Recommended. Okay, Michael Bay, formula action movie with tons of non-sequitur action sequences. But so what. It brought a transcendence that lifted the formula out of its typical action emptiness and gave it some real heart and soul, something so many action movies just lack. It is an exploration of cloning ethics that bears directly on our current issues of the definition of persons and the value of human life. Truly astounding. It’s the story of some clones who discover they are being bred to harvest their body parts for rich clients. They are born and raised in a facility like cows and are lied to that there is a contamination on the outside world that keeps them locked up in their facility. But there is a lottery that you can win and leave the facility to go to the one uncontaminated paradise left, The Island. Of course, they are actually taken and harvested for their organs and killed. Here is some of the obvious pro-life rhetoric in this film: The company that makes the clones says, “It’s a product, not human,” when questioned about the destruction of such clones (read: embryos). One of the clients tells his clone, “You’re not human. You’re not a person like me.” So the definition of personhood is challenged as well, because we see that the clones are obviously persons who have been defined away as non-persons, much like the Nazis did with the Jews. It’s the power of image showing the attempt to deny the obvious. The pro-clone people see the clones as “Organs in a jelly sack.” And they keep them away from the real world because people would see that they are living breathing human beings, NOT products without souls. When someone wins the lottery to go to the Island, they’re called “Chosen” and this is made a very big point several times throughout. This is an obvious allusion to “Choice” the fruit or results of “choice” is the death of these people. There are some powerful connective allusions to other atrocities of man’s inhumanity to man in history. They are branded with a number, like those in the Holocaust, A black man mentions how his people were called “less than human” in history, and some clones are herded into a gas chamber, another reference to the Holocaust. These are the same arguments made by the Pro-life movement that the declaration of the unborn or clones as “non-human” or “property” is exactly what was done in Nazi Germany and the Slavery movement in America. And to top it off, when the clones are being created, they are in big sacks in fetal positions sucking their thumbs. Another obvious reference to the unborn. Of course for sci-fi to be able to deal with clones that are aged the same as their donors, they have to create a way to grow a clone unnaturally fast, so in this story, they take some tissue and inject human DNA into it and it enables it to grow to the same age as the donor. Whatever. They hide the humanity of the clones by defining them in terms of the “mass of tissue” that they start out as. The point is that the entire run for their lives that the clones are doing is a metaphor for the lives being hunted down by the predators of the pro-choice and cloning movements. We have become a predatorial society that eats its young to sustain its aged. We have become a monstrosity that is dehumanizing humanity, the necessary first step in genocide and atrocity to alleviate the moral guilt. Interestingly, there are some side elements about religion and God that are somewhat ambiguous. On the positive side, the cloning guy says the clones are the “holy grail of science. They have no souls. I will cure leukemia. How many can do that?” (Science as religion) The hero replies, “I guess you and God.” In other words, the old point that scientists try to eliminate God but end up trying to be God in their power. On the negative side, I think the cloning city is made out to be a bit like religion. The point is made that “Contamination is the one global threat” to keep the clones from searching and discovering their true identity. Almost like a slam on the Garden of Eden and God’s curse for eating from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the Island becomes a sort of metaphor for Paradise, or Heaven, and the hero says, “I wish there was more than just waiting to go to the Island.” This worldly, rather than otherworldly. Which really, most Christians would agree, but it is nonetheless a caricature of religion as pie in the sky. But then again, the clones are NOT told anything about God, which is part of the censoring. So when the hero clone hears about God, he asks his secret helper who works for the corporation what God is. He replies, “When you want something and you close your eyes and wish for it. God’s the guy who ignores you.” The clone hero’s donor says he made his clone because he got hepatitis, “a parting gift from God for all my philandering.” So God is mostly dealt with irreverently and negatively, making me think the filmmakers’ were trying to have morality without God, which really only makes them look foolish and hurts the consistency of the philosophy behind their story. When the hero clone tells his love interest that “the Island is real. It’s us.” I think this may be a humanistic turning inward saying, either, “There is no pie in the sky Island paradise, humanity is paradise,” or a more positive version: “we are the means to the end of others to achieve their island.” So the God thing could have been a stronger angle, but may have been deliberately downplayed because of their own worldviews.
Wedding Crashers
Hard to Recommend. This is a story of two sleaze balls, played perfectly by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, who crash weddings in order to sleep with women. They are cynical divorce attorneys who do not believe in love or marriage, only selfish gratification and using women for their pleasure. This story is their redemption and how they discover true love, which is defined in the film as “A soul’s recognition of it’s counterpoint in another.” Okay, that’s good. These two selfish men, the worst of our kind, use every trick in the book to manipulate women, and then they discover true love which saves them from their selfishness. Well, a bit Romantic, and I’ don’t mean love romance, but the worldview of Romanticism. But a pretty good moral to the story. The problem is that it is very crass in getting to that moral. Obviously riddled with a lot of sex gags, and unfortunately, entirely inappropriate cussing throughout. What I liked was seeing Vince Vaughn’s character, getting his comeuppance in the form of his own fantasies so to speak. Well, the problem with this formula is always that it portrays human romance as the ultimate meaning to life. And as much as I would heartily believe in true love with my wife, it just can’t save us.
Bewitched
Kinda Recommended. Another brilliant feminist tale written and directed by my favorite female director, Nora Ephron. LOVED Will Ferrell. Amazing gut wrenching laughs. He is brilliant as the self absorbed movie star on a down turn in his career. Some great lines about Hollywood insanity and selfishness, especially about acting. “He’s an actor. Deep down there is no deep down.” And “I want to be normal.” “Acting is better than normal. You get to pretend your normal.” But hey, some of my best friends are actors, so… Anyway, this is a brilliant modern day story about remaking the Bewitched series from television in the present day. And Nicole Kidman plays a real witch trying to be normal, who gets discovered to play the part of Samantha on the series. Loved the postmodern self-referential awareness of the whole thing. Samantha blurts out the moral of the story when she is talking about the TV show and says, “This show is about marriage.” The story is about Will Farell turning from a selfish self-centered man who thinks the world revolves around him and a woman is a support to his fame, into a man who sacrifices himself for the betterment of the woman and an egalitarian marriage. Another aspect of the theme was in the concept of striving to “exist between two worlds,” as Nicole says. This is about her being “born” a witch and trying to fit into a normal world, which reflects the films bigger canvas of women trying to fit into a world of the past (represented by the Bewitched conservative reality of the 60s) and the present, of feminism. Nicole’s witch is made to be naïve to the real world of relationships, though God only knows why. But this naivete then is the vehicle for exploring the struggle of women today. The conclusion of the film is “You can exist between two worlds.” Which is to say women can be somewhere in between the two extremes of barefoot and pregnant and trying to be like men. By the way, this is why the witchcraft side of it did not bother me. I saw it merely as a creative metaphor for exploring the place of women in society, not as an endorsement of witchcraft as a viable worldview. Although the very concept of Witchcraft being an inborn trait and neutral is of course, a lie. Diversity is a strong mythology of postmodern America, which is why you see a lot of movies like this being about being different and not fitting into a normal world, as if we have to eliminate the notion of “normal” It reflects the zeitgeist of our era of the idolatrous elevation of diversity over unity, and while I believe in diversity and acceptance of people who are different, not ALL diversity is legitimate. There must be boundaries or limitations of “normality” or you wind up with Chaos. The legitimate question that is raised by pomos is “Who defines normality?” Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that the Creator of the universe defines what is normal in HIS universe, not us. Anyway, one weakness of the story is the pitch for women to have a job to get self-esteem. Nicole says this several times in her own life and in the TV show, so it is an important point to the storyteller, but I found this unsatisfying and inconclusive. A fuller picture would be the discovery that jobs and careers are not what personal meaning or that psychobabble term “self-esteem” is all about. The fact is, achieving a career is ultimately empty without being rooted in something eternal, like people and God. While I am happy with my own career pursuits and achievements in life, none of it has any real lasting value except in light of my relationship with God and my wife, so those kind of stories never ring true to me. In my mind, it is a character flaw to consider self-esteem as our goal, or even career as fulfillment. That is something we need to be redeemed from, not something that redeems us. Anyway, I found it an interesting postmodern story about stories as the ending shows Will and Nicole falling in love, marrying and moving into a house that is the exact house of the show and we even see Abner and his wife across the street nosing in about it all. And so the reality and the myth blend into one, illustrating the point that storytelling is enough of a valid means of truth, it doesn’t have to be real. Reality, in the postmodern mind really is meaningless outside of story, and story is about story, not reality. So we use story to define our reality.
Saints and Soldiers
Recommended. A great little story about a small group of Allied soldiers behind enemy lines in WWII. It is a very realistic exploration of a character who is a Christian of some kind, who struggles with having unintentionally killed 2 women and 4 children in a military raid. He is haunted by his guilt as his small company of men try to make it through enemy lines to deliver important intell to the Allied side. It was a refreshingly honest spiritual rip-off of Saving Private Ryan, even sporting Ryan rip-off music. But I loved it. I heard that it was made by Mormons, but I did not notice anything in the movie that indicated this kid was a Mormon, at least not to us normal people who do know any code words of Mormonism. The kid is called “Deacon” but that is biblical, and I have heard it used of Christians. Also, he was a “missionary” in Berlin. I’ve heard Mormons have to go on missions, but hey, that is a Christian concept FIRST, so it is not distinctly Mormon. So I don’t think Mormonism really holds sway if it is in there. One of the things about the authenticity of this film is that is was not black and white in it’s theme. On the one hand, it seemed to indicate that a religious conscience cannot work in war because there are too many accidents and innocents killed, but on the other hand, the kid is like the sharpshooter in Ryan (another rip-off, but I didn’t care), in that he is a good shot and kills enemy soldiers efficiently. AND YET, he has the ability to love and connect with an enemy soldier, he just happened to have befriended in Berlin before the War. So the sticky issue of spiritual brothers on opposing sides and how their allegiance to God’s Kingdom is higher than to man’s kingdoms was a very unique and welcomed challenge to this viewer. I am reminded of another great WWII movie that does this, but I don’t want to toot my own horn ☺ Anyway, I thought this film was thoughtful and had real heart. Awesome job for a low budget film. See it. Support meaningful thoughtful spiritual movies.
Fantastic Four
Ambivalent Recommendation. I say ambivalent because, while on the one hand, I enjoy comic book movies, Fantastic Four was my favorite comic as a kid, and this one was pretty good as those go, I have a growing suspicion of the comicbook superhero culture which I will explain in a minute. First, this one translated the characters pretty well, from the ornery Ben Grimm to the weasley Reed Richards, the sexy Sue Storm and the rowdy juvenile Johnny Storm. The interrelationships of these people suffice as a sort of family structure. The idea that a superpower reflects also the point of weakness for a character works extremely well here. Grimm has an anger management issue which makes him hard as a rock, Johnny is of course, adolescent and passionate which translates to the flame, Sue has the issue of being invisible to the man she loves, Reed, and Reed is so waffling and rubbery in his manliness toward Sue that it causes relationship issues. And even the villain, Dr. Doom, is a steely heartless Tinman. Well, the unique tack of this story was that it was more personal of a villain and goal. Dr. Doom had big designs, but this story was about him trying to eradicate the Fantastic Four in order to carry out his ultimate designs (which, I don’t even remember if he said what those were). Anyway, this personal edge that was atypical from the usual comic book villain trying to take over the world was on the one hand different and refreshing. On the other hand, halfway through I found myself getting bored because it seemed so petty of a goal, that is, personal vengeance on the Four not being an important enough arena to sustain interest. I don’t know, maybe I’m just impossible to please. I enjoyed watching them use their powers together to save people from a major accident scene on the bridge. I enjoyed their discovery of their powers, and I especially enjoyed their troubled relationship with each other. Their superpowers do not make them super virtuous. They are after all, humans too. And in that sense the audience can identify with them and they become mythological models of the pursuit of virtue. My problem with these superhero movies is a nagging little thought at the back of my head of how similar in function comic book superheros have become to the pagan pantheon of Greek and Roman gods. The similarities are scary. The Greeks and Romans did not believe that their gods were real, any more than we do watching our comic book superheros. They were stories to explain the origins of meaning and the values of the culture. The pagan deities were in fact projections of humanity at it’s greatest potential for both good and evil. Just like Superheros and supervillains are in fact, normal humans given extraordinary powers. The pagan pantheon was petty, bickering and struggled with vice, just as the FF bicker with each other, or the X-Men are demigods, yet frail. A big difference is that the Roman/Greek gods were religious, and superheros are not. But is that really true? What I mean is that the deities were worshipped as deities and were somewhat transcendent. But now, deity is relocated INTO nature, that is an intrinsic guiding process of change that operates with providential control through scientific laws. I see the new trend toward super power origins to be rooted in evolution. In the 50s and up, powers usually came from some atomic accident, marking the danger of science as well as it’s ultimate modernist saving hope for mankind. A delicate balance. But with XMen and now, FF, powers come from evolutionary adaptation. In Fantastic Four, the cosmic storm cloud that gives them their powers is described in the beginning as the source of life on earth as it interacted with the elements billions and billions of years ago. So, we see how the metanarrative mythology of evolution (unguided chance processes) is replacing the mythology of humanism (Accidental human genius). But of course, they are really just two sides of the same coin of modernity. But really, modernity is just a naturalistic religion that substitutes chance for fate or providence, substitutes immanence for transcendence (this worldly rather than otherworldly), and substitutes human love as ultimate in place of love of one’s creator. But modernity, or evolution, operate as systems of salvation where man is “saved” from his ignorance and superstition by his intellect, rationality and science. Ignorance replaces sin in this religious paradigm of modernity. So the point is that modernism does not replace religion with a non-religious paradigm, it merely replaces one religious paradigm with another religious paradigm of secular scientism and evolution, which still operates to explain the same questions of origin and meaning that religion does. Therefore, evolution is really just another religious story meant to give meaning to the world based on a faith commitment to an ultimate that cannot be proved, namely naturalistic chance processes. Okay, back to superheros. It is interesting that in FF, Johnny Storm muses that their powers are “a higher calling,” that “fate turned us into gods.” So there is an explicit metaphoric likening to deities that is recognized in the film itself. I am not making this up in my mad little mind. Just a cursory comparison of superheros with pagan deities will give you a taste of the likenesses.
Human torch – Vulcan, Roman god of fire
Be Grimm, The Hulk – Mars, Roman god of war
Superman – Hercules
The Flash – Mercury, Roman messenger god of speed
Aquaman, The SubMariner – Neptune, god of the sea
Of course, I am not suggesting a one to one correspondence, but merely a common paradigm of exalted humanity that replaces the One true God with many gods, a common impulse since the Fall. My point: Superheros have a tendency to operate as secular god substitutes in a postmodern pluralistic culture. They give us hope, they save us from evil, they provide an example of virtue and illustrate for us what we could be. Every system has an ultimate reference point and that ultimate reference point or standard is the deity of the system. The deity of pluralism is polytheism. Pluralism means “many truths,” which means, “many gods.” Having said all this, I am not condemning all superhero stories. I may be missing what separates the two mythologies. I am simply wrestling with thoughts that are creeping up in my mind as I interact with these myths and think them through. One fine example is The Incredibles, where I see superpowers, not as a secular god substitute, but as an obvious metaphor of the potential for extraordinariness and uniqueness of each individual. Maybe that’s not all that different from Fantastic Four. I’m not sure. Still thinking it through.
War of the Worlds
Not recommended. Another humanistic epic that destroys transcendence and in so doing, destroys the goodness that makes a movie a fulfilling story. First of all, the FX are fantastic, but ultimately empty because they are so devoid of “human” quality making this on the level of those old old flying saucer movies of just big robots killing and destroying everything. Well, that gets boring real quick without the personal element of the aliens explored. The most interesting part of the movie was the sole scene where aliens come down and the heros are hiding out underneath their noses. But then this scene accomplishes nothing for the story and tells us really nothing about the aliens. Compare this to the brilliant “personal” intimacy of Alien, and it falls like a sack of potatoes. I must say though that Spielberg is a brilliant mythologist. He knows how to create mythos like nobody else. One one level, this story reminds me of his rendition of Kubrick’s A.I. It is very boring and impersonal, but it is very mythologically deep. Like A.I. this is a quest of someone who discovers his humanity through the existential experience of seeking a goal (bringing the children back to their mom and “home” – in A.I. it was finding his maker) and staying alive. Existentialism. On the other hand, also like A.I. it’s a quest in a meaningless universe. Do you see the pattern here in Spielberg? Let me explain. First of all, it is based on a novel by the humanist socialist, H.G. Wells, who was also a materialist. And it stays true to the overarching essential premise that the aliens are unstoppable and the only way they lose is because of their biological unfitness. They are killed by the common bacteria that as the movie says, “humans have earned the right to survive from because of billions of death,” or our rights based on our immunity. Biology is destiny. Simple minded evolutionism, naïve reductionism, diabolical humanism. Cruise is the humanist hero who is rather anti-heroic in that he has no courage other than to survive by running, and he never changes, never wavers from that goal, and in fact turns out to be an insipid, boring, and coward, not a hero. His son was more heroic, willing to fight the evil, and yet he ends up accomplishing nothing. This of course illustrates that it was foolish to try to fight, the major theme of the film. But the only reason he doesn’t die is Spielberg’s commitment to Hollywood endings. You can’t have the kid die, the family has to get together in the end. I’ll talk more about this in a minute, that I think it contradicts the humanism he is trying to preach, which evidences that in his heart of hearts, he is driven by the knowledge of truth, but is struggling against it in his ideology, or as Christians like to point out, his sin nature that suppresses the knowledge of God. Anyway, this happy Hollywood ending is not insipid or unrealistic as naïve realists (who are actually undercover nihilists) claim. It is actually the inherent understanding of Eucatastrophe, as Tolkien called it. The pointing toward an ultimate righting of the all the wrongs in the universe, the eschaton of Final Judgement that is inherently embedded into creation. Happy endings in storytelling or art do not point to happy endings in this life, but to the ultimate eucatastrophic happy ending promised by God. It is God’s image in man that makes him long for such happy endings and in fact makes story telling unsatisfying that does not in some reflect at least a hinting towards it. So back to humanist. It is no coincidence that Spielberg has a church be the big dramatic building that crashes to the ground first when the giant alien robot explodes out of the ground. In this humanistic view, religion is the first to go with the triumphalism of scientific materialism. And then the reduction of people to masses of foolish herds trying to survive and turning on each other shows that humanity cannot rescue itself, we don’t have the goodness to do so. Actually, I concur with this, though not for the same reasons as the humanist suggests, that we are the products of billions of years of such arbitrary death and destruction and through such dying those who survive are the strongest, not the righteous. Then, the big “message” sequence is when Cruise and his daughter are holed up in a basement with a survival nut who believes in resistance, played by Tim Robbins. This is the man who says that we must not run and flee, but fight and resist. And of course he is a crazy. And his hopes are ultimately shown to be foolishly naïve, thinking that he can hide and then get the jump on the aliens, and then he is digging a tunnel with a shovel saying they will have underground tunnels to live in and resist the aliens, when of course he won’t get but 10 feet with his little shovel. It’s all to show that resistance is futile. Now, here are some interesting contradictions that I don’t think Spielberg is even aware of. Here is a man who made Schindler’s List, who supports a just war in Saving Private Ryan (although it’s a bit deconstructed, but that’s another story). Here is a Jewish man who is haunted by his people being the victims of one of the worst atrocities of genocide and now he makes a movie that suggest the opposite of his other movies. Fighting great impossible evil is foolish. So, what if the French Resistance didn’t fight back against the Nazis? What if the US didn’t fight against the juggernaut of imperialist Axis of Evil in WWII? And he makes obvious holocaust references with the revelation that the aliens are “exterminating” humans, and then he has a mist of blood in the air that is based on the using of humans as energy and spitting out the excess blood, an obvious reference to the snowflakes of ashes created by Nazi crematoriums. YET, I think War of the Worlds suggests that fighting great evil is futile. Thank God our ancestors did not believe such tripe. Thank God for the Bravehearts of this world. This mixed message is further complicated when we see Cruise ending up in Boston at a statue of Paul Revere or some other Founding Father coated with the alien vines, another obvious reference to freedom from tyranny. It made me think of the superiority of Independence Day, which played like a political tract out of the American Revolution itself, but so what, it used the mythology of that Revolution in a creative entertaining way and validated that humanity is at its greatest when it won’t stand for evil, no matter how impossible the odds. This is greatness, this is courage, this is humanness as it should be, which is why Independence Day blows War of the Worlds away. Because Independence Day was transcendent and touched that seed of truth, that image of God in all of us. Yes, history is littered with failed attempts to stop evil, but it has FAR MORE successes against impossible odds that prove not that you will always win, but that it is worth it to die trying, something the self destruction of the Tim Robbins crazy character tries to disprove. But verrrrrrry interesting that Tom Cruise KILLS that character to try to protect himself and his child. Now this is surely one of the most abominable choices in the movie. Think of the political implications of such reasoning in the modern war on terror (And that’s what this movie is about, let’s face it. Spielberg hinted at this in a Reuters article: “There are politics underneath some of the scares, and some of the adventure and some of the fear,”, the machines being planted underneath us and then “awakened” is an obvious analogy of sleeper terrorist cells). So this idea of Cruise killing the Robbins kook is an act of violence and hatred against those who believe in fighting tyranny. The hypocrisy is so staggering that it makes you hate the hero, it turns him into an unsympathetic hero. Not because he killed the guy to protect himself but because he was a pacifist seeking to stay alive and run and not fight back who kills his own people while avoiding fighting the true evil. Pacifists who will kill Patriots, like animal rights people who hate humans and would kill them before they would an animal, or environmentalists who would destroy humanity to save the environment. So the Cruise character just illustrates what’s wrong with the humanistic liberal hero, he is unsympathetic and cowardly, and uninteresting. I also find it interesting that America is always criticized as being imperialist in its origins, that Europeans marched into the New World and brought their diseases that wiped out the poor innocent indigents. But in this movie, by giving victory to those who are biologically more equipped to survive, Spielberg unwittingly justifies Europe’s taking over the New World. The Indians just weren’t evolutionarily prepared, tough luck, baby, only the most adaptable survive. Ah, the monstrosity of evolutionary humanism. Unsatisfying. My personal motto: Ideas have consequences, folks. Ideas have consequences.
Batman Begins
Recommended. Best of ‘em all. A more realistic Batman. And Deeper Batman, one that probes the psyche of Bruce Wayne to explain his origin. I appreciated this one for the themes it dealt with: Vengeance vs. justice (much richer than Batman Forever), Overcoming fear, and how our fears make us who we are. The one thing I didn’t care for, but tolerated is the cliché turning to the East for wisdom. This is very fashionable now in the West, when looking for spiritual wisdom, movies always have to look to Native American pagan crap or Eastern monist crap. Oh well, it wasn’t overwhelming. Some great lines in this movie: Liam Neeson’s mentor character tells Wayne, who is trying to deal with his guilt over his parent’s death as well as his hatred for criminals, “Vigilante is a man who is absorbed in his own self gratification. But if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something more than a man.” Wow, what wisdom. It’s true. People do not realize that transcendence is what they need, to be a part of something bigger than themselves. With all these humanistic epics out there like War of the Worlds, Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, that destroy transcendence and wonder why their stories fall flat and have no real heart connection. It’s because they spurn transcendent beliefs, they deny there is anything bigger than ourselves or beyond this life. Well, Batman gets it right. Another great moment that reveals the true tragedy of our culture that coddles criminals and seeks to “understand” terrorists: “Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society’s understanding.” Christopher Nolan, who wrote this thing is really thoughtful and great with words. Man, how did that Shakespearean intelligence get past the Executives? Another one: “To conquer fear, you must become your fear.” And thus Batman becomes the very bat he was phobic about because of a past experience. There is a bit of Existentialism in there as Batman responds to his love interest, “It’s not what I am underneath, but it’s what I do that defines me.” Okay, “we are what we do” is existentialism and it is really quite destructive to deny the inner man and the power of who we are inside that ALSO defines us. Because existentialism denies Logos or an underlying meaning to the universe, it concludes that we are thrust into existence and therefore have no inherent meaning, just what we do, that creates us. I have written about the fallacy of this worldview in my book Hollywood Worldviews. It stinks and is disenguine. But no movie is perfect, so it didn’t ruin it for me. And the whole dark approach to the movie is not a gratuitous artsy fartsy imbibing in darkness for the sake of being “edgy” and nihilistic, but rather a realistic attempt to deal with depravity, along with a desire to find hope and justice in the midst of it. Batman is told by his mentor, “Your compassion is your weakness your enemies do not share,” because Batman doesn’t kill everyone he fights, and he is not a vigilante like the vigilante force of Ra’s Al Ghul. But he replies, “No. It’s what makes us different from them.” And this really is the essence of moral fighting of evil. If we become like the evil we fight, then we have failed and will result in the furtherance of evil. We must be more “human” and do what is right even though it may not result in the best result for us, or we simply further evil. Quite refined and reflective for a movie, huh? And a comic book movie at that. I mean it was really quite a thorough investigation of revenge that rang true and captured the feelings and struggles a person would go through over evil done unto their loved ones. This is no mere comic book movie, this was an authentic study of justice and vengeance, good and evil. Nolan, who did Memento and Insomnia is one of my favorite filmmakers.
Dark Water
Not Recommended. So many of these adapted foreign thrillers start out with a real scary premise and presence, but end up with weak stupid endings that don’t make sense. Dark Water is one of those, along with The Ring, and The Grudge. Anyway, Great slow build up of this single mother and her child trying to make it by moving into an old dilapidated apartment complex, while the mom works through her relationship with her divorced husband. So the dark water that starts to drip into the apartment and spread in stains on the ceiling is a metaphor for unfinished business that also turns out to be a supernatural thriller with a naturalized explanation. The whole thing is Jennifer Connelly, the mom, uncovering a child death that is the result of negligence, but then in a stupid ending, she has to allow herself to be killed to be the dead girl’s mommy for eternity in order to save her real daughter from being killed. What the..? Jennifer was neglected and the girl who died was accidentally abandoned, so Jennifer is supposedly redeeming herself by saving her daughter and taking up an abandoned daugher ghost. But she abandons her own daughter to do it! It fits logically, but not emotionally or psychologically. It just wasn’t satisfying. Great spooky build up and great thriller metaphor, but unsatisfying ending and moral. Excellent quirky character parts by John Reilly, Eric Roth and Pete Postlethwaite.
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Recommended with caution. This is a young chick flick about four girlfriends in high school spending the summer in different parts of the world and how they mail a pair of pants to each other as a ritual of connection with some hope that it will bring magic into their lives. And of course, they do. I liked this movie for several reasons. One, it was a young teen movie that involved coming of age, yet it dealt with serious issues of life that I am convinced young people can deal with, but avoid it by filling their silence with media that numbs their souls. And this movie, like A Walk to Remember, proves you can make an entertaining movie for teens with meaningfulness in it. Second, I liked it for it’s very unusual truthful dealing with sex, while not exploiting it. One of the girls, who is an overachiever sets her sights on a camp counselor at Soccer Camp and finally gets him to sleep with her, and believe it or not, she actually responds with the truth rather than the typical lie of teens and sex. She tells her friends, “How can something that is supposed to make you so complete, make you feel so empty?” She regrets it cause she realizes she is too young for sex and this was not the appropriate relationship for it. She says, “I wanted it for all the wrong reasons. And everything I was running from just caught up with me that much sooner.” While the story does not stress marriage (a real lack), the context still shows that kids are not ready for the kind of intimacy and responsibility that sex brings. I was amazed and pleased. Another girl visits her grandma in Greece and has to overcome family prejudice based on family feuds when she falls in “love” with a young college kid from the “enemy family,” a Romeo and Juliet story, with a happy ending of the Grandpa learning to forgive and overcome his own prejudice. The down side of this story was that it did breed a foolish fantasy of a 17-year old having a relationship with a college aged kid, which in a very real way contradicted the previous story about the girl realizing she was too young. Thus, according to these storytellers, some girls are mature enough to have a relationship with older men. Well, I can tell you that sure fulfills the fantasy of a lot of “men,” but it does not help the plight of girls who must realize that they know nothing about love at that age. It would be more appropriate to say they are in “lust” or are in infatuation. Another great story was the cynical artist filmmaker who is stuck in the home town for the summer working at the local Wallman’s. So she decides to make a “suckumentary” about the boringness of mundane existence. She ends up befriending a young ten year old who is dying of leukemia, who helps this girl realize that the little things in life are beautiful and important, she just has to see that through the eyes of death. This young girl with so little time left likes looking up in the sky and wondering, “There’s got to be something more to life.” This makes the cynic melt with realization of her own cynical foolish blindness and she has her eyes opened to search for meaning in her life. The downside of this movie is that the cynic learns from the little girl the classic existentialist line, “it’s the little things strung together that have meaning. Maybe we just get through it and that’s all we can ask for.” Well, seems to me a wasted pondering of the meaning of life, but it’s on the right track, just doesn’t meet the finish line. Another story was of a Puerto Rican girl trying to reconnect with her divorced white father, who is trying to build a new blonde Anglo Saxon family in the suburbs – without her. A very touching story about family belonging and the lack of it in so many of our lives. Her redemption lies in finally expressing to her father her anger with him, yet, then forgiving him and going to his new wedding. Very redemptive and positive. The girls all experience deaths in some way, the death of innocence, death of family, death of a loved one, and for that reason, it is a very thoughtful film that moved me. Unfortunately, the worldview was rather humanistic in crying out for faith in something, anything, but God. The girls say, “I’d like to say it was fate, that summer. The pants knew we needed faith. Something to believe in.” And of course concludes, that something is not personal, not loving, and transcendent, namely the living God, but rather an arbitrary faith in fate or nothingness masquerading as something. Rather the narrator concludes her lesson: “Love your sisters and love yourself,” a rather meaningless 80s fashionable narcissism without much content. But I think the movie is one that also makes you evaluate your life and what is really important in it, and what growing up really is about: responsibility, facing your mortality and forgiveness.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Recommended. Two Assassins (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) are married to each other and don’t even know it because their lives are such a secret – until they become marks for each other’s secret agencies and have to kill each other. What a pleasant surprise this little gem was. Sure, it’s a popcorn action flick on the level of a married James Bond, but it is so much more. It is a brilliant metaphor for communication and honesty in marriage. When the two are trying to kill each other, any married person can relate to their fighting, but of course on a certainly less than lethal level. But that’s the fun of it. It takes the real issues of fighting in marriage and makes them into comic book action fun. I loved it! And it rang so true to the struggles of marriage, the bickering the lack of communication, but finally the intimacy through honesty and communication, working through the problems. Here’s the theme as I saw it: Better sex through communication. All right, its more than that, but the whole point of the story is that these two were keeping secrets of who they really were from each other, and because of that, their marriage was sour, but they kept up the cover for the sake of their own pursuits. It is not until they find out that each other is an assassin that they get angry at each other and fight, but in their fighting, for the first time, they finally open up and truly communicate their genuine feelings. Yes, it requires a bit of fighting, but it solves the slump in their marriage, because they come to know each other more intimately than ever. The movie starts with them in counseling because they are distant from each other and have no sex. But then, after discovering their true identities and fighting through their feelings together, they bond together, overcome the enemy and heal their marriage, ending in great sex! This is profound stuff in such an otherwise “light” film. This movie worked on a mythic level for me. What a refreshing change of pace from so many boring action movies without heart or meaning. And quite a bit ironic as well, considering the home-wrecking relationship these two had off screen. How typical of Hollywood to make movies of good values that are spit upon by these same people in their own lives.