January movie journal

This month marks a personal best for me: 34 features, and a total of 44 films including shorts, in a 31 day month.

1/1 Hotel Rwanda - My favorite theatrical viewing for the month
1/2 House of Fools
1/5 Ikiru - Best film I saw this month
1/6 Garlic Is as Better than Ten Mothers
1/7 Closer
1/8 Million Dollar Baby
1/9 The Agronomist
1/10 Open Water
1/10 Garden State
1/12 Corona Station
1/12 Ae Fond Kiss
1/13 The Adventurers
1/13 Midnight Cowboy
1/13 Watching Mrs. Pomerantz
1/13 In America
1/13 Little Terrorist
1/13 Goodbye Lenin
1/14 Cops
1/14 My Private Idaho
1/14 The Red Balloon
1/14 The Return
1/14 Walking Catfish Blues
1/14 Maria Full of Grace
1/15 Recycle
1/15 Winged Migration
1/15 And the Redman turned Green
1/15 Man on the Train
1/15 Close
1/15 Barbarian Invasions
1/16 Love Song for Bobby Long
1/17 The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
1/19 The Avengers
1/20 Crimes and Misdemeanors
1/21 The Woodsman
1/22 In Good Company
1/22 Touching the Void
1/23 Ashes and Diamonds
1/24 Dark Blue
1/25 Groundhog Day
1/26 Time of the Wolf
1/27 Before Sunrise
1/28 Before Sunset
1/29 Battle of Algiers
1/30 The Emporer's Club

The Woodsman

—Overview
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?� Walter and Vickie are in bed after making love. She wants to know Walter’s deep dark secret. So he asks her this question. It really doesn’t matter what she answers, Walter’s answer is worse. Walter has spent 12 years in jail for molesting little girls between the ages of 10 and 12.

Why would anyone want to watch a film about a pedophile? That is definitely a fair question. When I first saw the trailer for the film, I thought it looked interesting, but at a more visceral level I was disgusted that anyone would make such a movie. There are few things that so repulse us than those who victimize children, especially when they do so sexually. We don’t want to have to think about it. We certainly don’t want to come to the point of sympathizing with someone who would do such a heinous crime.

The Woodsman really doesn’t so much sympathize with Walter as it does give us a view of his ongoing struggle. Neither Walter nor the viewer is aware of what led him to these deeds. He wants to be normal, but knows that his desires are not normal, nor are they easy to control. Back in society, he is often in the presence of children. He lives across the street from an elementary school (the only landlord who’d rent to him). He sees them on the bus, in the mall, just about anyplace he goes.

His struggle is magnified by his isolation. He is sullen and solitary – full of self hatred that comes to a head late in the film. He has either cut himself off, or been cut off by those who have known him. Within his family, only his brother-in-law will have anything to do with him. No one at his job knows his secret, and when it is found out, he is ostracized and threatened. A police sergeant keeps coming by to keep tabs on him and to make sure Walter knows he’s unwanted and being watched.

The film is not an attempt to excuse or explain such behavior. It recognizes the grave nature of the subject. Walter is always seen as a flawed and damaged individual. But he is seeking to overcome his desires. In that he has a small sense of the heroic in his character. He continues to grow through the film. By the end of the film, there is enough hope for Walter that we can leave the theater without the despair of knowing that failure awaits him, but we are never really sure.

The film does not ask us to forgive Walter, but it does call us to question the extent to which we continue to punish people long after they have done wrong. To be sure, someone needs to keep an eye on Walter. But at the same time, the lack of support from nearly the whole community only adds to his feelings of alienation and need to experience some form of love. That is not to say that we bear responsibility for recidivism of molesters; that is their responsibility. But we often let our feelings rule such situations.

As hard as it may be for us to fathom, God is willing to forgive even those like Walter if they seek God’s forgiveness. One of the qualities of God’s grace is that it is available even when the world is unwilling to offer grace. Walter is deeply in need of such grace. Perhaps it is God’s grace that is allowing Walter to keep ahead in his struggle.

—Overview
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

My 2004 top ten films

Here are my picks for the year, with links to my reviews of appropriate.

1. The Sea Inside A beautiful look at life and death and love. Well done at every level.
2. (and a very close 2nd) Dogville It's love it or hate it, and I love it.
3. Sideways
4. Hotel Rwanda
5. Hero
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
7. Baadasssss!
8. The Incredibles
9. Control Room
10. Vera Drake

Films I wish I could include in my top 10 (alphabetically):
Coffee and Cigarettes
Collateral
Finding Neverland
Kinsey
Mean Creek
Million Dollar Baby
Monsieur Ibraham et les fluers de coran
Spring Summer Fall Winter ... and Spring

Films worth a note, even if not quite top 10 level:
The Aviator
The Motorcycle Diaries
Taegukgi

The Sea Inside

—Overview
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.� Thus Hamlet considered life and death and which he would choose.

Ramón Sampedro has already made his choice. He has chosen not to be, to die. But because he is a quadriplegic, he is unable, on his own, to bring that death about. For others to help him would be a crime. So in spite of his choice, he still lives 28 years after his crippling accident.

Alejandro Amenábar’s other well known films, Open Your Eyes (which was made into Vanilla Sky) and The Others also deal with the area in between life and death. In The Sea Inside he directly addresses the issue of assisted suicide (feel free to choose the term you prefer: assisted suicide, euthanasia, death with dignity, right to die).

Ramón fought a long court battle in Spain, even going to the European Court of Human Rights, seeking permission to kill himself or to allow others to assist him in the process. For him, the life of total dependence on others was unacceptable. He didn’t see any dignity in a life where he had to be fed, bathed, moved in his bed.

This is not to say that Ramón’s life was empty. He was cared for by a loving family, his brother José and sister-in-law Manuela and nephew. He was able to invent things that made his life more bearable. He was able to write, placing a stylus in his mouth, and create poetry that spoke of his life. But still, he was not ready to accept the limits that his life had assumed. For him, a life sentence in a body that would not work was cruel and humiliating.

In the film, we see Ramón 27 years after his accident. Two women come into his life. The first is Julia, an attorney who offers to take his case to the courts. She supports his right to die because she too has a debilitating disease that will eventually leave her incapacitated. She too would like to be able to die before her dignity is taken away.

The other woman is Rosa, a single mother struggling to get by, but seeing Ramón on TV goes to visit him, trying to give him reason to live. After a very rocky start, she and Ramón become close friends. She brings joy into his life, even though he still wants to die. Both women eventually fall in love, in their own ways, with Ramón, and he with them.

The film uses these two women to show us a broader picture of the issue of life and death. They represent the urge to live and the urge to die. Ramón understands and appreciates both, even though he has already made his choice.

For many this film will be anathema. Questions of euthanasia and assisted suicide run counter to the teaching of many churches. In the US, only Oregon allows physicians to give patients the means of ending their lives. But still, physicians often, in the final days of a dying patient’s life, will allow an increase in pain medication that becomes lethal, euphemistically referring to it as palliative care. The question of death with dignity is not a hypothetical question; it is one that people deal with every day.

The Sea Inside shapes this question as a very personal question. Ramón does not doubt that other quadriplegics find fulfilling lives in spite of their injuries. He wants only the right to act on his own situation.

Although the film clearly sides with his right to die, it also gives voice to the other side of the question. Sometimes this voice is more well done than others. The Catholic teaching is brought by a quadriplegic priest. He is determined to set Ramón right to convince him that he must live on, just as this priest has. His is the institutional argument. It comes across as somewhat wooden and uncaring, perpetuating the easy (and often wrong) assumption that the church is interested only in having its teaching accepted by all.

When the voice of choosing life is most powerful is when it too is speaking to the question at a personal level. Julia, Rosa, Manuela, and José all speak to the issue of life and death. Rosa and José are especially strong in their support of life. Rosa speaks from the positive position of the goodness of life, José from the negative position of the wrongness of killing another human, especially one you love. These are arguments that, like Ramón’s, are personal and from the heart.

And these voices make the point that life truly is special. Even Ramón would agree with that. Part of why he wants to die is that he does see life as precious, but he can no longer enjoy that life to its fullest. He has been reduced, at least in his mind, to an existence that only imitates life.

The question the film sets before us is who should be able to make such a choice. For many the question may seem inappropriate. They would maintain that all life is holy and must be maintained when possible. However, that approach condemns some to lives they consider intolerable. Should Ramón be allowed to have a say in how he lives (or not) his life? Should the courts or the church set limits on his rights? Should others be in danger of jail for helping Ramón do what he has chosen?

One of the things Ramón tells Rosa is that the one who loves him is the one who will help him die. Such an approach can come only from an understanding of the questions posed by this film as matters not so much of mind or law or doctrine, as of the heart.

Amenábar has crafted a film that may well get Academy Award consideration. There is no justice if it is not among the nominees for Foreign Language Film, and it may well get mainstream nominations as well. It will almost certainly be near the top of my top films of the year. Its power is not so much in the position it takes as it is in the question it poses and calls us to consider. Those who support the right to die will find a film that strongly and clearly champions their cause. Even those who would oppose such policies will find in the film ideas well worth their consideration, whether they adopt them or not.

—Overview
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

Hotel Rwanda

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

“Never again!� After the Holocaust, the Jewish survivors and witnesses of that great evil cried out that such a thing must never be allowed to happen again. Most of the world agreed and we cried out together, “Never again!� But, alas, the Nazis were not the first or last to try to wipe out an entire people. The Twentieth Century is filled with examples: Cambodia, Bosnia, Armenians, Rwanda. The Twenty-first Century is already witnessing genocide in the Sudan. And we always wonder, “How could this be happening again?�

Hotel Rwanda is a look at one of the heroic stories that took place in the midst of genocide. In 1994, there was a 100 day reign of terror in that small central African nation, during which up to 1,000,000 people were killed. The conflict was between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, distinctions that had been unimportant until the Belgians controlled the country as a colony following World War I.

Paul Rusesabagina was a manager at a 5-star hotel in the capital, Kigali. Through his efforts, over 1200 people were kept safe, and eventually escaped the mass murder going on all around them. As the film opens, he is doing what he does best – minor bribes, placating people of power, securing their good will in case of trouble. He was a friend to generals, journalists, people on both sides of the civil war taking place. He reminded me very much of the “dishonest manager� in one of Jesus’ parables (Luke 16:1-9).

Paul was Hutu, but married to a Tutsi. When the killing started, his wife, children and neighbors were all targeted for death by the paramilitary bands going through neighborhoods hacking Tutsis to death. He managed to fill his hotel van and get them all to the hotel, where the UN peacekeepers were keeping foreign nationals safe.

Things only got worse. Soon all the foreign nationals left. More and more Tutsis found their way to the hotel for safety, but it was a very fragile safety. Time and time again, Paul was called on to use his resourcefulness when Hutus bands came to kill the Tutsis at the hotel. Even when he had a chance to leave with his family, he stayed to care for all those who were left. He faced death many times in this process. Even though he was Hutu, he was considered a traitor for harboring and caring for the Tutsis.

The film makes his efforts seem all the more laudable in the face of the world’s response to what was happening in Rwanda. Journalists told the world what was happening. A small UN force was present (but as peacekeepers were not to take part in the battles). The western nations deplored what was happening, but beyond getting their citizens out of the country, would do nothing to stop the bloodshed. Nations would not even clearly call this genocide, because to admit it was genocide would mean they must act.

In the film, the Canadian colonel of the UN force explains to Paul (with great disgust) that the rest of the world will do nothing; to the rest of the world Rwanda is nothing. “You aren’t even niggers, you’re Africans.� American and European viewers will know that they are being indicted and shamed by these charges.

Writer-director Terry George has provided an excellent vehicle for the world to see and to think about the way genocide continues to take place in the world in spite of our cries of “Never again!� I suspect that his life in Northern Ireland has influenced his view of such violence. Year after year, we continue to see variations of the theme of genocide being played out. There is surely much to consider once we come out of the theater after seeing Hotel Rwanda.

One of my reflections after seeing movie (in January 2005) was to compare it to the tragedy of the earthquake and tsunamis in Indonesia and South Asia. Well over 100,000 killed. Villages destroyed. People left homeless. The world is indeed responding with help, as we should. But that is a natural disaster which no one could have stopped. Consider that several times more people perished in horrific violence in this small country, and it could have been stopped. I am overjoyed that the world is reaching out to the suffering in South Asia. I wonder why we were so less concerned with even greater suffering that could have been prevented.

The film chose to center on Paul’s story. As such, we get almost no explanation of the political conflict going on. Nor is there an exploration of the geopolitical issues that led to the lack of anyone acting to stop this atrocity. That does leave a small hole in the film, in that the viewer may not understand why this is going on at all. This is a real, but minor problem with the film.

Another possible flaw is the way this film hits our emotions so strongly. My wife and I discussed afterwards if it were a bit over the top emotionally, or if it were appropriate to be so strong emotionally. Does the subject matter require it to hit you hard? Is it even possible for a film on this subject to be “too much� in its emotional manipulation? Perhaps we need that emotional kick to make us act so genocide will not happen again.

But the film has a more important message than the call to end genocide. That is the call to live for others.

Paul did not set out to save hundreds of people, only his family. But more and more, he saw that this was his task. Men and women, children including orphans, Hutus and Tutsis all owed their lives to this man.

He also reminded me of another character in one of Jesus’ parables, the one we call the Good Samaritan. That parable also is filled with ethnic tension. But Jesus used that parable to define “neighbor� not as one who is like us, but as one who shows mercy.

In a BBC radio essay, the real Paul Rusesabagina is quoted, “Being human is a mission of each and everyone. What I have done is what all the people are supposed to have done so there's no special lesson.�

Perhaps what he says is true; he only did what we all are supposed to do. But it is clear that in those months of 1994, there were very few people around the world, including people of power, who could have acted to stop or at least minimize this massacre, who did not do what they were supposed to do.

When the next genocide begins, will the world have learned anything from the heroic story of Paul Rusesabagina?

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

The Aviator

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

Martin Scorsese has a gift for making the characters in his films very real. They may or may not be good people deep inside, but we do get that chance to see deep into their souls. Among the best examples of this are Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and all the gangsters that populate films like Means Streets, Goodfellas, or Casino. In The Aviator he shows us the self-contained contradiction that was central to Howard Hughes.

Many people only remember Hughes as the wealthy recluse rumored to have foot-long fingernails, said to be living in penthouses in Las Vegas, the Bahamas, London, Mexico. He is remembered for his eccentricity more than for any of his accomplishments.

Hughes was a business wunderkind of the mid-Twentieth Century. He dropped out of college to become CEO of Hughes Tool, which his father had built. He was, on the one hand, a capable, successful businessman. On the other hand, he took huge risks, even mortgaging all his assets for a pet project. He was a filmmaker, an aircraft designer, a record setting airplane pilot. He eventually owned Hughes Aircraft, RKO studios, and TWA. He escorted some of the most renowned actresses of his time, including Katherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. He was, by nearly every way of judging, a success. But even with all the success (often succeeding in spite of himself), he lived a life dominated by fear.

The juxtaposition of the drive to succeed and the deep fear that controlled his life is the heart of The Aviator.

The Aviator focuses on Hughes life from the 1920s to the 1950s. It begins while he is making the most expensive (at the time) movie ever made, Hell’s Angels, for which he had assembled the largest private air force in the world. He was compulsive about every aspect of the film. Expense was no concern to Hughes, although his stockholders in Hughes Tool were concerned.

That sense of compulsion underlies the contradiction that is so evident in this portrait of Hughes. As time passes in the film, we note the growing sense of compulsion, not just in his perfectionism in films and aircraft, but also in his private life. We see the development and advancement of his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. To all the world, Hughes was in control of everything around him. But we see that on a more personal level, he was totally out of control.

Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his best performances in recent years. It is not just in the way he has captured Hughes’s look, but the way he is at once both full of bravura and highly vulnerable.

Scorsese has made the film both a personal story and a sweeping epic (a combination that he fell just short of in Gangs of New York.) It may not be his best film, but it is certainly one of the better works of one of the grand masters of filmmaking.

Hughes was able to soar to great heights (literally and figuratively). The physics that allow for flight are counterbalancing forces: thrust and drag, lift and gravity. The Aviator shows how counterbalancing forces were present in Hughes life (as they are in all lives.) Scorsese chose to limit the film to the time period when those forces were still somewhat in sync. Eventually the forces that drug him down overwhelmed his life, but The Aviator leaves us with the sense that the forces that drive us on can overcome great forces against us.

In our own lives we know that there are forces that are capable of destroying us. It is through availing ourselves of the counter forces which God provides, we too may be able to soar.

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