BAD LIEUTENANT

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992, USA, Abel Ferrara, screenplay with Zoe Lund, Victor Argo, Paul Calderon)
Jesus said seventy times seven. A gift that makes sense ain't worth it.

The foulest movie in the book. Of all the films I’ve seen (and may well never see again), the ultimate example of how bright the slightest sliver of light can shine if the darkness is dark enough.

A nun is raped, her inner city church desecrated, and the camera never looks away. The baddest of bad cops pulls over two out-of-town teens and intimidates the driver into simulating oral sex while he masturbates beside their car. Is there any reason to see this kind of stuff?

Harvey Keitel: "I wanted to play this part because I have a deep desire to know God. Knowing God isn't just a matter of going to confession and praying. We also know God by confronting evil, and this character gave me the opportunity to descend into the most painful part of myself and learn about the dark places."

The performance is stunning, raw, naked, shameful, unashamed. Keitel’s presence in the film invokes Scorsese, though even his Catholic anguish never took us down streets so mean. This vice-ridden vice cop is beyond corrupt, he’s debauched, snorting coke off pictures of his kids’ first communion pictures. Obscenely in hawk to the bookies, he ingests every substance he can coerce from the dealers, keeping the suicidal spin going so he won’t risk connecting – with consequence, with humanity, with what’s left of himself and his conscience. “The Lieutenant is raging against God and, at the same time, administering to himself a cruel punishment for his own transgressions. A rogue, self-flagellating saint drawing himself closer to God through willful defiance – a tormented, bedeviled man engaged in unholy communion.” (Hal Hinson, Washington Post)

Until he visits that nun, who won’t name but will only forgive her abusers, and who’s more concerned with the cop’s condition than her own. “Talk to Jesus” she tells him, and in that desecrated church somewhere in Spanish Harlem, he does – raging, pleading, howling, crawling. It could be a hallucination, it could be a vision, it could be quite literally real: the drugged out, freaked out lieutenant can’t distinguish, and neither can we. Nor do any of us need to: all that’s needed is to respond.

I’m a Canadian kid, raised in the safety of the suburbs, happy middle-class family, nice life. Still, something in me knows, there but for the grace of God – or the luck of the draw – go I. Given different circumstances, the right timing, the wrong drugs, that could be me up there. I'm certain that we can be, at times, this lost, this depraved, and what is art for if not to take us to those places now and then? And what is our faith worth if it can't break in, even to those kinds of strongholds of spiritual darkness?

If there is grace or redemption in this film, it's confused and confusing, but isn't that exactly the way it would come to a man so addled, so fouled? I think of this film and I think of Bruce Cockburn's line, "Even though I know who loves me I'm not that much less lost..."

If you see this film, don’t say I told you to. But if you think you might be up to it, see this film.

TAXI DRIVER, THE ADDICTION


Available at Videomatica

THE APOSTLE

THE APOSTLE (1997, USA, Robert Duvall)
I’m goin’ to jail, and you’re goin’ to heaven.

The one fallen evangelist movie evangelicals don’t hate. Not that Sonny’s flaws are white-washed – though they may be washed in the blood, which is what really matters. He’s plenty fallen, not only before his riverside rededication (he initiates the dramatic action by taking a baseball bat to the youth pastor, right in front of the church ball team) but after. Even once he’s washed his sins away and taken a new name – “The Apostle E.F.” – he’s still got an eye for the women, a tendency to not-entirely-righteous anger, a preacher-sized ego and, the worst sin of all, a tacky sense of personal taste. (But Lord, can that man preach! One of the great pleasures of this film is the language – it lights up whenever Sonny is on fire. “I may be on the devil’s hit-list, but I’m on God’s mailing list!” He’s a “genuine, Holy Ghost, Jesus-filled preachin’ machine.”)

This is no Elmer Gantry caricature: Sonny’s a real mess, but at least he’s real. And he’s trying. He’s a lot like us.

Robert Duvall paid for the film out of his own pocket, and that conviction plays out both in front of the camera and behind it: it’s one of the great performances of one of film’s greatest actors, and one of the strongest directorial debuts you’ll be blessed to see. The filmmaker’s fervency is perfectly matched to his subject. Like his on-screen altar ego, Duvall was on a mission, maybe from God: he wanted to give credence to a people Hollywood had no understanding of or time for.

Not that he dresses up fundamentalism to make a good impression on the faithless: this is plain spun old school Pentecostalism, with all the hellfire and brimstone, stomping and shouting you can stand. But when Sonny, on the lam from that murder rap, sets up shop in a neglected church in an out of the way Louisiana town, his ministry is just as old school as his preaching. He rolls up his sleeves and just plain sets in to work; building, praying, preaching on the radio (“And no speaking in tongues on the air!”), inspiring. It’s called revival, and the truest thing of all in this true-to-life portrait of a bigger-than-life sinner is that it’s Sonny who gets revived most of all. Give and it shall be given unto you, for with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

You can count on that. It’s Gospel.

THE POWER & THE GLORY, WISE BLOOD

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE (1984, USA, Woody Allen)
Lou is a has been, he’s got a big ego, a temperament and a slight drinking problem. And Danny’s got faith.

The warmest of Woody’s films riffs on none of his philosophical / theological preoccupations, but is filled with affection for down-and-outs, second-rates and also-rans. Danny is talentless talent agent who champions the worst and strangest variety acts imaginable; the blind xylophone player (“But the man is a beautiful man, he’s a fantastic individual!”), the one-armed juggler, the one-legged tap dancer. Bookended by standout scenes with food on the table: for starters, a clutch of real-life old-time Borscht Belt comedians swap Danny Rose stories in Carnegie Deli, sparked with the ultra-natural comraderie that fires similar scenes in DINER and RESERVOIR DOGS; to finish, a comically bittersweet Thanksgiving dinner among the misfits that turns frozen turkey dinners and Tab into sacramental elements, a foretaste of some eternal feast of fools where the lion sits down with us losers, and we all win.

PLACES IN THE HEART


Available at Videomatica

13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING

13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING (2001, USA, Jill Sprecher, screenplay with Karen Sprecher)
It only makes sense when you look at it backwards. Too bad we got to live it forwards.

I can't imagine a better choice for a movie discussion group. Watch it on one level, it’s an eminently approachable film about ordinary New York lives, built on strong performances and a smart script. Take the bait and dig in a little, it’s as intricately assembled – and perhaps as baffling, to many of us – as that city’s famed crossword puzzle.

The film juggles four workplace-centred short stories (among attorneys, academics, housekeepers and claims adjusters) that are related thematically, and by visual and dialogue motifs that recur in intricate patterns. They’re also related by intersecting events, but I won’t say just how: part of the pleasure lies in the way the writers carefully craft the flow of the various plots to play with our expectations about cause and effect and interconnectedness. One critic sniffed that “the character crossovers between narratives are too contrived to work,” but he hadn’t done his homework: sketch yourself a little diagram of how the characters cluster, and at what point their stories converge, and you’ll see that their inter-relation really just comes down to... Well, to one thing.

Alan Arkin’s Gene is an actuary (fascinating how often films about things like luck, fate and providence involve characters in the insurance biz) whose painful life – a broken marriage, a son in trouble with drugs and the law – makes him resent the breezy optimism and lucky breaks of his co-workers. Walker (John Turturro) teaches the immutable, irreversible laws of physics but yearns for change, which random events and his own choices bring upon him. Clea DuVall plays a winsomely optimistic house cleaner named Beatrice who puts her faith in providence, while Matthew McConaughey’s Troy is a high-flying lawyer who believes in hard work, law and consequence: both of their convictions are weighed in the balance and found... Well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

I’m shocked to see how widely reactions to this film vary. One critic finds it morbid, cruel and devoid of humanity (Scott Tobias, Onion) while the next says it “encircles the viewer in a comforting, open-hearted humanism” (Tim Merrill, Film Threat). On first viewing I picked up mostly Job, the darker Psalms, and especially Ecclesiastes: the wicked prosper, the righteous get what the wicked deserve, and if you expect God to provide you with due rewards for all your strivings, if you think the universe is tidily ordered to reward your good deeds and punish people’s (usually other people's) bad ones, you're just plain wrong. Which always needs saying – especially in the face of Hollywood’s happy ending, dare-to-dream false gospel – but may not be the whole picture.

Having caught a whiff of something kinder, I watched again, very closely, and came away convinced that, for the Sprecher sisters anyway, that’s not the whole story. Track carefully through each of the story lines, sort out the chronologies and figure out cause and effect, then ask yourself what’s the final state of each of the characters and what things actually led them to that point, and I’m convinced there’s something more than post-modern “shit happens” bleakness here.

But then, that’s not unexpected. I do tend to be a bit of a Beatrice.

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, MAGNOLIA, SIGNS


Available at Videomatica

CENTRAL STATION

CENTRAL STATION (“Central do Brasil” 1998, Walter Salles, Marcos Bernstein / Joao Emanuel Carneiro screenplay)
Dear Jesus,
You’re the worst thing to happen to me.

She sets up her table every day in a teeming subway terminal, and the ones who can’t write dictate their letters to her. The glory of this well-loved South American film begins in those faces, a blend of actors and non-actors, laying out their hopes and promises, reprimands and offerings for Dora to transcribe. “I want to send a letter to a guy who cheated me. Mr Ze Amaro. Thank you for what you did to me. I trusted you and you cheated me. You even took the keys to my apartment.” Her face too is a wonder: weathered, compassionate, attentive, as she hears their lives and carefully records each one, addresses the envelopes, collects her small fee. And at the end of the day she takes them to her humble apartment and... Throws them in the trash. Some she saves in a drawer. A few she might actually send. You can’t trust a face.

Dora ends up traveling across Brazil in search of Jesus. (No, not that Jesus. Well, maybe.) He’s the father of the small boy she has in tow, is already well on his way to being as tough as she is – five or six more decades of disappointment, loss and betrayal and he’ll give her a run for her money.

The director has stated that he is not a Christian, but he portrays people of faith with affection and respect. A truck-driving evangelist is drawn with none of the disparaging clichés you’d expect in a North American film, and when the travelers near their destination they find themselves in the midst of a sea of faces as ordinary and extraordinary as the ones we met at the outset – Catholic pilgrims who seek soul-cleansing, and perhaps a miracle, in Bom Jesus du Norte.

It’s a far different world than most North Americans know, with a passionate and strangely gaudy religion. But those faces are so human, those stories so familiar, and that God of theirs.... Well, who can say?

A small, beautiful film.

THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR, AFTER LIFE


Available at Videomatica

COLD HEAVEN

COLD HEAVEN (1990, USA, Nicolas Roeg, Allan Scott screenplay, Brian Moore novel)
Rebuild the sanctuary. What is a sanctuary? It is a refuge, it is a safe haven. Have you not heard of the refuge of marriage, the safe haven of one's husband or wife? The sanctuary of marriage. It's a long hard road back to a faith that you've once lost, but I'll be glad to walk it with you. "Late have I loved thee." That's what we all say in the end.

Pity Brian Moore. He started his writing career as a serious literary novelist before turning his hand to pretty good second-best-seller genre fiction, and he's had more movies made of his stuff than John Gresham. Lousy movies, that's the problem. Couldn't just one of his post-Catholic, God-haunted, spiritually inflected novels work as well on the screen as on the page? Apparently not. Not nearly. (Well okay, there is one: BLACK ROBE, which he screenplayed and exec produced himself. Can't trust nobody...)

Certainly can't trust Nicolas Roeg. Maybe it was drugs that fueled the young lion's directorial brilliance during his PERFORMANCE / WALKABOUT / DON'T LOOK NOW / BAD TIMING phase, and maybe by the end of the nineties it was payback time: "mind expanding" becomes "brain damaging" eventually. Granted, Nic never made conventional movies, always more interested in mood and effect than in strict narrative logic, but COLD HEAVEN is appallingly bad.

The premise sounds bizarre but potentially interesting, and if its meaning is obscure, no moreso than the Moore's title and its tenuous connection to a William Butler Yeats poem. A woman pursues an extra-marital affair until her husband is killed in a boating accident. When his body goes missing, she returns to the seaside hotel where her liason began a year before, at which time she also experienced a troubling vision of the Virgin Mary telling her to "rebuild the sanctuary." You hope you've turned up an undiscovered gem, you're prepared for a little incomprehensibility in pursuit of the ineffable, but it's soon apparent that this movie is inept rather than inspired.

Apparently the principal actors showed up first day of shooting and decided to hold a bad acting contest for the duration. Apart from Will Patton, who missed that particular meeting, they comported themselves admirably, the director's wife taking the main prize, with Worst Actress In A Supporting Role honors going to newcomer Martha Milliken (who decided to retire on a strong note: this was not only her first but also her last film. Hopefully she didn't run off and join a convent.) Theresa Russell apparently thinks that inexplicable mid-syllable pauses and lots of agonized face-pulling indicates she's feeling extreme emotion: I think it indicates she should have learned her lines.

There is at least an artistic unity: the calibre of the acting is matched by the quality of screenwriting and direction. The film is an endless series of set-ups that never pay off, and pay-offs that were never set up. Early on Marie's husband makes a fuss about her "bad hand:" she replies that she quite likes it, and it is never referred to again. Not only is the fact that he dies and apparently rises from the dead never explained, it contributes nothing to either plot or theme. When Will Patton's priest comments on Marie's bizarre religious vision (staged with House Of Horrors music and lightning bolts, even!), he says "There's no reason to believe that your husband's illness has anything to do with this," we can only wish he'd been hired as script consultant. "It must almost seem like some kind of demonic possession" is his only fumble toward and explanation. I guess he'd seen THE EXORCIST.

Confounding dialogue, whispered, tortured voice-overs, time-lapse clouds and and kryptonite-green crosses ("It's incredible! It's incredible?" No, it's tacky...), morphing monsignors and portentous jet plane fly-overs signifying absolutely nothing combine with bucket-loads of over-wrought emotionalism and spooky pseudo-Catholicism to make this one of the dumbest treatments of spiritual themes ever to perpetrated on celluloid, right down there with GOD TOLD ME TO and WIRED TO KILL. Except...

Right at the end, once Marie and Martha's apocalyptic paroxysms have passed, the one actor we can still stand to listen to sits the star down for a quiet hillside chat about faith and faithfulness. It's as hokey and tacked-on as anything else in the film. But maybe because the lines were at least spoken by a human being, or maybe because they seemed to lend some sense to at least a few of the story threads that had gone before, or maybe because of the relief of hearing something so straight-forward (even faith-affirming) at the conclusion of such a crudely stupid movie, I found myself rather suddenly and surprisingly moved.

Turns out the one thing I liked in the movie didn't even originate in the source novel – it's cribbed from Saint Augustine and who knows where else, and even this scrap of good sense is pretty much foreign to the spirit of Brian Moore's book. Poor Brian. Oh well, we take our crumbs of inspiration where we can find them, and pretend the hour and forty five minutes wasn't a complete waste...

BLACK ROBE, THE STATEMENT, THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE, CATHOLICS, THE BLOOD OF OTHERS


Available at Videomatica

THE STATEMENT

THE STATEMENT (2003, Canada/France/USA, Norman Jewison, Ronald Harwood screenplay from Brian Moore novel)
The Church is my only hiding place. My only refuge.

An aging Nazi collaborator – now a devout Catholic – wrestles with his conscience as a Crimes Against Humanity investigation pursues him from one hiding place to the next; cathedrals, monasteries, the homes of “sympathetic” believers. Unfortunately, there's not much real wrestling of any kind in this flat flick: I'm not sure how an experienced director like Norman "IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT" Jewison could create so bland a film from the Brian Moore thriller – Michael Caine! Tilda Swinton! Alan Bates! Charlotte Rampling! John Neville! William Hutt! – but he did. Add this to the "Great Premise, Unfulfilled" file.

AMEN

BLACK ROBE

BLACK ROBE (1991, Canada/Australia, Bruce Beresford, Brian Moore screenplay from his novel)
I’m afraid of this country. The devil rules here. He controls the hearts and minds of these poor people.
But they are true Christians. They live for each other. They forgive things we would never forgive.

Pity Brian Moore. This Irish-Canadian novelist holds the distinction of having seen more bad movie treatments of his not bad books than any other poor soul on the planet. THE STATEMENT, COLD HEAVEN and CATHOLICS are as bad as movies can be: THE BLOOD OF OTHERS is bland, and even the THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE ultimately relents on the novel’s unrelenting bleakness.

BLACK ROBE is the exception. Moore finally took things into his own hands, drafting the screenplay and exec producing. A potent, realistic portrayal of the seventeenth century Catholic mission to the Hurons, this uncompromising film is celebrated for imposing cinematography that goes beyond pretty nature shots to portray the daunting scale of the Canadian wilderness, ultimately conveying the spiritual power Huron and Algonquin people found in the land, and the sense of isolation and spiritual oppression experienced by the Europeans; “The devil rules here. The forests speak. The dead talk at night.”

Fiercely anti-Catholic in his early writings, Moore became intrigued with spirituality mid-career and in time even achieved some sort of peace – or at least detante – with Holy Mother Church. BLACK ROBE is admirable for its even-handed refusal to sentimentalize or demean either native or Catholic culture. If we can’t quite empathize with the joyless stoicism of this Jesuit missionary priest –we wish he’d had at least some of the earthy humanity of a Father Damien, but the film refuses to modernize either priest or Algonquin to manipulate our sympathies – this “soldier of heaven” earns our respect and perhaps our understanding, enduring privation and even torture to reach out to the people he feels called to serve. And there’s no faulting his ultimate epiphany: if in dramatic terms it underwhelms – the story-telling doesn’t adequately prepare us for his final revelation – it is certainly gratifying thematically.

The film makers don’t always manage to direct our attention to what’s important, or to clearly shape events to tell the story with real mastery. Or perhaps that’s part of the film’s strategy: certainly we share some of Father Laforgue’s disorientation and incomprehension as he is isolated from all that’s familiar and immersed in a world profoundly different from what he knows. Focus on the character arcs and relationships among Laforgue, his interpreter Daniel, and Chomina the Algonquin patriarch and you’ll be fine.

In the final analysis, a remarkable film, an historically precise portrayal of two particular aboriginal cultures, stripped of political correctness but nonetheless deeply sympathetic: if the Europeans viewed these people as noble savages, this film treatment shows them not only in all their savagery, but, more importantly, all their nobility. Two great cultures meet in an uneasy truce: we observe the superstitions and spirituality, wisdom and folly – and, ultimately, both the terrifying inhumanity and the glorious humanity – of each in a film that takes us far from what we know to give us a glimpse of the other. Even, perhaps, the Other.

THE NEW WORLD, THE MISSION, APOCALYPTO


Available at Videomatica

AMAZING GRACE

AMAZING GRACE (2006, UK/USA, Michael Apted, Steven Knight screenplay)
You found God, sir?
I think He found me.

It’s a picture you wouldn’t have thought would ever get made – and certainly not by such exceptional film makers. It tells a hugely important story about the one thing Evangelical Christians got inarguably right – and, unlike AMISTAD, it doesn’t falsify the faith of its central characters.

If you’d stumbled on the historical facts, you’d have thought to yourself, this needs to be a movie – too bad Hollywood will never make it. The astonishing fact that William Wilberforce, who made the British parliament outlaw the slave trade, did so as a result of a profound Christian conversion. That his mentor, the aging John Newton, composed what may be the best-known gospel hymn ever sung, Amazing Grace. That Newton was himself a former slave trader, the song written in repentance for his sins. “Although my memory’s fading, I remember two things very clearly. I’m a great sinner, and Christ is a great Savior.” It gives you chills.

There’s nothing fancy in the way this story gets told: it’s a good old-fashioned biopic, with wigs and breeches and chewy accents. If the screenplay tends at times to melodrama, you forgive it: that’s all part of the fun, and there’s always the iron spine of conviction to cover a multitude more sins of that sort. Apted decides it’s better err on the side of occasional melodrama than to mute so extraordinary a tale by playing it safe, and I say God bless him. “To hell with caution.”

Screenwriter Steven Knight penned DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, a fiercely principled story about the modern “slaves” who keep our economy humming, refugees without status and illegal immigrants who make our clothes and clean our hotel rooms, who live alongside us in an invisible no-man’s-land without recourse to law. That same sense of outrage saves AMAZING GRACE whenever it risks being too cute or too safe. Wilber (that’s what they called him, so we might as well) has a dour group of social activists to his house for dinner: abruptly, the wildest-eyed among them sweeps the dishes from the table to slam down chains and leg irons, and the air is suddenly cleared of all that earnest conscientiousness. These people may be off-puttingly well-meaning, but blood is in the air – we’re reminded frequently that the French Revolution is running its violent course just the other side of the Channel.

There’s also terrific story of friendship weathering the test of time and political life, between Wilberforce and William Pitt, Britain’s youngest Prime Minister (elected at the age of 24!). Also a cracking good love story with a fiery red-head to keep things lively, and a Dickens-worthy panoply of vividly drawn supporting characters played with all the verve and sharpness you’d wish from a company of top notch British actors.

Best of all, the film stays true to the historical fact that, for all the drama of the circumstances, slavery wasn’t stopped in a day, and that so protracted a fight extracted a terrible cost. That it all ended not with a bang but a bill, the culmination of decades of dogged legislative machinations among the very men who most profited from the slave trade. A long obedience in the same direction. That the film makers have fashioned even those everyday realities into so compelling a picture is, frankly, nothing short of amazing.

AMISTAD


DVD unreleased at time of posting

COPYING BEETHOVEN

COPYING BEETHOVEN (2006, USA/Germany/Hungary, Agnieszka Holland, Stephen J. Rivele / Christopher Wilkinson screenplay)
This new symphony, it's my farewell. My farewell to music as I've always known it, as I've always written it. I'm starting a new chapter in my life. New forms, a new language. And now this woman is sent to me at this very moment. What if she was sent… by Him? Suppose it's a sign. That it's time. Time for me to join with him.

A promising enough beginning – even if the writing clanks a little, strains for weight and authenticity by mere repetition and padding. Part of that promise is fulfilled – the God talk continues – but so too are our misgivings, as the writers continue to strain for notes they don’t quite manage to hit.

It’s not a bad movie – just like Antonio Salieri wasn’t a bad composer. It’s just that they both suffer badly by comparison. A comparison which they invite. To a certain AMADEUS, blessed above all others and beloved of God.

I don’t want to be hard on this film, which has its own appeal. It asks questions about creativity and divinity, speculates about the wildness of God. It features a committed Ed Harris in the title role and a fetching Diane Kruger as Anna, the copyist he retains to write out manuscript for the Ninth Symphony premiere. There’s clever riffing on “copying” Beethoven, and a dynamite eleven minutes in which the almost completely deaf composer defies his critics (and, I’m afraid, both history and credibility) when he conducts his glorious Ninth Symphony by copying Anna, who – unseen by the audience – beats time and cues the orchestra. Mr Harris conducts like a house afire, and when that choir kicks in with the “Ode To Joy”.... Wowzer. Turn it up and sing along.

Still, things too often feel dutiful, derivative. Ed Harris gives it his best effort, but consider the effortlessness of his portrayal of that other tormented genius (Jackson Pollock, not Wolfie Mozart) and you’ll realize how actorish this performance is. Recall other films by spiritually-oriented director Agnieszka Holland – THE THIRD MIRACLE, EUROPA EUROPA, TO KILL A PRIEST – and you may find the religiosity here unconvincing. Most damning, compare scenes – the deathbed composition-dictation sequence, or Anna’s “You gave me the gift, so why are you telling me not to use it” speech – with the celebrated Mozart flick and realize how unoriginal and inelegant much of this writing is. It may be that the writers of COPYING BEETHOVEN were mostly just copying AMADEUS.

But comparisons with the Mozart flick are odious. Make a point not to watch it before (or think about it during) BEETHOVEN and you’ll be fine – the film looks great and sounds greater. If Holland’s film is Salieri to Forman’s Mozart, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching: people still buy CDs by Antonio and Wolfgang both. But next time you’re in Vienna, just try finding chocolate with Salieri’s picture on it.

There are reasons.

THE GAMBLER

AMADEUS

AMADEUS (1984, USA, Milos Forman, Peter Shaffer play and screenplay)
Whilst my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of. “Lord, make me a great composer! Let me celebrate your glory through music - and be celebrated myself! Make me famous through the world, dear God! Make me immortal! After I die let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote! In return I vow I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility every hour of my life. And I will help my fellow man all I can. Amen and amen!”

What extraordinary writing! Economy, irony, implication – volumes are spoken in this one brief speech, themes sounded that will be repeated and inverted in subtle variations throughout the film. Salieri, speaking at the end of his life, recounts the childhood prayer that set the course of his life. He critiques the self-serving prayers of his father, a merchant, yet his own prayer is every bit as mercenary: he isn’t confiding in a loving Father, he’s unilaterally setting the terms of a quid pro quo contract, and presuming that makes it binding on both parties. When he calls the prayer “proud” he means it was noble, but we hear the irony as he names the cardinal sin that will come to define him. He pledges a chastity he will readily cast aside when he decides God isn’t keeping His end of the bargain, he promises a humility that will only ever be evident in recognizing – and coveting, and seeking to destroy – another man’s greater gift. The musical gift of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

These vows amuse us at the same time as they trouble us. They are childish, speaking a conventional piety as naïve as a Boy Scout promise – “and do a good turn to somebody every day.” But the fact the man who recounts them has never outgrown them, that he repeats them without recognizing their vanity, is chilling. What we smile at in the child, we recoil from in the man. By the time Salieri whines “all I ever wanted was to sing to God,” we know better.

Salieri believes he yearns only for eternity: we recognize a thoroughly earthly-minded man lusting for a merely earthbound immortality. Cruel justice lies in the fact that his prayer will in fact be answered. The now-aged man’s final speech picks up this opening theme and plays it back in an ironic inversion, and we realize that he is in fact remembered centuries after his death. People are writing plays and making movies about him. How pathetic.

When the young Salieri’s father chokes to death on a piece of fish and the self-consumed lad is sent away to study music, he takes it as a miracle – “I knew God had arranged it all; that was obvious” – and it is all clear: this God will do Salieri’s bidding, and even murder is an acceptable means to that end. How tragic.

Indeed, for all its energy and brilliantly entertaining wit, this film is a classic tragedy: not the story of Mozart at all, except indirectly, but the story of a man who could have been noble, or at least godly, but whose tragic flaw brings not only his own ruin, but the ruin of those around him. And this is a singularly theological tragedy: Salieri's tragic flaw is "the eldest sin of all, that struck down the morning star from heaven." The deadliest of the deadly sins.

“Amadeus” means “beloved of God.” Celebrated playwright Anthony Shaffer – preoccupied (like his playwriting twin brother, Peter) with twinning, and with the clash between conventional religiosity and a wilder, more dangerous communion with the divine – imagines in this not-quite-historical story something of a Cain and Abel tale, a Jacob and Esau rivalry. He considers what it may have been like to labour as a moderately skilled composer in the shadow of one of the sublime musical geniuses of all time. To believe oneself cursed because of another’s greater measure of blessing.

One smart friend is convinced the film is anti-religious, and certainly the image of God the film conveys is thoroughly unappealing. But perhaps the film is not so much anti-religious as it is the study of an anti-religious man. Bear in mind that this is Salieri's story, his version of event. We see everything through his jaundiced eye – including God. If his deity seems cruel, withholding, manipulative, capricious, punishing, are we seeing a true image of the Father, or only one that Salieri makes in his own image (or that of his own father?).

Or perhaps it is even closer to the truth to say that the film is not anti-religious, but rather anti-religion - if by religion we mean the things we do to please God. Biblical scholar Robert Jewett reads immense theological insight in the film, arguing that it conveys “a distinctive and little-understood aspect of the theology of Romans”: that sin, properly understood, has little to do with the conventional sense of sin as indecency – Mozart’s arrogance and crudity, his irresponsibility and unwillingness to conform to social niceties – and everything to do with the self-deception of the self-righteous man who would set himself against God. Who would set himself up as God.

The film doesn’t gloss over the sins of Amadeus – as winsome as he can be, he also acts out his own high-flying arrogance, lives in deadly thrall to his own vices. “There is none righteous, not one.” But he possesses a humanity, ultimately a vulnerability, that leaves room for the glories of grace Salieri can hear in “The Marriage Of Figaro” but not live. That can find the humility to ask forgiveness from one who is all the more in need of it.

EQUUS, WICKER MAN, COPYING BEETHOVEN

Available at Videomatica

name that show

Remind anyone of anything?

"I am broadcasting on all AM frequencies. If you are out there... If anyone is out there... Please."

Or how about this?


Will's new movie opens Dec 14.

Hmm. Wonder if he'll run into Tom Cruise in those empty New York streets?

THE STAND

THE STAND (1994, USA, Mick Garris, Stephen King teleplay from his own novel)
Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma?
Yes. No. I'm God's Tom.

Stephen King calls this “a long, dark tale of Christianity,” and it’s loaded with things for Christians to chew on: indeed, some reviewers who don't believe any of this stuff are quite put off by it all. It's one of those post-apocalyptic survival yarns where the stark setting and life-and-death situations force characters to make impossible moral choices with their survival on the line. In THE STAND, those revealing decisions are clearly shown to have spiritual consequences, as people gradually align themselves with 108-year-old Mother Abigail or the demonic Randall Flagg. Hardcore King fans claim the big fat novel is a much better bet than the sometimes fascinating, sometimes tacky 1994 mini-series, but it's got its draws: watch for cameos by people like Ed Harris, Kathy Bates and even Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi.

CHILDREN OF MEN

Available at Videomatica

THE GREEN MILE

THE GREEN MILE (1999, USA, Frank Darabont, from Stephen King novel)
On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God and he asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I going to say? That it was my job?

Have you ever pitied God? All-compassionate, all-seeing, the whole panorama of human cruelty and suffering – “people being ugly to each other” – spread out before His unblinking gaze? Or does the thought make you angry: if He sees it, why not stop it? Stephen King has spent a lifetime contemplating the world’s evil – horrifying, pervasive, ineradicable – and his story about two good men who meet on death row goes to the heart of those questions.

Tom Hanks is the perfect Paul Edgecomb, a decent man trying to do an indecent job decently. These are the 1930s, jobs are scarce, and he makes ends meet supervising executions and managing the prison block where condemned men live out their last months. He sees “the green mile” as an intensive care ward for souls in extremis, a humane place where men can prepare to face their death.

I avoided this film for years. Partly its reputation for horrific prison violence, and partly the impression that it treats its gruesome subject with the glossy style and smack-you-in-the-face manipulation of the director’s subsequent film THE MAJESTIC.

I judged wrong: the film falls much closer to its predecessor, the wonderful SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and is even more explicitly spiritual, even specifically Christian. And while there’s no denying that the simple-minded innocent John Coffey is clearly a Christ figure – you see it right from the start, check those initials – several elements confound a simple one-to-one symbolic correspondence between the godly inmate and God incarnate.

Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship praises the film for offering “a powerful picture of the dignity and worth of men on death row. It shows us that God’s reach extends even to the least of these, the ones the world would only too happily forget.” There are grisly depictions of electric chair executions – the film challenges the morality of capital punishment, though not simplistically – but there is great humanity as well. We see characters wholly and convincingly given over to evil, others striving to hold on to, or in the inescapable grip of, a Good overwhelming enough to inspire a certain kind of fear. A good that’s powerful enough to make a difference, but at a price.

There is a consideration of mortatlity and inquiry into the nature of God, there is the Problem of Evil, but mostly there are finely drawn, memorable characters and – trust Stephen King for this – the appeal of good old-fashioned story-telling. Look away from the screen when you must, but don’t miss seeing this compelling portrayal of a compassion, empathy and self-sacrifice that may be divine.

IN YOUR HANDS, COOL HAND LUKE, DEAD MAN WALKING, SLING BLADE, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION


Available at Videomatica

dry season / new crowned hope

Doug Cummings points us to DRY SEASON, another international film that sounds like it will follow in the footsteps of other DC reccs that have found their place in the Soul Food pantheon; f’rinstance THE SON, L’ENFANT, HAWAII OSLO, and everything in black and white by Robert Bresson. It’s part of the New Crowned Hope series commissioned as part of Vienna’s celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday: here’s Doug’s entry from filmjourney.com, followed by gleanings from the July issue of Sight & Sound... (Since I can't seem to make that link work, here's the address of Doug's review, so you can cut and paste it into your browser; http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2007/07/02)

filmjourney.com
Doug Cummings, July 2
Continuing my exploration of the excellent New Crowned Hope series, I caught up with Mahamat Saleh Haroun's entry from Chad, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last year. The filmmaker builds off the themes of vengeance and forgiveness in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito by setting his story during the period following the Chadian civil war, when universal amnesty was officially declared. Rejecting that policy, an elderly man whose son was murdered during the conflict asks his grandson to avenge his father, and the teenager travels to a nearby village determined to assassinate the murderer. As the boy is devising his plan, however, the murderer--now a scarred and hardened sixty-year-old baker--offers him a job.
I don't want to say more than that, because this is a highly nuanced story that focuses on the antagonistic, yet strangely positive relationship that forms between master and apprentice-assassin. It quietly emphasizes the physical and emotional tensions that emerge in ways that are reminiscent of the Dardennes' superb THE SON. Like the Belgian masters, Haroun has an especially strong sense of visual rhythm and knows how to frame figures in loose yet provocative counterpoint. Haroun has claimed he was also inspired by the minimalist power of Mozart's violin concertos, and has crafted a deep meditation on justice through his highly observant camera, strong sense of place, and the film's terrifically underplayed, simmering performances. It's a fine, powerful achievement.

from IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
James Bell, July ’07 Sight & Sound, pg 37
DRY SEASON is set in the present and deals with a personal tragedy resulting from Chad’s ongoing civil war. It follows a teenager named Atim who is commanded by his grandfather to track down Nassara, the man who murdered the boy’s father before he was born. Atim travels to the country’s capital N’Jamena and soon finds Nassara, who employs him in his bakery. Atim continues to plot Nassara’s murder but experiences conflicting feelings when the older man shows him a paternal kindness.
James Bell, Sight & Sound: How did you become involved in New Crowned Hope?
Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: I prepared a ten-page treatment for DRY SEASON and Simon Field (executive producer of the New Crowned Hope series) thought it reflected the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation in Mozart’s opera “La clemenza di Tito.” So he invited me to join the project. I thought the best way to make DRY SEASON was to be very spare and pure: Mozart’s sonatas are simpler but also eternal and I wanted to see the film like that.
The first films I saw weren’t African: I was inspired by ROME, OPEN CITY, Charlie Chaplin, and now Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
S&S: DRY SEASON has been compared to the Dardennes’ THE SON, which has a similar story. Was it an influence?
Haroun: No. When I wrote the script, THE SON hadn’t been made. But the editor on DRY SEASON also worked on THE SON. I like the Dardenne brothers, but their approach is more factual whereas I tried to give to my story something mythological.

from CINEMA’S TAP IN THE DESERT
Geoffrey Macnab, July ’07 Sight & Sound, pg 38
What connects the world of Mozart to film-makers such as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun? By the time Mozart, racked with ill health and poverty, made his last public conducting appearance at the New Crowned Hope Masonic lodge in Vienna, the composer had become a highly politicized figure. Peter Sellars, Artistic Director, New Crowned Hope series: “Mozart created superbly refined works of art in “The Marriage of Figaro” or “Don Giovanni,” which are statements of the equality of all human beings. In the last year of his life, however, his work was no longer political in the same way but rather strangely illuminated, not holding grudges and instead offering alternatives.” What Sellars wanted from the New Crowned Hope film-makers was “a high level of self-searching” in pieces that dealt with the themes of transformation, truth, reconciliation and redemption that run through the composer’s final works.

BEYOND THE HORIZON
Mark Cousins, July Sight & Sound, pp 35-36
Back in 1790 new ideas were sweeping Europe. The French revolution was out of the starting blocks and marching to the tune of the Enlightenment, while in Vienna it was the freemasons who carried the torch of liberal fervour. When the secret police closed down their lodges there was an outcry, so the emperor – anxious to pacify his opponents – allowed one to reopen. To celebrate the event, a 35-year-old modernizer called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducted a cantata that was to be one of his last compositions. The lodge went by the exquisite name of New Crowned Hope.
Two hundred and fifty years after the composer’s birth, Austria is going Mozart mad. Amid the Amadeus keyrings and schnitzel, theatre impresario Peter Sellars has devised the New Crowned Hope arts festival, which took over Vienna at the end of last year and will play at the Barbican in London in July and August. This tribute to Mozart includes not a single note of his music. Instead Sellars has commissioned new works of music, theatre, dance, film, visual arts and architecture that respond to the themes of magic and transformation, truth and reconciliation, and ceremonies for the dead that inform Mozart’s last three great works: “The Marriage of Figaro,” “La clemenza di Tito” and the “Requiem.”
While the festival’s music, opera and dance are largely Euro-American, the six feature films and one short are from Kurdish Iran and Iraq, Indonesia, Paraguay, Chad, Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa. Tsai Ming-Liang’s I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE is a work of rare tenderness in which the director’s regular Lee Kang-Sheng plays two men, one in a coma, one a migrant Chinese worker in Kuala Lumpur who has been mugged. The film is about how each is nursed – and their bodies washed – by a young woman and a Bangladeshi man respectively. in each case the nursing is both a Magdalene act and an erotic one. The film ends with a real coup, a cinematic equivalent to the hidden track on a music CD. More than 30 seconds after the movie seems to have ended, with black on the screen and no sound, the top edge of the frame begins to glow blue. Nearly two minutes later there is a revelation.
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, magical or subconscious material erupts into the everyday to render its events mythic. Like Tsai’s film, SYNDROMES has two stories and a style that’s visually detached and radically spare: the people in his second story seem reincarnations of those from the first section. The last conversation in the first story is about reincarnation.
DRY SEASON is a version of the Dardenne brothers’ THE SON in which a young man whose father has been murdered is sent by his grandfather to kill the murderer, who turns out to be a taciturn, community-minded baker of physical nobility. The son becomes his apprentice and the baker asks to adopt him. As with the Dardennes, it feels as if Haroun has been watching Robert Bresson: most of DRY SEASON is confined to the bakery, where the suspense simmers as the men circle each other, and in the absence of words we read their body language.
New Crowned Hope shows how good world cinema is.

silent light

I've not been so excited about a forthcoming film since DOGVILLE played Cannes a few years back. Optimistic it will play the VIFF, as both JAPON and BATTLE IN HEAVEN were here in previous years. Here are excerpts from Jonathan Romney's piece in the July Sight & Sound.

Carlos Reygadas: SILENT LIGHT
review by Jonathan Romney

I felt deeply antipathetic to Reygada’s first film JAPON but was bowled over by his follow-up BATTLE IN HEAVEN, a success de scandale when it played in Cannes two years ago. In SILENT LIGHT he abandons his first two films’ sometimes calculated outrage quotient and goes for something deeper and more delicate. After the hothouse Catholic iconography of BATTLE IN HEAVEN he’ss still on a religious tack: his third feature is set within an austere Mennonite community in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The community sepaks Plautdietsch, a German dialect related to medieval Dutch, and this, along with a smattering of Spanish, is the language of the film.

The protagonist is Mennonite farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall), a husband and father who, contrary to the laws of his community, falls for another woman. He views this new attachment not with shame but with joy and eagerness: he truly believes that his passion for ice-cream seller Mariane (Maria Pankratz) is part of the fate determined for him by God. Johan vows to give her up... (SPOILERS EDITED)

In its severe, contemplative way, SILENT LIGHT challenges you to take seriously certain highly unfashionable propositions about grace and divine intervention: in that sense it’s not dissimilar to BREAKING THE WAVES, by that other Dreyer acolyte Lars von Trier, but in a much more serious register. ...

The film opens with what is arguably the single most remarkable shot in Cannes this year. ...

Much of SILENT LIGHT consists of scenes of Mennonite life that lend it an ethnographic documentary feel: Johan’s family praying at breakfast, his solemn children bathing in a pool, tender rituals such as the assaging of feet or the combing of... (his wife) Esther’s hair. ...

SILENT LIGHT is one of the more mature and thoughtful recent films about adultery... The film also makes clear the intensity of the sexual passion involved: here is a rare work that treats middle-aged sex between ordinary-looking people seriously, and photographs it beautifully. The camera plays subtly on the facial likeness between Esther and Marianne and on the facial likeness between Johan and his father, who are father and son in real life and both members, like many of the cast, of Chihuahua’s Mennonite community.

You can’t help wondering what it means for a Mennonite man to play a character caught in the throes of an extra-marital romance and what understanding Reygadas had with the community and with individual participants. But you no longer get the impression – deeply troubling in both JAPON and BATTLE IN HEAVEN – that the director is exploiting his non-professional actors, In this film there’s a contemplative sensitivity in the way he studies their faces and bodies that makes for a sensuous and compassionate experience. The ending could be as much a bone of contention as the notorious final shot (pious or ironic?) of BREAKING THE WAVES, but even if you can’t buy into the religious dimension of SILENT LIGHT, it’s hard to remain unmoved – not least by the exalting spectacle of a promising director making the transition to true mastery.

Sight & Sound, July 2007

And here's a link to Peter Chattaway's blog, where he posts an article about Canadian Mennonite novelist Miriam Toews and her casting as Esther in the film!

eve & the fire horse

Recent enthusings from the folks at IMAGE Journal about a Vancouver-lensed picture with east-meets-west, Buddha-meets-Jesus themes

Eve and the Fire Horse
An audience favorite at the Sundance Festival, Eve and the Fire Horse is a lovely debut film by Canadian Julia Kwan. The protagonist is a child caught between cultures and faiths in the Chinese immigrant community in Vancouver during the 1970s. Her parents and grandmother are still immersed in the old Chinese culture where remnants of Buddhism consort with a general emphasis on “luck” (something one can find with difficulty and easily lose). After her grandmother dies, Eve and her older sister Karena encounter Christianity in the form of the Catholic Church. Karena assumes the role of stern moralist, bent on a mission of evangelism and self-mortification. Eve, who is gifted with a hyper-active imagination and much less certainty than her sister, feels caught between the two cultures. That imagination of hers allows for some “magical realism” in the film, which comes off well, with the sort of seamlessness that good magical realism should possess. Karena is a divider of sheep and goats, but Eve is driven to be a reconciler. In one delightful scene Eve imagines Jesus dancing with Buddha in her living room at night. This sounds cuter and more precious than it actually is in the film. One of the refreshing things about Eve and the Fire Horse is that it refuses to engage in caricature, even in its portrayal of religion. The Christianity in the film can be moralistic and abstract, but it also impels its adherents to acts of love and generosity. The ensemble cast, including actors brought in from Hong Kong and Los Angeles, is terrific. And the soundtrack is pitch perfect. Eve and the Fire Horse is currently playing in a few art houses, but it will be available on DVD starting July 24.

Originally appeared in IMAGE Update, July 15 2007

Christianity Today Movies editor Mark Moring adds his own strong recommendation:

"What in the world is a Fire Horse? I didn't know either, till I watched a wonderful off-the-beaten path film recently called Eve and the Fire Horse, now available on DVD. One of the perks of my job is hearing about films that, as a "regular" movie fan, I probably would never know existed. Eve and the Fire Horse is one such hidden gem.

The movie had a limited 2006 release in Canada and has been on the festival circuit for the last couple of years, winning over audiences and critics alike. At Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Prize for World Cinema, Roger Ebert crowed, "Luminous! One of the most beloved films at Sundance this year. … Intelligent, delicate, and touching."

I couldn't agree more.

The film, something of a "spiritual-coming-of-age" story, centers on Eve, a precocious 9-year-old girl with a vivid imagination. Seems that she was born in the Year of the Fire Horse, which, according to ancient Chinese legend, means some serious bad luck. And indeed, after misfortune and tragedy strike her Chinese-Canadian family, young Eve begins to wonder about the Meaning of Life and other Big Questions.

Meanwhile, her older sister Karena has started looking into Christianity, and soon, statues of Jesus pop up in the family home—right next to the porcelain Buddha and several Chinese goddesses. As the young sisters—who dub themselves The Girls of Perpetual Sorrow—continue their quest for spiritual truth, we see it all unfold through Eve's wide-eyed, soul-searching wonder. Various religious figures "appear" to Eve here and there, the imaginative musings of a child that are reminiscent of another of my favorite films, 2005's Millions. And no, director Julia Kwan didn't steal any ideas from Danny Boyle's fine film; she wrote this script almost a decade ago, based in part on her upbringing as a Chinese-Canadian who grew up in a Buddhist family but also went to a Christian school.

It's a fascinating—and utterly delightful—study of what spiritual searching might look like through the eyes of the child, lest we've all forgotten. And if you're concerned about the spiritual mishmash of Christianity and Buddhism and ancient Chinese beliefs, don't be. There's a whole lot of truth, Real Truth, that shines through in the end—and I don't want to give away any more than that, other than to say this: Eve and the Fire Horse, though made a couple years ago, is one of the most enjoyable films I've seen in 2007. And the young actresses who play the sisters—Phoebe Jo Jo Kut as Eve and Hollie Lo as Karena—will steal your heart with their terrific performances."

Available at Videomatica

Soul Food Bargains at HMV

Okay, the only place in town to rent your Soul Food flicks is Videomatica. That's a given. But if you want to pick up a few to own, for not too many bucks...

I was at the mall the other day, jotted down a whole batch of Soul Food DVDs they've got on sale. (And you can mix and match your deals: buy one DVD priced 2/$20 and a second priced 2/$10, you'd pay $15 for the pair. Make sense?)

Here's what I saw...

$6
AMISTAD

2/$20
COOL HAND LUKE
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
THE ELEPHANT MAN
FORREST GUMP
GROUNDHOG DAY
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
THE SIXTH SENSE
SUPERMAN RETURNS

2/$25
BRUCE ALMIGHTY
THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
THE EXORCIST
GODSPELL
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR
LIFE OF BRIAN
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
THE STRAIGHT STORY
THE UNFORGIVEN

$20
BECKET
LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (SPECIAL EXTENDED EDITION)
LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (SPECIAL EXTENDED EDITION)
LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING (SPECIAL EXTENDED EDITION)
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

PERSONAL VELOCITY

PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS (2002, USA, Rebecca Miller)
I don't know what all of this means, but it's got to mean something. Don't you see that? It makes sense. It's got to be a sign.

Rebecca Miller transfers three of her stories to the screen with all the instincts of a true film maker. There is a literary quality here – effective use of voice over, the below-the-surface-ness of a fine short story – but that doesn't stop this deeply moving film from being equally cinematic, as strongly visual as it is verbal.

As a director, Miller clearly knows how to work with actors, drawing extraordinary performances from Kyra Sedgwick as a woman who takes her children and flees an abusive husband, Parker Posey as an up-and-coming literary editor, and Fairuza Balk as a young woman who picks up her first hitch-hiker: "She had known it was a sign...."

All three portraits are rich with human detail, capturing women who make unexpected, even inscrutable, decisions at those hinge moments when lives undergo tumultuous change. A certain unity is achieved by the distinctive look of the film – a wonderfully successful use of digital video – and the fact that parts of each of these New York stories occur on the same day, as signalled by the news report of a freakish traffic accident which plays into each.

The final 26 minute episode is a marvel of narrative understatement and compaction: the opening sequence at the donut shop uses extremely deft and understated editing to suggest important themes and raise doubts about characters and chronology, presenting subtle details which may reflect the character's thoughts and fears, or may be foreshadowing or memory. To say more about how this culminating story unfolds would be to rob it of its power, but it is highly recommended not only for its artistry, subtlety and humanity, but also for a deep sense that there may be more at work in our lives than our own ambitions and strategies for survival. Highly recommended.


Available at Videomatica

SHANE

SHANE (1953, USA, George Stevens)
Ma, I just love Shane. He's so good.

According to movie books, this is the classic western; a mysterious stranger hangs up his guns, but when the bad guys go too far, he's got to decide between his old ways and the new. And to judge by all that's been written in Christian movie books, the title character is practically Jesus on a white horse riding.

So you may be fuddled just a bit when you rent this one and it doesn't look like westerns are supposed to look – that Shane fella sure as shootin' don't look like no cowboy hero to me, ma'am. And unless you're a Christ Figure Hunter ready to find a Jesus symbol in every cross-shaped tree or window frame, I'm not sure Alan Ladd is going to become your image of Jesus any time soon. He may be called on to save the day – most heroes are – but that's a fair sight different than saving the world. I wonder: if director George Stevens hadn't gone on to make The Greatest Story Ever Told a dozen years later, would it have occurred to anybody that this particular buckskinned good guy was actually a stand-in for The Good Guy?

Still, if you find inspiration in stories of good, simple people resisting ruthless and powerful evil – and if you can get past genre expectations of cowboy hats and noisy saloons – this surprisingly low-key film is the touchstone.

PALE RIDER

Available at Videomatica