Catholic Film Reviews

For those of you who, like me, are disappointed three out of four years when the Oscar nominations come out, as they are about to now, here may be the reason why, beyond differences in values and notions of good storytelling, etc: A director needs only 64 of his colleagues to nominate him/her, and a cinematographer, 32. Etcetera. Granted, these are “peer” votes, which should count for something, but we also all know what happens when big decisions are made by small and somewhat “inbred” (culturally speaking) groups.

Here’s the story from The Wrap.

My two oldest and I drove fifty miles to an art house cinema several years ago to see the Michael Radford film adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s thorniest “Problem Plays”, The Merchant of Venice.

Fascinating how many of Shakespeare’s alleged Comedies–defined primarily by the fact that there’s a “happy ending” for the main characters–are actually Problem Plays, in which the happy endings begin to unravel on closer inspection. Merchant, as Problem Play, is of course made even more problematic by the the fact that, at its heart, it’s about a hard-hearted, miserly, and angry old Jewish money-lender who gets taught a merciless lesson in Mercy by a group of self-righteous Christians. The fact that we’re still producing and watching such a patently antisemitic bit of drama, when (say) Marlowe’s gross caricature The Jew of Malta has gone the way of the Dodo, is testament to Shakespeare’s genius as poet, dramatist, and all-around slippery fellow when it comes to trying to figure where he stands on, well, just about anything.

I don’t hesitate to say that as painful as this play is to watch at times, Michael Radford’s film is the best production I’ve yet seen of it. Except for a brief bit of historical scene-setting about antisemitism in the opening shots, Radford otherwise plays it straight and lets the characters speak for themselves, without the polemical apologetics one so frequently sees nowadays. Why do so many directors think the audience won’t “get it” unless he/she makes Shylock into some noble revolutionary hero, and Antonio a mustache-twirling villain?

The performances in this film are marvelous. Pacino plays a multilayered Shylock with great dignity, humanity, and surprising restraint, while Jeremy Irons gives us the first Antonio for whom I’ve been able to feel any significant sympathy. Yep, he’s a bigot down to his toenails when it comes to the despised Jews, but he’s also capable of true love and friendship, and sells the concept of Antonio’s many alleged virtues to an inherently skeptical audience. In the climactic trial scene, he plays the Merchant for what he is, in the flesh as it were: a terrified man about to have his heart cut out; I almost fainted with him.

So, yes, see this film. Just expect to come out more troubled than entertained, sympathetic to and repelled by every character, in equal measure…which is about the best one can expect from this ornery play.

Tags: Al Pacino, antisemitism, Jeremy Irons, Michael Radford, problem play, Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

reviewed by John Murphy

Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest was a novel about Hitler narrated by a demon, who writes: “Most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil…There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality.” I was reminded of that quote during Valkyrie, a true-story account of the most organized, wide-reaching conspiracy by German officers to assassinate their Fuhrer. As everyone knows, the plan failed. So did fourteen other attempts. At what point does one begin to suspect that dark forces were at work? Continue Reading »

Elegy, adapted from Philip Roth’s novella, The Dying Animal, aspires to be a meditation on the two capital-letter subjects, Sex and Death. As such, its insights are hardly revelatory: “It’s not about growing old, it’s about growing up,” observes a supporting character, helpfully supplying the movie’s main theme for any note-takers in the audience.

I should probably admit right off my general distaste for Roth’s work. In addition to The Dying Animal, I’ve only read his three most recent books (Everyman, Exit Ghost, and Indignation) and the the only reasons I finished them were because they are short and I was paid to review them.

For me, then, Elegy is a quiet triumph, since the movie succeeds at making an insufferable character — Roth’s frequent alter-ego, David Kepesh — not only sufferable, but sympathetic. Kingsley plays Kepesh as a moderately well-known New York intellectual– he banters with Charlie Rose about America’s puritanical beginnings in the opening sequence– whose preening pretension and cultural acumen is catnip to his Columbia students. (I’m reminded of the “Deriddettes,” the black-clad crew of young women who would sit front row at Jacques Derrida lectures.) Since this is based on a Roth novella, Kepesh is an unapologetic skirt-chaser, scanning the rows of students on the first day of class for his next prey. Continue Reading »

Tags: Ben Kingsley, David Kepesh, Dying Animal, Elegy, Isabel Coixet, Penelope Cruz, Philip Roth

After wasting an hour or two too many several years ago on the much-ado-about-patent-nonsense controversy surrounding Dan Brown’s laughable blockbuster, The DaVinci Code, I have of late been sedulously avoiding all references to “Dan Brown”, “Angels and Demons”, “Ron Howard”, or “Tom Hanks”. But when I stumbled across Ross Douthat’s spade-calling op ed piece in The New York TImes, I had to take five to look. And it was well worth the read.

A brief excerpt:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

Bingo.

For the rest of the excellent piece, go here.

Tags: Angels and Demons, Dan Brown, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks

The last word spoken in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is “panache.” It’s a single-word summation of all that came before. Cyrano — like Falstaff, Captain Ahab or Robin Hood — is a literary character turned worldwide phenomenon.  He is the big-nosed, swashbuckling poet who embodies “panache,” and has captured the hearts and imaginations of audiences everywhere. The name “Cyrano” conjures more than a Pinnochio nose and a floppy, feathery hat. Cyrano is synonymous with valor and bold romanticism: a brilliant, outsized soul, and selfless in his unrequited love for the beautiful but unapproachable Roxane.   

He is, in short, the great Romantic hero: individualistic, poetical, brave — but also tragic, lonely, misunderstood. His “deformity” has made him bitterly self-conscious, sensitive to insult, but also a man set-apart, the envy and enemy of many. He battles a hundred men, throws away a year’s pay in one grand gesture, and composes sonnets while matching swords with dim-witted aristocrats. Talk about panache. Continue Reading »

Tags: Anthony Burgess, Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, Gerard Depardieu, panache

The challenge of adapting Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo for the screen, large or small, is of such a colossal magnitude that perhaps only Nostromo himself, the novel’s hero and “a man in a thousand” should have been charged with the task. The difficulties start with the logistics of the production. Set in a fictional South American republic at the turn-of-the-century, with a silver mining operation as its economic engine, Nostromo demands a large-scale canvas if the book is to be done any justice.

No doubt that is why David Lean, legendary director of old-school epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, was slated to helm his version of Nostromo in the early 1990’s. In declining health at the age of 83, it was a big gamble for the studio behind it, and the studio lost. Tragically, Lean died before filming commenced and we are left with only a few tantalizing glimpses of the “might-have-been”: a script by Christopher Hampton (now published, though Lean would have worked from a script revised by the great Robert Bolt, author of A Man for All Seasons and The Mission), some costume and set sketches, and a cast list that included Peter O’Toole (slated to play the tortured alcoholic, Dr. Monygham), Isabella Rossellini, Greta Schacchi, and newcomer George Carraface as “Our Man,” Nostromo. Along with Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon project, Lean’s unrealized Nostromo is one of the great what-ifs? of film history.   Continue Reading »

Tags: Albert Finney, Charles Gould, Claudio Amendola, Colin Firth, David Lean, Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Serena Scott Thomas

2009 marks the 70th anniversary of arguably the single greatest year in cinema history. 1939 saw the release of The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (which many critics rank near or alongside Citizen Kane on all-time great lists). Heck, even the “fluff” was classic: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone as fiction’s most famous sleuth, is an elegant and stylish thriller that pits the legendary detective against his arch-nemesis, the fiendishly brilliant Professor Moriarty.

Continue Reading »

Tags: 1939, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone, classic mysteries, crown jewels, famous sleuths, Ida Lupino, Nigel Bruce, Professor Moriarity, Tower of London

[N.B.: This is the content of a comment/post on the Newsvine LOST group, a terrific little fan group which I read and post to regularly. If you're a LOSTie (and you know who you are), this is one of the more intelligent group's for the discussion of out-there and esoteric LOST theories.]

SPOILER ALERT: probably better not to read this if you’re not up-to-date on LOST.

First, here’s what I posted on last week’s episode, “He’s Our You“:

However, my kids and I have wondered if perhaps–okay this is wild, but I’ll throw it out there–Baby Ben does die, and his body is taken by the Others or Smokey, and they do whatever that weird Possession/re-animation thing is that turns people into baddies, like Rousseau’s husband.

So it wasn’t so wild, after all! Only they do the Possession/re-animation thing to prevent Little Ben’s death. And it does have a negative effect on the person’s soul or personality, just as it did with Rousseau’s people, at the very least making the person so totally committed to the “good” of the Others/Island that they’ll do anything.

And I repeat, now more than ever: The Others are at least in part Black Rock survivors, who have somehow latched onto a type of infertile immortality provided by the Island/Smokey/Jacob/theTemple—the Island’s ancient civilization. But as with all mythologies, the attempt to “seize” immortality is liable to have a deleterious effect on one’s soul. But surely that’s why Widmore wants back: He wants the immortality.

We were just re-watching the final ep of season one, where the Losties first see The Black Rock. One thing we noticed was how few corpses were in the hold of that ship. IOW, lots of survivors, as with 815.

And how sneaky were the clues! For instance—this is great “mystery writing”—when Hurley asks how an old sailing ship could get several miles inland, Rousseau responds, “Are you on the same Island I am?” What’s significant about this, as my son John pointed out, is that she answers without answering anything, which is a great diversion trick. Of course everyone (including audience) would wonder how the ship got there, so the writers appeared to deal with the question without dealing with it at all. Which means, in “clue” terms, it’s a significant point, and the fact that it occurs in a season finale makes it all the more significant, especially when you realize that the whole Black Rock thing has gone quiet on the series for the better part of three-four seasons. Soon enough, that other shoe is going to drop, though whether it does this season or next, I can’t say.

For Clan Murphy, this was easily the best Kate episode, and we’re not Kate fans. Good for Sawyer for sticking with Juliette!

But the highlight of the show for me were the scenes from the next ep, DEAD IS DEAD: A whole ep focused on Ben! (Be still, my heart!) We’ll be counting the days. LOVED the look on Ben’s face when he saw Locke by his bedside. I do believe that was the first time in the series we’ve seen our favorite baddie genuinely—as in jaw-droppingly—surprised. Then Locke’s wonderful little Mona Lisa smile in turn…ah, that’s going to be an awesome episode.

Also, watching the first season again, and especially the two-part “EXODUS” finale, Redemption and getting a second chance are huge themes in this series. I just hope they don’t kill off Ben in the process of “redeeming” him. In fact, I don’t believe the writers would kill Ben off at all—they know which side their bread is buttered on! I mean, where would Star Wars be without Darth Vadar?—unless it were Michael Emerson’s choice; say, other work he’s got on offer.

Tags: Benjamin Linus, Black Rock, lost, Michael Emerson, Others, Whatever happened happened

One of the greatest of film composers, Maurice Jarre, is dead at the age of 84. Probably best known for his scores of epic David Lean films, I grew up collecting Jarre soundtracks, along with those of Miklos Rozsa, Erich Korngold, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith and il Maestro, Ennio Morricone. It got to the point—at least until his path-breaking score to Dead Poets Society, a lovely piece of music in a very different vein from Jarre’s usual sound—where I could spot a Jarre score within the first thirty seconds of a film.

His greatest score is probably Lawrence of Arabia, of course, for which he won the Academy Award, but my goodness, how many magnificent scores he composed! Remember the gorgeous barn-raising music from Witness? I can’t hear that music without crying. Or his glorious Jesus of Nazareth? I especially admired his octave-dipping, spine-tingling turn for the raising of Lazarus scene.

Still, I think my own personal favorite among Jarre’s compositions is the unabashedly upbeat “waltz” theme to Is Paris Burning?, a big sloppy (but wonderful) mess of a movie about the thwarting of Hitler’s vengeful intention to burn Paris upon the Nazi retreat in 1944. I was twelve years old when this movie came out in 1966, and I no sooner saw it than I took my allowance and rushed out to buy the LP of the soundtrack. I used to play it throughout my teenage years whenever I felt a little down in the dumps and needed a quick pick-me-up—this one I can’t hear without grinning.

And what do you know, after many years of being out-of-print, I see they recently re-published the soundtrack on CD, looks like in 2008…for my birthday list! Either that, or “the Essecntial Jarre” collection, which has a bit of everything, including the Is Paris Burning? waltz. Decisions, decisions!

Here is an excellent little BBC article on the composer’s life and career.

Tags: Dead Poets Society, Film Music, film scores, Is Paris Burning?, Lawrence of Arabia, Maurice Jarre, soundtracks, Witness