Decent Films Blog
Not Film Related: Speak Up on Health Care and Life
I won’t make a habit of this, I promise.
If you live in the United States and haven’t yet done so (or haven’t done so recently), take action on the health care debate.
- First, learn why the U.S. bishops insist that the current Senate legislation must be defeated.
- Next, go to www.usccb.org/action to email your senators and representatives.
- Support Bart Stupak and his remaining Democratic allies in resisting the Senate bill.
- Learn more at American Papist.
Do it now!
Joseph of Nazareth: The Man Closest to Christ
Buy at Ignatius.com
Today is the Solemnity of Saint Joseph. Last year, Ignatius Press released a Region 1 DVD of Joseph of Nazareth: The Man Closest to Christ (2000), an Italian production from Lux Vide and Mediaset billed as the first feature film on the story of St. Joseph. The film is the first in a series of four “Close to Jesus” films, though I understand it’s by far the most biblical, and certainly the Gospels give us more of a story-arc for Joseph than for the other three subjects, Mary Magdalene, Thomas and Judas Iscariot.
Matt Page of Bible Films Blog has a review of Joseph of Nazareth as well as an interesting post analyzing the notable similarities between Joseph and The Nativity Story, which also focuses significantly on St. Joseph (many of which I noticed also).
My take on Joseph of Nazareth is pretty close to Matt’s. I watched it with my family this Advent, and it was a nice change of pace from The Nativity Story, though regrettably it’s nothing like the definitive birth of Christ movie we’re still waiting for.
To start on a positive note, I don’t often discover a new angle on a biblical text from a Bible movie, but Joseph of Nazareth suggests an attractive approach I had never before considered to a deceptively knotty passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel, namely, the passage in Matthew 1 in which Mary has been found to be with child by the Holy Spirit, and Joseph resolves to “divorce her quietly.”
The passage is full of hidden ambiguities. When St. Matthew tells us that Mary was “found to be with child by the Holy Spirit,” is that final prepositional phrase Matthew’s aside to the reader (she was found to be with child — but it was by the Holy Spirit)? Or does it suggest that the divine origin of Mary’s condition was part of the discovery, at least for some? Does “being a just man” have conjunctive or disjunctive force — that is, was Joseph “unwilling to expose Mary to shame” because he was a just man, or in spite of being a just man? Was it the resolution to divorce her, or the decision to do so quietly, that is related to his “just” status? Does “just” here bespeak primarily observance of Torah, or a broader sort of righteousness?
Most concretely, what exactly is meant by “divorcing her quietly” and not “putting her to shame”? Divorce was a public act; there would seem to be no way to abandon Mary in her pregnant state, however undramatically, without “putting her to shame.” I remember puzzling over this passage in scripture studies classes at St. Charles Borromeo.
I was struck, then, by Joseph of Nazareth’s portrayal of Joseph deciding to go through with the wedding and then divorce Mary quietly after the birth of the child. As far as I know, the usual assumption is that the “divorce” in question refers to breaking off the betrothal, a bond with marital force. Movies often depict Mary’s pregnancy coming in the middle of a year-long betrothal period in which Joseph and Mary are pledged to one another but have not yet come together, as Matthew tells us.
On the other hand, Matthew also indicates that Joseph took Mary into his house immediately after the dream of the angel. Thus, the prospect of going through with the wedding and then divorcing Mary quietly afterward would seem to be a viable option. The child would be assumed to be Joseph’s, and Mary would not be shamed. It’s so simple I don’t know why I never thought of it before. That doesn’t make it the correct solution, of course, but as far as I know it could be.
Three Phases of Pixar History
Peter Chattaway has just posted some thoughts he’s previously shared elsewhere regarding the shape of Pixar’s body of work to date, and I’ve long thought it’s a brilliant theory. In essence, he proposes three phases of Pixar history, which might be labeled thus:
- the “Disney distribution” phase, consisting of the first seven films up to Cars, which were all made under contract for distribution by Disney;
- the “looking beyond Disney” phase, consisting of the next three films — Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up — which may well have gone into development at a point when Pixar believed they were likely to part ways with Disney; and
- the “Pixar purchase” phase, consisting of Pixar’s roster of coming films — Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters Inc. 2 and The Bear and the Bow (or Brave?) — all of which began life very much under the Disney umbrella, either by Disney itself or by Pixar after it was purchased by Disney.
What makes this theory so interesting is the way it illuminates the differences between the films belonging to each of the three phases. I’m not sure it’s entirely persuasive to say, as Peter does, that the three phase 2 films, initiated when Pixar was likely thinking outside the Disney box, necessarily “aim higher” than the seven films of phase 1. In particular, I think The Incredibles aims as high as any film in Pixar’s oeuvre.
I would put it this way: The basic premise of each of Pixar’s first seven films fits comfortably within mainstream expectations for Hollywood animated family films. Anthropomorphic toys, bugs or cars; friendly monsters saddled with a human child; a father-and-son fish story; even a family of incognito super heroes — these are all concepts that could easily be pitched to Disney execs without making anyone blink or sweat. Pixar might take these concepts in brilliant directions, but there’s nothing about the basic concept of any of these films that especially pushes the envelope of family entertainment.
With the next three films, on the other hand, there is something audacious and outside-the-box about the premise itself, in terms of family-film expectations. A talky picture about a French rat who wants to be a chef? A substantially dialogue-free slapstick adventure about a lone robot in a post-apocalyptic world of trash? An elderly widower absconding with his house via balloon to South America? None of these hits you over the head as a ready-made idea for an animated family film. There is something counter-intuitive about each of them. Here is where Pixar pushes the envelope, not just in terms of how to make a animated family film, but even what it is possible for an animated Hollywood family film to be.
The End of Fairy-tale Princesses?
Yesterday I wrote about the possible effects of the box-office success of Alice in Wonderland on fairy-tale revisionism in family films to come. The flip side is the box-office disappointment of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, which hit DVD shelves yesterday.
It looks like concern over The Princess and the Frog’s poor performance is translating into branding concerns for upcoming animated fairy tales, including the Disney project formerly known as Rapunzel, and possibly Pixar’s The Bear and the Bow.
I found The Princess and the Frog to be an engaging blend of classic Disney themes and contemporary sensibilities, despite scary, morally mixed voodoo imagery too intense for younger kids. It didn’t click with audiences, though … and there’s some feeling that the title may have been part of the problem. …
Fathers For Good
This week Knights of Columbus website Fathers for Good has a short interview with me in their Newsworthy Dads feature. As you might expect, the interview questions focus on father figures in this year’s crop of Oscar nominees as well as recent Hollywood offerings. Unfortunately, the picture is more downbeat than not. Read more.
Coming at You: More 3D, Fairy-tale Revisionism
It’s a straw in the wind: As the recently restored 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz comes out on Blu-ray today, Warner Bros is giving renewed attention to a pair of new Oz projects in early development, now likelier than ever to come to fruition. The reason: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
Avatar’s monster box-office performance may have been the game changer, but it was Alice’s inflated opening ($116 million on the first weekend and still #1 in its second frame) that confirmed the trend: After six decades of curiosity status and technological evolution, 3D is finally the future of big-screen spectacle.
Upcoming movies like the Clash of the Titans remake and two final Harry Potter movies originally shot in 2D have been or are being retrofitted for 3D. From what little I know about 3D conversion, this seems dauntingly complicated — but then Burton actually shot Alice in Wonderland in 2D planning all along to convert it to 3D after the fact …
Green Zone: “Kinnear Lied, People Died”
In my last post on Green Zone, I wrote that while I was reasonably pleased with my review, I was sure that “if I were a savvier political thinker it would be a better review.” Now, posting at Arts & Faith, Peter Chattaway has thoughts that would never have occurred to me, darn it.
Responding to another poster who called Green Zone the movie equivalent of a “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker, Peter quipped that it was more like “Greg Kinnear lied, people died.“ Following that thought, Peter wrote:
I mention the “Greg Kinnear lied people died” thing because it seems to me that this movie lets a LOT of people off the hook.
The Iraqis who posed and postured as though they had WMD? The movie’s one fictitous Iraqi general says he told the Americans flat-out that they didn’t have any WMD.
The Bush administration which made the possibility of WMD such a key part (but not the ONLY part) of their casus belli for invading Iraq? Well, it turns out Greg Kinnear lied to them.
The CIA which, along with intelligence agencies from all over the world, believed that Iraq had WMD or at least WMD programs? Hey, whaddayaknow, the movie’s one major CIA character (Brendan Gleeson) is one of the skeptical good guys! (And despite a single passing reference to the UN early on, the film ignores the existence of all those other intelligence agencies -- which begs the question: Was Greg Kinnear lying to them, too? Or do they simply not exist?)
Even the journalist who disseminated Greg Kinnear’s lies in the first place gets a redemption of sorts in the end. Having made the case for war, she now gets to make the case AGAINST the case. She still gets a good story, as it were. (And, as noted in one of the earlier posts, despite the fact that this fictitious character is clearly based on a real-life New York Times reporter, the fictitious character has been assigned to a different paper -- so the New York Times is let off the hook completely, too.)
So you have a film which will piss off the pro-war types because, well, it’s anti-war, if nothing else; and you have a film which will piss off many (though of course not all) anti-war types because it lets nearly every culprit off the hook while pinning all the blame on a single fictitious character.
Green Zone and Torture
Regular readers know that I usually steer clear of politically themed movies. I’m the same in real life; political discussions usually shut me down, simply because I feel I have nothing to say, and on the rare occasions that I do I often wind up regretting it.
I don’t quite regret taking on Paul Greengrass’s new Matt Damon thriller Green Zone, although it turned out to be such a tough review in an even tougher week that I almost do. All things considered, I’m reasonably pleased with how the piece came out, though I’m sure if I were a savvier political thinker it would be a better review.
Now, though, as it goes live, I suddenly wish I had given some space to an angle I missed. I won’t go back and rework it (it’s long already, like so much of my work), but I wish to add a coda here.
Continue reading at NCRegister.com >Katyn: Poland’s Dark Night
Exactly 70 years ago today, on March 5, 1940, Josef Stalin and the entire Soviet Politburo signed an order to massacre tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war: officers, mostly reservists; doctors, academics, civil servants, clergymen of all faiths—the cream of the Polish intelligentsia.
If you haven’t seen the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn—one of my top 10 films of last year—you should take this occasion to make a point of seeing it. (It’s available on DVD and streaming from Netflix.)
Some background: The massacre was uncovered in April 1943 by the Nazis, which found tens of thousands of bodies in mass graves in Russia’s Katyn Forest near Smolensk. A multi-national investigation correctly dated the executions to the spring of 1940—a finding Goebbels attempted to exploit by disgracing Moscow to Washington and London and splitting the Allies.
The 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100
“Read not the Times, read the eternities,” Thoreau advised. The 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100 Films, just released days ahead of the Academy Awards, won’t make the headlines of the Times — but if you prefer to scrutinize the eternities, you might want to skip the Oscars and check out the Arts & Faith Top 100.
Arts & Faith is an online community with roots going back to 1999. “A forum to discuss movies from a Christian perspective” was the original mission statement. In 2004, the A&F message board was founded to offer broader discussion of the arts in general. Later that year, the A&F community produced the first edition of its “Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films” list. (I’ve been a part of this history since sometime in the 2001–2003 range, and I vote in the Top 100 polls.)
Updated versions of the Top 100 appeared in 2005 and 2006, then the list took a hiatus.
Miyazaki Week at Decent Films!
Marking this week’s DVD release of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo — as well as new special editions of three of Miyazaki’s most family-friendly films, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Castle in the Sky), I’ve posted a new article on “The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki,” written for this month’s issue of Catholic World Report. (The version here is expanded from the magazine version.)
I hope also to post more reviews of other Miyazaki films later this week. Watch for them!
Bible Films Blog: Color and Symbolism in Bible Films
My friend Matt Page, who blogs Bible Films Blog, has just written an interesting post on color and color symbolism in Bible films.
Some highlights:
Many people think that colour only arrived in cinema only arrived sometime after the Second World War. However, the use of colour in moving pictures goes right back to cinema’s earliest days. Early films like The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ [1905] had no Technicolour processes, so resorted to hand colouring significant elements of each shot. …
Some of the earliest films to experiment with colour were in fact films based on the Bible … In [The] Ten Commandments [1923] DeMille experimented with the new [color] process for the scenes of the exodus — capturing both the joy and the sense of entering a whole new world. With [The King of Kings (1927)] he saved the colour for the resurrection …
One Bible film to make particularly good use of these colours was Nicholas Ray’s 1961 King of Kings (pictured above). One notable example is Jesus’ outer garments which change from brown prior to ministry, to red when he is at the peak of his powers, and then again to white as he becomes the spotless sacrificial lamb.
Matt’s blog is a helpful resource on Bible films, particularly for informed commentary on Bible films in relation to the Bible texts and comparison and contrast of different cinematic interpretations of particular stories. He’s also got his ear to the ground on Bible films in development. Check out his blog.
2009: Year of Onscreen & Offscreen Infidelity?
A recent story in Variety connects the dots around various real-life and large- and small-screen stories and comes up with a disturbing picture: One way or another, 2009 was a high-profile year for adultery.
The headline reads “Infidelity scores Oscar noms,” but Variety writer Diane Garrett sees a larger pattern that includes the public scandals of Tiger Woods, Governor Mark Sanford, and John Edwards, revelations concerning small-screen personalities David Letterman and “John & Kate Plus 8” stars Jon and Kate Gosselin, and what Garrett suggests seemed like “nearly every other movie released in the past six months,” including the 8½ musical remake Nine and the Meryl Streep–Alec Baldwin comedy It’s Complicated.
The kernel of the story, though, is that extramarital liaisons of one kind or another are central to four of the ten Academy Award Best Picture nominees: An Education, A Serious Man, Up in the Air and Precious. Garrett writes:
The Return of Decent Films Mail
Too long neglected, Decent Films Mail returns today with two new columns, Mailbag #16 and Mailbag #17. (For the benefit of RSS subscribers, at this writing it looks like the RSS feed hasn’t yet picked up on them. This looks like a glitch; I’ll look into it.)
As sporadic as Decent Films Mail has been in the past, I hope from now on, in keeping with my general program of adding more content more frequently, to to be more regular about the Mailbag too — and in my responsiveness to reader emails, which has also been regrettably sporadic in the past. So sporadic, in fact, that I acknowledged it on the Contact form, which noted, “I read every email I get, and I try to write back, but sometimes I’m just too busy (or I plain forget).”
This year I got off to a wobbly start due to some contact form–related technical issues, but that’s behind me now. (There are still one or two emails from January I have yet to get to, not because of more delay issues, but because I’m trying to frame thoughtful replies.) In keeping with my new resolve, I’ve changed the Contact form to read: “I read every email I get, and if you include a valid reply address I will endeavor to respond promptly.”
So: I’ve you’ve written in the past and waited weeks — or indefinitely — for a reply, I’d like to invite and encourage you to write again and give me a chance to make it up to you. I’ll do better, starting now. (Since I missed making this a New Year’s resolution due to my January mail issues, I’ll make it a Lenten discipline that I hope to carry over into Easter and beyond.)
Is there a review or article you want to comment on? Something you liked or that bothered you? Comments, criticisms, questions, suggestions, complaints, of delight, cries of outrage? Write me. I want to hear from you! And I’ll write back promptly (if you include a mailable address).
In the meantime, check out Mailbag #16 and Mailbag #17.
Best Films of 2009: More Lists
A few weeks ago the National Catholic Register ran my 2009 year-end piece with my lists of “top ten” and runner-up films. (An expanded version of the article appeared at Decent Films.) This week, I’d like to catch up with a few other lists from Christian sources worth noting.
Earlier this week, Christianity Today Movies & TV released the second of its two annual Top 10 lists, the CT Critics’ Choice Awards. Last week CT released its other list, the 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2009. (Full disclosure/disclaimer: As a regular CT contributor, I voted in these awards, though I didn’t necessarily vote for all the winners, or even see them all.)
In 1-10 order, the 2009 CT Critics Choice winners are:
More on Lenten Viewing
My Lenten viewing suggestions prompted a reader to ask:
Would you consider supplementing an English-only list? I love the idea of a Lenten movie night, but I have several children under reading age, and my husband just dislikes reading his movies. LOL. I will have to carve out time on my own during the week to watch the intriguing foreign films you have included.
In reply, I’ve supplemented my original blog post with a follow-up mail response, posted at the bottom of the original blog post.
Live Near Phoenix, Arizona?
If so, check out the Emeth Society, billed as “A Book and Film Society Promoting Catholic Culture in the Diocese of Phoenix.”
And if you don’t live near Phoenix, check out their website anyway, and ask yourself, “How can I get something like this going in my diocese?”
No matter where you live, the Emeth Society’s website is worth a gander just for the excellent blogroll-style sidebar of links: authors, Catholic theologians, education, film and more. I’m sure this is only such sidebar ever assembled to bring together links for Hayao Miyazaki, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Ballet Arizona, the Arts & Faith Top 100 Spiritual Films and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins all in one place.
If you do live near Phoenix, definitely don’t miss the Emeth Society’s next film screening, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which also happens to be one of my six recommended movies for the six weeks of Lent. (So they’re watching it in week 2 instead of week 5, let’s not get legalistic about these things.)
Into the Desert: Lent and Film
Many Catholics observe Lent with a discipline of withdrawal, in whole or in part, from mass communications media: movies, television, Internet, radio, music, newspapers. This is an admirable discipline, and one I recommend.
Short of withdrawal, I recommend limiting and altering one’s media use in keeping with the spirit of the season. For example, if you typically have, say, U2 or Taylor Swift CDs in your car, or if you listen to talk radio, try exchanging your usual listening for some Gregorian chant. (If you usually listen to chant, try holy silence, or maybe CDs of the Bible or something.)
My work doesn’t permit me not to watch movies at all. I could try to cut back to the bare minimum of movies necessary to do my job, but I find it helpful to make a practice of spiritual viewing during Lent, just as many make a practice of spiritual reading.
For those inclined to consider this practice, here are six film suggestions for the six weeks of Lent.
A Brief Note on Horror
One thought I’ve had for using the site’s new features, including the blog and the homepage Spotlight, is to highlight some of my past writing for particular occasions, or even for no particular occasion, just to bring an older piece to the attention of readers who might not have encountered it before.
This weekend, the release of The Wolfman made me think of highlighting my 2003 essay on horror and the macabre, originally written for the re-release of Ridley Scott’s Alien. At first I thought I would take the occasion to make a few cosmetic changes, but as I began pulling threads here and there, I kept thinking of ways to improve the piece, until I wound up doing quite a bit more work expanding the piece than I originally intended. (The story of my life…)
Anyway, enjoy the expanded piece.
“Spectacular Spider-Man”
Buy at Amazon.com
Note: Volumes 6 and 7 of “Spectacular Spider-Man” are now available on DVD.
“Spectacular Spider-Man” is perhaps the most exciting entertainment for family audiences to come from the small screen in a very long time. I’ve been watching it on DVD with my kids, and with this week’s release of Vols 6 and 7 nearly completing the show’s two-season run to date, it’s apparent that the show just keeps getting better and better.
“Spectacular Spider-Man” caught my attention early on for its sharp dialogue, clever plotting, humor and thoughtful moral vision. Watching those early episodes, I laughed with delight when Peter Parker responded to a remark about the irascible Mr. Jameson being a decent man “deep down” by asking doubtfully, “Are we talking Marianas Trench deep or Dante’s ninth circle deep?” Think about the two disparate frames of reference in that throwaway line. I’m pretty sure the cartoon characters I grew up with never said anything remotely that erudite.
Well-drawn characterizations and relationships give the series immediate appeal. Peter himself, who starts season 1 as a high-school junior new to superhero-dom, is far more complex and interesting than the big-screen movies have allowed him to be: likable, compassionate, conflicted, and actually exhibiting the science smarts the movies only talked about. Aunt May isn’t just sweet and and decent, but actively and even strictly involved in Peter’s life; she keeps him on a curfew, and makes him stay in touch via cell phone when he’s out late (which leads to very funny moments during action scenes).
Some characters are reimagined from previous incarnations; others are pretty much as we've always known them. Peter’s closest friends, Gwen Stacy and Harry Osbourne, are fellow nerds. Traditionally blonde Liz Allen is now a Latina, J. Jonah Jameson is a rather manic caricature. Mary Jane is an free-spirited but empathetic siren. Green Goblin is a Joker-like wag in the mold of Mark Hamill’s Joker from “Batman: The Animated Series.” The creators are clearly familiar with multiple versions of the Spider-Man mythos, from the original comics to Sam Raimi’s films and Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man series, and manage to balance Spider-Man’s varied history into something at once fresh and familiar.
I’ve been consistently impressed with the thought put into the action scenes. Series creators Greg Weisman and Victor Cook have never settled for having Spider-Man simply beat the bad guys — there has to be something clever and inventive about it. Thus, in an early episode featuring the monstrous Lizard, who has taken refuge in the heated alligator house at the Bronx Zoo, Spider-Man hits on maneuvering his reptilian foe into the polar bear pool, where the frigid water will slow the cold-blooded creature’s metabolism. In another episode, Spider-Man combats a newly minted Doctor Octopus in a way I never thought of: by running down the battery powering his mechanical arms.
The stylized, anime-influenced visual design is simple but vigorous and appealing, and carefully worked-out action choreography is highly enjoyable in a Jackie Chan sort of way. In one bravura first-season stunt, Spider-Man detects a hidden bomb in a large ballroom only seconds before it explodes. What happens next I can’t do justice to in words; it’s worth watching and rewinding and watching again.
Multi-episode story-arcs are well-crafted, and established storylines and characters, particularly villains and their origins, are elegantly dovetailed into a compact new continuity. As a serious Spider-Man geek, I find this take on my hero and his world enormously satisfying — the best screen incarnation of the character to date — and I’m happy for my kids to get to know Spider-Man this way.
Date Correction: CA Live Thursday, Not Friday!
Last week I blogged about my upcoming Catholic Answers Live appearance — but I wrote the wrong day. It’s Thursday, 2/11, not Friday, 2/12, from 7pm–8pm EST / 4pm–5pm PST. Sorry for the confusion!
I’ll be reviewing two movies opening this weekend, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief and The Wolfman, so those will naturally be on the agenda. We’ll also probably be talking about Legion, The Book of Eli, Avatar, the Oscar nominations and the 2009 Decent Films top 10.
Other than that, discussion will go wherever callers take it.
Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Hollywood Revisionism
In a short piece at Variety, Roger Friedman (hat tip: Peter Chattaway) writes about the upcoming Ridley Scott movie Robin Hood:
Now comes Crowe and Scott. I am told they’ve been screening the new Robin Hood for insiders. Everyone likes it. Universal is counting on a big hit leading into Memorial Day. Certainly the main actors at least have accents to begin with.
But wait: Does the public want a dark, brooding Robin Hood…? Robin Hood movies and TV shows are always fun. The Ridley Scott movie doesn’t sound like fun from what I’ve been told. It’s dead serious. “I don’t know if it will make money,” says a source. “But it will be respected. It’s dark, violent and very Gladiator.”
“Robin Hood” started out as “Nottingham.” Many scripts came and went, and along with them, many millions of dollars. The shooting script was revised a lot while the movie was being shot. Crowe is prone to clashes with Scott. The rumors fly! Something tells me Universal won’t let anything but a blockbuster be the final release.
Nottingham, the project that ultimately became Robin Hood, was originally conceived, according to an earlier Variety piece, as “a revisionist take on the Robin Hood tale, with Nottingham as a noble and brave lawman who labors for a corrupt king and engages in a love triangle with Maid Marion and Robin Hood.” At that point, Russell Crowe was set to play the Sheriff. The change of title and recasting of Crowe suggests that Robin Hood is at least the protagonist again; whether we can call him the hero remains to be seen …
Legion: Peter Chattaway Speaks
Regular readers know that one of the critical voices I cite most often is my friend Peter T. Chattaway. For a ripping example of why Peter is so quotable, check out his brilliant blog post on Legion, now in theaters.
Some excerpts:
What a mess this movie is. When I first heard the premise two years ago, it raised certain questions for me … and I was curious to see how the movie would answer them. Well, in a nutshell, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even raise them …
How can anyone make a movie about a rebel angel — in this case, Michael, who turns against God and his fellow angels to protect humanity after God decides to wipe us out — and not bother to make even a passing reference to Lucifer?
Where the heck is the “legion” referred to in the movie’s title? We only get a good look at two of the angels: Michael and Gabriel …
The director has reportedly said that this film acts as though the New Testament never happened. But if that’s the case, why do the characters use words like “Christ” as a curse-word? How did that word get into their language? (It’s kind of like how The Invention of Lying depicts a world in which no one has ever believed in God or religion, but they still say they live in the “21st century” or whatever even though they have presumably never believed in Christ, without whom we wouldn’t have a division between B.C. and A.D. in the first place.)
The post is worth reading in full for Peter’s typically insightful observations on the iconic significance of color in a scene with a quasi-Marian figure and some startling parallels with other films now in theaters, among other things.
Academy Award Nominations: Notes
Last year’s Academy Awards were not the least-watched Oscars in history—that was the previous year—but they were widely perceived as contributing to the ongoing apathy of viewers by snubbing popular and critical favorites like The Dark Knight and WALL-E while honoring a roster of films (Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Milk, Doubt) aptly characterized by A. O. Scott’s phrase “hermetically sealed melodrama[s] of received thinking.” (By contrast, Scott called The Dark Knight and WALL-E “contrasting allegories pitched at the anxieties of the moment,” “populist entertainments of summertime” that incited the “interesting movie debates of 2008.”)
It was probably with an eye to overcoming that gap and reconnecting with viewers that the Academy announced last year that the list of Best Picture nominees would be expanded from five to ten, reviving a practice last seen in 1943.
This week’s announcement of the nominees for 2010 seem to provide some vindication of that decision. As Roger Ebert points out, one can surmise which of the ten Best Picture nominees would most likely have made a cut of five by comparing them to the five Best Director nominees. (This isn’t an infallible method, but it’s a good rule of thumb; last year the categories matched four out of five.) …
Zorro: The Complete Seasons 1 and 2
Buy at Amazon.com
Silent star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. is still the silver screen’s ultimate swashbuckling Zorro. Tyrone Powers ideally embodies the sly subterfuge of a man of iron turning on a dime from foppish languor to finely double-edged banter to masked derring-do. But Guy Williams, hero of Walt Disney’s popular 1950s television series, is the most beloved Zorro of all time.
Well-written, exciting, funny, with multi-episode story arcs, “Zorro” sets a standard for family entertainment unmatched by any other television series I can think of. Last November, when the Walt Disney Treasures series released Zorro: The Complete Seasons 1 and 2, I started watching them with my kids — boys, girls, older and younger kids. These are kids who’ve grown up with Pixar, The Lord of the Rings, Miyazaki. For weeks on end we watched an episode a night of a half-century-old black-and-white TV series, almost finishing the first season before anyone felt like requesting something else one night.
The Walt Disney Treasures edition marks the DVD debut of the fully restored black-and-white series. A previous DVD edition offered the colorized version of the show. There is no reason on earth why “Zorro” should be colorized. Bias against black and white is an acquired prejudice that I have met more in adults than in children. Children are open to black and white, silent film, anything (“so terribly catholic,” as C. S. Lewis put it).
The TV show offers its own spin on the Zorro mythos in some ways. Williams’ Don Diego adopts a more studious than foppish manner, and his mute servant Bernardo (talented pantomimist Gene Sheldon) only feigns deafness to serve as his master’s spy. Sergeant García (Henry Calvin), fat, slow-witted, and overly fond of drink, is a comic relief stereotype, but a lovable one who often proves a stout-hearted ally to both Zorro and Don Diego. Even more than in past incarnations, Catholicism is a positive presence in a number of episodes — especially early in season 1, as when Father Filípe aids Zorro by giving sanctuary to a wrongfully arrested prisoner.
The Walt Disney Treasures edition includes four rare hour-long “Zorro” specials from “Walt Disney Presents,” filmed after the second season ended while Disney was still trying to get a third season off the ground. Introductions by Leonard Maltin, a pair of featurettes on Zorro’s many faces, and a behind-the-scenes extra with Guy Williams Jr. round out the handsomely packaged set.
Mild, occasionally deadly action swashbuckling; much drinking, sometimes to excess; rare oblique innuendo. Fine family viewing.
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy
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Recently I experienced Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City for the first time, again.
A Vatican list film, Rossellini’s celebrated 1945 landmark of Italian neorealism is a must-see film for film lovers—and of course I saw it, and reviewed it, years ago. Even at the time, though, I knew I wasn’t really experiencing the film Rossellini made.
Partly this is because previous DVD and VHS versions of Open City were based on a print of the film with such spotty subtitles that they played as if the subtitler often got so absorbed in the story that he simply forgot for minutes at a time to keep up with the dialogue.
As a result, if you didn’t speak Italian, you missed over half of what was said … and if you did speak Italian, you were stuck with the distracting subtitles anyway, which were hard-printed onto the image and couldn’t be removed.
Now at last the Criterion Collection has come to the rescue with the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy, a three-disc boxed edition that also includes Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948).
What I didn’t know until I rewatched the film in the Criterion edition was the extent to which I hadn’t seen the film before. I did know that Rossellini’s team had to scrounge for whatever film stock they could find to shoot the film, which contributed to the gritty, grainy imperfection of the images. However, the degradation of the images was greatly compounded by the worn, dirty condition of the prints used in the previous editions. For anyone who has seen the previous versions, the clarity and beauty of the new Criterion editions is stunning.
As important as Rome, Open City is cinematically, the 1995 Vatican film list includes the film not for its artistic significance, but for its moral value (it’s listed among the 15 films in the Values category). Rossellini’s film offers searing images of evil in the Nazis’ racist reign of terror, and celebrates the human solidarity binding together ordinary citizens, Communist activists, Catholic priests and even children in surreptitious resistance to Nazi oppression.
Open City is notable for its Catholic milieu, embodied in the heroic priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), whose clerical status allows him to ignore curfews and even enter a building evacuated by the Nazis. Rossellini was not a faithful Catholic by any means, but his Catholic heritage was a significant factor in his work, most obviously in films like The Flowers of St. Francis and The Messiah. (The Flowers of St. Francis is also available in a must-have Criterion edition; The Messiah isn’t available on North American DVD, though you can dig it up on VHS used.)
I hadn’t seen Paisan or Germany Year Zero before, so the Rossellini War Trilogy is a fantastic opportunity to become more familiar with one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century.
Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints by Peter Dans
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An associate professor of medicine as well as a serious movie buff, Peter Dans has an understandable interest in the portrayal of the medical field in cinema. In 2000 he channeled that interest into Doctors in the Movies: Boil the Water and Just Say Ahh!, an entertaining and insightful study of social attitudes regarding medicine as illustrated by Hollywood. Dans is also a Catholic, and he has now published a second book, Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints and Sinners, a similarly impressive inquiry into the cinematic portrayal of Christianity and Christians.
Like his first book, Christians in the Movies is both a highly readable and informative work of film commentary and a discussion of changing social attitudes. Just as doctors enjoyed a “golden age of medicine” before being knocked off their pedestals, Dans notes how “[t]he movie clergymen of my youth were tough-yet-good-hearted priests, often portrayed by big stars like Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, and Bing Crosby. Now it appeared that all orthodox clergy and believers were either vicious predators or narrow-minded, mean-spirited Pharisees.”
Dans not only documents changing images of faith, he sketches the larger social context of films from The Passion of Joan of Arc and Angels With Dirty Faces to Dogma and The Magdalene Sisters. (Full disclosure: Dans cites my article on that last film.)
Avatar: What the Vatican Really Said
Recently, as I noted in a blog post at NCRegister.com, the mainstream media cocked a bemused eye at critical reactions to the film Avatar originating from the vicinity of the Holy See.
“Vatican Lashes Out at ‘Avatar’” was the headline at an ABC News story. (Of course it does. It wouldn’t be the Vatican if it didn’t “lash out,” would it?) “Avatar is being slammed by the Vatican,” adds USA Today.
In reality, coverage of the film at L’Osservatore Romano (the Vatican’s quasi-official paper of record) and at Vatican Radio was more or less comparable to the mainstream of wider critical reaction, though obviously the Vatican gave greater attention to spiritual issues than critics generally.
Gaetano Vallini’s review in L’Osservatore Romano could hardly be called a “slam.” (He ends by noting “The visual spectacle alone is well worth the ticket price,” and calls Cameron’s Pandora “exceptionally well imagined and created.” At the same time, like many critics he is critical of the emotional hollowness of the “forgettable” plot, and offers critical perspective on the film’s spiritual and political dimensions.)
Getting the straight dope should be as easy as going to the Vatican website and pulling up the English edition of L’Osservatore Romano. Unfortunately, although the Church’s teachings consistently accord the communications media great importance, her practice lags behind her principles. There is a weekly English edition of L’Osservatore Romano, but it’s spotty (the Italian edition is daily), and as far as I can tell the Vatican website offers only articles from the current issue. (You can get previous issues on CD-ROM — up to 2008.)
A priest friend, frustrated by dodgy media coverage, recently sent me his own translation of the entire L’Osservatore Romano review, as well as of a segment that ran of Vatican Radio.
Here’s the L’Osservatore Romano piece (translation courtesy Fr. Shane Johnson).
Avatar, the Golden Globes … and the Vatican
Haiti guilt competed with self-congratulation at Sunday’s Golden Globes, which started with Nicole Kidman highlighting “Ribbons for Haiti” and George Clooney’s “Hope for Haiti” telethon, and wound up with James Cameron speaking in the invented Na’vi language from his film Avatar and repeatedly telling the audience to “give it up for yourselves.”
Host Ricky Gervais set a low tone early in the evening with obscene humor, and took a couple of pokes at Mel Gibson’s drinking, possibly getting his biggest laughs from Gibson himself. Meryl Streep was classy and humble accepting her award for Julie & Julia. Jeff Bridges scored points when he “complained” about his Golden Globe for Crazy Heart, protesting that the Hollywood Foreign Press was messing up his “underappreciated status.”
Robert Downey Jr. had one of the night’s best lines when started by thanking his wife Susan “for telling me that Matt Damon was going to win so ‘don’t bother to prepare a speech.’” The sentiment was less convincing when Cameron recycled it for his Best Director award, acknowledging his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, also a contender for directing The Hurt Locker. “Frankly, I thought Kathryn was going to get this. She richly deserves it,” Cameron said.
The double triumph of Avatar‘s Golden Globes for best director and picture establish it as the clear favorite for the Academy Awards. While Avatar will likely not match the number of Oscar nominations or awards achieved by Cameron’s last feature film, Titanic, Avatar may well result in back-to-back best film and director Oscars for Cameron (if a lacuna of a dozen years can still be called back to back).
Powering Avatar‘s sense of inevitability is the film’s, yes, titanic box-office performance. This past weekend Avatar ruled domestic and global box office for its fifth straight week, picking up steam and toppling records that seemed untouchable just earlier this month. Avatar is poised to take the #1 global spot from Titanic before long, and could push Titanic to #2 domestically as well. After the irrelevance of last year’s Oscar race, which snubbed popular and critical favorites like Wall-E and The Dark Knight while lavishing attention on films that neither audiences nor critics were crazy about (e.g., Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, Doubt), the Academy may well be ready to embrace a popular and critical front-runner.
In spite of all the hype, critical praise for Avatar has been tempered by acknowledgments of its weaknesses, including its derivative storyline, cardboard characters and lame dialogue. One critic spoke for many (including me) when he wrote, “Is it a great movie? Maybe not. But it is a great step forward in moviemaking.”
Curiously, similar sentiments recently expressed in L’Osservatore Romano and on Vatican Radio have attracted rather prickly mainstream media coverage.
“Unlike much of the world, the Vatican is not awed by the film ‘Avatar’” was the lede on a recent AP story that went on to note that the film received “lukewarm reviews by both the Vatican newspaper and its radio station, which say the movie is simplistic in its plot is superficial in its eco-message, despite groundbreaking visual effects.” Owen Gleiberman wrote more or less the same thing in Entertainment Weekly, but never mind.
Looking a bit closer, the Christian Science Monitor wondered in a recent headline, “Why is Vatican paper reviewing Avatar, the Simpsons?” Noting significant shifts in editorial policy under new editor in chief Giovanni Maria Vian, the story called the Avatar review “part of L’Osservatore Romano‘s efforts to shrug off its previously staid, stuffy image and strike a more contemporary tone.”
In other recent Avatar news, a CNN.com story talked about what could be called “post-Avatar depression” among extreme fans lamenting the “intangibility” of Cameron’s fantasy world. For more, see “Avatar and the Meaning of Life.”
Avatar and the Meaning of Life
Was I wrong to contend, as I did recently in a response to a reader, that “Unlike Star Wars and The Matrix, Avatar doesn’t strike me as a film likely to burrow deep into the collective consciousness”? A recent story at CNN.com, “Audiences Experience ‘Avatar’ Blues,” at least raises questions about that assessment. Some highlights:
James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.
On the fan forum site “Avatar Forums,” a topic thread entitled “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope. …
“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” [a reader] posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ ”
The comments go on, one sadder than the last. It’s like the obssessive, distracted Twilight Moms phenomenon all over again. In my New Moon article I commented that where Dan Brown fans got to flock to Rome and Paris, Twilight obsessives were stuck with rainy Forks, Washington. But what if you’re an Avatar obsessive? There’s literally nowhere to go.
About one thing, at any rate, I was certainly wrong: It was not yet clear, when I wrote that response, just how titanic Avatar’s box-office performance would prove to be over time. Even with higher 3-D ticket prices, I would never have predicted that Avatar stood a chance of sinking Titanic’s domestic and overseas box-office records — but it’s looking like it does now. There’s no doubt about it: Cameron is the king of the world (or even the emperor of the universe, as one critic half-snarked).
Even so, I continue to be skeptical that Jake Sully, Neytiri, Dr. Grace Augustine and evil military what’s-his-face, Colonel Quaritch (I had to look it up) are colonizing viewers’ imaginations like Luke, Leia, Han and Darth Vader, or Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and Agent Smith. On the other hand, I also wrote:
There are self-proclaimed “Jedis” today who make “the Force” an actual religion; I don’t see a lot of people declaring themselves “Na’vi” or getting passionate about “Eywa.” (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of people who see this film even two or three times wouldn’t be able to tell you afterward who “Eywa” was even if you supplied the name.)
Does the obsessive fan comment posted above, about wanting to be a Na’vi badly enough to entertain thoughts of suicide in the forlorn hope of being reincarnated in a world like Pandora, disprove my optimism? Even if it doesn’t, even if there’s a meaningful distinction to be drawn (and I think there may be), it’s still depressingly close to what I thought so improbable. It’s hard to fathom that kind of existential or imaginative alienation from the real world.
