December viewing

Here's the list of my viewing for this month:

12/1 8 1/2
12/2 Kinsey
12/3 The Incredibles
12/4 House of Flying Daggers
12/6 Notre Musique
12/7 The Five Obstructions
12/8 The Ox-Bow Incident
12/10 X-2
12/11 A Very Long Engagement
12/15 Miracle
12/18 The Sea Inside favorite for the month
12/24 A Home at the End of the World
12/25 Bad Education
12/27 Ned Kelly
12/28 The Aviator
12/29 Million Dollar Hotel
12/30 Meet the Fockers
12/31 The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

List of all 205 films I've seen this year

Manson's Memo 12/28

From the Dec. 28 Artesia Christian Church newsletter:

2004 is drawing to an end. What do you remember from this year? A “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl? The division into red and blue states? The Boston Red Sox escaping their curse and winning the World Series?

Maybe you remember something more personal – a wedding, a birth, the death of a loved one, a vacation, an accomplishment or a failure.

Every year is made up of a variety of memories -- some pleasant, some not. 2005 will be this way as well. We’ll have good times and bad. We’ll laugh; we’ll mourn. I’m beginning to sound like the author of Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a time, and a season for every purpose under heaven.”

Ecclesiastes is often brought up as the year turns. It’s a fairly brief book, but very meaningful. It is an examination of what makes life worth living. It’s written by someone who has struggled to find meaning in life.

That kind of question is precisely the kind of thing we think about as the new year dawns. That is why we use it as a time to reflect and to resolve to change. As the year sits before us, we look at this time as an opportunity to seek to have our lives mean something.

A blessing for us all: Our lives do mean something. We are people created in God’s image. We are people whom Christ gave himself for. It’s not that we need to find meaning for our lives. We just have to live out that meaning

Bad Education

Links
—Overview
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

Blackmail. Revenge. Drugs. Murder. Abuse. All set in a pessimistic atmosphere where characters seem to be trapped in their situations. These are the makings of film noir. These are the makings of Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education.

Central to Bad Education is Ignacio, or more precisely, several versions of Ignacio, both real and fictional. Is that confusing? So is the beginning of the film as the viewer has to discern what is real, what is fictional, and how various people are in both of the parallel stories.

The film begins with Ignacio showing up unannounced at the office of film director Enrique, a friend from their early school days. Enrique could barely recognize him since it had been so long, even though Ignacio was Enrique’s first love. Ignacio, a hopeful actor wanting to be known by his stage name, Angel, has a story he has written based on their time in school. He’ll let Enrique make the film if he can play the key role.

The story that Ignacio tells is about a transvestite who is seeking revenge on a priest who sexually abused him at school. Ignacio is using the story to blackmail that priest (who has since left the priesthood.) As we move back and forth between the real and the fictional stories, the plot of the film involves a number of twists and turns along the way that keep us guessing about what really happened so long ago.

Gael García Bernal is brilliant in his multiple roles, bouncing back and forth between the real world story and the fictional story. He is equally believable as an aspiring actor, a transvestite and an aspiring actor playing a transvestite.

The NC-17 rating this film received is, in my mind, questionable. It does include some gay sex scenes, but is no more intense or graphic than some R-rated films I’ve seen. It should be noted that it received significantly lower ratings in some countries.

Almodóvar has stated that he harbors hostility toward the Catholic Church as an institution. The film should be watched with that in mind, although I don’t see this film as an assault on the church, even though there is a pedophile priest. The priest and the church are no more villains than any of the other characters. In fact, we see Enrique using his power to take sexual advantage of Ignacio’s brother in much the same way that Father Manolo took advantage of his power over Ignacio.

There are no innocents in this film. Each of the characters is in turn a victim and also a perpetrator of abuse of various kinds. Each is morally culpable for some of the evil that befalls others and themselves. But in each character we see them blaming others without being willing to accept their own share of the blame. Their actions, whether sexual abuse, blackmail, or murder, are really based in striving for power over others. Each is retaliating for actions others have done in asserting their power. That striving for power is the foundation for much of the way people injure one another. Bad Education shows us how the struggle for power can bring ruin into many lives.

Links
—Overview
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

Merry Christmas

May the gift of God seen in the child of Bethlehem fill you with hope, peace, joy and love.

Glory to God in the highest heavens!

A Very Long Engagement

HJ Links
—Review
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film
—Spiritual Connections

A Very Long Engagement reunites actress Audrey Tautou and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet who together made the pleasant love story Amélie. But don’t look for the same light-hearted comedy this time out.

A Very Long Engagement is the story of a young French woman (Mathilde) searching for her fiancé (Manech) who has been sentenced to death for intentionally getting wounded in hopes of being sent home from the trenches of World War I. Rather than a straight forward execution, he and four others are sent out of the trench into No Man’s Land - the area between the trenches. There they will no doubt either be shot by one side or the other, or eventually starve. It is a cruel sentence. It was meant to be a deterrent to others who might think of wounding themselves to escape the war.

Even after word of his death, Mathilde refuses to believe Manech is dead. She lives in hope that some how he will be found alive. Her quest begins in earnest after, in 1920, she is called to a veterans’ hospital to hear a man tell the story of Manech’s demise. She finds enough to question in the story to begin an investigation. Slowly she begins to learn more and more about the tragedy of these five condemned men. But she also keeps learning of discrepancies in the stories, which continue to give her hope, even as each story affirms Manech’s death.

The film really is a combination of a war story, the love story of Mathilde and Manech, and a detective story driven by Mathilde’s love. The detective story is the most engaging of the stories. In it, Mathilde has ups and downs as she gets evidence that Manech might still be alive and other evidence that makes it seem sure he is dead. The more people she talks to, the more this quandary grows.

The love story is less well developed. We see brief looks back at their childhood and their time before the war, but we really aren’t brought into the relationship that is so consuming for Mathilde. It is hard to understand, other than the denial of grief, why Mathilde can have such certainty that Manech still lives. Without that understanding, the central premise of the film become shaky.

The war story is also well developed, but also very intense and violent. To be sure, the trench warfare of World War I was miserable in both physical and psychological ways. This film does its best to show us the misery of that experience. The film shows us bodies being ripped by bullets and blown apart by bombs.

At the core of these three elements is hope. We may not understand what sustains Mathilde’s hope, but we do see that the hope is what sustains her. She is willing to give all she has to find her lover. That hope rides a roller coaster as things look promising or dire, but Mathilde is never ready to get off the coaster. Even after finding his grave, she continues on her quest in hope that even that grave is wrong.

The film’s ending, which I found to be a bit too easy and contrived, is also grounded in hope. We are not sure what will become of Mathilde after the final scene, but we know that there is promise of something wonderful happening. We know that there is hope that the love she has shared will live again.

Manson's Memo 12/14

From the 12/14 Artesia Christian Church Newsletter:

I got our Christmas lights put up last weekend.  My
preference is multi-colored; Jane, Eric and Dan prefer
all white.  Since Eric and Dan don’t live here
anymore, and since Jane left it up to me, the colored
ones are shining this year.  Or at least they are now.

On Saturday, after I put them up and plugged in the
timer for them to come on automatically, Jane and I
went of to Hollywood to see a movie.  It was dark by
the time we got home (we made a few stops on the way.)
And as we drove in, Jane asked, “Where are our
lights?”  I knew where the lights were, they were up
along the edge of the roof.  The problem wasn’t where
the lights were, it was why weren’t they on.

So I had to get the flashlight and check the timer
(it was working), and the extension cords.  At the
connection of the extension cord and the first string
of lights, the plug had pulled out just enough to look
like it was connected, but it really wasn’t.

It occurs to me that this can be true of much of our
experience at Christmas.  We get up all the
decorations – lights, crèche, wreaths, trees,
mistletoe.  We fill our CD players with Christmas
albums and let it just play all day.  We wrap presents
and bake goodies to share with our friends.
Everything about us says it’s Christmas.

But sometimes, the days of Advent and Christmas just
don’t shine.  I wonder if those days aren’t the result
of us letting the plug slip out just a little bit.

Check your connection to Christ so that your lights
will shine at Christmas.

Top 10 (preliminary thougths)

Since it's only mid-December, there are still some wonderful films to open in the next couple of weeks. But I am beginning to think about what my Top 10 list will look like. Keep in mind that this list is very tentative, but will give you some idea of how it's shaping up. I'm not terribly pleased with the selections for this year. I think I'm going to use 2004 as my definition of a C grade movie year. There are a few standouts, but overall, this year hasn't really amounted to much, and I doubt that even the very promising films opening soon will be enough to raise the grade.

TENTATIVE ranking
1. Dogville
2. Sideways
3. Hero
4. Baadasssss!
5. Control Room
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind

Movies good enough to make a top 10 list (still in running):

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, ...and Spring
Coffee and Cigarettes
Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du coran
Intimate Strangers
Mean Creek
Finding Neverland
Vera Drake
Kinsey
The Incredibles

Maybe (after further consideration) I'll move these up:
Collateral
Taegukgi
The Motorcycle Diaries

Movies I still have to see with potential:
The Sea Inside
Million Dollar Baby
The Aviator
Bad Education

Notre Musique

HJ Links
—Review
—Spiritual Connections

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most influential figures in French New Wave cinema (a movement in the 1960s.) Now in his 70s, Godard has a new film. Notre Musique is a look at war, but a very different look than we may have seen before.

First, I need to confess that one of the (many) areas of film history I don't know much about is French New Wave. In fact, Notre Musique is the first Godard film I’ve seen. I’d love to be able to compare it with his earlier work?or even note the way New Wave is exemplified in this film?but my ignorance precludes that.

I can say that it fits my idea of New Wave cinema. It is structured in such a way as to brag, “This is IMPORTANT!” To Americans this may come across as pretentious and pompous. It’s not what we are used to in film. It’s not storytelling like American films (and even documentaries) are. It has an air of philosophy about it, but the philosophy isn’t under the surface, as in American films, rather it is all about being philosophical.

If you’re willing to put up with all of that (and let’s be frank, most Americans aren’t), Notre Musique does offer us some very interesting insights into the world we live in?a world of war and terrorism.

The film is structured in three “kingdoms”: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The first and last are rather short, the Purgatory kingdom makes up the bulk of the film. Hell is about war. It is a collage of brief clips of war. Some documentary war footage, some clips from war movies, war in the twentieth century, war in past ages. The images change quickly and are accompanied by a pounding discordant piano. It is a visceral assault that reminds us of the chaos and utter repulsiveness of war.

The Purgatory section takes place at a literary conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Godard himself plays a key role in this section. He is one of the speakers at the conference, which give him a chance to be on camera making his point. This can be summed up in his idea from film that there is a shot and a counter-shot. Man, woman; facing right, facing left; tears, laughter. He pushes this idea into the Israeli-Palestinian situation. He sees the two sides as shot and counter-shot. Each has come to a place of being defined by relationship to the other.

While this real life section is taking place, there is also a fictional story unfolding, involving an Israeli student at the conference, Olga. She is beginning to see the ways that the two sides are connected. She returns home to Tel Aviv a changed person, and a person seeking change.

The Heaven section is a brief, pastoral scene, with bits of military paraphernalia and personnel included. (This section really is what Americans think of as European film.) It is the aftermath of Olga’s action at home. It is peaceful, but it is also a scene we recognize as death.

Although I think it’s a bit heavy-handed and not especially creative for Godard to go on camera to literally tell us what he wants to tell us, Godard’s discussions of the nature of conflict are worth listening to, especially in a post-9/11 world in which we so readily define the world as “us” and “other.” He reminds us that there is a connectedness between enemies. That connection is part of what makes war so tragic?that we fail to see ourselves in the other.

When Olga begins to identify the connection between herself and Palestinians, her understanding brings her to the point of being willing to sacrifice herself as one of them. Seeing this film a few weeks before Christmas, I am reminded of how God identified with humanity to such an extent that Christ emptied himself (Phil. 2:5-11) to become one of us. For those who are in Christ there is no “other.”

The Machinist

HJ Links
—Review by Darrel Manson
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

Everything about The Machinist is designed to creep you out --the blue lighting, the music full of reeds and strings (and a bit of theremin) reminiscent of 50s horror films, and, most of all, the skeletal Christian Bale, who is said to have lost sixty-five pounds for the film. All of this sets the mood for a psychological thriller.

Trevor Reznik has been awake for the past year. He's been suffering severe insomnia. He spends the nights scrubbing his floor with a toothbrush and bleach, visiting his prostitute girlfriend, or sitting in an airport diner drinking coffee and talking to the friendly waitress. During the day he works as a machinist on an assembly line where he gets along with the workers, but angers his supervisor.

The trouble with such sleep deprivation is that it can lead to paranoia, hallucinations, and other mental problems. All this lack of sleep is taking its toll on Trevor. Accidents happen, or are they accidents? Notes with a game of hangman start appearing on Trevor's refrigerator. As we watch the film, we begin to wonder just what is, and what isn't, real.

The Machinist is a bit like crossing a Hitchcock film with The Twilight Zone. It has the kind of overwhelming mood that Hitchcock was so adept at producing. It also has the kind of discovery as we come to the end that made The Twilight Zone so popular. As Trevor struggles to understand the things that seem to be happening to him, he eventually needs to struggle to understand himself.

One of the problems with trying to review psychological thrillers is that by their nature, you can’t say much about them without giving away the twists and turns that make them so intriguing. And although I think many people will readily figure out what is happening, it is the “why things are happening like this” that makes for the mystery.

In the end, we get a glimpse into some important questions about life. We think about how one deals with guilt. We think about the power of confession to set us free. We think about the way we try to hide from our problems, but know that the more we hide, the more powerful those problems become.

The Machinist is an excursion into the darkness that can overwhelm people. As the truth of the story is revealed, we discover that the truth may be the way out of the darkness. It is then we see that often the truth really does set us free.

House of Flying Daggers

HJ Links
—Review by Darrel Manson
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

Earlier this year, American audiences got to see Zhang Yimou’s visually beautiful and intellectually thoughtful martial arts film, Hero. Now we are treated to Zhang’s second martial arts film, House of Flying Daggers. This film shares a good deal with Hero -stunning cinematography, excellent choreography of the wuxia style martial arts sequences, and interesting plot twists. (Note: while I won't be speaking of the twists themselves, some of my comments may give hints that will reflect some of the twists.)

House of Flying Daggers is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. It focuses on the romantic triangle that develops between the three main characters: Mei, Jin and Leo. (Hence the title of the film in Japan: The Lovers.) We are never sure about any of the relationships, however, because the whole story is also a story of deception.

Jin and Leo are deputies for the security forces of the corrupt government. This is a period when many rebellious groups are taking advantage of the government's weakness. One of these groups is the House of Flying Daggers, a collection of martial arts practitioners who have been robbing the rich and sharing with the poor, gathering much popular support. There is a rumor that a new dancer at the local brothel is an agent for the Flying Daggers. Jin and Leo hatch a scheme for Jin to go undercover to find and kill the new leader of the House.

The new dancer, Mei, at the Peony Pavilion turns out to be blind (as was the daughter of the old leader of the House). But she is such an accomplished dancer she can perform the “Echo Game,” an elaborate dance that even a sighted person would have trouble with. She also proves to be an amazing wuxia fighter in spite of her blindness. After her arrest, Jin rescues her and they set off on a trip to the north. Along the way they come under attack by government forces, always barely escaping death (but keep in mind that Jin and Leo have set all this up).

Along the way, Jin and Mei begin to fall in love. Leo is constantly trying to warn Jin about such a connection, but it happens anyway. Eventually we discover that Leo has his own love for Mei. When Jin and Mei finally make their way to the headquarters for the House of Flying Daggers, the plot begins to twist in various ways.

The love triangle creates the foundation of the tragedy. There is no way that this triangle can work. Once all the relationships are revealed, the story becomes one of sacrifice, but also of selfishness. Both of those concepts can lead to courageous action. Each character has a bit of selfishness; some, though, manage to put the one they love above their own safety. And we see the extent to which love will go to in order to save the one we love -even giving up our own lives.

House of Flying Daggers, while certainly a commendable film, may be a minor disappointment to fans of Hero. Although just as beautiful, the story doesn’t carry the same vast sweep that is found in Hero. The film also fails to follow all of the story lines to conclusion. This is especially obvious in the story of what happens to the House of Flying Daggers. While the crucial confrontation between Jin, Leo and Mei is taking place, we see an army closing in on the headquarters, but never see the outcome of the inevitable battle.

But while it may be a disappointment in comparison to Hero, it still manages to speak to us of the power of love that leads us to great sacrifice. Sometimes that coming together of love and sacrifice can lead to tragedy, as it does here. But even in the midst of the tragedy, there is also a vision of the salvation that also comes from sacrifice. For people of faith, it can serve as a reminder of the sacrifice God made to bring salvation to us.

Kinsey

We live in a world saturated with sex. A former US Senator and presidential candidate touts the efficacy of a pill for erectile dysfunction. TV ads hawk contraceptives and lotions for feminine yeast infections. Homosexuality has been mainstreamed on Will and Grace and A Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It hasn't always been like this.

This is just the extension of changing attitudes towards sex that go back through Dr. Ruth Westheimer (the little grandmotherly woman with a German accent who shocked people with the things she would talk about; grandmas aren’t supposed to say these things!), back through The Joys of Sex and Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) and even The Total Woman, back through the Hite Report and Masters and Johnson, back through Playboy and Hustler.

All of this goes back to Alfred Kinsey. In a culture that kept sex locked in the bedroom, Kinsey sought to study it, measure it and understand it. His primary tool in this was the collection of thousands of sexual histories. He (and his assistants) would interview people about their sexual lives. When his report came out, it changed the way we thought about sex.

Kinsey gives us a look at the man who pulled sex in America out of the closet. To many he was a hero and an early leader in what became the sexual revolution. To others he was a dangerous perverter of social norm and values. The film leans more toward the former, but is not without questions about the man.

Kinsey is portrayed as obsessive. Early in his career he studied gall wasps -collecting, studying, and cataloging through the years over half a million specimens. When he began to teach a class in marriage (which discussed sex), that same sort of obsession led him to begin his broad study of American sexuality. As the film progresses we see that his obsession never relents: he constantly pushed to get more histories, to hear about or observe different manners of stimulation. He encourages his staff to have open marriages and swap wives. He has an affair with one of his staff, who then also has an affair with Kinsey’s wife, with his full knowledge. Kinsey even branches out into a bit of masochistic behavior, seeking yet more understanding. It gets to the point that we begin to wonder if he has passed the boundary between science and voyeurism.

There is plenty of room in Kinsey’s study to quibble (and people have been attacking both his methods and results for over 50 years). For example, since he didn't think a representative sample was possible, he tried to make up for the lack of quality of the sample with quantity. In the process he oversampled some groups (such as prisoners) and undersampled others (such as conservative Christians who wouldn’t talk about sex to the interviewers). The film gives only the barest reference to these valid objections.

The film does recognize a key shortcoming in Kinsey’s study: the lack of inclusion of love and emotion as among the key elements of sex. The audience sees a bit of that as we are briefly shown some possible consequences of the permissiveness that Kinsey encouraged among his staff. There is also a brief dialog about love not being something measurable and understood by science. But more, there is also a sense in which Kinsey, as portrayed here, is somewhat of an emotional cripple. We aren’t really sure that he can fully appreciate love. He is passionate about his obsessions, but we rarely see that passion in relationships with people. We do see there is a flicker of warmth between Kinsey and his wife, but even then, the depth of their love is deeply buried within him. His relationship to his son (as his relationship with his father) is built on control and disappointment. His instructions to the staff about wife swapping is to forbid emotional attachments -as though such attachments were something that can be separated from sexual behavior.

HJ Links
—Review
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

This is a film that is filled with sex -but not the way most films are. To be sure, some of the visuals and dialog will offend some, but most of it is done almost clinically, even at dinner in the Kinsey home with their teen-aged children. But it is also done in such a way that most viewers will feel somewhat uncomfortable, even in these more sexually liberated times. Even the clinical discussions make us a little bit edgy, giving us a small taste of what the world felt as Kinsey began showing us that what we always thought about sexual behavior was not what was the reality in our culture.

No doubt many people will read the first paragraph of this review and think the world would be better off without such things. Maybe. Kinsey really didn't change America’s sexual behavior. He merely tried to show us what that behavior really is. He made it something that could be talked about and studied. I understand sexuality to be a gift from God. The work of Kinsey and others through the years has allowed us to enjoy that gift more fully. This film gives us a chance to reflect on this gift and celebrate those who have opened that gift for us.