J. & C.'s Movie Reviews

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2008-02-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

We're going over here:

http://jcreviews.wordpress.com/

Pardon the construction there while we get things sorted out.

Rescue Dawn / Touching the Void

2008-02-08T06:31:00.000-08:00

Incredible but true stories tend to make good movies. They are hard to screw up. If we took the barebones material of Rescue Dawn, for example--a German-born, Vietnam-era pilot shot down in Laos, captured by Vietcong, held prisoner with several others in a dense jungle, all planning to escape while starving and suffering from temporary dementia--we could only fail by adding too much to it. Like making it a hokey morality tale that prominently involves a swelling John Williams score.

As it is, Rescue Dawn doesn't have enough added to it, though. Up until its conclusion, we waited for a push that it never quite gave us. The story of Dieter Dengler is almost solely about Dieter's survival and unfailingly upbeat attitude during his trial. This attitude keeps him alive--in contrast to his other fellow prisoners--but what does Dieter learn? There are no character transformations or internal revelations that provide us, as attentive watchers, with meaning that can transform us.

This is not to disparage a good movie, but to say how a good movie just barely missed being far better. We're tempted to argue that Rescue Dawn needlessly keeps us focused on the material world. The movie foregrounds the harsh reality of POW life and jungle escape--hunger, scum, bowel movements, vines, maggots, leeches. These are unsettling, but they're all trumped when Dieter catches and attempts to eat a live snake. Dieter's escape is providential and transcendent--fulfilling Dieter's earlier request to God to save him--but the final scene concludes with a puzzling koan from Dieter to his Navy buddies: "Fill what is empty, and empty what is full." This has no relevance unless Dieter means his stomach.

Touching the Void goes one step beyond Rescue Dawn in this regard, which makes it as moving as it is gripping. Sadly, while it's a story of a kind of captivity and survival, it's central turn is a moment of denial of God. In this way it is an anti-conversion narrative, though this is not necessarily due to the filmmakers' prejudice and does not detract from the great lessons the movie has to offer.

Touching the Void is fundamentally a documentary, with reenacted scenes from the original story. This story is of mountain-climbing: two young Brits in the early 1980s (Joe Simpson and Simon Yates) decide to scale a previously unclimbed mountain in Peru, Siula Grande. The strength of Touching the Void is the two climbers' ability to relate their stories, which they tell on-camera as they look directly at the viewer. What happens is best left untold here--you will thank us later for saving it. We can say that one of the climbers faces one of those ethical hypotheticals--like what would you do if you and another person were stranded on a raft in the Pacific without food--that never occur in day-to-day life. The other climber faces the consequence of his friend's choice.

Dieter, Joe, and Simon are all admirable, but only Joe and Simon leaves us with afterthoughts long after the closing credits (indeed we've seen Touching the Void twice and the last time well over a year ago). Dieter smiles his way through Laos, but the other two--especially Joe--help us see others with pity and thankfulness. Most importantly of all, they remind us of grace given to us.

Rescue Dawn
Entertainment: 8
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 6 (some language)

Touching the Void
Entertainment: 10
Intelligence: 7
Morality -- (one brief scene of language)

Surf's Up

2008-02-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

For some reason, around 2003 movie studio executives thought penguins would sell. What's the cultural significance of that? We have no idea, but we do know that after watching March of the Penguins, Happy Feet, and now this movie, we hope moviemakers stay far away from our featherless friends. Of course, now that we're sick of them, we wouldn't be surprised if VeggieTales' next feature prominently involved birds from Antarctica.

Surf's Up has lots going for it. Mostly, it isn't terrible like Happy Feet is. But it doesn't have personality, the jokes aren't really jokes, and it's about surfing. Along with the surfing is the stereotypical surfer, "live and let live" attitude, embodied in the movie's two main characters, Cody Maverick and "Big Z." Cody is a wannabe hotshot in a somewhat dysfunctional family, and he wants to compete in the world penguin surfing tournament. He idolizes "Big Z," a famous surfer who supposedly disappeared in a surfing accident. The plot wouldn't have anywhere to go if Big Z were really dead, though, so you can guess what probably happens when Cody and Big Z get together. The student learns something, the teacher learns something, and the world penguin surfing tournament is the climax of all this learning.

Since the characters lack any sympathetic trait and the plot is pretty lame, we would've turned this movie off fairly quickly. What kept us involved was the style and direction. Surf's Up is filmed as a documentary, with character interviews and hand-held camera motions. It cheats on this style a bit, but overall the documentary aspect frees Surf's Up to present unique camera angles previously unseen (or unimagined) in digital animation films. We appreciated that and the animation, which is the reason we can say this one sets the standard for mediocre kids' movies featuring penguins.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 2
Morality: 5 (a few jokes inappropriate for children)

The Office (American TV Series)

2008-01-28T11:52:00.001-08:00

A thought-experiment we recently encountered: What performers, artists, directors in popular culture are worth our serious attention in the last 10 years? The criteria for this question's answer are that the artist/cultural production must be technically competent and also have an overall positive influence.

If you are like us, you had a hard time coming up with an answer.

Sadly, The Office would not fulfill the requirements. When we began watching Seasons 2 and 3 recently, we believed it might have a chance, hilariously refracting as it did at least two previous work experiences we've had. Yet the show is awash in foolish sexual talk--gradually increasing it throughout the third season--and has a fixed hierarchy of idiotic cultural caricatures. It's no surprise to us that the show's one Christian is supposed to be funny because she's an uptight jerk, and that the one farm boy/nerd is funny because he's a farm boy and a deranged nerd. They both, of course, are having a secret affair.

While the show is filmed documentary-style, including in-character interviews and movements only a handheld camera would make, it does not play equally with every character. Jim Halpert, the suburban fratboy who plays pranks on Dwight Schrute, the aforesaid countryboy and nerd, gets off easily. Everyone else is the subject of subtle jokes rooted in social criticism, made solely by the show's mockumentary tone. Halpert, however, gets to be at once in and out of the world of the office. His casual, "who cares?" demeanor, combined with his frequent glances at the camera, given as the other characters say something stupid, make him the show's hero of sorts. His frequent flirtations with the office secretary are constantly forced upon us, as their friendship-slowly-turning-into-romance is a constant, trite subplot (the fact that's she's already engaged does not keep the morally-challenged Halpert from wooing her by "being her friend").

This is all too bad. Otherwise, the show blisters many of the stupidities of modern-day white-collar work, while charitably respecting the characters caught up in them. It is something like Herman Melville's short story Bartleby the Scrivener, but whereas Melville's narrator sighs "Ah Bartleby, ah humanity!"--conjoining Bartleby's ethical issues related to work with humankind's--The Office doesn't bemoan the tendency for the business world to create isolated individuals. Instead, it smirkily sympathizes with the attempted forging of human communities--located in the modern office, in this case--among people who seem to want them but don't really know how they work.

The workplace--here, the regional office of a dying paper-supply company--is a poor but necessary substitute for traditional, closely knit social groups, such as families and churches. It has to be, since none of the characters seem connected to anything else. The young MBA student, who is dating the Indian (Asian) girl addicted to fashion and gossip columns, seems taken off guard when the girl's traditionalist parents ask him what he's saving his money for. "Uh, I'd like to travel. Oh, and an XBox." They had expected the answer to be a dowry and child-related expenses (1). No one in The Office seems future-oriented, except Stanley, who admits to grudgingly showing up for work solely in order to retire. The office itself is the place for social bonding (demonstrated by the frequent parties and gatherings that seem to coalesce for different reasons), though these bonds are tenuous and superficial.

The boss of this office, Michael Scott, is a typical fish-out-of-water, but in an intriguing way. Handicapped by political correctness and business management-speak, Scott constantly fails the systems he thinks he's constrained by. Not that he minds being constrained by them, but he cannot help breaking the ethics of political correctness while trying to be politically correct. The joke is that any boss like Scott would be fired instantly, but in the world of TV fiction everyone puts up with him, proving still that silly comedy is the last refuge for anti-P.C. thought. Though the show sometimes involves him in nonsense--such as when he engages in an affair with his female boss, and the two enact a role reversal whereby Scott takes on typical feminine qualities-- Scott is a great exemplar of a modern American dolt. (Watch him, for example, try to buy a condo or conduct a safety seminar).

Though we cannot give our full recommendation, we'll list several particular episodes (see the comments section) that serve well to demonstrate what we're trying to get at here. Our one caution is that The Office, like just about everything else today, is flippant about sex. However the episodes we list generally avoid the topic altogether.

Notes:
(1) See the episode in Season 3 titled Diwali, maybe the best one of all.
-- Also, Netflix subscribers can watch this show online instantly.

On the Death of a Young Celebrity

2008-01-24T09:28:00.001-08:00

We didn't know who he was until we looked him up. "Oh yeah, that guy," we said.

Other people were not ignorant. They showered him with accolades and paeans. He made the lead page of papers. They say it's a tragic loss, a cute young guy dead in his prime.

Decades ago, another actor died young too. He grew up in a small town not far from where one of us is from. That town has a museum in his memory. It advertises this museum in tourist brochures and on highway billboards. The dead actor is this town's lone claim to fame. It is a dying town.

Maybe this guy will get a museum. Maybe he can have a monument in the midst of a dead place too.

No End in Sight

2008-01-11T05:25:00.001-08:00

The American army might stay in Iraq for one hundred years, says Republican presidential nominee John McCain. But according to No End in Sight, it only took about one hundred days for the occupation to be bungled by administrators and decision-makers, which will make the next hundred years of occupation constantly difficult. Ignorance of this history, the movie argues, will lead future administrators and decision-makers into greater folly. In fact the present situation--early 2007, in terms of the movie's release date--has turned into a problem with no good solutions, no matter what military action has or will be taken.

We're just reporting what the movie says. Video essays like this are assembled and edited collections of soundbites, juxtaposed with other soundbites to make a point. In terms of rhetoric and argument, watching this movie is more emotional and less thought-provoking than reading a well-crafted book on the same subject. No End in Sight musters forth a number of arguments that go by quickly in the 1 hour, 40 minute running time. Rather than sustaining and flushing out the consequences of those arguments, the movie seeks to make its points most strongly by presenting credible witnesses. Of course No End in Sight is a prosecutorial case sans defense, but with its roster of military officers, ex-soldiers, and bureaucrats (including key people once in charge, such as Jay Garner, Paul Hughes, and Richard Armitage), No End in Sight makes it seem impossible for any great defense to be made without calling George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the stand. By the end, it seems that they're the only people who might defend the decisions made and the actions taken.

The movie does not exactly make a case against the initial arguments to go to war against Iraq. That decision already made, No End in Sight moves quickly to its central topic: post-war planning. Essentially there was none, and what little was done resulted in a series of bungled moves: failing to stop post-war looting, failing to guard Baghdad's numerous weapons caches, walling up the Green Zone, hiring college students to make major civic planning decisions, firing all the former Ba'ath party members, and firing the entire Iraqi military (resulting in a estimated half-million young men unemployed and disgruntled). Each of these moves subtracted from the initial joy and goodwill toward America of liberated Iraqis, resulting in a hostile population ready to join the insurgency. With 40-50% unemployment, approximately three million refugees, and an unknown number dead, Iraqis needed immediate help they never got. So they turned to the mosque for social and civil leadership, and then to violence against their occupiers. Thus the results of the last three years: thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands of casualties, and an estimated 1.8 trillion dollars spent. So much for staying 100 years.

As we mentioned, the movie's conclusion is that the Iraqi population is mostly splintered and hostile. Shi'ites fight Shi'ites, Shi'ites fights Sunnis, Kurds fight whomever, in a scenario that makes the final scenes of Lawrence of Arabia look like a political utopia. America is in a double-bind, the movie says. Any new plan or military action is too late, because the existing population is war-weary and ticked off. But leaving Iraqis to fend for themselves will likely result in chaos. In its title, the movie is not claiming there is no end in sight to the occupation of Iraq, but that instead there is no end in sight to this unresolvable problem of staying or going. We'll pray that it's wrong in its prophetic implications, but No End in Sight is a fine refresher for all of us four years removed from the fall of Baghdad. Bombarded by new news constantly, which encourages us to have very short memories, we need to take a longer view of the past, remembering what we were once told and evaluating its truth and outcome. This documentary gives you a partial opportunity to do so, until a more fully researched version of the war is available.

Engagement: 8
Intelligence: 8
Morality: -- (two or three curse words)

Amazing Grace

2007-12-25T05:44:00.000-08:00

Now before our readers accuse us of being grumpy, which we prefer to call tasteful discrimination, we should say that Amazing Grace is pretty good. It does its job, which is to sneak its moral in while being somewhat pleasing to watch. We suspect a number of our readers will feel roused by the ending. That ending features bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace," the only tune that bagpipes ever seem to play these days, but in this case it seems relevant. Not only is "Amazing Grace" the movie's title, but the author of the lyrics, John Newton, is a central character.

The story is essentially about William Wilberforce's efforts to get the slave trade abolished in the British Empire. This is sometimes difficult to understand, though, because the movie mixes moral issues and political goals into the ambitions of six or seven different characters. We weren't sure which reformer cared about which issue: was the slave trade their beef or were they gunning for the abolition of slavery? The movie even seems to hint that slavery was legal in England, which it was not. Eventually everything gets sorted out and we end up with Wilberforce, after years of toil and doubt, getting Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807. Good for him, we say, since manstealing is a heinous crime under Biblical law. Of course, slavery wasn't abolished in the British colonies until twenty-six years later, in 1833, but tacking that onto the end of the movie would've delayed us from being roused by bagpipes.

Let's now use Amazing Grace as an example of a general problem we constantly face. The movie casts Wilberforce as a tall, dashing gentleman. His wife, too, is a model of beauty; even in the wee hours of the morning her crisp, red hair and makeup are perfectly in place. They're obviously the most beautiful couple in England, which adds to our acceptance of Wilberforce as a moral leader and reformer.

This is radically different from historical reality. Imagine if Wilberforce was cast as he really was: as a crippled, nearly blind, short man. (Wilberforce's spine was curved, and so he was only 5'3".) Imagine further that the actress that plays his wife is average-looking, which is probably historically accurate. We would then have an unwatchable movie, which doesn't conform to the ridiculous standards of beauty that all movies conform to. Those standards in practice mean accepting traditional ways of "improving" looks -- you know, like having one's face surgically altered over and over again. Now we don't have a serious problem with seeing extra-beautiful people every now and then on the big screen; it's probably an inevitability in a highly competitive visual medium. Still, what if we saw Wilberforce as an ugly cripple, getting his reforms passed in spite of his obstacles and handicaps?

Perhaps the ending would've been even more rousing than it was. "Gee, he had those problems but did that?" we might exclaim. "He really was blessed with amazing grace."

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 9

2007 Ten Best

2007-12-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

Our 2007 top-10:

1. King Lear, performed by our local theater company.
2. Ratatouille
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Unfortunately numbers three through ten have yet to be filled in, seeing as how we didn't keep up with the new releases and no other 2007 movie was memorable. Not only was time scarce, as it always is, but nothing seemed particularly worthwhile for us to rush out and watch.

The top honor on this list goes to a local performance of King Lear, put on by our city's yearly Shakespeare festival and performed by no-name actors. It was both engaging and moving in ways that movie theaters never can be. We endured no commercials or previews, and didn't have to view gigantic faces that have been surgically altered to look "movie star-ish." We were also guaranteed one of the best scripts ever written, by a scriptwriter who didn't have to conform his vision to the demands of major studio executives or the silly expectations of modern audiences.

Not that we entirely dismiss theater experiences or new releases. Ratatouille was not only very good, it was even better the second time. We have changed our earlier judgment on it: it's easily the best of the Pixar bunch.

Should there be a 2007 movie worthy of this list, we shall add it eventually. Perhaps in 2009, or 2014, or 2020. Whenever we get around to it. There are plenty of old movies to watch, there are even more great books to read, and there is an even greater amount of family time to spend together unmediated by LCD screens and Surround Sound.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3

2007-12-21T08:39:00.000-08:00

So at the end of this trilogy we find out that pirates are heroes of a sort. They are heroes when compared to the British empire and the East India company, which is inaugurating a "new era" on the seas. This era, in case you are wondering, is English mercantilism. In other words, the combined efforts of government and corporations will rule the world with an iron fist. As the dying villain tells us, ruling the seas is "just good business." Thank goodness our multinational pirate coalition (hey that's a great description of the United Nations!)--made up of Chinese, Mexican, French, and African pirates--destroys the corporate hegemony so that piracy can continue unhindered on the open, blue seas.

This movie is completely incoherent, while making the afterlife a joke and a sham. There are something like five or six resurrections from the dead in this series. Clearly pirate rockstars should never die. The downside to this final sequel is that it is a bit more darker and vulgar than the first two, with fewer whimsical stunts and more swords thrusted through stomachs. We stand by our earlier review and add that movie #3 is easily the worst of the bunch.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 0

No Country for Old Men

2007-12-13T19:14:00.000-08:00

No Country for Old Men is yet another recent, ultra-bleak movie that has had critical praise heaped on it. It almost won the Cannes Film Festival's top award and might garner others. But even though the movie is a smashing success in its depiction of a tense hunt for money and the showdowns that accompany that hunt, it is an utter failure on a philosophical level.

Part of that is because it is too faithful to the original storyline of the Cormac McCarthy novel it is derived from, which doesn't work for a tense action movie because it ends up sputtering in the concluding moments. Having read the book, we think the movie is a unnecessary accompaniment to it. Yet almost wholly lacking from No Country is McCarthy's dual-level minimalist dialogue, which on one level mirrors everyday conversation but on another poses basic, philosophical questions to people who live entire lives without asking them. It is Anton Chigurh, the ruthless drug hunter, who stimulates that kind of dialogue. Unfortunately he had only one profound conversation, which takes place early in the movie and left us wanting a bit more. Chigurh needs to be attached to that kind of dialogue, or else his character is nothing more than your average movie psychopath. He is the most significant character in this story--the only one who, as one character says, lives by a principle, and who keeps his word. For us, he is the pivot on which the story's various symbols and meanings turn. But other than looking mysteriously bad, he does not live up to that level in the movie.

Instead, Sheriff Tom Bell takes over the movie's quest for meaning. Bell is chasing Chigurh, who is chasing Llewelyn Moss, a poor Texas welder who stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong and runs away with a briefcase full of two million dollars. The movie is an elaborate chase, albeit a slow-moving one, in which Chigurh hunts down Moss, leaving the slow Texas cop two steps behind. Near retirement, Bell becomes ultimately disillusioned with God and life. His viewpoint, which the movie exits with, is fatalistic: life is random and vague, ho-hum. Chigurh's coin tosses, in which are decided his victims' fate, augment Bell's attitude. No Country tips its hat to the idea that life, like the stark violence it contains, is meaningless.

McCarthy's book was about far more than that though. The story's texture suggests that, in our ever-slipping society, evil is outpacing good. Society is in decline: the lust for drugs and money and the fulfillment of base desires (Moss's ultimate problem) push us toward outright decadence. Law, symbolized by Sheriff Bell, cannot quell or contain the forces of drugs and decadence; it is too old and out-of-date, ready to be retired, like Sheriff Bell. In this way it seems to us that McCarthy has a Hobbesian view of the world, that without law, society collapses into anarchic madness. These social views pop up in the movie--Chigurh takes out good old Texan folk every chance he gets--but the movie's ultimate messages simply reinforce the kind of decadence the story tries to deplore. If life is determined by luck, by a simple coin toss, who cares about moral decline? In the words of a song from the generation of people who were in attendance at our theater, nothing really matters. And in the words of another song they know and probably live by, nothing else matters. No Country for Old Men desperately needs the God of Love.

Engagement: 7
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 2 (rated R solely for violence)

The Emperor's New Groove

2007-12-13T09:26:00.000-08:00

Somewhere, lost in Disney's 1990s collapse into multiculturalism and embrace of CG animation, is The Emperor's New Groove. This is a full-length Looney Tune with an obvious, decent moral. That means it is zany and manic at the same time that it strives to teach about the need for repentance, humility, and wholesome family life. We don't quite know what younger viewers might take away from it, but as Christian adults we prioritized the moral and enjoyed the zaniness for what it was. May wise guardians make wise decisions.

The story involves the Emperor Kuzco, who desires to take away a community's hilltop village by virtue of his sovereign will (known in our day as "eminent domain"). Reminiscent of Ahab's maniacal theft of Naboth's garden, Kuzco wants the hill for his pleasure palace, only to be opposed by the good-hearted peasant Pacha. Kuzco, however, faces his own internal threats. His right-hand lady and her sidekick use a potion to turn Kuzco into a llama, kicking him out of the palace and taking over in a secret coup. It is up to Pacha to help Kuzco return to the palace and change back into a human, so that Kuzco can return to power.

And therein lies the problem. Kuzco remains a self-centered jerk, a snideful mocker of a teenage boy, even while Pacha tries to help him. Ever a model of patience, Pacha lets Kuzco fail in his own selfish schemes again and again until Kuzco eventually relents. You know what will happen after this, but the story is told in an upbeat, postmodern way. By "postmodern" we mean nothing bad. It's only that the story is self-referential, constantly talking about the way the story is being told. The narrative starts and stops and restarts often, providing spunk and wittiness to an otherwise mundane, familiar plot. This we liked, as well as the failed empress' sidekick, Kronk, who is a humorous mix of Rocky Balboa and Sancho Panza. Characters like Kronk are few and far between.

The Emperor's New Groove was part of Disney's effort to move away from traditional European settings and artwork, so the movie is a send-up of Peruvian and Ecuadorian landscape and Incan artwork. Unfortunately, the Incan empire was far from zany and cool, as The Emperor's New Groove might have it. Probably a real Incan emperor would've been more interested in burning Pacha's children than in repealing a decision to steal property. The Emperor's New Groove engages in historical anachronism and bad judgment when it praises the continuation of Kuzco's bureaucracy and empire. Still, Looney Tunes always simply use history as a prop rather than strive to make a point with it. In that sense, the movie is simply innocent and ignorant.

Entertainment: 9
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 6

Meet Me In Saint Louis

2007-12-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

How's this for surreal? While singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," Judy Garland holds two crazed-looking toy monkeys and croons to her kid sister, Tootie. This is the same Tootie who proudly announces that she's been burying her animal toys in the local cemetery, who cross-dresses during an extended Halloween scene, and who gets injured while trying to throw a fake body in front of trolley (leading one of her sisters to announce, "My, you could have killed somebody!").

Well, okay. It's not that Meet Me in Saint Louis is deliberately bizarre, like the nightmare sequences in Oklahoma and Singin' in the Rain. It's just that from the vantage point of sixty years later, it's weird. The lone plot point, in a movie set in St. Louis circa 1903, centers on a father's complete disconnect with his family. They don't seem to communicate with him, and he doesn't communicate with them. He, for example, doesn't know that one of his daughters is being pursued by a young man, in a noteworthy scene where that young man calls long-distance during dinner. His family also doesn't know ahead of time that the father has taken a cushy lawyer job in New York City. They don't want to move, Judy Garland doesn't want to move due to a love interest, and that's the entire story.

It seems that just when the family looks disconnected, they start singing songs, which make their problems go away. That works well in the world of musicals, but one can see quickly why this syrupy genre faded away: it was too hoaky for a culture knocking at the door of southeast Asian countries and the attendant, all-too-real cultural and political problems with barging in through that door. Meet Me in Saint Louis is too hoaky for today's world too, though all the cutesiness of musical performances is here, ready to be appreciated for their own sake.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 6 (nothing bad, but you wouldn't want to emulate anybody in the movie either)

Tunes of Glory

2007-12-10T12:35:00.001-08:00

Picking up where The Bridge on the River Kwai left off, Tunes of Glory tells the story of a Scottish battalion's change-of-command in the post-WWII, post-empire era of Britain. Walled up in a scenic castle that substitutes for a barracks, the battalion's commanding officer, Colonel Jock Sinclair, is being be replaced as C.O. by Colonel Basil Barrow. This creates a major problem, because Sinclair is well-loved by his men and too interested in being C.O. to let Barrow take over. The Oxford-educated Barrow, heightening the problem, is too anxious to take over; as the son and grandson of former C.O.'s of the battalion, he is steeped in its traditions of formal dance and bagpipe-playing and eager to set them right. What is worse, being dedicated to the idea of commanding this battalion, Barrow alienates his men with his ill-temper and stricter regulations. In short, this is a simple story of a clash of authority, tied to the themes of disillusion and despair so intricate to twentieth-century stories.

Now the power struggle between Sinclair and Barrow is the central and only propeller that moves the plot forward. Not that this is all bad, since the movie is well shot, well acted, and well written. Barrow represents the upper-half of British society, while Sinclair, a whiskey-drinking commoner, represents the lower-half. Both men have complicated relationships to military tradition and public virtue, but their particular loyalties come under great pressure when one of them does something he should not, while the other has to make a key decision about the fate of his rival. The two men, of course, do share one thing in common: both are former battlefield veterans. In fact, Barrow seems to come straight from the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai, his P.O.W. experience possibly shaping his paranoia and quick-tempered ways.

Tunes of Glory is one of the few peacetime dramas about military life that doesn't involve flashbacks on past battlefield action or a military trial. Unfortunately, there's a lot of monologue and dialogue in this movie, which amounts to too much pontificating on the story's thematic concerns for a contemporary American audience. We write that last sentence, not as harsh commentary on such an audience, but as members of that kind of audience. British class divisions and military traditions aren't so terribly interesting as to be engaging and moving when placed in a strung-out drama. Mid-twentieth century British colonels may have been great men, but their downward falls are nowhere near as tragic as, say, Agamemnon or King Lear. What's more, while the choice made at the end of Tunes of Glory is quite sad, the motivations aren't all that clear. So we want a script revision, while keeping the same actors and nice-looking sets.

Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: 6.5
Morality: 7 (nothing bad in here)

Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2

2007-11-30T11:50:00.000-08:00

In our misspent youths, we played a computer game called Pirates: Gold! The object of that game was to assemble a pirate crew, sail the Caribbean, and plunder the ships and cities of various empires. The game had a lasting effect: it taught us the detailed map of the Caribbean, which we remember to this day. It also taught us that 17th century piracy was fun. Gold, babes, and destruction--what more can a young lad ask for?

In spite of this characterization, piracy in the 17th century wasn't good times, nor is it today. As we learned later in life, pirates are essentially ocean gangs, packs of greedy barbarians who plunder private property and, if they can, rape and murder whomever. This is where Disney's pirate trilogy comes in. Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and probably 3 (we haven't seen that one) depict pirate life--albeit a sanitized one--as whimsical and glamorous.

What's the harm in that, one asks? It forms the conscience in a similar way as our old game Pirates: Gold! did to us in the late '80s. The skull-and-bones flag, Davy Jones, squawking parrots, and Johnny Depp dominate the movie's image of piracy. Theft and destruction, meanwhile, are far removed from it. This misses the essence of piracy, which is theft. Is it ever proper to depict thieves as they are not, in this case, as rockstar metrosexuals?

While the answer to such a sharp question seems pretty easy to come up with, we do admit to indulging in the viewing of this series of movies. The plots are nonsensical, and so if you enter the movies expecting anything but watered-down tripe for a story, you will be sorely disappointed. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the stunts and special effects a bit too much. Here again, movie-magic lulled us to sleep, because the portrayal of the dead is goofy and pagan. Thus we advise staying away instead of getting sucked in. You are better off answering the question at the end of the second paragraph, applying it to these movies, and sticking to the moral imperative of that application. Don't give in to mass marketing.

Entertainment: 8
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 0

Zulu

2007-11-30T09:51:00.000-08:00

The forgotten war movie of the last century, Zulu is an Anglophilic celebration of the heroism of British soldiers and a depiction of incredible military tactics. It is not filled with fluff, however, or emotional phoniness as so many post-Vietnam era war movies are. It is instead all guts.

The situation plays out simply at a small British supply station in present-day South Africa. After successfully attacking 1500 British soldiers, a Zulu army of 4000 warriors comes to attack the supply station at Rourke's Bluff. With just over 100 men, several of whom are sick or injured, the British must defend their post from attack.

A simple situation, but a unique cinematic approach. There is almost no John Williams-esque music, complete with a pompous brass section, to overarouse a viewer's emotions. Instead we wait and wait for the Zulu to arrive, while the two British commanding officers make tactical decisions. This results in a build-up to the battle with an interesting blend of anticipation, boredom, and anxiety. Zulu is the only movie in which being bored for a few minutes in the early going greatly enhanced the payoff at the end.

The movie's lone misstep may be the inclusion of the missionary and his daughter, both of whom deplore the coming battle as a gross violation of the Sixth Commandment. The missionary comes off as a loony prophet and a scared drunk, who harbors far less aplomb and righteousness than the stiff-upper-lip British officers. He might've been better left out than included, but he also provides the lone voice that puts the forthcoming action in the context of Christian morality. He is also the only go-between for the Zulu and the British, who obviously do not understand each other's military culture and instead harbor a different warrior ethos. That might be needed, because the movie gives an unusual amount of respect to "the other side," which in this case are the Zulu.

Should we ever have to choose just two war movies to watch on a desert island, it might be Patton and this one.

Engagement: 8
Intelligence: 9
Morality: 9 **

** Note: The early moments contain National Geographic-like nudity, though it is not wholly superfluous. This is, we suppose, the exception to our house-rule of watching no movies containing scantily clad or less than scantily clad people. Do with this piece of information what you will.

Walk the Line

2007-11-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

Walk the Line is never sure if it's a morality tale or a rockstar celebration. On the one hand, it praises a mass-marketed icon's rise to fame and iconographic status. On the other, Johnny Cash's story keeps wanting to veer toward Christian repentance and redemption. He does not exactly find that repentance and redemption here, unless June Carter is an able substitute for Christ. Since she is not, we wonder what lessons this movie actually teaches.

Yes, we learned, celebrities tend to be pampered delinquents. In Cash's case, drugs, booze, women, and money come all too easy to him. Unfortunately in Walk the Line, Johnny's fall into licentiousness goes on and on and on. There is nothing else but this fall, for almost two hours of this movie, except the hope that he might be saved by June Carter.

We also learned that being a rockstar is sexy. This movie is a de facto musical, since all of Johnny's songs are used to augment or comment upon the plot in key moments. And so we see Johnny and June up on stage for what seems like a quarter of the movie. And they look real cute together, even while married to other people.

This was our problem with Walk the Line. While we appreciate the plot arc that leads to Johnny and June's marriage after which everyone lives happily ever after, the movie throws away opportunities to deride Johnny and June for their three divorces and extra-marital activities. In fact, just the opposite. In several scenes, they are married to other people, but the movie-language makes clear that these two people always have been Meant To Be. In early scenes we almost want them to quit their spouses and fall in love. Then, in a later scene, we encounter a puritanical witch in a corner drugstore, who tells June that she has committed an abomination by twice divorcing, because "marriage is for life." Here, June is supposed to be the sympathetic character, but this lady has a point. June and especially Johnny have alienated their families by living somewhat decadent lifestyles, from which ensues divorces and wrecked relationships. It is therefore difficult to praise their final marriage when we were supposed to want it to happen when it should not have even been considered.

A more mature screenplay would've realized that--gee whiz--Johnny and June's early flirtations are not just dumb but immoral. June does recognize this to a degree, but yet she keeps touring with Johnny, smiling cutely on stage at his antics. In the end, it is she--and not the message at the church the two of them attend--who saves him from drugs and isolation. When Johnny asks her to marry him for the fortieth time--on-stage, embarrassingly enough--she accepts without any reason, reversing her previous adamant decisions to not marry him. The camera shows the two of them kissing, with the stagelights creating a bright aura around them. This is Johnny's salvation, of sorts. June has offered him grace, and thereafter we see Johnny reformed and his broken relationship with his father repaired. This is not to say that Walk the Line is necessarily blasphemous; there's enough Jesus stuff in here to lend weight to a counter-interpretation of some parts of this review. The movie just struck us, in its use of the modes and messages of conversion stories, as a bit cock-eyed.

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 5
Morality: see review (but not as bad as a PG-13 rating these days suggests; two bad words and Johnny pops some pills)

Shadow of a Doubt

2007-11-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

The central conundrum of this movie is, who is Uncle Charlie? Let's try to figure this out before the movie starts. Here are the facts:

This is an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

So the answer is obvious.

By the time you get to the point that Uncle Charlie has revealed himself as Uncle Charlie, you realize that an hour of your life has slipped by. By the time that Uncle Charlie tries to do what Uncle Charlie has done many times before, you realize that two hours of your life have slipped by.

There is a two-minute ending that attempts to say that Uncle Charlie was bad. Well, no kidding!

Entertainment: 1
Intelligence: 7
Morality: 2

Breaker Morant

2007-11-15T06:50:00.000-08:00

Breaker Morant is the best movie about the Boer War. It is probably the only movie about the Boer War, but if they made fifty of them it still might be the best. This war, of course, was one of the nastier of modern colonial wars, wherein both sides lusted for diamonds and gold and the Brits began the modern practice of rounding up women and children and shoving them into concentration camps. It was a very complex colonial situation, with native Boers, native Africans, and Brits and British colonials all involved.

In Breaker Morant, this complexity is figured in the trial of three men--Lt. Harry 'Breaker' Morant and two Australians. The men are charged with murdering three Boer prisoners and a German missionary. They will be tried by a military court and, if found guilty, sentenced to death. Appointed to their defense is a native Australian who has never practiced law and has one day to prepare for the trial, in contrast to the British prosecutor, whose bushy moustache signals smarminess. The movie intercuts present-day narration (the trial) with past goings-on in the accused men's military company, so that the historical truth from the perspective of the camera eye is contrasted with what at times is a sham trial with false witnesses.

Why is it a sham trial? There appears to be a cover-up. British high command, led by Lord So-and-So, had possibly ordered British companies that engaged Boer commandos to take no prisoners (i.e., kill them even if they wave a white flag of surrender). And the reality of Boer war battle is that guerrilla warfare tactics were used by both sides, so that no one in any situation could be trusted. Enter the German Missionary. An old man who claims to be spreading the Word of God in a warzone, he is not trusted by Morant and the soldiers, who think he's spying. But is he really guilty of anything? And do they really murder him?

The answer to these questions complicates the moral position of this movie, which lays it on a bit thick about the culpability of British high command and the "just doing my duty, sir" of the three accused soldiers. These accused men and their noble defense lawyer claim to be scapegoats for the moral and tactical failures of British command. This command, they say, is part of a corrupt and falling empire, which, soddened by its own unChristian brutality, needs to be cleansed of its sins. What better way to "cleanse itself" than to lay blame for atrocities on colonial underlings paid to do the biddings of imperialists?

If Breaker Morant at all exemplifies cultural feelings, Australians must really loathe their past associations with the British empire. For a non-Australian, however, Breaker Morant can be appropriated to other contexts wherein empire is waning and its overseas efforts are destructive to all parties involved. Of course warmongering imperials--guilty of great crimes--tend to blame others for their failures. Although they may not receive justice in the moment, as in this movie, we know that they will indeed beyond this Earth.

Engagement: 8
Intelligence: 7
Morality: 8

Miss Potter

2007-11-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

Movies like Miss Potter remind us that the American self-made man myth has expanded. It now firmly and happily includes females too. Nevermind that this movie takes place in late-Victorian England, hardly the place of modern feminist ideals. It plows ahead with the idea that Beatrix Potter can and will be an Independent Woman. Every scene constantly reaffirms how easy it is for a plucky female to get rich, and how happy she is when she gets to do what she wants.

But Miss Potter does not fully indulge in feminist ideals. The fictional Beatrix Potter relishes the idea of marriage, and the movie in fact repudiates the feminist viewpoint of one of Beatrix's friends, who at first says that men are only good for procreation but latter reverses that statement by enthusiastically urging Beatrix to marry because that's what women need to do. You see, moviemakers understand that women need to have their cake (Marriage) and eat it too (Independence). Thus ideology, despite its attempts, will never totally trump biology.

The story engages in another cliche when Beatrix removes from London into the rural Lake District. Here, the old city/country dichotomy flourishes. In London Beatrix is cooped up in her parent's upstairs studio. But once she leaves London and inhabits the Lake District, she's surrounded by the inspiring beauty of the countryside. Not surprisingly, something tragic happens in London (always a place of disease in these kinds of stories), and as Beatrix copes with that she finds redemption in the country. The message, as always: stay away from cities! This message is further augmented by the last 15 minutes of the movie, wherein Beatrix battles real estate speculators from -- cue bad guy music -- the city, who want to develop the country into the city. Wouldn't that be a shame? So Beatrix uses her enormous wealth to thwart the bad guy speculators, and we are told in the end that she establishes a land preservation trust to give to farmers. How agrarianism meshes with female independence beats us, but then again, this is a movie where you just have to shut the old brain down and take the night off.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 6

Secondhand Lions

2007-10-18T04:35:00.000-07:00

Now this is sad. The "Making Of" special feature on the Secondhand Lions DVD is more entertaining than the movie. There, you'll learn that the script for this movie circulated amongst movie studio execs for over a decade. They all cried when they read it, they are quick to admit, but circumstances kept them from greenlighting it. Further, the movie's director (also the scriptwriter) had to have his vision and no one else's. He bashes movie execs for trying to alter his vision, accusing them of money-grubbing, but of course he makes a movie so saccharine that it could easily define the phrase "pandering to an audience so as to generate cashflow."

Now, you might cry during Secondhand Lions, but only if you are not thinking. The movie tries its best to keep you from thinking, thanks to its use of emotion-drenched cliches. These include the neglect of our main character, Curious Boy, by his easily abused Single Mother. Because of her neglect, Curious Boy finds himself one summer in the company of strange relatives. These are two uncles--Robert Duvall and Michael Caine--who relate their mysterious pasts to Curious Boy in bits and pieces throughout the movie. They are rich, he knows, but why? Might they really be bank robbers, and not volunteers in the French Foreign Legion who acquired magical treasure?

It ultimately does not matter, for two reasons. First, the uncles' backstory turns into a ridiculous bit of Orientalism, capped by the utterly moronic ending in which a Middle Eastern man helicopters down to visit Curious Boy (now fully grown). It is made emphatically clear that Middle Eastern man is a bigwig in an oil corporation. Why? You see, the uncles in their youths some fifty years earlier fought *against* the forefathers of Middle Eastern man. But now, in today's world, the new generations meet each other cordially. The suggestion is that East meets West, big Middle Eastern oil interests meet typical American male, in order to show their full cooperation and friendship. Is this the kind of ending that makes studio execs cry? In the context of this movie, this ending is utterly stupid.

The second reason that the truth about the uncles' backstory does not matter has to do with Secondhand Lions' worldview. This is summed up in a speech given by Robert Duvall's character. All movie long, Curious Boy has been demanding that Duvall give him the speech. When that time comes, Duvall lets some howlers fly:

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

So let's see. People are naturally morally good, and it's fine to believe in lies as long as you believe in a good one. Thanks for the moralistic mush, Bob! Guess it doesn't matter whether you're an honest man or a thief. Just believe whatever.

So that's what we say to the possibility of seeing this movie ever again: whatever, man.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 1
Morality: 2

(One final note of pickiness: Michael Caine's attempt at Southern accent is probably the worst attempted accent since Kevin Costner talked AM-MUR-I-KIN as a twelfth century Englishman in that lame Robin Hood movie he did.)

Word Wars

2007-10-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

We've noted before the emerging movie genre we've labeled game-umentaries. Word Wars, a movie about four contestants in the 2002 National Scrabble Tournament, is the best of them, which is really not saying much.

Now competitive Scrabble itself is not exciting at all, but as Word Wars tries to demonstrate, the world of Scrabble tournaments is pretty interesting because it is full of quirky nerds. For instance, there's Joe Edley, who's won the national championship several times. He's been a high-level Scrabble player for two decades, but he constantly annoys his opponents by playing psychological games during competition. Yet on camera Edley tries to project a humble image. He practices tai chi and mumbles over and over again, in New Age speak, that competitions mean nothing to him.

All of Edley's opponents are after him. The weirdest is "G.I." Joel Sherman, a dead ringer for Pee Wee Herman, who gets his nickname because of his constant acid reflux problem. Sherman, like the other professional Scrabble players we meet, does not work. He studies Scrabble five hours a day and gambles with fellow players. It's never clear how any of these Scrabble pros earn a living. The tournament prizes are not even a month's normal wage, and even if one won the national tournament, he'd only get $25,000.

The four contestants followed in Word Wars interact in complex ways. They are at once friendly, competitive, and distrustful of one another. They oftentimes surprise. Sherman, who we'd all judge to be talentless at first glance, is a fine piano player and singer. And Marlon Hill, a pottymouth and proud pot smoker from the Baltimore ghetto, who complains that the English language oppresses him and oppressed his ancestors, came in 2nd at the 1996 national tournament. There is a reason they surprise us: they are exceptionally lazy. Three of the four characters do not have jobs. They are all extraordinarily smart, and they are all clearly wasting their God-given mental abilities.

Word Wars' main point is that the Scrabble tournament world, far from being filled with boring nerds, contains diverse personalities, hierarchies, rivalries, expectations--in short, nothing different from the mini-worlds that we know and interact in. Its attempt to construct complex, sympathetic characters is the means by which it draws viewers into this world. We are supposed to sympathize, and thus better understand what being "human" means. For secularist critics, Word Wars succeeds at this.

But let's not kid ourselves. This is Word Wars, not Hamlet. "G.I." Joel Sherman is not Hamlet, and a hotel conference room in San Diego is not the kingdom of Denmark. We are dealing with Scrabble, and so the cares of this tournament world are extraordinarily petty. This point is all we could dwell on at the end the movie, and so our final question was, "Was the hour and twenty minutes we spent watching this movie worth it?"

If this short review gives you a reason to do better things, then maybe.

Entertainment: 7
Intelligence: 3
Morality: It depends. (a lot of foul language from one particular character though; should be rated R)

Black Hawk Down

2007-10-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

When I go home people'll ask me, "Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?" You know what I'll say? I won't say a **** word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it. That's all it is."

This apathetic philosophy of war, the philosophy that soldiers fight only for themselves and each other, is the prevailing message of Black Hawk Down. Spoken at the end, these lines sum up a movie that for its last two hours is nonstop war. Spoken by an Army Ranger who barely survives a modern urban warfare battle, it questions the entire point of the preceding events. Why are U.S. Army Rangers fighting Somali warlords in Mogadishu? What is their purpose in a Third World desert country? More generally, how did we get from the Battle of Bunker Hill on U.S. soil to a military and P.R. catastrophe on the other side of the world?

St. Augustine once formed the Just War Theory, founded in Biblical principles (admittedly mixed with natural law), which prevailed for the most part in the Christian West for well over a millennium. It has since been totally abandoned by modern states and empires, which practice warfare purposefully on civilian populations when convenient. We currently find ourselves in a "War on Terror," but basic assumptions about this war are never addressed. What is "Terror"? What are the conditions of victory in this war? Can a state really be fighting a "war" against a non-state entity? How should Christians respond to such wars? In seeking answers, Christians do not to seek the church's response because the church has no response of its own. It is far too weak. Instead, national loyalties are far stronger and more concrete than church loyalties, and in our experience, they tend to determine Biblical interpretation of both war and politics for individuals and church bodies.

In its own way, Black Hawk Down is about these issues. It does, however, appear simpler: the story involves the U.S. Army conducting a mission in Mogadishu, Somalia, when one of its Blackhawk helicopters is shot down and crashes into the city. The Army conducts an operation to extricate the downed soldiers, which is when the real shooting starts. This is because Mogadishu is controlled by Muslim warlords, not a national government. And the Army, ultra-powerful but inefficient, is controlled in part by Pentagon headquarters and the Geneva Convention. Getting the soldiers out involves all of these factors, plus the fact that Mogadishu's urbanites have crude weapons and little affection for the United States Army. Such is usually the problem of colonizers and occupiers, as Britain found out in 1776.

We suppose, since this story is one incident, that others may extrapolate from it something wholly different from what we're arguing. They may say that full support must be given to U.S. military operations. After all, the Blackhawk fiasco occured under the Clinton administration, which is perceived as liberal and therefore half-hearted in its support of the military. Yet, no degree of support ultimately matters in this Black Hawk Down situation. One side is a modern military that practices siege-and-occupy warfare, and the other is an undeclared entity that blends into populations. There is no "winning" when the enemy can't be identified or represented; such an enemy can't really be sieged or occupied, and a formal declaration of peace doesn't do much good, if one could even be attained. Black Hawk Down depicts the tactical and theoretical faults of this sort of warfare. By doing so, it does not necessarily push us to turn to our Bibles to answer the basic questions asked above, but we hope that our readers will consider doing that anyway.

Engagement: 10
Intelligence: 7
Morality: 3 (lots of bullets and foul language, a lesser vice of soldiers)

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-10-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

SPOILER: Plot revealed herein. It's completely impossible to discuss this movie otherwise.

Despite its title and marketing, Pan's Labyrinth is not wholly a fairytale. And despite its apparently redemptive ending, it is not pleasant. Ubiquitous critical praise for it makes you wonder how much darker and depressing well-loved stories can get. This movie arrives at a time when Oprah is pushing an apocalyptic story of a father and son running from cannibals. What, are suburban soccer moms eating bon-bons and weeping when they read The Road? Does Roger Ebert really want to see the "one of the greatest of all fantasy films" multiple times, wherein are many violent deaths and Alice in Wonderland is murdered? When Ebert and Oprah are pushing archetypical myths bleaker than most any other widely praised myth ever written, you know that the times are dark indeed.

Anyway, Pan's Labyrinth isn't exactly a fairytale because it's grounded in historical reality, specifically in the tail end of the Spanish Civil War. In 1944, somewhere in the mountains of Spain, Francisco Franco's henchmen are pursuing "rebels" or "freedom fighters." They're probably Communists, but we're only told the positive angle, which is that they celebrate the fact that "we're all equal." The man who tells us this is the movie's villain, Captain Vidal, who makes Hitler look like Mr. Rogers. Vidal is obsessed with two things that insane Fascists are always obsessed with in movies: the birth of his yet unborn son, so that he can preserve his genetic heritage, and murder, particularly the slow, unsightly kind. Vidal's latter obsession leads to some unnecessary, grotesque scenes, which is the reason for this movie's rating.

Vidal is the stepfather of our heroine, who we'll call Alice in Wonderland. Alice enjoys fairy stories, much to the Spanish fascists' disgust. One evening she visits the Captain's garden labyrinth, where she encounters a faun, who tells her that she is the daughter of the King of the Underworld and that she must perform three tasks by the next full moon. The rest of the movie deals with Alice pursuing her three tasks, while Vidal and his goons try to murder all of the "freedom fighters."

Now Alice's visions and adventures tend to be in step with what will happen next in the movie. This leads to some interpretive questions. Is she dreaming? Does she have uncanny premonitions? Does she affect the future? The answers to these questions are key, because they influence how you interpret the ending of the movie. Pan's Labyrinth suggests that, in the end, Alice is resurrected from the dead. (If she's only dreaming about the afterlife, this movie is seriously depressing.) But what Alice is resurrected to is the problem. Being the daughter of the King of the Underworld, she of course becomes Princess of the Underworld by default. And the way she becomes princess is by playacting the right moral choice in her imagination . . . although it might not be just her imagination. Pan's Labyrinth engages in a recent formal device we've noted before, which is the inextricable blending of fantasy and reality, so that we viewers don't know which is which. The movie allows us to believe that either one (fantasy or reality) is more real than the other. Much of the critical praise heaped on this movie is probably due to this ambiguity, which, admittedly, is constructed far more complexly than Big Fish or Finding Neverland.

Since Fascist rule is the key concern of most of Pan's Labyrinth, it seems to us that the movie's emphasis is on an interpretation of fairyland rooted in politics. This kind of interpretation answers a constant, fundamental literature question: what do people mean when they write stories about fantasy worlds? Answers always vary. Stories can have implicit political, cultural, personal, or theological meanings. By setting fairyland in Franco's Spain, Pan's Labyrinth is using fairyland as a political critique of WWII Spain and our present-day global political situation. Thus, it seems to us that Pan's Labyrinth, as a comment on fascism and its opponents, is a modern global democratic view of fairyland. It is therefore a different kind of fairyland. Compare it to any of the following scattered examples: the original Arabian Nights (Islam), Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (Japanese; Shinto), or Edward Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Christian). In fact, think of any story where a boy or girl enters into a fantasy world. In nominally Christian fairy tales, Alice receives sound moral instruction, or the maiden becomes queen, or everybody lives happily ever after. But Pan's Labyrinth--a liberal democratic fairyland--is the most dismal fairyland you will have ever seen. In the end, Alice is murdered in cold blood, and she either simply turns to dust or becomes the Princess of the Underworld. All possibilities in this fairyland of anti-fascist politics are totally bleak.

Engagement: 9 (well-done, though sometimes revolting)
Intelligence: 8
Morality: 0 (see review, and a bit of unnecessary language)

Drums Along the Mohawk

2007-09-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

Frontier life is a favorite dreamland of the typical American historical narrative. Its cinematic depiction never needs to be true, and it never needs to be realistic, but it does have to strictly conform to contemporary expectations. Fittingly, you get what you pay for with John Ford's 1939 Drums Along the Mohawk. It's the ultimate stereotype of frontier life, complete with drunken Indians, log cabins, and a whole lot of the American flag. Given contemporary political and social attitudes, there's a lot to offend everyone. Show this at a diversity rally, for instance, and you could start a riot.

Now, to be fair, we should consider the historical moment of the movie's release. Ford made Drums Along the Mohawk at a time when American avoidance of WWII was a fairly popular idea. And frankly, who could disagree with that, seeing as how the Stalinists and the Nazis were about to obliterate each other well in advance of Pearl Harbor? The problem of American entrance into WWII is taken up by Drums Along the Mohawk, but that topic is distanced by the historical setting of the movie: upstate New York circa 1776. Ford is in favor of American entrance into war, sort of. Basically, he shows how national defense--and defense of Freedom with a big capital F--is of utmost importance against the tyranny of oppressors. These oppressors, of course, are no less than Evil Incarnate. They include Indians and British stooges, led by a man with an eyepatch, but they might as well be Nazis or Orcs or Imperial Stormtroopers.

(Yes, it's always the handicapped who are the most evil of all. Whether the handless Captain Hook, the legless Long John Silver, the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride, the eyeless man in this movie, the asthmatic Darth Vader . . . we could go on. When you see a deformed individual in an older story, you can bet he's a little bit twisted. More fuel for the diversity rally riot. But we digress.)

Anyway, this upstate New York frontier--derived from the pages of history books--is about as real as Middle-Earth. For instance, our wealthy main characters, Gilbert and Lana Martin, get married in Albany and head straight to their backwoods log cabin. Why they leave the good life for the rugged life, we never find out. Then, as soon as they get to where they're going, there it is, the log cabin, already built and ready for family life. No hardships, no troubles, it's all rich and plentiful out in the backcountry.

Later, two drunken Indians show up in the house of the sassy widow, Mrs. McKellar. They take several swigs from a jug, as Mrs. McKellar upbraids them for setting fire to her house. She commands them to take her precious bed out of the house, which they both attempt to do, while drunk. Several minutes later, the entire Mohawk valley experiences an Indian invasion. Whether all 2000 of them are plastered or not the movie never says, though a number of them get hit by 18th century rifles firing from several hundred yards away.

Now, if you like this sort of thing, go for it. Frankly, despite our lack of sensitivity, we were annoyed with the portrayals of the following:

1) Gilbert and Lana Martin's marriage. This is adequately symbolized by one moment, wherein Gil proudly places a cane above the fireplace, given to him because "if women act up, they need beatin'!"

2) The Indians. Either they're drunk or they're comic relief. There's a Christian Indian, the only friendly one (looking more Apache than Iroquois), who constantly shouts "Hallelujah!" like Sloth from The Goonies.

3) The Reverend Rosenkrantz. He acts like a pious fraud and it's supposed to be funny. For instance, during a sermon he advertises for a general store and then announces a that there will be a military conscription, concluding while praying to God, "Any man failing to report to duty will be promptly hanged. Amen." Sounds like John McCain's dream pastor.

4) The weeping and wailing over the consequences of militarism. This is a tradition that goes back at least to Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, where the people who froth at the mouth for battle have to, at some other time, tell us how horrible war is. It always seems short-sighted or hypocritical, and it seems doubly so when Henry Fonda is reading his lines.

There's more ridiculousness where that came from. As we said, there's something to offend or annoy anybody. We first saw this movie in a 7th grade history class in public school, so we've had two different reactions to it. Back then it was boring. Today, it's dumb and it's boring.

Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 4 (some simplified heroism, but moronic characterizations of everybody)

Eragon

2007-09-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

Three minutes into Eragon, we needed a map and a scorecard. The voiceover narrator told us that someone was fighting someone in magical land XYZ, and that there were dragons involved. Beyond that, we were lost. And we remained lost throughout the entire movie. When the credits rolled, we couldn't recall the names of the characters and weren't sure they were even told to us. Thus, in the spirit of the Internet, we present you with the following plot summary, which is sure to thrill you on cold winter evenings:

Once upon a time, the forest world of Alagaesia was populated by dragon riders. But one of the riders, Galbatorix, desired power and so formed an army to destroy the dragon riders. He killed them all and has ruled Alagaesia for a long time, with his evil sorcerer Durza's help. Nevertheless, a remnant of the dragon riders (the Varden) escapes to distant mountains, where they await the fulfillment of a prophecy about their reconquest of Alagaesia. So, when the orphan farm boy Eragon finds a blue stone sent by Princess Arya, he realizes that it is a dragon egg. When the dragon Saphira is born, Eragon meets his mentor Brom, and becomes the dragon rider foreseen in the prophecy that predicts the fall of Galbatorix. Eragon journeys to Varden, where he fights against the armies of Durza.

Follow that? If you're like us, you got lost at the word "Galbatorix." We realize the impossibility of absorbing the many names of fantasy characters and their doings. But there's hope yet. In fact, this plot summary is actually a translation, and all you need is for someone to put it back into its original language. Well, you've come to the right place! We've provided that service to you below, free of charge. What follows is Eragon as it really is:

A long time ago, in a land called Middle-Earth, a blond orphan farm boy named Luke "Harry Potter" Skywalker found the One Ring, which looked an awful lot like a blue dragon. This Ring promised the destruction of Sauron, the evil ruler of Middle-Earth, and his henchmen Saruman, an evil sorcerer. Sauron was ticked that his One Ring was missing, so he went after Luke and his family.

Thankfully Luke is not there when his uncle's farm is destroyed by Orcs. This is a necessary plot twist, so that Luke can journey with Obi-Wan Kenobi to the hideout of the Rebel Alliance. Along the way, Obi-Wan teaches Luke how to practice good magic. They defeat a few Orcs, but then Luke gets premonitions about a captured princess (named Leia), whom Luke decides to rescue from Saruman's fortress. Obi-Wan isn't down with that; he wants Luke to learn more about good magic, but Luke stubbornly persists that Leia needs saving.

Anyway, Luke heads to the fortress alone, sneaks in unnoticed, then finds Princess Leia. But Saruman shows up and does a few magic tricks. He throws a spike at Luke, but Obi-Wan appears out of nowhere and sacrifices his life for Luke's. Then Han Solo appears out of nowhere and helps Luke and Leia get out of the fortress.

Together, all three rush to the Rebel Alliance hideout in the mountains. There, they prepare for battle against Saruman and the Orc Army.

As a service to you, we will not finish our plot summary. It's enough to know that the Forces of Good do their thing and the Forces of Evil do theirs. The ending does scream "Sequel!" but, clearly, the movie studio will have a hard time deciding whether to call it Star Wars VIII or Lord of the Rings 5.

Entertainment: 1
Intelligence: -10 (dumbest movie we've seen since BattleField: Earth, which is saying something)
Morality: 3

Rocky

2007-09-28T03:48:00.000-07:00

How do we choose what movies we watch? We ask, because the decision often involves so little thought. Sometimes boredom overwhelms the notion of "redeeming the time." Or, as in our case with Rocky, one of our family members had been living in a cultural hole and hadn't viewed any of the series' six installments. "What!" the other said, "Never seen Rocky! Why, if had to choose ten movies that defined the American experience--whatever that is--Rocky would be one of those we'd put in one of those time capsules city governments are always burying for the people in the year 2500 to dig up."

So, one evening we watched Rocky.

Yet this earlier comment, upon reflection, was a little presumptuous. The idea that we must "catch up with culture" by seeing every movie that everyone else has seen comes from . . . where, exactly? Social pressure? The desire to be "in"? Whatever it is, it doesn't strike us as a worthwhile reason. The most potent argument we've heard in favor of watching what everyone else does is the one that says we must be culturally relevant in order to be great witnesses for Jesus Christ. Well, Peter and John had probably never read Homer and Virgil, but they did okay. True, Paul quotes a couple of pagan poets. Maybe there is something to knowing something about the magic C-word ("Culture"). So the best thing for us to do, had we not seen Rocky, is simply to ask someone else to tell us the tale. Give us the five-minute overview, beginning to end. That would save us one hour, fifty-five minutes, and we'd be a bit more relevant than before.

As for Rocky itself, the boxing ruins all. This is probably why the final five Rocky movies are so bad: they all concentrate on boxing and heavyweight titles and rematches. This is the central aspect of the final third of the original Rocky, but the best parts occur in the beginning. There, Rocky and Adrian and Pauly slowly reveal themselves as complicated characters who make inscrutable choices. Rocky, for instance, appears to be a loveable dope, yet possesses streetsmarts and a small amount of wit. Despite being a loan shark's muscles, he likes exotic turtles and lectures teenage girls on morality. Adrian, Rocky's love interest, is an ultra-shy pet-store worker who may or may not be interested in Rocky. All of the characters drift in and through the wasted urban landscape of 1970s Philadelphia. The dialogue in these early moments is witty and funny. Sylvester Stallone--a fairly prolific scriptwriter, we bet you didn't know--never came close to writing anything this good afterwards, leading us to wonder if he got hit in the head too many times while making this movie.

Yet the movie collapses, we think, when Rocky is given a shot at the heavyweight title. Not only does it cheer on the fact that two men violently beat each other to a pulp in a sanctioned "sport," but it turns Rocky and Adrian's relationship into a sentimental, praiseworthy shack-up. When Rocky invites Adrian to his apartment, one of the shyest women in movie history gives in after two minutes of pleading (yeah, right!). Then she gives in to his advances, and then . . . The rest is left to the imagination, but Adrian eventually moves in with Rocky and, after Apollo Creed has radically altered Rocky's face, Rocky can only think of one thing: Adrian.

The movie's final lines, like its training scenes, are well known and have been oft repeated in pop culture. What has gone unnoticed, of course, is that while the movie ends with women and sport, it opens with Jesus Christ. The very first shot is an image of Jesus, painted on a gym wall above where Rocky fights in a local match. His image is shown here, we guess, to signify that the proceeding story is blessed. And then, except for the crucifix hung above Rocky's bed, He simply exits the movie and we do not hear from Him again. We aren't sure what Jesus has to do with Rocky pummeling another man and living the American dream. Perhaps Stallone, in the days of the Jesus movement, thought He was relevant. Yet there He's left, floating above everything, while a champion fighter seeks boxing glory in five subsequent movies. Perhaps the people who dig up the story of Rocky in the year 2500 will learn something from this.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 1 (also, some choice language from Rocky's trainer, among other things)

3:10 to Yuma (1957)

2007-09-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

How timely! Just as we review 3:10 to Yuma, some big movie studio puts out a remake in 2007. We aren't sure why they'd bother to "improve" on the respectable original. Maybe they thought it needed to be spiced up: throw in plenty of crudities and now we've made a modern Film with a capital "F." Add Russell Crowe, some guns, lots of blood, and more plot twists and we've got ourselves a multi-million dollar product. Well, we say, there's no need to go to the theaters and add to the studio's coffers. Just rent the 1957 version instead.

Why, you ask? There's plenty of decency and good-heartedness in this morality tale. The plot is fairly simple. The movie opens with the notorious Ben Wade gang robbing a stagecoach and commiting murder. They waltz cockily into and out of a nearby town, but Wade himself makes a mistake by remaining in town to pursue a female. The good townsmen realize this, and stumble into capturing Wade. Worried about his gang, they make a plan: divert the gang while two of them take Wade to Contention City, where a train will appear at 3:10. Dan Evans, a farmer in financial straits, volunteers for this job, mostly because he needs the $200 reward money due to a long recent draught. The bulk of the movie is a psychological showdown between Evans and his captive Wade. Wade is a sweet-talker, a real tempter like the devil, and given Evans' financial vulnerability, Evans can be easily tempted. Will Evans give in to Wade's bribes? Will Wade's gang find Wade before the 3:10 train? If they do, how will Evans get out of that predicament by himself? The morality tale part of 3:10 to Yuma is the interplay between Evans and Wade. Evans is a decent family man with a wife and two boys, and Wade is an outlaw without scruples. Each, at times, leans towards becoming like the other. The real question is, who will prevail and will he do so honorably or not?

In many ways, this is a better Western than the John Ford/Howard Hawkes fare that stereotypically defines what "The Western" is. There's no Federalist political moral, as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. There's no apathy towards violence or revenge, as in every Clint Eastwood movie. There are also fittingly hilarious moments (someone had fun creating oddball lines in this script), as when the townsmen are deciding who will take Wade to the 3:10 train.

Marshal: Do I have two volunteers?
Member of posse #1: We gotta know what we're gettin' ourselves into.
Member of posse #2: Sure... might not be safe.
Marshal: Safe! Who knows what's safe? I knew a man dropped dead from lookin' at his wife. My own grandmother fought the Indians for sixty years... then choked to death on lemon pie. Do I have two volunteers?

And frankly, the lead actors (Glenn Ford and Van Helfen) fit their characters perfectly, so much so that we don't think Russell Crowe could do a better job. The movie's lone problem is poor editing and an abominable soundtrack. The movie's pacing isn't always great--it needs 15 minutes cut from it--and someone needs to write a new score that doesn't radically exaggerate emotional tensions like all early Western soundtracks do. We would prefer that a movie studio would've performed these two simple tasks, instead of spending millions on a crude remake. That's the way to turn 3:10 to Yuma into a A+ Film.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 10

Babette's Feast; Tender Mercies

2007-09-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

When we started this website, we were already far behind. Now we're trying to catch up, but as the weeks go by we see that we're getting farther and farther behind. Such is the nature of work and time.

So we just wanted to say this: we highly recommend Babette's Feast and Tender Mercies. Ignore the junk in the movie theater and go rent these. Eventually, we'll get to reviews of them, but since our recommendations are and probably will always be few and far between, we're putting these two out there for you.

Anatomy of the Murder

2007-09-19T04:30:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the murder trial in Anatomy of a Murder, defense attorney Paul Biegler (played by Jimmy Stewart) receives a note about his fellow prosecuting attorney. It reads:

The prosecutor is from the state Attorney General's office. He's a real hotshot. Look out

Unfortunately, no one was told to look out for Biegler. Anatomy of a Murder pits two slick lawyers head-to-head, both of whom are more interested in performing and winning than arriving at truth and justice. After taking on the case of a soldier who killed a bar owner because the the bar owner supposedly raped the soldier's wife, Biegler does all he can to get his client off the hook. He winks and nods at his client, provoking the soldier to decide that he in fact killed the bar owner in a fit of temporary insanity (an obvious lie). Biegler then finds a psychiatrist who will back up the temporary insanity claim by saying that the soldier could do nothing other than kill; in a fit of extreme psychobabble, the soldier is diagnosed with "Irresistible Impulse." Biegler then finds a 70-year old court case that allows that ridiculous diagnosis a legal precedence. Then comes the show trial. Biegler plays the jury. When his client asks why Biegler would ask a question that could be struck from the record, Biegler replies that "it's a moral point. No jury can ignore it, even if they're told to."

So the trial goes. Biegler and the prosecutor play courtroom games constantly, in a movie where the trial takes up two-thirds of the running time. Even though the case and the charge are about murder, the trial turns into a long, drawn-out query as to whether the soldier's wife was raped. Does the soldier know more? Was the wife cheating on her husband? Are the witnesses who know the bar owner concealing key information? We never find out the answers to these questions, even though it's hinted at repeatedly that there's more to the case than meets the eye. Anatomy of a Murder does not really mind that either. Throughout, Biegler is portrayed as a sort of hero. And in the end, when the soldier is declared "Not Guilty" for reason of temporary insanity, we're supposed to feel good about it. But given the monkey trial we just watched and the unjust actions of the characters, the movie's sentiments are totally ridiculous. Biblically speaking, this is calling evil good.

Looking up Anatomy of a Murder on the IMDB database, we discovered that Jimmy Stewart's father was so outraged when this movie debuted, that he took out an ad in his local newspaper, telling people not to go see it because of its immorality. That's an action we'd call brave. Not only does this movie not care about the morality of the procedures of its courtroom drama and the final outcome, but the idea of prurience is always in front of us. The soldier's wife, for example, wears tight outfits, and the dialogue and the camera closeups tell us to look at them over and over (especially one key scene where she reveals her golden hair in the courtroom). Also, a key piece of evidence in the court case happens to be her underwear, which we also hear about constantly. Other words unusual for 1950s films come up: "sperm" and "intercourse," for example. The movie's obvious excuse is that discussion about rape and sex were necessary to in this particular court case. However, it's quite obvious that the sexual talk was written into the script for its own sake, to give a little shock and jolt to prudish audience members, including Jimmy Stewart's father. In this regard, Anatomy of a Murder is a lot like a 10-year old who just learned a "dirty" word; he'll find any excuse to be able to say it. But at least a 10-year old would know better than to consider Jimmy Stewart's character a sort of hero, which is more than can be said for the fools who wrote and directed this movie.

Entertainment: 7
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 0

The Ox-Bow Incident

2007-09-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

"Ultimate democracy . . . is really a tyranny divided among a multitude of persons." -- Aristotle, Politics

The Ox-Bow Incident is a morality tale about modern law and justice. It is such a morality tale that two things unusual for Westerns occur. First, Henry Fonda, our main character and starring role, is subordinated to the mob that he joins. Second, the movie clearly eschews romance by quickly bringing on and whisking off a love interest for Fonda, which tells us that Politics is more important than Love here. The Ox-Bow Incident was released in the middle of WWII (1943), and frankly we were puzzled that a studio released a non-propaganda film like this. It's even prescient about ex post facto law being applied to the Nuremberg trials. The clear difference between this movie and other Westerns is that it uses a questionable mob instead of a singular hero out for justice/revenge, which provides a nice antidote to impersonal Man-With-No-Name shoot-em-ups starring Clint Eastwood.

The story moves quickly (the 75-minute running time is rather nice for those with crowded schedules). Fonda and his sidekick ride into town and enter a saloon. Soon after, the men in the town get riled up about a reported murder outside of town. A heterogenous lynch mob forms, featuring our star, a burly old woman, a black preacher, and an ex-Confederate soldier named Tetley. Most, but not all, are bloodthirsty. When they find three men camping out in an ox-bow, a sort of kangaroo court forms. What happens next forms our law-and-justice moral. We will report no more about it, except to say that this lynch mob thinks it's lawful. It sticks to a semblance of the legal procedures it knows, as when the sheriff's deputy deputizes all of the mob's members. Tetley takes on the crucial leadership role, and he demands majority rule. Despite this, the mob is clearly practicing sham justice. They eschew the Biblical rules of accepting at least two or three witnesses and presuming the accuseds' innocence. They are, in short, a democratic tyranny.

We had the disadvantage of reading the Walter Van Tilburg Clark novel that this movie is based upon, and to us the differences between a book and its movie still applied (the one always being far better than the other). Fonda's sidekick is the narrator in the novel, a semi-trustworthy teller of events whose injury during the course of events is meaningful and impacts his taletelling. In the movie, however, this sidekick is a pointless character who receives a pointless injury. Also, in the book Tetley is a little complicated, but in the movie he's an inhuman monster. The C.S.A. pin always easily visible on his hat, his status as a Southern gentlemen and mob leader displaces the movie's application of its moral, changing it from a contemporary political critique to a commentary on the history of the American South, which we've been beat over the head with all of our lives.

Yet the movie does do one thing better: it gets right Fonda's response to events at the very end. As a sort of accomplice to the mob, he has a burdened conscience, and that spurs him to go beyond the actions of James 1:27. Unlike John Wayne's and Clint Eastwood's many film characters, this is a hero we can learn from.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 8

The Problem with Roger Ebert (and other so-called critics)

2007-09-15T06:45:00.000-07:00

In his recent Answer Man column, Roger Ebert fielded an absurd question and gave his response:

Reader's Question: My sister heard about a movie called "Corpus Christi," in which Jesus is depicted as being gay. Is there such a movie? That would be sad.

Ebert: It would be sad if it was a bad movie, not if it was a good one. A movie's quality is separate from its subject.

If that's the case, the potential is limitless. We could make a masterpiece about Roger Ebert the homicidal maniac. Or better: a great movie that defames Ebert's family and friends, mocks his entire career, and jokes constantly about his past girth problems and his current health problems. Undoubtedly, if it were really great, Roger would give it four stars.

This idea, that the quality of a movie can be disconnected from its morals, has been Ebert's fundamental presupposition for his entire working career. We have seen Ebert say again and again that "a movie is great not because of what it's about, but because of how it's about what it's about." This is the same thing as saying that the telling of the story is the only thing; a story's contents and messages are not at all relevant. While we don't dismiss the need to tell stories well, it's clear that Ebert trots out the old "art for art's sake" dictum whenever he needs it. So you want a movie about a gay Jesus? "Art for art's sake and all beauty is truth!"says Roger. Ebert has sometimes followed this idea to its extremes, calling a nihilist's nightmare (Pulp Fiction) a masterpiece and endlessly praising the "ground-breaking" Deep Throat (not the Watergate informant). In fact, if there's one thing we've learned by reading Ebert for years, it's that he enjoys naked women. He just likes his pornography cloaked by things that appear artsy.

Now, though Ebert says "a movie's quality is separate from its subject," he's by necessity a hypocritical humanist. Roger can't go too far in throwing out all values, or else he'd get the values he doesn't like thrown back in his face. So of course he's given zero stars--a very rare rating for him--to movies about which he thought the subject intolerable. The pseudo-documentary, C.S.A.: Confederate States of America, a what-if fantasy abou the Confederacy winning the Civil War, received Ebert's utter disapproval because it came across as far too serious about its subject (even though the movie was attempting to be ironic). Similarly, Ebert castigated September Dawn for its portrayal of Mormons as murdering, intolerant fanatics because "the vast majority of the members of all religions, I believe and would argue, don't want to kill anybody." "There isn't anything to be gained in telling this story in this way," says Ebert, because "it generates bad feelings on all sides, and at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain they are Christians, underlines the way that these Mormons consider all Christians to be 'gentiles.'" So in this case, the political and social morals that the movie depicts make a difference. Fancy that, the possibility that a movie will alter its viewers' morals matters greatly after all! We wouldn't want people to start hating Mormons because of September Dawn, would we? As usual, Ebert allows his liberal-humanist views to determine his movie experience and opinion, even when it counters his "a movie about anything can be great" dictum.

So morals of stories matter to everyone--even to those who say they don't. It only depends, for the person involved, which morals a movie touts are important. For Ebert, a good movie about a gay Jesus Christ is like a good movie about hardcore porn: a "cultural triumph" that advances the causes of social progress. For almost all critics, the same is true. A movie can be good, so long as it's socially acceptable or provocative, according with the idols of the day.

But for Christians, the entirety of Scripture lays out the rules for man-made stories by providing the moral foundations that should underlie them and by providing numerous stories that serve as capable models and examples. It probably goes without saying for you, but the Word of God is the basis for all thinking, watching, and reviewing of movies. We've seen many Christians give into the invented standards of secular critics, praising 300 for ground-breaking visuals or desiring to watch some actor's stellar performance, while totally ignoring a movie's contents and messages. Sometimes we want to let others--scriptwriters, film critics, actors who blah-blah about their new film--tell us how to view a movie. But as followers of Jesus Christ, there's a better way: "be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves."

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." We acknowledge that this is sometimes difficult, but this is where we'd like to be. Select what movies you watch, and what stories you ingest, carefully.

Cars

2007-09-12T03:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a first: a Pixar movie that we completely loathed. Cars has as much charm and depth as a NASCAR race. In fact, the hint is in the bland title. Cars eschews a story (mostly) and instead produces a narrative that unfolds as if you are watching a TV channel. The "story" begins with a NASCAR race, complete with Bob Costas as an announcer and the Goodyear blimp providing the overhead cam. Then we're told about the life of Lightning McQueen, the egotistical race car hotshot, through commercials, movie previews, and a Hollywood Insider TV show. Please. If we had wanted inanity, we would've flipped on the tube itself.

Equally as bad, the cars in Cars do not work as characters. They look nothing like human beings, and so they lack the expressive features of human beings that allow us to take in a range of character traits. Instead, vehicle difference is substituted for character. There is a semitruck, an old police car, a cutesy sports car (a female, obviously), and a beat-up tow truck. All of these are one-dimensional; they have the personality you would expect a semi-truck or sports car to have. Sometimes glitz is added to spice up the cars. When modified cars appear, equipped with neon lights and blaring rap music, our guess was that they'd have an ethnic flavor. And wouldn't you know, they were cars with Mexican accents.

The main story is archetypal. Urban hotshot serendipitously ends up in the country, where he learns new life lessons and make friends with the local yokels, and when he returns to the city he is wiser and able to perform something he wasn't able to do previously. The animated whirly-gigs and the constant noise of car engines are supposed to spice this basic story up, but there is nothing--voicework, scene, or character--that makes this particular story ingratiating or charming. Cars is as loud, flashy, and obnoxious as the NASCAR culture it is based upon. It makes Ratatouille all the more amazing, and we would rather watch it a thousand times in a row than watch Cars one more time.

Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: -1
Morality: 8 (though if it's this stupid, is it really moral and edifying?)

On Movie Ratings

2007-09-08T11:26:00.001-07:00

It's difficult to say whether movie ratings--G, PG, etc.--are total shams or not. On the one hand, they give you a standard by which to gauge what a movie contains. On the other hand, the standards are vague and misused, and they have changed wildly over time.

Let's give an example. We've had enormous problems with PG movies from the '70s and early '80s, before the PG-13 rating came out in about 1985 (because of the "heart" scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). In those years, movies got shoved into either 'PG' or 'R', which apparently meant that a movie was either family-friendly or for adults only. On that basis a movie like Barry Lyndon still carries a 'PG' rating, even though it has a half-second long orgy scene that would make Internet pornographers proud (unfortunately, we discovered this by experience). Similarly, a so-called family movie that critics say will "make you and your kids cheer and weep"--that is, Breaking Away--contained so much "mild" profanity in the first twenty minutes that we couldn't imagine showing it to an 18-year old (we did not finish it). And Planet of the Apes, with a G rating, contains Charlton Heston's bare backside.

The 'PG-13' rating alleviated these problems only to a degree. Filmmakers can now shoot for 'PG' or 'PG-13', the optimum ratings for big-budget summer fare that will be marketed heavily to children, teenagers, and adults. No one wants a 'G' rating, unless the name attached to it is Pixar or Disney, because 'G' does not sell to all key demographic groups and will not make as much money as, say, 'PG-13'. Meanwhile, what is considered 'R' today is so horrific that 'NC-17' has become tantamount to pornography. There are unwritten codes that the MPAA ratings board uses to separate the PG fare from the PG-13 and the PG-13 from the R. These codes, you probably have experienced, are both silly and arbitrary and the difference between PG and PG-13 matters to few anyway. In recent years the board has been including brief descriptions along with ratings. For example, Batman Begins is rated PG-13 for "intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements," while Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is rated PG for "frightening moments, creature violence and mild language." So what's the difference between "frightening moments" and "disturbing images"? And what in the world are "thematic elements"?

Let's go back in time for a moment. In the so-called glory days of Hollywood, the first several decades of the twentieth century, major studios stuck to the standards known as the Hays Code. Some of the highlights from that code are as follows:

General Principles

No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

Applications

Nudity and suggestive dances were prohibited.
The ridicule of religion was forbidden, and ministers of religion were not to be represented as comic characters or villains.
The depiction of illegal drug use was forbidden, as well as the use of liquor, "when not required by the plot or for proper characterization."
Methods of crime (e.g. safe-cracking, arson, smuggling) were not to be explicitly presented.
References to sex perversion (such as homosexuality) and venereal disease were forbidden, as were depictions of childbirth.
The language section banned various words and phrases that were considered to be offensive.
Murder scenes had to be filmed in a way that would discourage imitations in real life, and brutal killings could not be shown in detail. "Revenge in modern times" was not to be justified.
The sanctity of marriage and the home had to be upheld. "Pictures shall not imply that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing." Adultery and illicit sex, although recognized as sometimes necessary to the plot, could not be explicit or justified and were not supposed to be presented as an attractive option.
Portrayals of miscegenation were forbidden.
"Scenes of Passion" were not to be introduced when not essential to the plot. "Excessive and lustful kissing" was to be avoided, along with any other treatment that might "stimulate the lower and baser element."
The flag of the United States was to be treated respectfully, and the people and history of other nations were to be presented "fairly."
"Vulgarity," defined as "low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil, subjects" must be treated within the "subject to the dictates of good taste." Capital punishment, "third-degree methods," cruelty to children and animals, prostitution and surgical operations were to be handled with similar sensitivity.

The Hays Code was slowly abandoned during the '50s and eventually was junked in the late '60s. Clearly, none of these standards are in place today; you may see all of them violated in one movie preview shown on daytime TV. This is not, however, to say that Hollywood movies from the 1940s were necessarily more "moral" than those today, although we believe that that's generally the case. One of the most praised movies ever, Casablanca, blatantly glorifies the thought of adultery, and we have seen a number of Westerns that do in fact glorify the killing of Indians. But the now-discarded Hays Code, compared to present-day practices, demonstrates changes in cultural temperaments. Yes, there once was a time where standards existed. This is why, as a general rule, you will be fairly safe with an "old" movie. You knew this already, but the Hays Code shows you why.

Today there is only the shadow of a code in the MPAA's ratings, and it will not take much more cultural disintegration before G, PG, and PG-13 are totally meaningless, if they aren't already.

What's an adult or parent to do if official movie ratings are vague and unhelpful? We use a site called Kids-in-Mind, though we don't have children of age to watch movies. This is for our own use because our ideal is to try to watch that which is "true, lovely, and of good report." We wouldn't recommend that anyone work for the Kids-in-Mind site, and we wouldn't pay for their services if they required subscriptions. The reason is obvious: someone is watching all the junk and writing down every four-letter word and piece of skin shown. Nevertheless, as long as the information is there, we'll use it.

A Little Princess (1995)

2007-09-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

Don't let the title fool you: A Little Princess is not for little girls only. As a rich and well-directed production, we think it has elements that all adults may appreciate. The title signifies the plight of its main character, Sara Crewe, who at the beginning of the movie travels from her home in India to New York City with her father where she will stay in a boarding school for girls. As Sara says repeatedly, "any girl can be a princess," and this she needs to remember because the cold, massive, dark-mint green schoolhouse is very foreboding, as are the streets of New York City. If Sara can't be a princess, she can imagine herself as one. You see, Sara likes wild stories. She especially likes tales of Indian myths, which are not only told by Sara but shown visually during the movie. Sara in turn teaches her fellow girls that stories are richer and more rewarding than some of the humdrum rules and activities of boarding school life. Yes, there is a wicked schoolmistress and, yes, lightning and thunder literally crash when the schoolmistress goes on a tirade. However, the cliches are few and far between in this movie, thankfully. And if the few cliches bother you too much, you will marvel at the production design (including the use of color) and at the way the director uses the camera. If we were making a movie, we would put this one on our short list of movies to study.

The context of Sara's storytelling is the dark-green schoolhouse, the loss of her mother, and her father's participation in World War I trench warfare (he is British). She does not imagine for imagination's sake, but she does so because of the cruel realities of the world around her. What happens to her father--his fate we cannot say--is the heart of this movie. His fate changes Sara's life, who always makes use of her pleasant disposition and unlikely friendship with the school's black servant girl. This servant is a virtual slave, a role that's anachronistic for New York City circa 1914. Her incorporation into the girls' lives, particularly Sara's, is well constructed. It's true: A Little Princess is one of probably two movies we've seen in which some themes of multiculturalism didn't seem blatant, ridiculous, and hoaky.

This is not exactly true of the inclusion of Sara's visions of India, though. There is a god-like or savior figure who pops up in the movie repeatedly, appearing to orchestrate key events in the lives of Sara and her father, and he is figured as an Indian mystic. He is very striking is in a movie that is deliberately colored dark-green, because his light orange robe stands out against that background. Sara's mental life, moreover, is ordered according to Hindu religious tales. She in fact narrates the story of Ramayana throughout, which the movie deliberately parallels with her own story. The Hindu tale has apparently competed for and won Sara's approval. This, of course, is in direct opposition to St. Paul's injunction to know and live by the principles of Scripture stories and precepts. We wondered how much different this movie would be if Sara hadn't associated exoticism and sacredness with a stereotyped vision of India, and instead had thought about how her relationship with her father was analogous to that of hers with God the Father. Christianity is totally absent from A Little Princess, a point to consider if you are going to let your children watch it, even though the original novel penned by Francis Hodgson Burnett (of The Secret Garden fame) probably draws at least loosely on Christian stories. Nevertheless, we still enjoyed the movie very much because of its excellent construction, which is a reason unto itself to see it.

Entertainment: 9
Intelligence: 7
Morality: 4

Howard's End

2007-09-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

Based upon a 1910 E.M. Forster novel, Howard's End is firmly entrenched in the long tradition of British stories about aristocrats. Several things always happen in this tradition. The aristocrats always seek happiness in marriage. They move between the country and the city, demonstrating the urban-rural dynamic. There are always concerns, usually in the problems of minor characters, about family inheritance. Finally, they are typically comedies, in the sense that they always end well. Howard's End toys with all of those conventions, but set in the early twentieth century--with trains, motorcars, and bootstrap capitalists--it distorts them so that the ending is not exactly comedic. In fact, it isn't even close to happy. Howard's End is basically a Jane Austen story that needs psychotropic meds.

To fully understand this story, you have to see the three levels of society it portrays. First there are the Wilcoxes. Henry Wilcox is a wealthy businessman who married an heiress with a small country house called Howard's End. Next, there are the Schlegels, a lower-class aristocratic family descended not from Englishmen but from Germans. They can afford a nice London flat, but they can't pay for it when the rent rises astronomically. Finally, there are the Basts, a poor couple at the bottom end of society. The interaction of these three groups is important. The Schlegels at first are a happy family, but they split themselves in two: one Schlegel sister has sympathy for the Basts, but the other Schlegel sister develops a devotion and dependence upon the Wilcoxes. This is one of the main sources of conflict in this movie, and what happens to the Basts and to the Wilcoxes will tell you the social moral that the movie trumpets.

It is not so easy to say that these families merely typify economic classes though. Margaret and Helen Schlegel are characters in their own right. The way these two split is the heart of the movie. While they enjoy their tea parties and London social life early on, they slip ever so slowly into an antagonistic relationship. Howard's End does not depict this split as occurring instantaneously, as in one dramatic scene where something major happens. Rather, the two sisters slowly move away from each other, towards either the Basts or Wilcoxes. For Margaret, her communication becomes totally stunted, so that when she marries Henry Wilcox she is never able to talk to him honestly (as if Henry could be honest anyway!). For Helen, her passion moves her to alienation from the family and a sinful act. But Helen is not vilified in Howard's End, as in earlier novels in the aristocratic tradition when fallen women are castigated (they usually die at the end of the story). Rather, it is Henry Wilcox who is castigated, primarily for being the one who is forgiven but who cannot forgive others. But this movie ultimately offers no solution to the decaying society it depicts, nor to the Schlegel family split or the problems between the Basts and the Wilcoxes. After Howard's End ended, we were the ones who needed psychotropic meds.

Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: 8
Morality: 4

Spellbound

2007-09-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Spellbound tells the stories of eight teenagers as they seek glory at the 1999 National Spelling Bee championship. Glory, in this case, is fifteen minutes of fame on ESPN -- that is, if they can spell 'cabotinage' and 'opsimath.' In one of these stories, we follow a young girl from Texas, whose father can't speak English and may or may not be legal. In another story, there's the white guy nerd from Missouri. In yet another, a 12-year-old son to Indian immigrants, living in California, who push their child to the point where he has almost all of the dictionary memorized. There's also the black girl from Washington, D.C., whose mother appears to be single and says that her daughter hasn't gotten enough props for her creds. Or something like that. So, while these are eight loose stories, they clearly tie together in a sentimental, N.P.R. kind of way. This, Spellbound tells us, is American diversity, and these are intelligent Americans.

Pardon us for waxing sacrilegious about an American tradition, but we don't get spelling bees. The final rounds of the National Spelling Bee competition in 1999 were broadcast live on ESPN. In 2007 they were broadcast live on primetime network TV. The competition must draw in millions in ad revenue, so not only are spelling bees quaint high school competitions, they're big business at the national level. But why spelling bees, we wonder? As one father says in Spellbound, a child works hard to memorize thousands of words that no one ever uses. Plus, aside from the apparent uselessness of memorizing "heleoplankton" and "apocope," Americans also have a proud tradition of being poor spellers. George Washington wasn't so great at it, though there were no grammar police in his day to regulate the art of spelling. Lewis and Clark were absolutely horrendous. Noah Webster concocted alternate spellings for numerous words, in order to make American spelling different from British. So it seems okay to us to be a little off once in awhile. Why not create a different bee, one more useful for the young ones later in life? Why not a biology bee? A history bee? Memorizing the names of and dates associated with Roman emperors and ancient empires sounds more valuable to us. Or, if these eight teenagers are going to study words all day long, they should just learn two or three foreign languages instead of the spellings of exotic words.

Spellbound is cute, no doubt. Some of these people will charm you, and some of the things they say will make you chuckle. Of course the camera, put right in their face constantly, demands that they talk and talk about themselves. Mothers of spelling bees contestants talk about how they feel. Fathers brag about their children. The children talk about themselves. For this narcissist fest we partly blame the interviewees and partly blame the filmmakers.

Because it tracks several contestants before and during the competition and because of its presentation, Spellbound is not unlike other documentaries about novel competitions; to name a few, Wordplay (crossword puzzles), Word Wars (Scrabble), and The King of Kong (arcade version of Donkey Kong). They all film quirky contestants who obsessively play a game familiar to us all, most of whom normal society would label nerds or freaks. This is the beginning of a genre. Should we call it Docugamery? Gamumentary? Sounds like we've created another word to add to the competition.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 7

And It Only Gets Worse

2007-09-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

We read today that the umpteenth sequel to Halloween, directed by sadist and ex-rock star Rob Zombie, is the #1 movie this September. We also note that this Halloween version has the first perfect score we've ever seen at Kids-in-Mind. It is anticipated that the movie will make 33 million dollars this weekend, meaning that somewhere over 400,000 people will see it.

So it's a sure bet: World magazine will pay someone to watch it, and the ensuing review will tell us that it depicts the results of the Fall.

There have been eight Halloween movies. Meanwhile, there remains only about five or so characters identified with Christianity and portrayed positively in the last thirty years of Hollywood movies.

Lastly, we wonder why those willing to continue waging a War on "Terror" should be more afraid of Arabs in Mesopotamia than the moral decay in their own midst. If the resulting freedom gained from such a war included the continued bombardment of world populations with America's and Europe's cultural filth, we're not sure we want to be a part of that kind of freedom. We don't really blame Muslim nations for not wanting it either.

Zathura

2007-09-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

If we were ten-year old boys, we'd be enthralled with Zathura. In fact, this movie reminds us of clever but forgettable fantasy movies in the 1980s that we still remember fondly. Zathura is a mix of so many movie scripts that came before it that anybody who is on an originality hunt should look elsewhere. See if this plot sounds familiar: two young boys are bored in a big house. In the creepy basement they find a space-adventure boardgame that takes them on amazing adventures. The boys argue a lot, in part because their parents are divorced. But along the way, they reconcile and learn to become brothers and friends.

So Zathura is terribly derivative, but it is amazingly well executed. The DVD cover compares this movie to Jumanji, which is a bad comparison because we would be more entertained by a 3 A.M. lecture on C-SPAN than by Jumanji. What Zathura does perfectly, in our humble opinion, is to make the action exciting by confining it in a familiar location. The boys roam around a large, old house, and when they make it into space, their house is basically the spaceship. The action does not leave that vantagepoint, which actually gives the movie a homely feel. Of course there have to be aliens and robots and black holes, but these all come to the boys via the playing of the game; in a worse movie, the boys would be whisked off to other worlds and would visit the aliens and robots. Those who are fond of big, old houses will instantly find a sentimental attachment to this movie. Who hasn't been bored at home, just like these boys are, even though you may have TV and video games readily available?

The dilemma is how to watch this movie. You cannot ask any questions about things that happen in the plot because that will ruin the way you are supposed to watch it: that is, with wonder and anticipation. Further, we don't know if ten year old boys should be watching Zathura. While lessons may be learned by seeing the boys transform from bickering enemies to good friends, young watchers might pick up a few new colorful terms from the boys. We counted four such words in total, though there are more, which is entirely too bad. But Zathura is a lot of fun for viewers whose brains are nearly fried after a long hard week of work and thinking. For us, watching it wasn't too much different from reading adventure stories. It was just too bad that it lasted only an hour and a half.

Entertainment: 9
Intelligence: 3
Morality: (everything okay except a few choice words spoken by kid actors)

Maxed Out

2007-08-29T18:08:00.001-07:00

Exodus 22:25: If you lend money to one of My people who is poor beside you, you shall not be to him as a money-lender, neither shall you lay upon him interest.

Proverbs 22:7: The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

The United States is the largest debtor nation in history, by far. Americans now have a negative savings rate, meaning that each person spends more than he keeps for later. Yet we are encouraged, even in time of war, to spend like there's no tomorrow. This encouragement comes from a number of sources, one of which is our inherently inflationary economy. Money will always be worth less tomorrow--the dollar has lost 95% of its value since 1913--so it only make sense to trade those dollars for stuff. Another source of encouragement is easy credit. It's everywhere, and you probably received a few offers today in your mailbox totaling thousands of dollars, preapproved with no questions asked. In the context of the history of the world, this kind of lending is insane.

In a way, the 2006 documentary Maxed Out is about all of these issues. It shows, through the interweaving of a number of interviews and stories, America's addiction to credit, especially credit cards. There is no first-person narrator, thankfully, as in Michael Moore films. But there is a clear point-of-view: the movie portrays lenders as sharks and debtors as sob stories. We sympathize with this portrayal a bit. What most lenders are guilty of is usury (under any definition), especially instant check-cashing centers and credit card companies. Banks, as well, are guilty of fraud. Banks are built on a fractional-reserve scheme; only a portion of what account holders have is actually (physically or digitally) in the bank itself. If all account holders were to withdraw their accounts at the same time, only a few would get their money back. No other business sells what it doesn't have and can't provide. Banks, therefore, are inherently bankrupt, and this very idea has caused a great ritual to occur every two decades or so throughout American history: the bank-run. Finally, the ultimate bank (the Federal Reserve; our country's central bank) creates money out of thin air. This is effectively counterfeiting, that is, stealing. So all of our benevolent lenders are corrupt, and Maxed Out is eager to portray most of the individuals, who are involved in concocting credit schemes and then harassing their lendees, as corrupt, heartless jerks.

Yet we cannot sympathize with the debtors in this movie that much. Dave Ramsey, a money guru on the radio who comes from a Christian perspective (as far as we know), appears in this documentary. He makes a number of points about wise money choices, and shares his own helpful story. The debtors in Maxed Out have not listened to him. They have not been wise. We don't understand their choices, frankly, because we don't believe that it's wise to enter into debt, unless it can all be paid back with ready collateral. Our credit card company must hate us, because they pay us to use their card. If everyone used a Discover card prudently, Discover would not exist. Clearly, the movie is playing to the audience, most of whom have some debt and will therefore be very willing to sympathize with the plights of other debtors. But we all know what happens to a fool and his money.

As we said, Maxed Out touches on usury, an almost vanished subject in Christian churches these days. That it is a vanished subject strikes us as beyond bizarre. Almost a complete reversal has occurred. For the first 1500 years of Christendom, usury was one of the sins most preached against. It was banned everywhere (for Christians). But the last 500 years? Not much of a peep, except from a few faithful souls. It's not as if usury is a marginal topic in the Bible. It appears in a number of books, and it is clearly described as a heinous practice. Your question may be, what is it exactly? We'll leave that lengthy discussion for another time and place; it is enough for us that people even care about and discuss a neglected subject in God's Word.

As for Maxed Out, it's a reasonable entry into individual and national issues concerning debt. Most of the information in it was old hat for us, however. We recommend, instead of the movie, that you study the Bible on the subject of lending and borrowing. Next, the book Empire of Debt is a fine entry on America's problem with debt, particularly the last two chapters (written by one of our favorite contemporary business writers, expatriate multimillionaire Bill Bonner). Quick introductions to banking can be found here and here (the latter link is the first in a series of videos; however, its ultimate solution--more government intervention--is ridiculous). And finally, pray that Christians will be wise and will not get sucked into the innumerable debt schemes in our present age.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 5
Morality: (a bit of unnecessary foul language)

Shrek

2007-08-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

We were once visiting a parent (occupation: the ministry), who was dealing with an energetic two-year old. After having some trouble with the boy, the father put him in front of the TV and turned on Shrek. As we all do, the child passively sat there, entranced. With a look of weariness, but without getting the full meaning of his words, the father said, "Training children never ends."

As it happened, the DVD was set to start in the middle of the movie. It was at the part where Shrek, an ogre who loves his independence and enjoys his own crudity,wrestles WWF-style Lord Farquaad's knights. At that point, the soundtrack blares the Joan Jett hit, "Bad Reputation":

I don't give a damn 'bout my reputation
You're living in the past it's a new generation
A girl can do what she wants to do and that's
What I'm gonna do
An' I don't give a damn ' bout my bad reputation

Yes, we're always training children. And this kind of brazen rebellion was what the two-year-old was learning throughout.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 1

Flushed Away

2007-08-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

Flushed Away is an apt description of what will happen to your mental capacities after you reach the end of its 94-minute running time. You will feel like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz: "If I only had a brain . . ." This movie is a multi-million dollar Looney Tunes feature. The main character--the pet rat of rich Londoners--gets hit, kicked, slapped, and electrocuted dozens of times. In fact if you like slapstick scenes where characters get hit in the groin with one thing, then get hit again with another, you might appreciate the finer nuances of Flushed Away.

Sure, there are one or two clever spots (the scene with the mime and the cellphone, for example). But the plot exists merely to see the sights of London sewers--filled with a rat city and slugs that sound like chipmunks--and to experience chase scenes, love connections, and more chase scenes. Just for kicks, there's a family values angle to the story. Our main pet rat enjoys life in his bachelor pad, a fact reenforced by Billy Idol's "Dancin' With Myself," played in the opening moments (the lyrics of which you won't want kids singing). But then he meets the spunky female lead. She's a family girl, sort of. Actually she wears Union Jack pants and steel-toed boots. She's a posh, urban warrior-woman, but she's disappointed that our hero doesn't have a family. So of course, after a bunch of stuff happens, they sail off together in the end. But you knew that would happen ten minutes in. From our point-of-view, the family values angle is a con, and it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, which is about chase scenes and the main character getting hit in the groin five times in a row.

We can imagine a scene where a parent sticks her kids in front of the TV. She turns it on and pops in Flushed Away. Then she replays it two hours later. Then the next day. Then the day after. This of course trains the kids to do exactly what they see on TV, which is to act like a Looney Tune. We wouldn't be surprised if little Johnny is hitting his sister twenty minutes into the Flushed Away marathon. This might not happen, but it could. In any case, shut off the TV forever and give Johnny a decent book. If he wants frogs and rats, which Flushed Away features, give him The Wind in the Willows. Let him read that ten times, and see if a different child emerges. We wouldn't rely on that remedy alone, but stories of value and depth will prove more effective aids in child training than the dangerous sedative known as the Television. If Flushed Away teaches us that, then it has one useful purpose.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 1
Morality: 1 (the lone value this movie has is that it's somewhat entertaining. But entertainment for entertainment's sake is a problem.)

Happy Feet

2007-08-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

One of the many penguin films of the past few years, Happy Feet won the Truly Moving Picture Award at the 2006 Heartland Film Festival, held in our beloved former home and Midwestern state. Why did it win? The chief criterion for the award is that the winning film should "explore the human journey by artistically expressing hope and respect for the positive values of life." Thus, Happy Feet proves that what moderns mean by "the human journey" and "positive values" is nothing more than deep-fried penguin poo.

Happy Feet is a triumphant story for evolutionists who've spent no time thinking about the moral consequences of atheistic materialism. In Happy Feet's animated world of penguin silliness, survival of the fittest is at its cruelest. Penguins devour fish, sea leopards devour penguins, and killer whales devour everything. The Antarctic is an ecology of death and competition. But nevermind that, because penguins dance and sing idiotic pop songs. Happy Feet's penguins are given human qualities so that we can sympathize with their plight and believe its ending. This makes the movie's message more heartbreaking (supposedly): that humans are destroying the habitats of all Antarctic creatures and we have to stop killing them all NOW. (Gee, people. Have a heart!) However, and this is what we exited the movie wondering, if everything in the Antarctic just lives to procreate and die, why should we care about the food supply of penguins? The environmentalist ethics of Happy Feet leaves us with absolutely no warrant for believing in its cause. In fact, it's just the opposite. If everything is eating everything else in the world--and we are all collections of atoms anyway--then humans have every right to take and eat whatever we want. To quote Keynes out of context, we're all dead in the long-run anyway. Further, if penguins evolved by natural selection, they will eventually die by natural selection. So why should we humans care when and by what means this happens? Happy Feet doesn't supply the answers to these questions, and frankly it doesn't want you to ask them. The ending is one of the lamest in the short history of movies. The script writers painted themselves into a corner, and in order to get out they had only one solution: to serve their audience deep-fried penguin poo.

Thankfully, Christians have justifiable warrant for conserving and maintaining global habitats: God's creation mandate to Adam in Genesis' opening chapters. This mandate shows us that God is the owner of creation and we are its stewards; we therefore are charged with earthly caretaking, a duty that includes not trashing our tiny blue ball in space. Happy Feet, a secular movie, doesn't understand stewardship. It simply tries to make its viewers feel guilty without warrant (all of whom have no connection to emperor penguins), then calls on a centralized government power (the U.N.) to solve the penguin problem.

We won't deny that this movie is stunning to look at, especially the long-takes with the camera swooping out and through the Antarctic terrain. But the incorporated pop music is absurd and not for children, and Christians who let their children watch this movie umpteen times have much explaining to do. We were not grooving when a bunch of penguins sang "Let's Talk About Sex." Worse, Happy Feet encourages generational rebellion by representing the older generation of penguins as wooden, oppressive fakers. You see, that generation has created a false belief system to deceive the younger generation. Only by singing Prince and Queen do the younger folks rebel against their older oppressors. But who cares about social progress? If Happy Feet's penguins don't get eaten by sea leopards, they'll die in the long, harsh polar winter. Or they'll die in five billion years, when the sun cools and expands. In the long-term, nothing matters, and neither does this movie. So don't even bother.

Entertainment: 2
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 0

Saving Private Ryan

2007-08-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

In the first thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, one soldier picks up and carries his dismembered arm, another gets his face blown off, another's guts spew out of his belly, and another drags the top half of a body around. We suppose this is what modern warfare looks like. And we are left wondering: what maniac would start a war like this without tremendously great, Biblically justifiable reasons? Thankfully Saving Private Ryan, a eulogy to European-theater-based American soldiers, is about WWII. That allows the general public to feel secure in the movie's vision of heroism, but a movie like this probably will never be made about the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, WWI, the Korean "Conflict," the Vietnam War, the Iraq Wars, and the hundred or so other skirmishes the U.S. military has been involved in.

Saving Private Ryan has an important framing device. It begins with a shot of a transparent American flag, then continues with a scene set in the present-day where the elderly private Ryan visits a military graveyard and weeps. The movie eventually ends where it started. Ryan, at the Normandy gravesite, honors the men who sacrificed their lives to find him, and by this time everyone is supposed to be weeping. After all, everyone has devoted himself to Ryan's cause--from the Tom Hanks-led squad that tramps across France to find Ryan, to the military bureaucrat who gives a rousing Abe Lincoln speech. The goal of Hanks' squad is anti-utilitarian. A large number of men sacrifice themselves for the cause of one person. They are all Americans, he is an American, and naturally we Americans fight for each other. Subservient to this cause are the various religions practiced by the squadron: Christianity (Protestant and Catholic), Judaism, agnosticism, and probably atheism. Spielberg deliberately inserts them all in different places--watch, for instance, for the Jewish graves with Stars of David instead of crosses--apparently because our rallying point ought to be the abstract nation-state instead of religious doctrine.

Which got us thinking. If Christians cared about their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ (wherever they are) like they do about U.S. soldiers, the church would be a united force and we would consider the fate of Christians everywhere before rushing to blow stuff up. Unfortunately we live in a nationalistic era when state loyalties are very strong and church loyalties are very weak. Thus in Saving Private Ryan, the Nazis--some of whom were probably Christian--are depicted as lifeless dummies to be gunned down in all situations. Yes, Nazis are Nazis and Spielberg may be right in always depicting them as monsters or stooges, but there's an animosity to them in Saving Private Ryan that ignores the complexities likely present in the cases of ordinary soldiers (see Das Boot, for example). But oh well. The point is that this movie is not just aiming for a lifelike depiction of WWII; it asks viewers to reaffirm their loyalties to American greatness in a post-Vietnam era. We are sure that many American viewer responses will vary from thankful to extremely thankful. For us, though, the blood and guts and the sad reality of war's carnage and chaos are too much to take.

Entertainment: 0 (Though we may learn something from movies about total war, they are never entertaining.)
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 1 (for video-game violence and lots of unnecessary language)

The New World

2007-08-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

The New World is just another Pocahontas story. If this movie is about anything, and it never seems like it is, it's about the transformation of Pocahontas from Indian princess to English maiden. At the beginning of the movie, she frolics in Virginia forests. At the end of the movie, she frolics in English woods. There's lots of frolicing in this movie, in fact, and lots of pining--John Smith is crazy in love with her--but little else. Ostensibly The New World's subject is the English colonization of Virginia, beginning with Jamestown in the first decade of the 1600s. Had the movie stuck to the interesting points of history--English contact with the Powhatans and their subsequent interactions--it might've worked, but every time it tries to go that way it steers backwards into the Pocahontas myth and a fabricated love story about her, which made us hit the FAST FORWARD button repeatedly.

If there were compelling characters and a plot, The New World would've been a visual masterpiece. The scenes and sets are stunning. Our director, Terence Malick, has done much reading and consultation to get the Jamestown colony and Powhatan villages to look as authentic as possible. In effect, Malick shuttles us through a multi-million dollar period village, so we congratulate New Line Cinema on wasting capital on an introductory video for Jamestown Museum tourists. It is true that, in the movie's first fifteen minutes, the costumes and settings are visually awesome (particularly the Powhatans), but the story goes nowhere afterwards and so eventually we don't care at all what it looks like. We suppose a history class could benefit from watching these early moments, which present first contact between English and Powhatans and the erection of the English settlement. To supplement these early scenes, Malick plays Wagner's stirring "Vorspiel" to "Das Rheingold," the key musical theme throughout the movie. It is also played at the end, when Pocahontas dies and gets a strange sort of movie resurrection, but there's no rhyme or reason why Wagner should be played during a tour of the Powhatan village.

The New World is totally ruined by voiceover narration, most of which sounds like lines taken from a Transcendental Meditation guidebook. We rolled our eyes when the movie opened with Pocahontas' voiceover saying "Come, Spirit, blah blah blah." In fact, Malick--in no big shock in these ridiculously politically correct times--characterizes the Powhatans before first contact as being "without guile, deception, or forgiveness." They don't know forgiveness because, apparently, they don't know how to be bad until the English teach them. John Smith gets that line about the untainted Indians. He is to the historical Smith as the fictional Gandhi is to the historical Gandhi. Instead of a fizzled love affair between a hunky Smith and a nubile Pocahontas, which is the major story line of The New World, the historical Smith was a hardened warrior and self-promoter and Pocahontas (if she really saved him at all) was probably no older than 10. The historical Smith's biography is beyond belief--a real whirlwind of adventure--but Malick chose to make him an introspective mope in the middle of a love story. Go figure.

Perhaps the movie's greatest atrocity is its representation of the English, who all might as well be secularist pigs. Besides the lunatic who shouts verses from Jeremiah and the brief shots of St. Paul's in London (which Pocahontas visits), there's no evidence of the Christian faith of Englishmen. Instead, London looks like a bigger freakshow than the Powhatan village. But we don't feel upset about this, knowing that The New World--with its poetic tedium and blubbering voiceovers--will rightly fall down the memory hole of film history.

Entertainment: 2 (tremendous visuals though)
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 3 (clean overall)

The Prestige

2007-08-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

Note: The second paragraph contains spoilers. You will NOT want to know about the ending of this movie beforehand.

If show-business is the art of deception, then Christians must beware of it. Entertainers can be tricksters, which the origin and connotation for the word "hypocrite" ("actor" in Greek) demonstrates. The Prestige is about two entertainers in competition with each other, which is often a morally dangerous situation in a fallen world. As stage magicians in early 20th century London, the two warring magicians, Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, strive to win audiences and to improve their art by creating increasingly more daring tricks. Competition has its benefits; in The Prestige, it spurs creativity and innovation that promises to improve ordinary lives. The price of competition, however, is covetousness that turns into revenge. The Prestige, in its representation of revenge, has a low view of competition, which takes place not only between magicians, but also amongst wives and mistresses and rival scientists. Everyone is a deep sinner here, and this is probably the first story in which Thomas Edison is a villain.

The film distinguishes between the two at-odds magicians. Borden, it shows us, is morally a better man; he's a deceiver but an ingenious artist. Angier is a fine entertainer but an uncreative thief. Both become murderers, but the problem with The Prestige is that it justifies Borden's final actions and makes Angier the greater monster. This might seem sensible to some. Angier implements technology in a monstrous way (reminding us of C.S. Lewis' warnings in The Abolition of Man). He clones himself and murders his own clones just to wow his audience, and his pseudo-resurrections are used for diabolical purposes. From the movie's perspective this seems more vicious than Borden, who, given his wrongful imprisonment and relationship to his daughter, is the more morally complex of the two magicians. Still, in the end Borden is allowed a pass even though his deceptions resulted in four deaths, including his own wife's suicide. This seems backwards. The devil is not the abuser of technology, but the father of lies.

Thanks in part to its two trick endings, The Prestige is a symbolically rich movie. There are a number of foreshadows, doubles, and replications and variations on themes in this movie--not just the birds, balls, tanks, hats, and cats, but the multi-level commentary as well. The construction of this movie is much like the story it tells. Just as the characters themselves are multiplied by Nikola Tesla's machine, the main actors play multiple roles and two brothers penned the script. The Prestige is clever because it warns us to beware of the deceptions of entertainment while trying at the same time to be as entertaining as it can be through deception. The story comments upon its own telling. Though viewers might be confused in the early going by the chopped-up chronology--the movie tells its beginning and end and middle sections in a jumbled order--for thoughtful viewers it will be worth persevering to the end. The Prestige ought to and will provoke reflection upon the morality of both its story and its story-telling.

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 9
Morality: see review (not recommended for most viewers)

The Moral Minefield of Movies

2007-08-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

We attend the movie theater twice a year at most. This is for a number of reasons, chief among them is that a $10 ticket is a vote in favor of Hollywood fare that may turn out to be at best idiotic and at worst immoral. DVDs, cost effective as they are, have excellent tools for the purposes of censorship -- namely the STOP and EJECT buttons. A case in point is our recent trip to Ratatouille. The projectionist put the wrong movie through the reels, and so we ended up seeing previews for R-rated movies, featuring the graphic liaisons of a male gigolo (Good Luck Chuck) and the umpteenth sequel to Halloween. From what we could see, our matinee audience consisted of grandparents and children, none of whom seemed to flinch at shot after shot of half-naked females and the glorification of a resurrected murderer. (To be fair, one parent got up and left with a young child, though we debated whether they complained or went to the restroom.) We had a word with the manager, but the movie theater treated us merely like upset customers returning a broken TV. When Good Luck Chuck and Halloween XII debut, the theater will likely feature them.

Far from being the funhouses they're marketed as, movie theaters and video stores are moral minefields. An honest Christian could not operate a movie theater in good conscience these days. He might run, say, a drive-in theater for families, but that would limit showings to three a year during the summer season. Otherwise, he would be forced into peddling current releases, the majority of which celebrate violence and pornography. The same goes for video rental chains and retail stores that sell DVDs. Retailers who profess Christ ought to get out of the movie-selling business altogether, not because if they limited their selection they couldn't make a profit, but because little they could sell would edify their fellow Christians.

We therefore advocate two things: step as cautiously as possible in movie-watching, and know the Bible as well as you can. God's story shows you how to examine man-made stories, and it will not let you be indifferent to previews for R-rated fare. We advise this knowing that, unless you are Amish, you will probably watch at minimum several dozen movies in your lifetime. Be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.

Batman Begins

2007-08-06T08:08:00.001-07:00

The old Soviet propaganda newspaper Pravda once called Batman a capitalist murderer, a superhero ideologically in league with the FBI. This judgment was meant for the '60s TV show, but we have no doubt that Pravda would say the same thing about Batman Begins. This movie is utterly and self-consciously ideological; it is some kind of weird symbolic allegory about terrorism, social justice, and the nation-state's relationship to both. That might sound too far out, especially for a movie about a superhero in a bat costume. Nevertheless, the movie persists to ask the question "What is justice?" and then answer it by creating an opposition between Bruce Wayne and Ra's Al Ghul (the villain).

All that matters comes early in the movie. We're shown in the opening scenes that Bruce Wayne represents deep pockets, a family-run corporation looking to practice philanthropy in Gotham City. Wayne himself is an American son; his is a patriotic, aristocratic family. Wayne is compassionate, his family is compassionate, and to let us know how compassionate they are, Wayne's great-grandfather helped slaves travel the Underground Railroad, hiding them in what in this movie becomes the Bat Cave. But Bruce is disillusioned by the murder of his parents, a crime committed by a peasant. Who's to blame? The murderer or society? Bruce and Ra's Al Ghul have their own answers, and they debate the nature of justice and crime when Bruce travels to a remote Himalayan training facility for advanced ninjas. The movie makes itself a philosophical allegory within the first five minutes. These early training scenes set up the motivations for the action that will follow, which is as dark and grim as any popular movie we've ever seen.

Actually Batman and Ra's Al Ghul share the same beliefs, but because Batman has "compassion" and Ra's Al Ghul does not, the two have different aims. We detected a strong "War on Terror" angle to Batman Begins, one from a Sean Hannity perspective. Consider the location of the training facility (remote mountains in Asia), the purpose of Ra's Al Ghul's ninja group (stealth missions), and the poppy flowers, which are a lot like Afghanistan's major export, the poppy plants that can be turned into opium. Further, Ra's Al Ghul is an Arabic name, but in the movie this character goes by another moniker, Henri Ducard, which is decidely French. Al Ghul is a fanatic who prides himself on cleansing crime-filled Gotham City by destroying it. Meanwhile, Batman wants to rid Gotham of crime by becoming a vigilante, an above-the-law terrorist of sorts. The only difference between the hero and the villain in this case is Batman's status as a corporate capitalist do-gooder and an American patriot who has a cutesy girlfriend in the DA's office. This is our judgment, not the movie's. It firmly believes in Batman, but that means it also believes in vigilante justice and the stealth means of attaining it (e.g, wire-tapping, torture, concealing information), or, to put it another way, in subverting several of the Ten Commandments.

The worst aspect of this movie is that in its "meditation" on justice, (if we can call cliches meditations), it is deliberately secular. There's scant discussion of what the standards of justice actually are and why they should be standards, except for the cliches of utilitarianism and various crusades for social justice ("the greatest good for the greatest number" and all that rot). Batman, as a pseudo-savior figure, makes up the rules as he goes. As he admonishes one criminal, who shouts "I swear to God" as he reveals a secret, "Swear to me [instead]!" Batman Begins advocates the worst of abstract theories of justice, and it shows in the relationships between characters, which are all cold and distant. Almost no one is a warm-hearted friend in this movie. They all relate to one another through their status in a bureaucracy, whether corporate or governmental. Even Bruce Wayne's and Alfred's master-servant relationship seems shallow, and Bruce and his girlfriend treat each other more like a crimefighter-prosecutor pair than as old childhood friends. The human beings in this movie are objects upon which Batman's idea of justice is either being done or not. They are impersonal abstractions, like the anonymous boy Batman's D.A. girlfriend saves and cuddles during Ra's Al Ghul's attack. This a mathematical and cold idea, represented by the movie's dark tones and the black Batman costume. There's little here that represents the characteristics and quality of relationships to family, neighbors, and church members contained in, say, the New Testament epistles (a form of writing that implies warm-hearted relationships). As a secular savior, Batman fails in every regard.

Entertainment: 4 (too dark for us, but very well constructed)
Intelligence: 7
Morality: 1 (also contains disturbing images inappropriate for most people)

Ratatouille

2007-08-04T12:57:00.001-07:00

Warning: Possible spoilers in the second paragraph.

Here's an oddity. Ratatouille breaks with the traditions of animated movies, especially with that of Pixar's recent popular fare. Instead of a simple quest story (as in Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, etc., etc.), we get an elaborate plot structure with an equally strange setting and premise. Most of this movie takes place in the kitchen of a restaurant in Paris (a majority of the characters are French), and the story is centered around the idea of savoring fine cuisine. There are so many significant minor characters that several of them get distracting, but Ratatouille splits its main character duties into two: Remy the rat and Linguini the human goofus. The two share a creative partnership that evolves, gets tested, and then morphs into a satisfying final outcome. This is the best part of the movie. Particularly satisfying was the idea of giving the rat the gift of creativity, then letting that creativity be worked out in his imaginative visions of famed chef Auguste Gusteau. A simpler movie would've made the story totally about rats or totally about humans, or else it would've given the visions of Gusteau to Linguini. But Ratatouille instead presents us with a host of perspectives, including Remy's, Linguini's, and morbid critic Anton Ego's. This, no doubt, will prove rewarding on multiple viewings.

What partially diminishes Ratatouille's complexity is the fact that it tries to bash us over the head with its moral. In fact that moral is stated outright at the end: "Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." Only people goofier than Linguini could've missed that. Even worse is that this moral contradicts another of the movie's prominent messages, that "anyone can cook," which is the title of Gusteau's famous book and the source for a few inspirational acts performed by the characters. But clearly (and Linguini is a stellar example) not everyone can cook. As symbolized in the dynamic between the hard-working but thieving rat colony and the palates of customers at five-star French restaurants, Ratatouille contains an implicit tension between egalitarianism and aristocracy. The ending not only leaves this tension unresolved, it blares it loudly. Ratatouille itself, we are told, is a peasant's dish now being served in the most exquisite of restaurants. So which has really triumphed? What kind of social and intellectual structure is this movie really rooting for, and does it concur with (for instance) Exodus 18 or 1 Corinthians 12?

We quibbled with other choices: with Linguini as an American, with the inclusion of his relationship with Collette, his fellow cook, and with the notion that an elderly lady would fire innumerable shotgun blasts at rats. But this is the land of animation, after all. Ratatouille is one of the best looking movies we've ever seen; do not, in other words, watch it on a small or fuzzy screen. And the voicework for Anton Ego (performed by Peter O'Toole) is fantastic. Our favorite animated movie remains one of the Toy Storys, we aren't sure which, but Ratatouille is more intelligent and novel than any other computer-generated movie we've seen. Be on the lookout for its political and social messages, and enjoy the show.

Entertainment: 8
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 7

National Treasure

2007-08-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a profit-maker in the wake of Da Vinci Code madness. National Treasure is an Indiana Jones detective story about a treasure hunt in which the map (on which X marks the spot) is the Declaration of Independence. You see, those clever Knights Templars and Freemasons in the eighteenth century hid the greatest treasure on earth right under Wall Street, then devised elaborate clues, dispersing these clues in Independence Hall, a ship in the Arctic, and in between the text of our revolutionary document. We not only have to read the Declaration, we have to read through it with 3-D glasses. Leave it to our enterprising genius and adventurer (played by Nic Cage), a character of extraordinary American pedigree, to really read the document. As we learn in the end, Cage "stands with the greatest men in history" and reads the Declaration as our Founding Freemasons intended. If only he would run for President and become the de facto dictator of Freedom.

Chasing the treasure along with Cage are crafty British subjects, led by Boromir from Lord of the Rings, who try to steal the Declaration out of greed and probably because they want to take over America or something. Cage, meanwhile, has to steal the Declaration in order to save it. He does it with the help of a skinny blonde and wise-cracking computer nerd. The blonde does what blondes do in movies, but as we discover in a near-death moment, both she and Cage assert their patriotism by caring first about the Declaration. This movie is soaked in moronic nationalist tropes and stereotypes, and (even worse) depicts the FBI as compentent, just, and sympathetic to Freemasonry. We weren't surprised when the token black showed up for two minutes, portraying a black mammy figure. This movie is just plain stupid. It is filled with so many implausible coincidences--even ignoring the idea that the Declaration is a treasure map--that the occurrence of any of them would be less likely than a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling this movie.

Despite National Treasure's premises, Freemasonry has always been a boring social club where good old boys conduct banal rituals. Ben Franklin did not invent 3-D glasses. Gunpowder does not take five minutes to explode. People do not get everything they could ever want. And it is a sin to celebrate theft and fornication. But one thing it did get right: moviegoers laid down 176 million dollars at the theater. We don't suggest you participate in the box office take of any of the dumber sequels this movie will probably spawn. You will only get blondes and evil Boromirs trying to steal "our American heritage." Ignore it at the theater, and ignore it when it shows up in the $5 DVD bin at Walmart.

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: -5
Morality: 1

Michael Palin: Sahara

2007-07-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different. In 2002, BBC produced a travelogue of the Sahara desert region, with Michael Palin of Monty Python fame as host. Palin's goal was to tramp around the Sahara and see the ancient sites--taking just one small bag and a skeleton TV crew. The name "Sahara" evokes a far-off empty wasteland (it is the size of the United States), but as Palin notes at the beginning, the Sahara is only 300 miles from Gibraltar and is loaded with diverse peoples. The Sahara, we find, is not just sand after all. This is one of the major points of the travelogue. Except for one lonely camel journey, Palin befriends scores of people and finds loads of evidence of the human imprint on the region: from the 800-year-old dye-making process in Fez, Morocco, to the vast iron ore mines of Senegal, to the 6000+ year-old rock carvings in Niger, to the rich oilfields of Libya. With Palin we zip from one place to another, each new and unique, all containing lots of people.

As a traveler and interviewer, Palin is interested in culture. He visits the Muslim Arabs on the north coast, the West Africans in Senegal and Mali, and several tribes without traceable roots. This journey is a bit anthropological, since Palin is quick to describe the cuisine (often camels' heads), and ask the locals about marriage customs. In fact he asks about this latter topic about fifteen times. Marriage in the Sahara region is practiced a variety of ways, but it's clear that polygamy and fornication are rampant and that no one in the Sahara embraces Western feminism. And there is some rejoicing about the effects of Islamic religion and custom, particularly in regard to art and architecture. But this is a "non-judgmental" documentary, so no value system gets its toes stepped on.

One of the most interesting things about this series is its presentation of itself as an unplanned trip. Palin doesn't seem to have booked transportation to the places he's going, and when he tries to board the iron ore train in Senegal and hire a boat to ride up the Niger river, we believe him. And popping up here and there--seemingly by accident--are displaced Westerners and expatriates. They show up in every place Palin stops, whether at a Senegalese bar, where Palin meets an American jazz saxophone player, or in no-man's land in Southern Algeria, where Palin runs into a retired RAF officer driving around the desert. The most interesting for us were the Anglican church in Morocco, attended by five British subjects and 195 Nigerians (cellphones ringing during the service and all), and the Christian Norweigian missionary in Mali. This latter lady seemed quite exuberant about her work, but Palin tried to squelch her fire by asking her again and again how many Malisian Muslims she'd converted. When she responded that her mission isn't about numbers, it's about living for Christ, Palin wasn't satisfied and kept pressing her about number of converts. This is the last we see of her, and we were left feeling that it was too bad we had to keep going with Palin and couldn't travel around with her.

In fact, this documentary works in spite of Palin, who draws people out in interviews very well but whose knack for on-camera improvisational joking is probably poorer than yours. Our household had this exchange about him:

"This guy is actually a famous comedian."
"Really? He's not funny."
"Yes. He was in Monty Python's Flying Circus and several comedy movies."
"Huh. I thought he was just another one of those travel show hosts."

Even worse, Palin ends up judging his Sahara project in terms of European immigration. The journey ends where it started, the Rock of Gibraltar, where Palin investigates evidence of African refugees crashing on Gibraltar's shore, then interviews Nigerians who trekked across the Sahara by themselves. His tentative solution is humanitarian aid and a free invitation into the E.U. for all who want to come. Of course there is no analysis of the potential effects of this invitation, and Palin doesn't seem to understand the difference between visiting alien peoples and living with them. Palin didn't like the socially restrictiveness of Islam (he needs a bodyguard in Algeria because of a fatwa on foreigners) or the filthiness of countries like Mali (the banks of the Niger are covered in sewage, to Palin's dismay as he walks on it). Why then would he want to invite the Sahara into Europe? The documentary fails to reflect on what it shows, but despite that, we can partly recommend this one as something far better than what PBS or the Discovery Channel could produce.

Note: We particularly recommend the first two of the four episodes. The third only shows a camel journey, which plods on a bit, and the fourth is hardly about the Sahara but instead about the tourist traps on the North African coast. Also, Palin has numerous other travelogues. If you've seen them, let us know what you think.

Entertainment: 5.5
Intelligence: 7
Morality: (okay, except for a half-second shot of Palin demonstrating a Saharan shower)

Mary Poppins

2007-07-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

If Mary Poppins is anything, she's a savior from the sky. The question is, what does she save? We're inclined to be a bit cynical about Ms. Poppins' magic, which is enlisted to turn hum-drum business-types into whimsical sillies. This is something like what Disney movie magic is supposed to do to audiences: after long, dull days at work, you go to the theater and experience the escape that Mary Poppins allows. Most of this movie's running time is dedicated to its song-and-dance numbers, which contribute almost nothing to its story arc. But they do to its worldview. There is a deep anti-Enlightenment strain in the movie's plot and form, the view that imagination must overcome reason at all costs. This is what Mary teaches the family she works for, and this is what the crotchety bankers learn in the end.

But imagination itself can be an idol, which is always trouble. Mary saves the upper-class British family (the Banks) to whimsicality through movie magic. Whether it's jumping into animated worlds or floating above rooms by telling jokes, it is always, as we're told, a "jolly holiday with Mary." The Banks' family structure re-forms because Mary turns a dim house colorful by making the impossible happen. Then she floats away, sadly looking at the family she's reformed because they seem to have forgotten her. Of course she's been a bit impersonal all along, and the final results appear to be the effects of her teaching, which advocates lounging in one's own imaginative world.

Aiding Mary's cause is Bert the Chimney-Sweep, a figure almost as pervasive and other-worldly as Mary. He enlists his chimney-sweep buddies to sing on London rooftops, then to invade the Banks house and have fun with Mrs. Banks' secretive "Votes for Women" campaign. While it might be fun to watch these soot-covered sweeps dance till they drop, they will probably all contract emphysema and die within two years. Chimney-sweeping was a deadly profession, yet the bankers in the end learn not to have compassion on the poor but to go fly kites and yuck it up (though perhaps the bird-lady is the exception). And so Mary doesn't change hearts; instead she teaches minds to create and live in their own jolly worlds. We live in a darker world than the one in Mary Poppins. Movie magic cannot overcome that, but thankfully the operations and offices of our Savior are far greater than Mary Poppins'.

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 2
Morality: see review

The Big Country

2007-07-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

It's been said that the most impressive feature of the American West is its sky, an all-consuming blue that swallows up the Earth below it. Well, the sky stars in The Big Country, a '50s cowboy epic directed by William Wyler (of Ben-Hur fame). This is in a movie with Charleton Heston, Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, and Burl Ives, whose Academy Award for this one shows how silly that award can appear in retrospect. Wyler's strategy in The Big Country was apparently to outdo John Ford by making the all-consuming sky and landscape the film's prominent feature. Scene after scene we see long shots of that landscape, with characters either walking or riding into the horizon, appearing like little blips of nothing. It's unclear whether Wyler wanted to show the insignificance of the human condition in relation to nature or the universe, or whether he just wanted to show off, but this persistent camera viewpoint is inconsistent in terms of the narrative.

And what a sprawling morality tale we have. Peck's character rides into Frontier Land (somewhere between Wyoming and New Mexico) after a career as a sailor. He refuses to fight some ruffians from Ives' clan, whose initial prank leaves Peck a little dirty and ashamed. This irks Peck's host, a rich Southerner who's a figurehead for the wealthy cattle ranchers in the area. Eventually a showdown takes place featuring this richer segment of society against Ives' clan, who are obviously dirt poor and whose water rights are being infringed by the rich. Who wins? Let's just say that Peck--representing the middle-class, civil law, and U.S. state rule (ala Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence)--preaches non-violence throughout, even though he carries around his father's dueling pistols, which proved to be the death of his father. What's going to happen with those pistols is important, obviously, and we learn this in the first thirty minutes. In fact, the movie telegraphs most of the coming problems and resolutions in the first thirty minutes, and since you're in for a 167-minute epic, you've got a long wait in front of you.

Along the way, there's a romance plot. Peck travels to Frontier Land to return to his fiancee, the daughter of the rich Southern cattleman. Of course Peck--being virtuous and all--can't marry into that family. Thus the plot throws us a landowning schoolteacher for Peck to fall in love with, demonstrating that key values for Peck's kind are private property and education. That kind of judgment is easy to make because the movie is not subtle in its political and social statements. Wyler's clear aim here is to trumpet a quasi-populist agenda--most of which we might agree with but which is also made far too obvious by cardboard cutouts that substitute for characters (expect bad acting, especially from Heston). But then there's the landscape, which consumes whole shots. It's unclear whether the vastness of Frontier Land undermines Peck's values by visually representing the smallness of human beings (thereby colliding with the messages of the plot), or whether we are shown this vastness because there's a whole lot of it to be conquered by Peck's values and, golly, we the U.S. of A. had better get on that. Whichever the case, you have better options. Anything by John Ford makes similar points in half the running time, though Ford's characters don't trumpet non-violence. The Big Country is ultimately too plodding and easily forgettable, but if you like the genre of the Western like we do, the movie will keep you somewhat interested.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 4.5
Morality: 6

Breakfast at Tiffany's

2007-07-23T15:04:00.001-07:00

We only lasted 45 minutes into Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). That was 45 minutes of idle, plotless chit-chat, with a mean stereotype of a Japanese man (and we don't ever care about P.C. flimflam) and an urban party that celebrated lewdness and dissipation. Both of the main characters were basically self-absorbed prostitutes, and we were supposed to care about them "falling in love." After Audrey Hepburn snuck into bed (merely to sleep) with Hannibal from "The A-Team," and after Buddy Ebsen showed up to declare that Ms. Hepburn was both his adopted child and wife, we couldn't take much more. The 1950s and 60s contained plenty of moral freaks, and we don't spend time with that which celebrates them.

Entertainment: 1
Intelligence: 1
Morality: 0

You've Got Mail

2007-07-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Here at TPR we seek to provide equal opportunity offense. No idea--whether in a chick flick or testosterone thriller--should escape critique. So in this installment we assault the beloved fortress of modern American women: Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. No matter how cute this pair appears to be, they tend to make sentimentalist tripe together, and You've Got Mail is no exception. We don't blame the actors solely; the heart of this movie is its writing. But Hanks and Ryan make adultery and the fiction of the One True Love look fun.

We begin the movie with Hanks and Ryan shacking up with different lovers. This is presented as quirky in a fun way, since Ryan's boyfriend is a Luddite and Hanks' girlfriend is mouthy and self-absorbed, but in a fun way, you see. Since these matches aren't perfect, but we're having fun in New York City anyway, it's okay for Hanks and Ryan to seek a different, secret, anonymous lover on the Internet. The development of this secret relationship is the heart of the movie. Hanks and Ryan exchange cutesy banter in personal emails, then compete to see who can act cuter just as their respective bookstores compete in the business world. Cutesy, cutesy, cutesy, all in the name of adultery.

After the movie laughs off their lovers, Hanks and Ryan meet in a garden and declare their Eternal True Love for one another. Returning to Eden, Hanks has found the "one single person in the whole world" who he can spend a blissful life with. While we hope so for the sake of his future children--in the movie, Hanks' father recites his own list of lovers and Hank's grandfather sires a daughter at the approximate age of 75, making Hanks 35 years older than his aunt--we were ready to set the betting line for when Ryan breaks up with Hanks. 2 years, 5 years, it doesn't matter. In the real world, these characters would be self-centered melancholics. They love to be loved, and after exiting the garden, it might be a matter of time before they again found themselves searching for another Internet lover.

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 5.5
Morality: 0

See also: The Shop Around the Corner

Facing the Giants

2007-07-21T08:33:00.000-07:00

Facing the Giants is a million-dollar skit. It uses the kind of dialogue and plot elements found in Sunday sketches in evangelical churches, usually acted out some time during the worship service, just prior to the sermon. In fact, Facing the Giants often feels like that skit and sermon rolled into one. Not surprisingly, it was funded by a baptist megachurch in Georgia, which also contributed--so the credits tell us--catering, settings, and volunteer actors. Given the amateur involvement, the construction of the movie isn't as bad as you'd think. It has some nice individual moments where personal and corporate piety is acted out in a not-terribly hoaky way. You might be inspired for a minutes. But the sum of those moments rests on overly pietistic notions: that God is a quasi-genie and that our lives of faith are emotional rollercoasters. This is the Second Great Awakening packaged in a twenty-first century sports movie.

The plot borrows from the Eternal Sports Story: underdogs overcome long odds to win the Big Game. When a character named David enters the movie, struggling to kick footballs and to believe in himself, we sort of know where this is going. When we discover that the best team in the state is nicknamed the Giants, we have a good guess ten minutes into the movie that, yes, David will kick the winning field goal to defeat the Giants. But this isn't all. Our main character, the football coach of Shiloh Christian Academy (SCA), undergoes severe hardship. He hasn't won in six years, has his job threatened by vicious parents, has his assistant coach turn on him, struggles to pay the bills, and learns that he can't conceive children with his wife. But once Coach repents and dedicates his life to Christ, all of his problems are solved. His team starts winning, his assistant coach apologizes, someone gives him a new truck, he gets a $6000 raise, his team overcomes long odds and defeats the Giants for the state championship, and his wife gets pregnant. The final scene shows that Coach Faith wins back-to-back titles and has baby #2 on the way. By our count God performed six miracles in the movie after the school's revival, including turning a dumb football jock into a math genius and changing the direction of the wind at the perfect moment. All that, with only one very brief disappointment (a loss turned into a win).

Facing the Giants tells us not to care about winning football games, until its final moments, when it focuses on winning football games. Along the way, Coach Faith weeps a lot and yells a lot, in an attempt to inspire his players to glorify God. Testosterone-laced scenes drag on for minutes, as Coach Faith screams at his players to give everything they've got. Almost every scene inspires a different kind of emotional high, with the aid of contemporary Christian music. Meanwhile, we yearned for a quiet break, wondering when SCA's revival would inspire someone to go sit at a pond and fish for a few hours. Perhaps, while at that pond, Coach could ponder what happens when all his problems aren't solved instantly via miracles. Perhaps, while pondering, he could think about the difference between caricatures and characters. And maybe he could turn a skit into a script. Chariots of Fire and Tender Mercies would be places to figure out how to do that.

Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: 1
Morality: 10

Death and Resurrection List

2007-07-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Here we keep a list of all the movies featuring the death and resurrection of a character. It's a dynamic list; we'll add to it when we think of more. Email us with your suggestions.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
The Matrix
The Iron Giant
2001: A Space Odyssey
Pan's Labyrinth
Star Trek II and III
Alien 3 and Alien:Resurrection
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (forthcoming)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Halloween
The Abyss
Contact
The Passion of the Christ
Groundhog Day
Pirates of the Caribbean series
High Plains Drifter
Field of Dreams
Big Fish
The Prestige
The New World
Solaris
Ernest Goes to Jail
Any Frankenstein movie
Any zombie movie

And this is a list of "almosts." E.g., people turn into ghosts, resurrections don't take place due to a technicality (like Superman traveling back in time to revive Lois Lane).

The Princess Bride
Star Trek: Generations
The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
Superman
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The Terminator series
The Sixth Sense
Stranger than Fiction
Beetlejuice
Ben-Hur (Christ isn't resurrected in this one)
Star Wars series
Ghost

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Santa Claus Versus the Martians

2007-07-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

Our movie bias here at TPR leans towards reviewing what are supposed to be excellent films, those "classic movies" that appear near the tops of best-of lists. But every now and then, we have shake that up with something else. Of course for every one of the "classics," there are ten thousand non-classics. Almost all of those (and many of our beloved "classics") are worthless. They're the cultural detritus that's flowed from the sewer pipes of Hollywood into theaters and TV sets for over a century, rot made for audiences worldwide to consume. We don't refer just to that which glorifies immorality, but also that which is just plain crap -- poorly-made fare for souls who only want entertainment for entertainment's sake.

The cult cable TV show of our youth, Mystery Science Theater 3000, lived to mock the worst of the worst in movie history--and this is the subject of our review. The show's concept was simple: three people (one guy and two robots) watch a movie and make fun of it. The comments were scripted rather than made as improvised quips, allowing intelligent jokes to emerge slowly, ones that could be developed over the course of the movie. The show also engaged viewers of all levels of knowledge, so that if you knew something about Maynard Ferguson, Citizen Kane, Sylvia Plath's The Bell-Jar, and Joseph Biden and Teddy Kennedy, you'd be rewarded. But if you didn't know those, you'd still get half the jokes.

There are two problems with the show. The first is whether it is actually a postmodern celebration of the cheesy movies it makes fun of. To air Santa Claus versus the Martians in the show's format, a movie no human being should ever see, is to revive and repackage it for mass-culture consumption. The result is an updated bad movie, one with layers of cultural commentary (MST3K's jokes and observations) added on top of it. There is nothing more postmodern--if such an idea or movement exists at all--than watching a movie about people watching a movie.

The second problem is deeper: whether cultural satire like this show's is Biblically justifiable. Leaving aside the two or three risque jokes per episode (it's clean comedy otherwise), we wonder what place satire has as a form of entertainment. Classically speaking, satire was not just meant to poke fun at something but to provide some moral corrective for a bad or idolatrous idea--see for example Gulliver's Travels. If viewers take the show this way, they might learn something. In fact MST3K's Santa Claus Versus the Martians episode has several corrective points to make (critiquing, for example, a bad movie's celebration of Christmas commercialism). But if viewers take the show as mocking for mocking's sake--and it sometimes veers that direction--then MST3K advocates apathy and cynicism. That kind of talk is obviously vain and wrong. Viewers who tend toward it and are influenced by it--including almost all male youths--should stay away.

Santa Claus Versus the Martians (1964), the movie under this MST3K episode's attack, is well worth pummeling. Not only was it horribly made and acted, but it's a subversive children's movie that promotes both Christmas commercialism and the military-industrial complex. These are visually represented as toys and bombs, two things Americans perhaps can't do without. In the movie Santa Claus is kidnapped by Martians, who have a society where children pout unhappily in boredom and adults are wooden stiffs and harsh taskmasters. But over the course of time, merely through his jolly laughter, Santa wins over Martian hardhearts. And by building a toy factory on Mars and by attacking the main Martian villain with the toys that that factory produces, Santa saves the day.

All of these plot points, plus the abominable production design and directing, are ridiculed by the MST3K crew. Witty jokes, mostly one-line observations, take apart the absurd ideology that Santa Claus Versus the Martians tries to perpetuate in its plot and presentation. We admit, we laughed quite a bit. Probably too much. After a long day of working on scholastic achievement tests, we were ready for this. But after the show, we weren't wholly sure how much good MST3K promoted. Would this keep us from encouraging others daily, increasing in proper thoughts and actions, and abounding in the grace we've been allowed? If so, to any degree, it would be best to stay away.

MST3K: Santa Claus Versus the Martians
Entertainment: 8.5
Intelligence: 7
Morality (see review)

Santa Claus Versus the Martians
Entertainment: 0
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 3

Great Expectations (1946)

2007-07-16T06:28:00.000-07:00

David Lean's Great Expectations is a Dickens novel turned Gothic film that uses the conventions of early twentieth-century horror movies. Sure, there are quaint, Dickensian characters like Herbert Pocket and Mr. Wemick's father, but Miss Havisham's estate is a cobweb castle and the wall of Mr. Jagger's office are draped with masks of his former clients who've been to the gallows. Lean frames scenes so that shadows are larger and far more menacing than the people that make them. The movie is not scary, but it deliberately surprises, as in the opening scene where Magwitch emerges out of a foggy swamp to grab Pip. This is an intriguing way to reconstruct a Victorian story that, when we read it, was more whimsically melancholic than Gothic.

Great Expectations would be a good case study for students on the significances of story endings. Dickens wrote two different endings and Lean's movie makes a third, one impacted by the demands of the movie audiences and the conventions of 1940s romances. It might be the most satisfying for some viewers, because in one short burst Pip strips away the Gothic and the feminist idea of emancipation from marriage. It is, admittedly, also a little rushed and a little hoaky.

We should state our biases outright: we appreciate Lean's films, especially ones with Alec Guinness, which would pretty much be all of them. If the movie isn't totally pleasing to watch--and a 40-year-old actor playing 20-year-old Pip is a great annoyance--then it is at least pleasing to view. Lean is a master at framing pictures and crafting scenes. Probably this movie could be shown in a Christian film class for aspiring directors. In fact we highly recommend that, so that we no longer have to endure cheesy "Christian" fare like the Omega Code and Facing Giants.

Entertainment: 5.5
Intelligence: 9
Morality: 9

Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit

2007-07-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

The world of Wallace and Gromit is mostly harmless and tranquil. Except for thieving penguins and dog robots, Wallace and his faithful sidekick live in harmony with their neighbors, inventing new contraptions and turning them into entrepreneurial ventures. Clearly Wallace is no self-made genius though; he needs Gromit to correct hisabsent-minded mistakes. In Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the same problems happen as in the older Wallace and Gromit shorts. And the same kind of resolution occurs, order and tranquility being restored (mostly due to Wallace's inventions and Gromit's resolve). This is an excellently constructed movie, and Gromit could've been up for best dog-turned-actor awards. Just like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, the best "actor" in that sci-fi flick, no one says more with less than Gromit. All he can do is move his forehead, but that forehead tells us everything.

Leaving aside this movie's delights, let's turn to its possible objections. The Anglican priest is slightly conniving at the outset, then turns a bit warped, warning us all to "Beware of the beast within!" It's a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the old penguin. If the priest is taken as a stand-in for the Christian religion, a part of this movie is a mockery. But it's hard to blame the writers and directors (probably British neo-pagans anyway) for making the priest what he is, since the C. of E. is a bit loony these days, the Archbishop of Canterbury being a druid and all. A good satirical basting was probably in order. Also, there are several hidden adult jokes in this movie, a few of which we missed on first viewing. The British like to be a bit coy about these things, but we were annoyed at the utter lack of necessity for such jokes. They're out of place in the world of Wallace's breakfast machines and small-town vegetable-growing fairs.

We appreciated the voice-work in this movie, especially Lady Tottington and her courtier. And we learned that we shouldn't shoot rabbits, that we should be careful when inventing mind-altering machines, and that cheese is good. We'll eat to that.

Entertainment: 10
Intelligence: 4 (though there are some great puns)
Morality: 6 (the adult jokes are the problem)

Jane Eyre (1997)

2007-07-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes low-budget thrift in movies out-fancies lavish period pieces or blockbusters. This Jane Eyre, produced for A&E in 1997, works well despite its disadvantages--namely, that it was made on the cheap for A&E. We admit, we winced a little when we saw those two letters pop up before the DVD title. "Oh no," we said, "here comes a TV movie." Not the case at all. The performances were strong, with Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester (you've seen him in Persuasion) carrying the movie. Admittedly, our household was split on how well they performed--some of us have to make comparisons to the original novel or other productions--but there's no doubt that they were not only consistent and believable, but moving.

Now while Jane Eyre the novel is partly about the boundaries of feminine self-expression in a male aristocratic world--though it's not a proto-feminist work as some hornblowers for Female Liberation would have it--any Jane Eyre the movie will have a tough time replicating that theme. The third-person camera point-of-view replaces the first-person "I." Consequently this A&E version focuses far more time on the relationship between the two main characters, and on the moral conundrums that Mr. Rochester's secret provides. Take that all for what it's worth. Yes, lovers of the book will roar in disbelief that numerous scenes were clipped or omitted. But that allows Mr. Rochester here to be a focus of the movie. And we liked Ciaran Hinds as Mr. Rochester quite a bit, who, though a man of money and reputation, leads an aggrieved life, yet he doesn't know quite what to do when his new governess (that's Jane) enters his life.

For Jane, her choice in husbands is between Rochester and an Anglican missionary-to-be. This version presented that choice as being between True Love and duty, with the latter involving a relatively dull banishment to India. We'll let you guess which one won out for Jane. Rochester, though, may not make the best husband, asking in anger in one scene "What has God ever done for me?" It's not clear if Rochester changes much, or at the end how devoted he is to his faith--if he has any at all. True, Rochester's secret riffs on the story of Jacob visiting Laban, which deserves pity. Given the way the movie constructed her options, Jane's choice was logical. But we'd like to see in a movie, for once, devotion to God (and picking a godly husband) win out over True Love. Not in this version, though.

Entertainment: 9
Intelligence: 7
Morality: 5

Bridge to Terabithia

2007-07-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Ah, adolescence. Sometimes we miss those days when we could feel the carefree joy of no responsibilities one minute, while the next minute dive into selfish angst. But thanks to Disney, we can relive those days vicariously. Enter Bridge to Terabithia. Our hero, Jesse Aarons, is a repressed teenage artist with an oppressive father, something we've never, ever seen in a movie before. This father is so oppressive that he was once the evil Terminator in Terminator 2. Now he's an impoverished hick working as a slave for a local retail store. From bad to worse, we say. Anyway, Jesse finds a friend in new neighbor Leslie, who helps Jesse find (with some help from her novel-writing parents and a hippie schoolteacher) the artist within. Together they imagine a backyard world of "Terabithia." We will not say what happens to Leslie, except that the way the movie constructs things, we didn't care that much.

The movie succeeds several other recent ones--Finding Neverland and Big Fish come to mind--in which both reality and characters' imaginations are visually blended. It's not quite magic, but it's close. In traditional fantasy stories, fantasyland can be a whole world to itself, as in Lord of the Rings, or else characters have to enter fantasyland through some portal--like the wardrobe in Chronciles of Narnia or the pillar at the bus station in Harry Potter. But in Bridge to Terabithia, reality is fantasyland is reality. One can be made into the other. If ideas have consequences, this sounds a little problematic to us.

Of course Jesse's family is quasi-fundamentalist Christian, and his little sister mouths hate speech about wicked sinners going to hell. Leslie disagrees, asserting that if God is something, he/she/it has to be nice and friendly. Then Leslie punishes a bully with a mean prank. But despite this, the movie appears to agree with Leslie. If Terabithia is Leslie's constructed heaven on earth, hell can't be much worse. After all, heaven is hell and hell is heaven. Just imagine it in your backyard.

Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 2

The Shop Around the Corner

2007-07-05T06:45:00.001-07:00

Falling in love in Hungary. Nearly as romantic as Paris, we think. This 1940 Jimmy Stewart flick shows us how to love and live in that delightful Eastern European clime (something not possible after WWII). The forerunner to the cutesy You've Got Mail, which had your favorite cutesy actors, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, The Shop Around the Corner has far less charm and consistency than its recent remake.

Two things we're thankful for are the Stanislavsky acting method and the advent of music scoring for every movie. Both are badly needed here. We wondered at the beginning of the movie how our heroine (played by Margaret Sullivan) was reading her character. We later discovered that she had no plan. Her character wavers between deliberate deception and cutesy perk so much that by movie's end we were rooting for Jimmy Stewart to NOT go after her. Meanwhile, Stewart looks like he's mailing this one in for the paycheck.

The subplot involves the Wizard of Oz, as the owner of the store where Stewart and Sullivan work, feeling suicidal thanks to his cheating wife. His return from despair was the best part of the movie. Really, we never thought we would care so much about Hungarian entrepreneurs. If you're looking for a tale about the interrelationship of marriage and business, here you go.

Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 7

Gandhi

2007-07-04T07:38:00.001-07:00

Richard Attenborough's Gandhi is one of the best film fantasies we've ever seen. It is remarkably consistent. The Mahatma has a vision, and the people respond. The Mahatma fasts, and the people stop fighting. The Mahatma stands up to empire, and it caves in. Gandhi represents a super-idealistic vision of the relationship between leadership and "the people." Wrap that up with ultra-pacifism, hyper-anti-racism, and "we all worship one god" talk and, PRESTO! the ultimate liberal fantasy. Yet we admit, though, that despite its blasphemies we were taken in with the film's vision, being as we are against oppressive empires and all. The fictional-Gandhi's resilience and determination to resist the bureaucratic governance of outsiders, while practicing a non-violent approach, provides a fine example,we think.

This is not exactly Attenborough's film; the Indian government financed Gandhi, reminding us all to keep heeding the old slogan "Follow the Money." Gandhi pumps the message of Indian nationalism and unification into our brains every twentieth frame, but that message rests on the ridiculous assertion that Muslims and Hindus can get along and will, one day, lounge in an economic paradise. Perhaps if we all only followed the Mahatma's example. In almost every scene he weaves his own clothes and deals with farm animals (so much for the division of labor!). In a pivotal scene, he makes his own salt from the ocean. By the end of the movie, he has few teeth. Pardon us for shunning socialist delusions, but we do appreciate a free market of clothing and dentistry.

It's necessary to distinguish between the historical-Gandhi and the fictional-Gandhi. The film compares the latter to Christ over and over again, while the Mahatma mouths his dedication to "god," whatever that is. But we learned a few things from perusing the excellent essay, "The Gandhi Nobody Knows." We learn that Gandhi was an opportunist, stressing non-violence only in some situations but imperial wars in others. As a Hindu, he worshiped cows and was obsessed with bowel movements. As a holy man in a false religion, he uttered more self-centered double-talk than most modern-day presidential candidates. This does not discredit the fictional-Gandhi. It only points out his fictionality.

When we tell people that Amadeus is one of our favorite films they often respond that Mozart really wasn't like that. True enough. But all art uses materials--historical and imagined--to construct an artifice, a point we have to consider when evaluating the final piece. If we'd wanted Mozart's life, we would've picked up a biography. If we'd wanted character study--to try to learn a little about ourselves and others--we'd watch Amadeus. The same is true with historical-Gandhi and Gandhi the movie. For that we give a partial recommendation, just so long as you don't try to believe what you see.

Entertainment: 7
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 8
View of God: -100,000

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

2007-07-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

A 1977 yarn, Close Encounters shows us that music--at least John Williams'--brings together the galaxy. And thankfully the federal government takes care of things for us. If it hadn't displaced whole populations by concocting a toxic gas hoax in Wyoming, and if it hadn't spent millions on a synthesizer lightshow, we would never have made contact with our lovable outerspace friends. And now we know the truth: space aliens love tubas. We had no idea before last night.

If the above paragraph makes little sense, dear reader, you'll have to watch the movie. Just know that you'll get a veiled "journey to heaven" tale in the form of the movie's main character getting to ride on the mothership, which, we are told, is akin to near-immortality. That character, played by Richard Dreyfuss, certainly deserved all he received. First, he led a dysfunctional family into further dysfunctionality. Then he drove that dysfunctional family away with his unexplained obsession. Then he cheated on his wife. For all that, he enjoys a Rapture-like experience and gets to live forever on Planet Tubala. What a wonderful life.

Spielberg has gone on to show us (in War of the Worlds) that aliens aren't the warm, fuzzy creatures he once imagined after all. We have to agree with him there. Nothing could be trustworthy about a race of beings who flash mysterious lights in the sky and create crop circles, but who won't let us see them or who refuse to establish galactic peace and join the United Nations. Perhaps, with space aliens, there's some connection to the ancient notion of "daemon"-- that is, creatures who inhabit the realm (in an older cosmology) between the earth and heavens. These creatures weren't trusted at all, hence the conceptual and linguistic connection between "daemon" and "demon." We are pretty sure, space aliens can never be trusted. Perhaps Devil's Tower was an appropriate location for first contact after all. Anyway, enjoy a well-constructed but moronic UFO tale, an obvious prequel to a worse one, E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Entertainment: 8 (of 10)
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 2

The Pursuit of Happyness

2007-07-03T07:18:00.000-07:00

In its basic plot elements, The Pursuit of Happyness is a typical American rags-to-riches story, trumpeting the self-made man theme that Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger loved. It goes like this: Poor Independent Male begins with nothing, has a great work ethic and desire, works hard, has some bad luck, works harder, and then achieves all his material dreams. Moral of the story: Hard work pays. A nice moral, except for the elephant in the room.

We noted in the movie that Will Smith's breakthrough was when he had the Dean Witter executive cornered, and the exec. couldn't figure out a Rubik's Cube. Will Smith grabs the Cube, solves it in two minutes, to the amazement of the exec., and thereby earns an interview for a Dean Witter internship. Smith's complaint to that point is that he had no formal education beyond high school. His job application had empty lines under the "Education" heading. How then would he ever be considered for a job? Two minutes with a Rubik's Cube filled those empty application lines. Why? A Rubik's Cube is an IQ test, basically (at least in this movie). An fairly imperfect one, but a sort of intelligence test nonetheless. Rubik's Cubes screen only the super-smart from the rest of us, because few have the exceptional visual-spatial capabilities necessary to solving it. What the Dean Witter executive saw in Smith's character was intelligence--a lot of it.

So what's the elephant? Well, we know that hard work does pay off, whether we are cleaning bathrooms at McDonald's or selling IRAs at Dean Witter. Most people can succeed at McDonald's. But--and here is our elephant--only certain kinds of people succeed at Dean Witter. The self-made man at Dean Witter can never be like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz: "If I only had a brain ..." This truth is hidden in every rags-to-riches tale. All of them masquerade as egalitarian fantasies: anybody can do anything if they only work toward their dream. But Will Smith's Rubik's Cube is anti-egalitarian to the core. Only a few can solve it. Only a few are great with numbers. Not every possible self-made man is good with numbers. Those who are go to Dean Witter. Everyone else dreams or works another job.

But there is another fine moral here: everyone ought to use his God-given cognitive ability to his best potential, no matter how much of the Rubik's Cube he can solve. That we applaud. And Will Smith's dedication to his son was laudable, too. For those things we can give our recommendation.

Entertainment: 6 (of 10)
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 7

Rear Window

2007-07-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

Every story has a point, and this one's was obvious: it's good to spy on your neighbors. There's little else one can get from this film, made during an era of Communist scare. In Rear Window Jimmy Stewart is an old grump, and his extravagant young girlfriend whines about his grumpiness. And then she whines further about the fact that he won't marry her. Makes perfect sense. She's so upset at his reluctance to marry that, in order to provoke him, she spends the night at his apartment. And here we thought people in the 1950s were moral prudes.

It is, of course, impressive that all the action takes place in one locale, the camera hardly moving from one spot in Jimmy Stewart's apartment, and that even despite this the movie is supposedly so harrowing as to be ranked #13 all-time on IMDB.com. But the fact about the limited camera movement is ultimately a novelty. And we were greatly hoping it would move, too, because we were tired of seeing the barely-clad blonde do calisthenics in her window. This kind of female obsession is more than a fault in Hitchcock movies, viewer beware.

The villain of Rear Window turns out to be just the kind of murderer you expect: a middle-class Norwegian, (the sort of person in a group with one of the world's lowest murder rates, but since Norway is so close to Russia and we're dumb Americans, we were thinking he was a Commie Pinko all along anyway). The movie, of course, reveals no motive for our knife-wielding Norseman. And for almost all of the movie, all we have is purely circumstantial evidence to judge him on. In Rear Window, the Biblical principle of having two or three witnesses is discarded in favor of Jimmy's Stewart's one-man-band assumption that the guy across the way is a murderer. Meanwhile, the characters over and over ask the movie's lone moral question: what is the ethics of Stewart's window observation? At the end we receive a clear answer: spying is okay, because we've got to watch out for middle-age Norwegian males. Thanks for the tip, Mr. Hitchcock. We'll be on the lookout for Thor and Lars next time.

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 1