he loses the ability to distinguish between illusion and reality, so does the audience. It’s a pleasurably disorienting, provocative ride.
Pop music-oriented Cameron Crowe speaks of his remake as a “cover” of the original, and it’s a respectful one, an almost scene-for-scene transposition of a Madrid story to New York City. Crowe punches up the story with clever dialogue and pricier visuals, tossing in an abundance of pop culture – for good thematic reasons, as it turns out. The structure remains the same, but he makes the telling more “vivid” (his own word), clarifying character choices at each critical decision point. Perhaps most significantly, he brings a characteristic empathy to his treatment of each of character – which may be a considerable part of what undermines the film’s ultimate impact.
Amenabar’s original grew out of a nightmare so terrifying he felt compelled to commit it to paper, and in his treatment the central character is a monster, a narcissistic manipulator whose inner ugliness is concealed by the mask of a beautiful face until circumstances conspire to match his visage with what lies beneath. The horrors he endures are so clearly an outgrowth of the darkness of his own soul, I am reminded of the scales being scraped from Eustace in Voyage Of The Dawn Treader at the same time as I think of the souls trapped in a hell of their own making in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.” Lawrence Van Gelder of the New York Times sees OPEN YOUR EYES as “at bottom a retelling of the story of Job for a vain, materialistic, selfish age.” While he’s right that there are comparisons between stories of men who have and lose it all, I think he completely misunderstands the essence of the Biblical story: Job is a righteous man whose sufferings are completely unwarranted, who questions God but refuses to curse Him, while Cesar is an appallingly self-consumed young man whose choices and attitudes bring about his own suffering – who we can only hope will wake up to a life worth living.
Amenabar’s impetus was horror, his cultural referents literary monster myths like The Phantom Of The Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty and The Beast, perhaps Jekyl and Hyde, his narrative one of judgment and possible redemption. Crowe found his way into the story through an Elvis Presley interview where the icon spoke of the loneliness he felt “even in a crowded room:” identifying closely with that image, Crowe essentially tells “a story about the eternal belief in love and what love can really be.”
That’s not all to the bad. Where Crowe’s compassion for the protagonist lets the Tom Cruise character off too easily for the story to have the gravitas of the original – he probably sees it more as a difficult journey toward a more fulfilling life than he does a story of possible (and possibly deserved) damnation – the more empathetic treatment lends audience identification with the characters. Particularly in the case of the spurned lover (enhanced by an emotionally raw Cameron Diaz performance), the story gains a relational complexity by adding depth and emotional impact to a character who was basically a mentally unstable femme fatale in the original film. The protagonist may refer to her as a stalker, but in the Crowe version that sounds like a self-serving exaggeration: she may simply love the guy, walking that thin line between being crazy about him and being just plain crazy. In Amenabar, we see that she’s trouble right off the bat, and she probably goes well beyond stalker into predator territory.
If director empathy adds complexity to the jilted lover character, it risks diminishing Sofia, the film’s main love interest. Both films riff on the many faces of the Cesar/David character: the handsomeness that covers a nature far less appealing, the deformed face that may actually reveal of the soul, and the prosthetic mask created to cover the disfigurement – complicated by the therapist, who questions the extent and even reality of that disfigurement. It is not only beauty that may lie in the eye of the beholder. Both films contain extraordinary images of two-facedness, the mask on the back of the head, or carried in hand. But the later film doesn’t extend this idea of duplicity to Sofia, the love interest played in both films by Penelope Cruz. At the risk of over-stating, Crowe tends toward reducing a more complex story of human interaction to the confines of a genre picture. Amenabar’s Sofia is an actress, and Cesar questions whether she can be trusted to present her true “face”, or whether she is performing: she collects figurines of white-masked mimes, and when Cesar re-connects with her after a separation, she practices her mime on a park bench, not fully recognizable until the white-face is washed away by the rain and her tears. Crowe jettisons that layer of complexity: his Sofia is a dancer, mostly because, well, Penelope Cruz looks fetching in tights. And we don’t want anyone thinking she might also have things to hide.
Not to be dismissive of the latter film. The typically American clarification of narrative creates a film that is more ethically centred, perhaps even something of a cautionary tale: the careful tracing of the chain of events, the way values and character beget choices which are carried out in actions that have consequences yields what Roger Ebert called “a scrupulously moral picture.” But the more ambiguous and decidedly darker European treatment creates what might be called a more spiritual film, with a real sense of personal sin and accountability, foregrounded by references to religious culture: while Amenabar doesn’t claim an active faith, his Catholic background and context are evident. So too is a fascination with death that informs subsequent films like THE OTHERS and THE SEA INSIDE – compare the suicide motifs in VANILLA SKY to the latter film for some real conversation fodder. (“All I can do is eat, shit, sleep and dream of my memories.”)
Crowe’s tendency to soften (or even sentimentalize) things is certainly seen in the final moments of the film: where Amenabar’s protagonist faces a truly painful decision, an apparently irrevocable choice involving real and permanent sacrifice, the American director offers the possibility that he’s not really giving anything up permanently. Indeed, in the Spanish film we are unsure up until the final words of dialogue whether the protagonist is making the right choice: is Serge Duvernois tempting him to destruction, or leading him into real life? There are resonances with THE MATRIX.
It would be misleading to exaggerate the differences between the two versions, or to insist that one is necessarily superior to the other – indeed, the greatest value probably lies in viewing both films, and considering both their common themes and their different emphases. There’s no denying the power of the love story in Amenabar’s original, and if Crowe makes that his central focus, plenty of nightmare and metaphysics remain. He may have tightened and heightened the narrative, but that tidiness and focus certainly don’t remove the story’s puzzling, even baffling features.
Indeed, it’s the fact that both treatments end up as “puzzle films” that may best explain the deflation many feel by the time the credits roll. Both stories start out somewhere on the continuum between character study and love story. Both films increasingly take on the elements of something like a supernatural thriller, with shifting realities signaling madness or mania or something more spiritual, or perhaps even some sort of deadly conspiracy (the latter brought to the fore in Cameron Crowe’s adaptation – again, a choice to move the film more in the direction of a recognizable American genre). The problem comes in the final scenes of both films, when there is a sudden and radical shift not only of genre, but of something more fundamental: while the audience is eager to gain some sort of understanding of what’s been going on, we feel jarred or even betrayed by the abrupt change in the basic ground rules of the entire film. It’s not that they haven’t been diligently set out for us, or that the whole thing doesn’t hang together on analysis: it’s only that we have no appetite for any of that once we disconnect from the human, emotional centre of what engaged us all along.
If you can get over that, either of these films provide plenty to digest – not just a puzzle to solve, but substantial human, even spiritual questions. Billy Wilder once told Cameron Crowe that his greatest dream was that he could make a movie that people would want to talk about for fifteen minutes afterwards. That was the goal that Crowe had in my mind when making Vanilla Sky – that this could be a movie that people could talk about. Don’t let possible disappointment with the ending discourage you from that. However gimmicky you may find the film’s final act, it doesn’t really undermine the substance of all that’s gone before, nor its potential to feed the soul – particularly if we allow ourselves to be drawn into a close reading of either version of this multi-layered story of a chance at spiritual awakening, the possibility of real life that’s offered to one half-dead young man.
JACOB’S LADDER, WAKING LIFE
OPEN YOUR EYES and VANILLA SKY both available at Videomatica
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