Tag Archives: film

April 2, 2012 · 11:00 am

A Little Sugar in My Bowl

This being Holy Week, as usual I am going to take the time over the next few days on this blog to share some reflections on this most sacred time of the year for Christians. However, I hope that my non-Christian readers will not wander off, to wait until after Easter for me to ruminate on more secular subjects. I believe that even non-Christian readers may find this week’s posts to be worth a read, because I intend to look at some cultural matters related to the events Christians are recalling this week, which I think may prove of interest to all.

The text I will be using as a touchstone for this week’s writing is the retelling of Jesus’ Passion and Death in St. Mark’s Gospel, which we heard at mass yesterday.  You can read St. Mark’s entire account on the USCCB website by following this link.  Today, I would like us to focus on a small detail from the early part of this passage, in which Jesus is anointed with oil by a woman who is traditionally identified as being St. Mary Magdalen.

Before we begin, let us all agree to take The Magdalen as herself, and not some twisted fantasy of diseased minds.  She was a disciple of Jesus – not a mistress, a wife, a female priest, a freemason, a space alien, or anything else you may have heard from those who, like Dan Brown, hate the Catholic Church in particular or Christianity in general, or who are simply ignorant and prone to accept the ridiculous as truth. If you are looking for anti-Catholic, heretical conspiracy theories with your morning coffee, then I suggest you look elsewhere.

Now, turning back to the matter at hand, St. Mark tells us that Jesus and His Disciples were in the town of Bethany, outside of Jerusalem, and He had been invited to dinner at the home of a friend:

When He was in Bethany reclining at table
in the house of Simon the leper,
a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil,
costly genuine spikenard.
She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on His head.

Rather than focus on the spiritual significance of this event as understood by Jesus, which becomes clear if you read the rest of the passage, I want to focus our attention on the jar, if the reader will indulge me. The connections that we make between everyday objects and more complex concepts when we are children, often have an impact on the perceptions we have and the choices we make as adults. In this case, The Magdalen’s jar of perfumed oil is something that I am reminded of almost every day, because of just such a connection I made when I was little.

When I was growing up – and indeed still now – my parents kept the household sugar in two places. A bulky, large sugar bag was kept in a canister in a high cabinet in the kitchen, along with the flour, salt, and so on. From this large container, a much smaller, lidded, sterling silver sugar bowl was filled for everyday use, and kept on a lower cabinet to reach easily. So for example, when I go home for Easter this coming weekend, I will get the sugar for my morning coffee out of this silver sugar bowl; if it is empty, I will have to fill it from the large canister in one of the high cabinets.

This particular sugar bowl has a very pleasing shape, looking very 18th century, yet it was also somehow vaguely exotic in my mind. As I grew older and I began to look more closely at the objects one could see depicted in paintings and sculpture, I noticed that St. Mary Magdalen was often shown with a jar that looked not unlike a taller version of our sugar bowl. Indeed, in the back of the church connected to my primary school, there was a life-sized, very Victorian-looking Crucifixion sculpture group, with Christ on the Cross flanked by the Virgin Mary and St. John, and with The Magdalen sitting at the foot of the Cross with her alabaster jar. When I was very small, I always wanted to go over and take off the cover of the jar, and see whether I might find some tasty sugar inside.

When I moved into my present house some years ago, I had to purchase a number of household items, including a coffee service. I did not really think about it until I got home, but of all of the different sugar bowl options available, I chose one that most closely resembled the one that my parents have. The ones with more squat lids, or with side handles, or with simpler lines simply did not appeal to me. My brain had made the connection between the sugar bowl it had known growing up, and the symbolic connection of that sugar bowl to the Passion and Death of Jesus, through the gift of St. Mary Magdalen, and so of course I wanted to have that iconographic reminder in my own home.

The point here is something which I think is worth all of our noting. Whether it is a sugar bowl that reminds me of The Magdalen, and thereby of Holy Week and the central matters of the Christian Faith, or a bald eagle that reminds me of the United States when I see it in a documentary film or carved onto the side of a building, human beings have a unique ability to express and to comprehend complex concepts by distilling them into simple objects. Even if I myself am not creating these objects, by “reading” them I am giving them meaning beyond the obvious. Finding sugar in the sugar bowl may be a pleasant discovery, but remembering Christ when I pick up that sugar bowl affords me an opportunity which is even sweeter.

The importance of our understanding and passing on the meaning of symbols in this way cannot be overestimated. Forming these connections may get a child to think about, understand, and retain mature concepts, and then be able to recall them as an adult. This is why our creative output in things such as art and architecture, literature, film, and music, are vital elements of culture, which we ought not to ignore. When they can be seen as something more than just intrinsically pleasant, they serve as powerful tools for reminding us of who and what we are.


“The Magdalen” by Bernardino Luini (c. 1525)
National Gallery of Art, Washington

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March 19, 2012 · 11:38 am

Review: New Territory

It is not often that I engage in a bit of nepotism on this blog, so I hope that the reader will indulge me in allowing me to say how much I enjoyed watching my youngest brother’s new short firm, “New Territory” this weekend. It was shown on the big screen at the historic Allen Theatre near my home town, and has been submitted for consideration to a number of film festivals around the country. If you have the opportunity to see it, I believe you will find as I did that its combination of nostalgic introspection and stark realism is compelling, beautiful to look at, and thought-provoking.

My brother’s film was based on a short story by our father, and features costume design by our sister, and thus is a real family affair. Shot in the pastoral Southern Pennsylvania countryside where we grew up, the film captures the experiences of three young children playing in the fields and woods of this bucolic part of the world. As part of their play, a violent event occurs which I will not describe in this review, but which has a dramatic impact on all three of the characters. The viewer comes away realizing that this is a watershed moment, in the type of coming-of-age experience which marks the beginning of the transition from childhood to adulthood, which will have an impact on each of them as individuals, and also in their relationships with one another.

It is always a bit difficult to look at the work of someone you love with a critical eye, for you cannot help but have a deeper understanding of and sympathy for what that person is trying to do. That being said, in all of his films my brother has exhibited a very palpable sense of both place and light that makes viewing his work an engrossing experience. For example, in one scene in “New Territory” he captures pools of light breaking through an overhead canopy of branches and creating illuminated patches on a forest floor, juxtaposing this with the flow of water over pebbles in a stream, which reflect and shine in much the same way. His attention to detail and craftsmanship succeeds in making the viewer feel the heat of the sun out in the pasture, or the coolness of dirt being dug under the trees.

As he mentioned before the movie was screened, my brother broke several of the cardinal rules of cinema in making this film. He worked with child actors for a start, who had a bit of acting experience in commercials or local theatre, and yet were still somewhat raw, unaffected performers; he also, as it happens, worked with animals. The use of the just-starting-out actors in particular, none of whom give off that cloyingly saccharine ”show kids” vibe one gets on programs like “Toddlers and Tiaras” or “American Idol”, brings an authenticity to the film which more experienced actors would have been unable to evoke. It adds to the realism of the piece, even as the camera lingers over details of the landscape in a dreamy way.

Moreover because the speaking roles in the film are of the somewhat taciturn variety, the camera does much of the work in telling the story, as it captures the expressions on the faces of the children as events unfold. We are thereby allowed to read what our own thoughts would be, if we were placed in the same set of circumstances as they are. We may find ourselves identifying with each of the three characters in turn, as we remember moments when we behaved or reacted in the same way as they do.

Suffice to say, I am very proud of my brother’s achievement in this piece, and I will be sure to inform my followers if it will be showing at a location near you in the coming weeks and months.

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November 7, 2011 · 2:17 pm

Film Review: “Page Eight” (2011)

I had been looking forward to seeing “Page Eight”, the BBC film which garnered some good reviews earlier this summer in the British press when it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and which aired last night on PBS’ “Masterpiece Contemporary”. With a cast of accomplished actors that includes Bill Nighy, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon, and Judy Davis, and a plot that promised to pit the different branches of British intelligence against each other, the package sounded too good to resist. Unfortunately, after unwrapping all of said package’s eye-catching trappings, one is left with something so utterly muted and boring, that one wonders how one is perceived in the eyes of the giver.

The somewhat complicated plot involves a memo in which we Yanks have been doing some rather bad things, and Downing Street is seeking to cover this up as it moves toward replacing MI-5 and MI-6 with something more akin to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The film then revolves around who is doing this, and why, and efforts to either release or stifle this information. Normally this would be a recipe for something at least marginally interesting. Unfortunately, from the get-go the film never really “goes”.

As is inevitably the case in these sorts of films, there is a great deal more talking than action, which is not necessarily a bad thing when it is handled well. The “House of Cards” series, for example, involved complicated political intrigue and lots of conversation, and never dragged in the way that “Page Eight” does. The languid pacing of people standing around, speaking sotto voce about how tired they are simply makes the viewer – or at least this one, at 9pm on a Sunday – rather tired himself.

When you have a cast of the quality of that assembled for a project like this, who are capable of some extraordinary feats of acting, creating this kind of group, it is hoped, will lead to fireworks on screen. Yet most of the actors here seem to be searching about for some sort of direction as to who exactly they are supposed to be. Michael Gambon is killed off fairly early on, regrettably, while Ralph Fiennes does what he usually does post-”Schindler’s List” which is to stand about trying to seem menacing – while looking more like he is about 5 foot 8 instead of his actual 6 feet tall.

Bill Nighy was more interesting as a vampire in “Underworld” than in this film, which he has to carry as the lead. The normally-adept Judy Davis can’t seem to decide which sort of British accent she wants to emulate from scene to scene, and sometimes from line to line. There is however, a beautifully shot sequence between the two of them which begins with Davis striding down a dark, London street in a scarlet coat, to meet Nighy in a restaurant for an incredibly tense conversation. Unfortunately there is not enough of that to keep either the actors or the viewers particularly interested in what happens next.

And then there is the dialogue, which is a mixed bag at best. Sometimes, the back-and-forth about politics and espionage starts to approach the level of crackle that you would hope for in a production of this quality, but just when you think they are about to pull something interesting into the film, it seems to fall back into soap opera writing.I quite literally winced at one point, when Rachel Weisz’ character turns to Bill Nighy’s and says, “I thought I’d never learn to feel again.” I had to double-check the clicker and make sure I was not watching an episode of “EastEnders”.

One of the more unappealing aspects of the plot was the film’s use of America as a kind of moral bogeyman.. On this side of the pond of course, particularly when filming a costume drama, we are not loathe to make the British the “bad guys”, as it were, thanks to that little unpleasantness after 1776. Yet generally speaking we do not make the British our enemies in our contemporary espionage films, but rather our allies – or at the very least our colleagues.

The fact that “Page Eight” paints Americans as being immoral, or at best amoral, and their influence as a corrupting one on the British government, is nothing new, for it has cropped up in a number of British films which I have seen in recent years. Indeed, even on my beloved television series “MI-5″, as the BBC’s “Spooks” is known in America, “The Cousins”, as the Americans are referred to, are more often treated as a potential threat rather than a helpful partner. Perhaps this is because Britain’s influence in the world is not what it was, and so certain British filmmakers feel that this is the only way they have to combat what they perceive as being America’s bad influence on their own country. And perhaps because this was a film made for a British audience, rather than an American one, it would hardly be right for me, as a non-Brit, to complain about this plot device: but there it is, all the same.

The tricky part of doing an ensemble cast of highly-skilled actors in any film, it seems to me, is to make sure that they all balance each other out so that everyone gets to shine, rather than one or two eclipsing the others, or everyone going at it in a free-for-all trying to out-do one another. Unfortunately in this film, whether because of the sluggish plotline or the sometimes chuckle-worthy dialogue, this brilliant group of players seems wasted, lost in a kind of gray funk on screen from which they can never emerge. And while there may be the occasional flicker of interest or intrigue, by the end one simply does not care what happens to any of these people, which is why the piece fails.


Rachel Weisz and Bill Nighy in “Page Eight”

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September 6, 2011 · 1:54 pm

The Courtier Reviews: “The Debt”

The British film “The Debt”, which opened here in the U.S. this weekend, is a remake of an Israeli film from a few years ago of the same name.  It deals with a great many themes, too many to address in a single blog post.  However if you are prepared, gentle reader, to challenge yourself and go see this film, you will not only find it entertaining – with plenty of Hitchcockian touches and John Le Carré thrills, punctuated by some superb acting – but you will also find it challenging, raising a number of issues for the thinking man to consider.  And one of the most fundamental of them, for this reviewer, was its frank look at the question of evil.

The film is a tale told in flashback, but not in a strictly linear fashion, meaning the viewer must actually pay attention to what is going on.  I have seen several reviewers complain about this fact but personally, I found it engaged, as Poirot would say, the little gray cells.  That the filmmaker expects his audience to use their brains seems rather refreshing in an entertainment era when the stimulation of one’s brain – let alone the assumption that the viewer has one – seems to have been abandoned in favor of using the cheap and obvious to stimulate other bodily regions.

The film begins with a book launch event, in which the daughter of Helen Mirren’s character Rachel tells a story that has had a profound impact on the main characters of the film. Stefan, David, and Rachel, three agents of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence agency, are sent to East Berlin in the 1960′s to capture Dr. Vogel, a man who is working as a gynecologist but who had previously performed human experimentation in a Nazi concentration camp.  What happens to him, and to each of them, is woven into a story that at times is very much like one of the “Bourne” series, and at times reminiscent of films such as “Munich” and “Death and the Maiden”.

At the core of “The Debt” is a sequence in which the young Israeli agents hold their man prisoner, feeding him and keeping him clean against his will, until he can be sent to Israel for trial.  The way in which each of the three reacts to the old Nazi is telling about their character.  Stefan, being older than the rest and the leader of the group, never lets the prisoner speak to him.  He has seen his like before, and says he views the doctor as an animal; he mocks and shows his contempt for Dr. Vogel and his ideology by playing and singing a kind of slag-rendition of “Deutschland, Deutschland” on the piano.

The exchanges between Dr. Vogel and Rachel, and Dr. Vogel and David, are very different from his interactions with Stefan, in part because they allow him to speak, but also because neither of them treats him as Stefan does.  And here we move into somewhat different cinematic territory from either a spy film or Holocaust film, for as I watched these sequences my mind kept going back to two reference points: “The Exorcist” and “The Third Man”.  Of course, director John Madden is not deliberately evoking either of these movies, but if the reader will indulge me, I believe he will see why I made these connections.

If you have not seen “The Exorcist” in some time, or dismiss it as mere Halloween fare, you are missing the point. Spinning heads and pea-soup vomit aside, what is truly terrifying about the film is not what takes place physically, but psychologically, in the tony Georgetown home of Regan, the possessed young girl.  The Devil *knows* things about those who are holding him prisoner, and uses his uncanny, infernal mixture of knowledge and twisted reason to try to affect the hearts and minds of his jailers.  By causing them grief or doubt, he hopes he can take advantage of their indecision.

Similarly, the famous “cuckoo clock” speech in “The Third Man”, when Orson Welles and Jospeh Cotten are on the ferris wheel, employs a kind of logic of justification for acts of evil.  Harry Lime (Welles), realizing that his old friend is no longer entirely loyal to him after having seen the evil that Harry has done, points out that during decades of strife under the Borgias and others, Italy gave rise to Michelangelo, Da Vinci, the Renaissance, and all that flowed from it, whereas under centuries of peace and harmony, the Swiss only managed to produce the cuckoo clock.  It is an over-simplification, obviously, but it raises an issue that Harry – in loco diaboli – wants his listener to consider, in an attempt to save and justify himself: is “evil” really such a bad thing?

So it is that in “The Debt”, Dr. Vogel preys on Rachel’s emotions, and on David’s doubts.   Like Father Damian Karras in “The Exorcist”, Rachel is subjected to mental torture about the fate of her mother, which causes her to lash out at the demonic doctor.  She has, in several superbly restrained scenes, literally put herself in Dr. Vogel’s hands, but even though now the tables are turned and he is in her power, he manipulates his knowledge of her in deliberately painful ways.  He wounds her even though he is physically restrained, just as was the case with Linda Blair’s character of the possessed child, Regan.

Far worse in scope is Dr. Vogel’s challenge to David, about how easy it was for the Nazis to succeed in exterminating the Jews, and whether the Jews ought not to look at their own role in how the Holocaust took place.  Earlier in the film we learnt that David lost every single member of his family in the Holocaust, and cannot open up to others about his sense of guilt as to why that happened, and why he survived and they did not. Like Harry Lime’s cuckoo clock speech, Dr. Vogel’s words to David form an infernal over-simplification of a complicated subject, and yet the words have a profound impact on David.  My Jewish readers in particular may find this exchange difficult to watch, and even as a Catholic European-American it made me squirm, mentally.  I do not know whether this bit of the script was taken from the original, Israeli version of the film, having not seen it, but it is a profoundly disturbing bit of evil to put on film.

It is of course usually the case that evil does not gain control over man through physical attack, but rather through the subtleties of the mind.  From Adam and Eve being tempted by the Serpent into committing sin, to the rotting away of human decency through our educational, cultural, and political institutions coming to embrace and celebrate selfishness over self-sacrifice, Satan does not have to actually show up, horns and all, to throw us into chaos: all he needs is to put an idea into someone’s mind, and then twist it.  As Shakespeare writes in “The Merchant of Venice”, Act I Scene iii,  ”The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

There are many good reasons to see “The Debt” – terrific suspense moments; interesting young actors whom I was not familiar with; the always-superb Helen Mirren, whose performances are much beloved of thinking men and women in this country; and so on.  It is not a perfect film, though I did not find its flaws to detract from the impact of the work. For this reviewer, the best recommendation I can make is to say it is a superb cautionary tale, showing how easy it is to allow evil to walk in and start affecting your thinking – and subsequent behavior – if you are not careful.


Helen Mirren as Rachel Singer in “The Debt”

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August 23, 2011 · 2:03 pm

Senility at the Cinema

Those who know me personally are very much aware of the fact that I rarely go to the movies, and it is extremely difficult to persuade me to see a film I have either not read about or have no interest in seeing.  This is not to say that I do not enjoy watching films – quite the contrary – but rather there is so much garbage foisted upon our screens, and so little in the way of accomplished art, that I prefer to wait until a film gathers a significant amount of well-written reviews, and then rent it so that I can enjoy and study it in the privacy of my own home.  And with my interest and extended family in Spain, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that I prefer films from that country.

Unfortunately, many of the Spanish films that have made it to these shores over the past few decades have been rubbish.  With a few notable exceptions, they mainly feature celebrations of moral relativism and depravity, or weave revisionist tales of the Spanish Civil War, where everyone on the left is some sort of martyr and everyone on the right – and particularly the Church – is evil incarnate.  Of course, how an atheist/relativist can make a logical determination as to what is good and what is evil is another question entirely, but we will leave that incongruity as it stands.

So I was rather surprised today to learn from an interview with the elderly, leftist Spanish film director Vicente Aranda that the reason contemporary Spanish cinema is so repulsively bad is because of Spanish conservatives. Yes, you read that correctly.  Despite the fact that virtually every major film coming out of Spain since the 1970′s has featured themes such as explicit sex and violence, mocking of the Church and traditional values, and the like, Aranda believes that  “the Spanish right refuses to see Spanish cinema”, that there are no Spanish intellectuals on the right, and therefore “the most important historical issue in the country, the Civil War, cannot be touched because the right thinks that a film about this issue is always leftist.”

Before we turn to these assertions, let us start with a bit of background on Aranda himself, who is what old-school conservative Catalans would call a “xarnego”. Despite living in Barcelona for most of his life, Aranda himself is not a Catalan, but a non-Catalan peasant from another part of Spain.  As you might expect, his family supported the left during the Spanish Civil War, and he briefly emigrated to Venezuela for several years due to the climate under the Franco regime that followed.

Aranda’s first film was, tellingly, about a young man from small-town Spain, who moves to Barcelona to try to enter the urban haute-bourgeoisie.  He ultimately fails, and moves to Paris, where supposedly he will be happier than with the stuck-up well-to-do in Barcelona. As my grandfather would say, “¿No quieres? No puedes.”

Although Aranda had a late start as a film director, he soon found his niche in the 1970′s as a purveyor of smut for the leftist intelligentsia, including “Clara es el Precio”, about a middle-class housewife who becomes a porn actress, “Cambio de Sexo”, about a boy who wants to have a sex change, and “La Muchacha de las Bragas de Oro”, about a right-wing writer who is seduced by his niece into committing incest.  He continued to gain in notoriety through the 1980′s and 90′s, but his more recent films, including 2007′s “Canciones de Amor en Lolita’s Club”, about twins having trysts with the same prostitute, and 2009′s “Luna Caliente”, about a man who rapes the daughter of his friend in the period of the late Franco regime, have been flops at the box office.

Aranda’s assertion that there are no intellectuals on the right in Spain is hardly worth consideration, for I doubt he could tell an intellectual from a dilettante if one bit him on the posterior.  What is truly laughable is his assertion that it is impossible to make films about the Spanish Civil War, because Spanish conservatives will not go see them.  No doubt they will not, but that is only because there is a complete lack of balance to treatment of the subject in contemporary Spanish cinema.

I am not sure what sort of cave Aranda lives in, but there have been many, many Spanish films about the Spanish Civil War made by Spanish directors in the post-Franco period, which I personally have seen over the past 20 years or so. And in every single example I have seen to date, the film in question has a leftist point of view, from “¡Ay Carmela!” and “Libertarias”, to “Las 13 Rosas” and “Los Girasoles Ciegos”. There is, in fact, a surfeit of films about what happened to Spain before, during, and after the Civil War, and all of them favor, either explicitly or implicitly, the left’s side of the story. Aranda’s assertion that it is impossible to make films about this period is ludicrous, and not borne out by the facts.

While Aranda is no doubt correct in stating that your average, conservative, church-going Spaniard does not want to see films such as the ones he himself tends to make, this is probably because such a person does not want to have to wash out their brain with bleach and a scrub brush after seeing the filth which Aranda typically puts on the screen. However, the fact that Aranda himself is increasingly proving to be a failure as a director cannot be laid at the feet of conservatives who do not want to see his films. If the new, moral relativist Spain, which Aranda and those of his ilk helped to bring about does not want to patronize his work, perhaps it is because, like most men of his age, Aranda has lost his powers.

Unlike many conservatives, I do not necessarily eschew seeing a film that has a point of view very different from my own. However, I do feel that I am perhaps a bit more intellectually prepared for what I am to be shown, even if I am still shocked by the depravity that often passes for art in the present climate. Yet what I absolutely cannot stand is the assertion that if such art is not attracting an audience, that the problem is the audience, rather than the artist himself. It seems to me that if Aranda is dissatisfied with the state of Spanish cinema, that he has only himself to blame for turning it into the unwatchable, sideshow freak of an art form that it is today – and perhaps it is high time for him to pack up and head off to the retirement home, where he belongs.


Interior of the historic Cinema Coliseum in Barcelona

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