Decent Films Blog
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”
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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
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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. …
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 Lovely Bones
Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones paints an unconvincingly ham-fisted, sometimes ridiculous picture of what happens when someone dies. No, I’m not talking about the film’s attempt to portray the afterlife with kaleidoscopic montages of trippy concept art. I’m willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt, there.
But suspension of belief has its limits. A 14-year-old girl has been brutally assaulted and murdered, and as her grieving father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) lies in bed holding his sobbing wife Abigail (Rachel Weisz), he tearily assures her, “We’re going to get through this. I’ll take care of us. I’m going to make it right.”
Well, perhaps in the throes of new grief, a man might say something that inane. But then, months later, frustrated by the failure of the police to catch the killer, Dad begins stalking the neighbors looking for anything suspicious, and reporting perceived hot tips to the detective on the case — much to the ongoing pain of his wife.
“Herman Stolfas, just across the street,” Jack begins. “Now he appears to be perfectly normal, but Len … the man wears adult diapers.”
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.
The New NCRegister.com
I’m pleased to note that National Catholic Register, for which I have been writing on film since 2003, has launched a completely revamped website at NCRegister.com.
The new site isn’t just a redesign of the old site, which was originally based on the print edition and was last revamped in 2008 with a daily blog. The new site goes well beyond the print edition, and includes a whole lineup of shiny new blogs by longtime Catholic bloggers and others, including my friends Jimmy Akin and Mark Shea, my old publisher Tom Hoopes — and yours truly. Yes, I’m now blogging twice a week at NCRegister.com, as well as here at Decent Films whenever I get the chance.
There’s a lot of worthwhile content free to all at the Register site, as well as a wealth of content for subscribers only. The down side is that the print edition has cut back from weekly to biweekly, which means I’ll probably be writing fewer full-length reviews for the Register for the foreseeable future.
On the up side, your subscription dollar now gets you full access to NCRegister.com subscriber-only content for twice as long. (If you don’t subscribe, you can do so online. (And I’m not just saying that because it’s my paper: I was a Register subscriber long before I was a Register columnist.)
In any case, check out the new site.
This week on DVD & Blu-ray
This week’s DVD and Blu-ray releases include noteworthy new editions of a pair of films worth highlighting: The Reluctant Saint, newly available from Ignatius Press, and Fellini’s 8½, now on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
Starring Maximilian Schell as Saint Joseph of Cupertino, The Reluctant Saint has long been popular among Catholics on VHS, but the new DVD edition restores the coda missing from the VHS copy (the “lost ending,” as a product blurb calls it; see my essay for more about this coda and its deletion).
The new Ignatius DVD comes with a 16-page booklet that includes my essay on the film and a biographical essay on St. Joseph by historian and journalist Sandra Miesel. (I’ve never met Sandra, though we did have this exchange a year or two ago over The Dark Knight.)
I first saw The Reluctant Saint something like 18 years ago in Philadelphia. I enjoyed it at the time, but on rewatching it recently I found it to be a more sensitive and enjoyable film than I remembered.
I’d like to revisit 8½ (and La Strada, both Vatican list films, and neither recently rewatched by me), but other duties continue to press for awhile. Perhaps soon.
P.S. At first glance it might not appear that The Reluctant Saint and 8½ have anything in common, but they do: Filmed in Italy within a year of one another, they were both scored by the Italian composer Nino Rota.
The 12th Day of Christmas: St. Lucy Nativity
One of the top questions I’m getting about the new Decent Films is how I’m going to be using the blog. My hope is that the blogging format will allow me to be flexible: to post short movie reviews and commentary, notes on DVD releases, and perhaps occasional personal tidbits of the sort that I have often posted in the past at my friend Jimmy Akin’s blog — though generally, I think, with a film-centric focus here. (I won’t be blogging on apologetics and such here at Decent Films.)
For example, in this post I’m stepping out of my normal Decent Films role as a film critic to share a short film I made, just a few days ago. It’s not my very first stab at movie-making (that would be a short, unfinished Super-8 project I began shooting at the age of ten or twelve), but it’s perhaps my first stab at a video that may be of general interest to a sizable number of viewers — not because of my cinematic skills, but because of the highly photogenic subject. As such, it’s my first venture into YouTube.
The video was shot on my iPhone at St. Lucy’s Church in Newark, New Jersey, about ten minutes from my home. St. Lucy’s isn’t our home parish, but our family attends weekday Mass there on a fairly regular basis.
The church has a side chapel dedicated to St. Gerard that is notable for at least two reasons. First, it’s the National Shrine of St. Gerard, patron saint of motherhood and childbirth. Second, every year at Advent and Christmas season, the St. Gerard chapel celebrates the greatest birth in history with a Nativity display that is one of a kind, to say the least.
The video is a single shot lasting just under five minutes. Being shot on a handheld iPhone, it’s naturally a bit shaky. Unfortunately I just missed capturing the congregation singing “Silent Night” in the background (in Spanish!), so I’ve tried to use YouTube’s AudioSwap functionality to add a reasonably appropriate background. AudioSwap seems to be buggy, though, so I’m not sure which audio track you’ll hear. (It seemed to work the first time, but then the original soundtrack apparently came back, so I’ve done it twice now. I’m still not sure it’s taken.)
As I shot it, St. Lucy’s Nativity display initially looks like a typical creche scene like you might find in countless churches at Christmastime, but is slowly revealed to be something more remarkable. Every year the people at St. Lucy’s do it a bit differently; perhaps next year I’ll find a way to shoot it again with better equipment. Anyway, here it is, just under the wire for the twelfth day of Christmas.
If you can’t see the embedded video below, you can watch it at YouTube. Enjoy!
Welcome to the New Decent Films!
Has it really been ten years?
Not quite, perhaps. The earliest roots of Decent Films go back earlier, to some film scribblings I did in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until about mid-2000 that I launched the very first version of the Decent Films Guide, a modest collection of some 35 capsule reviews that provided the occasion and excuse for me to take my first baby steps into HTML. A whimsical graphical interface provided a fig leaf to the paucity of the content — the design probably called for almost as many images as there were reviews — but it made the site fun, I think. Anyway, I enjoyed the challenge of building it, and the challenge, in the ensuing months, of enriching the content behind the interface.
By mid-2001 I had outgrown the original site, both in terms of volume and Web development skills, and in September I launched a more robust redesign that served fairly well for the next few years. Eventually, my content outgrew my ability to manage it from a technical perspective — permanently. About five years ago, I sought — and received — help from a generous reader and Web developer named Simeon with more back-end chops than I. He did the back-end magic, I did the front-end design, and Decent Films was reborn, in more or less the form it’s been until now.
The 2010 edition Decent Films Guide is the most ambitious yet. In some ways, it fulfills the promise of what I had hoped to do in 2005 but wasn’t initially able to. As always, I did the design myself, and coded the HTML and CSS by hand, and piled Simeon’s plate high with wish-list items and proposed enhancements, which he has labored mightily in bringing to fruition.
The site as it is now is still a work in progress, with a few bugs in the process of being worked out, but enough of the pieces are in place to make it a major advance over the previous iteration of the site that has now been retired. What’s new about the new Decent Films? Here are some highlights:
- Design. In my opinion, the new site just looks about a thousand percent sweeter than the old site. Layout, fonts, colors, everything looks better — so much so that I have to admit for weeks I’ve found it hard to look at the “old” site. (More about this later.)
- Navigation and options. The new site offers two top nav bars, one for global site content (Home, Search, About, Links, Contact) and another for filtering content (Recent, In Theaters, DVD, Reviews, Blog, Mail). In Theaters is a new page offering blurbs and ratings for all reviewed titles currently in theaters.
- Blog. There is now a Decent Films Blog, and you’re reading the inaugural post. More to come! (No blog comments, yet. I’ll keep you, um, posted.)
- RSS feed. It’s been a long time coming! Really there was no excuse for not leveraging RSS back in 2005. Simeon set up the site for it, and I always meant to take advantage of it, but somehow or other I never got around to it. With apologies to those who asked about it for so long, it’s finally here.
- Content groups. This is the update I’m most excited about. For a look at how it works, scroll down to the bottom of the review of Angels & Demons. Right there on the page are related mail items from Decent Films Mail as well as previews of related reviews and articles.
- More dynamic content. For those interested in back-end stuff, the Mail section, previously a collection of flat files, is now dynamic (a prerequisite to being able to call mail items from related reviews). The DVD section, often sadly neglected in the past because it was a hard-to-maintain flat file, is now dynamic content that should be easier to keep up to date (once a few technical details are worked out; it’s still a work in progress).
- Improved Amazon links. Obviously, I want the Amazon links to be as helpful as possible, in part because every Amazon purchase made via links on this site helps support Decent Films. In the past, through, my Amazon linkage has been spotty. So far I’ve gone through every single A-range review (A-plus to A-minus) and made sure that there are up-to-date Amazon links for every highly recommended movie. (I’ll work on the B’s next, and maybe hit some of the C-pluses. I don’t put Amazon links for anything rated C or below, since if I can’t even lean slightly positive on a movie, I don’t want to help you buy it or to profit from your doing so.)
- New review ratings/info sidebar. Ratings, content advisory and filmmaker/studio info are now presented in a sidebar that I hope offers various advantages over previous ways of organizing this information, which in the earliest designs had a tendency to take over the review and more recently has been a bit sprawled out and scattered. Now it’s compact and organized, prominent but not obstructive. It’s the best solution yet, I think.
- Lots of corrections. Over the last month or two I’ve gone over my content and made innumerable small corrections — nothing huge, but hopefully it will make a difference. (I still want to hear from you if you catch anything that needs to be fixed! (Disagreeing with my review of 3:10 to Yuma or Where the Wild Things Are does not count as catching something that needs to be fixed. Not that I don’t want to hear from you anyway!)
This is a major advance over the old “See also” links, both because there is richer content and because it’s semi-dynamic so I don’t have to add all the links manually. (I say “semi-dynamic” because the connections are made by me, not by software — a very good thing in my opinion. It means I’ve put in a lot of work creating content groups, and will continue to spend time managing it, but with a lot less effort and a lot more payoff than was possible before.)
Readers who have often written to me to alert me to linking errors on the homepage will be glad to know that these, too, will no longer be coded by hand. No more clicking on The Princess and the Frog and wondering whether you might find yourself reading the review for 2012!
In most cases, Amazon links (for movies in the A range) are dynamic, meaning that you’ll get all editions of a given film — DVD, Blu-ray, single disc, special edition, etc. In some cases I target a single edition that is (I think) the one right edition to get.
Design and other enhancements include:
- A true three-column layout with right and left columns that actually go to the footer (easier on the eye for long pieces).
- A four-column home page with feeds for Recently Added and DVD & Blu-ray as well as a dedicated Spotlight feature.
- Improved color scheme. Frankly, I agree with the reader who wrote some five years back to object (mildly) that the 2005 color scheme was too chilly. The new palatte is more in line with Decent Films’ previous color schemes, and makes the whole site nicer to look at. I’m particularly happy with the new sepia duotone version of the banner collage, which is not only visually clearer than its blue predecessor, but warmer, more natural-looking and sort of old-movie-ish.
- Single-match search defaulting. Type “Ponyo” in the search field and you go right to the review — no need to click the one resulting match and confirm that, yes, you wanted Ponyo.
- Improved HTML and CSS. This may not mean much to anyone but me, but it makes me happy that my markup is cleaner and more semantic than it used to be.
There’s probably more, but that’s what I’m thinking of at the moment. Like I said, it’s still a work in progress, and I hope that Simeon and I will continue to roll out small enhancements over the next few weeks and months. In the meantime, I’d like to know what you think of our efforts so far.
This latest exercise in site renovation has been an enormously invigorating and exciting; it’s also been humbling. Looking over ten years’ worth of writing has left me at turns pleased and dissatisfied, sometimes delighted, too often chagrined. There is so much room for improvement, so much to be done.
Every revamping of Decent Films has been a renewed impetus to write more and (hopefully) better — not least because my productivity always dips while I'm knee-deep in the renovation process, and I feel the need to make up for lost time. In particular, I hope that the new blog will offer me an opportunity to update more, to write more freely, and in particular to write frequent shorter pieces rather than always laboring long over one lengthy one. (Not that I will ever stop writing long, long pieces … y’all know me better than that by now.)
Obviously, I owe Simeon an immense debt of thanks — as does every reader who enjoys the site for what it has been over the last five years and is now becoming. I’ve done what I can to make Decent Films interesting to read and pretty to look at, but Simeon breathed the breath of content-management life into my empty templates, fielding my ever more-demanding wish list of proposed enhancements, bells and whistles, and making it all happen. Now, once again, Decent Films feels like too much site for what could be more and better content. If in the coming months and years I succeed in altering that equation, no small part of the credit will belong to Simeon.
While I’m on the subject, we are also deeply indebted to Mrs. Decent Films, the amazing and heroic Suzanne, homeschooling mother of six and the rock of support without which this site would not be possible. For her active support, encouragement and enthusiasm for my work, for offering a first response to nearly every word I write, for giving me up to regular screenings and allowing my stack of year-end screeners and DVDs to dominate our evenings every December and January, she deserves the gratitude of anyone who appreciates my work. Not incidentally, she also holds the world together while I watch movies and write. (On rare occasions she’s even written or co-written a few reviews; check them out.)
Finally, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to you, my readers over the last ten years or any subset thereof: Catholics and Protestants, Christians and non-Christians, agnostics and atheists. Thanks for reading, for caring, for thinking it over, for agreeing and disagreeing. I am humbled and honored by your interest and engagement, your thoughtful criticism and moral support, your just being out there reading. I hope to continue to repay your interest for years to come, and, God willing, to do better in the next ten years than I have in the last. Take a look around and let me know what you think.
The beginning, again.
