Category Archives: A Strange Review

Great jumping dust bunnies! The way critics have fawned over this film, you’d think it had been a collaboration between Charlie Chaplin and F.W. Murnau only recently discovered in a vault somewhere, lovingly restored by Martin Scorsese and paired with an animated short courtesy of Pixar.

What a mildly amusing trifle—emphasis on mildly and trifle. A black-and-white* silent film that is an homage to silent films, with a retro aspect ratio to boot. Got it. A silent movie star (Jean Dujardin) in 1929 Hollywoodland finds his career in tatters with the advent of sound. A young former costar (Berenice Bejo) with whom he had enjoyed a serious flirtation goes with the technological flow and becomes a bigger-than-life screen goddess with her first talkie. Think seriously dumbed-down versions of A Star Is Born meets Singin’ in the Rain meets Sunset Boulevard meets about a half hour too long. (Seriously: This film would have been much more impressive if it had taken half the time to tell the same story.)

Never before have I seen a film so desperately in need of some comic relief—even though most of this melodrama is intended to be comical. How this overlong exercise in nostalgia could have used a Harpo Marx skitting across the frame, stealing a scene or two. There’s a giggle here and there, mostly because of a preternaturally charismatic doggie, but otherwise there’s neither wit nor originality to either the story or its illustration. Director Michel Hazanavicius composes his shots with all the visual elan of a series of court sketches. Yes, there’s the odd canted angle and playing with camera height in a couple of scenes, but otherwise his compositions make Jim Jarmusch look like Sergei Eisenstein.

The only saving graces are the performances by its two stars. Dujardin brings a Latin panache to his disaffected leading man, a second-rate Valentino kicking against the goads, who fears sound like some fear death (for a reason that becomes all too obvious in the film’s one genuinely charming moment, really a punchline). Bejo is a delight — light on her feet, with a winsome smile and airy appeal. Imagine a magical mix of Lena Horne, Irene Cara, Myrna Loy, and Thandie Newton. And yes, there’s Uggi, the almost-human pup. Normally, I resist cute pets in films like Hal 2000 resisted opening the pod-bay doors. But the dog comes close to achieving the kind of comic scene-stealing this film craved.

If the Academy is in a sentimental mood regarding Old Cinema, please please let them reward Hugo. As for you, my dear readers, if you want a taste of real silent genius, yes, there’s Eisenstein. And Sherlock Jr. And King Vidor’s The Crowd. If you want a really entertaining modern take on the silent film with a Latin twist, try Ettore Scola’s Le Bal. And there’s always Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, with its manic energy and emphatic “No!” uttered by none other than Marcel Marceau.

As for The Artist, I wouldn’t go so far as to say, “Just say no.” It’s not a bad film by any means. At it’s best, it’s a one-off oddity, a distraction from the MI:4s. At it’s worst, it’s look-at-your-watch time. I certainly can’t imagine sitting through it again. I’m rather surprised I sat through it once.

*Actually, this is a study in gray. It’s impossible to reproduce the same texture of black-and-white films of, say, the noir era. Film stock and processing are simply not the same.

If we can stop [Moriarty], we shall prevent the collapse of Western civilization… No pressure.

War, war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing — unless you’re in the arms business, of course. Or an anarchist hoping to sit back and watch the Old World Order bleed. Both Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and MI:4—Ghost Protocol revolve around plots to set the world on fire by turning would-be allies into adversaries. Wackiness, of course, ensues.

This time out our old friend Sherlock (Robert Downey Jr.), a master of disguise and the martial arts, is out to discover who’s really behind the recent terror attacks in London town. Anarchists! it is said. Yes — but we know who the true mastermind is, who it always is, the blasted Moriarty. With the help of his recently married partner, the good doctor Watson (Jude Law) and a gypsy companion (played by the original Dragon Tattoo‘s Noomi Rapace) whose brother has become a pawn in Moriarty’s sinister game, not to mention his older brother Mycroft (the indefatigable Stephen Fry), Sherlock must get to the evil doctor, the father of the military-industrial complex, it seems, before a highly anticipated international peace conference in Switzerland becomes the a tinderbox that ignites world war.

The first half of Sherlock Holmes II is a rather raucous mishmash, and no one will ever confuse this screenplay with a carefully crafted film narrative. But the film’s second hour makes for some rather brilliant entertainment. Guy Ritchie has evolved into a quite deft and imaginative action director, and the set design is spectacularly involving and beautiful in its own right. 1891 London and a Europe that in a generation will be scarred forever by the trench warfare of WWI has never looked so rich and inviting … and menacing and daunting.

This is a film that in the hands of any other moviemakers could have taken itself and its antiwar message way too seriously, to the point of ponderous speechifying. But Guy Ritchie and his band of merry men are way too busy having fun to let a little thing like the fate of the West weigh them down. Downey is all wrong for the part of Sherlock Holmes, always was, and yet once again he charms and chatters his way through the kinds of beatings and bloodlettings that only a two-dimensional projected image could endure. His preternatural ability to anticipate how some very painful encounters will play themselves out, a kind of sixth sense that’s supposed to explain in some way his powers of deduction (but don’t really), is, again, an extremely effective update to the iconic character. Which is to say, he’s a blast.

There’s a very British cross-dressing bromance that may more than hint at the prescient detective’s more than platonic affection for a befuddled and infuriated Watson, whose new bride Holmes has defenstrated from a moving train. But with Downey’s marred makeup making him resemble Heath Ledger’s Joker, I wouldn’t take it, or anything else about this raucous romp, too seriously.

Except, of course, the boom-boom, bang-bang stuff, because that, as we know, would prove only too too real.

As for MI:4—Ghost Protocol, the plot reads like something that was kicking around for a Bond flick in the 1980s: a group of recycled Eurotrash needs “the codes” to launch a nuclear strike that will pit Russia against the U.S. and set the whole world on fire. Shades of SPECTRE!

The flick starts off promisingly enough, with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) virtually dancing his way through an IMF-engineered prison break, Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” playing in the background. (Almost anything can be made better with Dino playing on the soundtrack, I have learned.)

Once freed, Hunt pulls together his crew of uber-spies to hunt down the aforementioned bad guys, led by a mega-genius named Hendricks (played by Dragon Tattoo‘s original good-guy journalist Michael Nyqvist), excommunicated from the scientific fraternity for also being a maniac without written permission from the King of Denmark or something. Things go badly when the Kremlin is blown up. Things go very very badly when the IMF is blamed and the White House calls for a ghost protocol — a disavowal not just of an IMF mission or a particular agent but of the entire agency.

As the Russians think some rogue Americans are blowing up the joint, setting the entire geopolitical chessboard on “check,” Hunt & Co. must not only prove their innocence but also stop the disappointingly one-dimensional and extremely dull archfiend Hendricks from initiating a nuclear holocaust.

Again, no pressure.

The much ballyhooed scaling of the world’s tallest building in Dubai proved rather predictable and flat, and less interesting visually than Ethan’s mountain mounting in director John Woo’s MI:2. Throw in a ludicrous car chase through a — wait for it — sandstorm, in which the relative positions of the cars is determined by a — wait for it again — Droid GPS, and you have an example of way overthinking an action sequence in the pursuit of being “original.”

But again, as with Holmes, it’s the second half of the film that saves this picture, when the race to the nuclear button kicks into hyperdrive, and a clever turn on the original MI‘s dangling Ethan sequence is re-enacted — without the wires. Director Brad Bird (Iron Giant, The Incredibles) no doubt has a hit on his hands, and so has now entered the ranks of go-to action helmsmen, his ability to render wide vistas balanced nicely with little touches like sly asides and giveaway gestures, necessary to make vaguely credible some of the plot twists.

Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is a nice addition to the IMF crew and a fit counterpart to Cruise’s Hunt, as is Paula Patton, another kick-ass gal who’s having trouble keeping the murder of her lover, another agent, from affecting her judgment. Simon Pegg is the A-lister’s sidekick of choice, a rich man’s Rob Schneider. The “doubling” gimmick — when IMF agents don masks that enable them to assume the identities of their nemeses — is finally dropped in this iteration, thank goodness. The doubling redoubled sequences in that Woo MI:2 multiplied ridiculously until you couldn’t help but feel you could show up onscreen at any moment.

As with Holmes, I wish the script had been run through the laptop one more draft: a little less running around, a little more attention to narrative cohesiveness and character development, and this would have been a better picture. As is, it’s just enough of a joy ride, with an unexpected and touching kicker, to make it worth taking the trip.

CODA: Both these films suffer from the industry’s overreliance on computers. Yeah, yeah, they’re supposed to awesome and mind-blowing  and eye-popping. But with the aid of CGI, anything can be slapped up on the screen. And when anything can happen, nothing really happens, which is to say, the characters become just another special effect and may as well be duking it out on Pluto or in John Malkovich’s head. And great characters — whether Sherlock Holmes or Connery’s Bond — begin to fade into memory with every stroke of the keyboard. (Ethan Hunt never reached iconic status, I don’t think.)

With that said, I still look forward to a Sherlock Holmes III, assuming everyone involved can keep up the energy and joi de vivre, and hopefully with Stephen Fry on board once again (fully clothed, though, please). But despite a couple of nicely turned set pieces, I fear the MI series is played out, regardless of the glowing reviews of the mainstream media. But money talks, and all I ask is that if there must be a Part V, please, pretty please, bring back Ving Rhames. I mean, for real. And maybe Quentin Tarantino as director. Or Woody Allen. I’d pay to see Woody Allen’s MI:5, with a cold open of Hunt on a psychiatrist’s couch having imagined the first four films as an escape from his mind-numbing job in the social security claims office…

The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.

There may be life somewhere else.

But there isn’t.

It’s a comedy, you see. Or at least I hope so. Because if Melancholia, the much-ballyhooed dirge from controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier, is intended to be tragedy, then we have here a disaster that makes the German Peasants War of 1524 look like an episode of Curb Appeal.

Cold open. Very cold. Deep space. Deep, deep space. Planets. Colliding. People. Fleeing. Nature. Unhinged. A bride. Entangled. In tree roots. Everything. Moving. Slowly. Until. Planets. Go. Boom. Blackout.

A terrifying dream? The nocturnal effluvia of a melancholic personality? Or a presage of terrible things to come, a foreordained and predestined end of everything. Make that Everything.

Justine. Played by Kirsten Dunst. It’s her wedding day. She and her groom are two hours late to the reception owing to the incompetence of a limo driver who won his license at a Middle School raffle.

Justine’s sister, Claire, played by the painfully pained Charlotte Gainsbourg, is more angry than relieved, having gone to great pains to create a party to end all wedding parties at an estate that features an 18-hole golf course and onion soup. Justine’s mother (Charlotte Rampling) is a bitter, pissy woman who declaims to all the attendees how she hates marriage, which is why she didn’t go to the church. And who can blame her, when her ex husband (the great John Hurt), has shown up with two dates, both named Betty.

Justine’s boss, Stellan Skarsgard (real-life dad of Alexander, who plays the pathetic groom), is the head of an advertising agency and offers her as a wedding gift a promotion to art director from that of copy writer. There’s just one catch: he needs a tagline for a new ad campaign. Before the honeymoon begins. In an hour of so. And to ensure that he gets the goods, he has just hired his nephew to get that tagline out of the otherwise preoccupied Justine before evening’s end, lest he lose said job.

So how is Justine holding up under all this wackadoodle? Not well. She is trying, poor thing. Putting on a brave face. Insisting that this extravagant celebration is exactly what she wanted. Then why does she keep walking out? Why does she leave the table to go take a bath? Why does she leave her poor schmuck of a clueless husband to hump the boss’s nephew on the golf course? Why does she then tell the boss off in a fit of worker revolt not seen since Keep the Aspidistra Flying?

Why has she used her wedding day to blow up everything “good” in her life?

Because life on earth is evil.

After the wedding guests have all gone home, Justine plunges deeper into near catatonic depression, to the point where she can’t even bath herself without help from Claire. Her put-upon sister, too, is limp with anxiety, not only because her sibling, who she hates as well as pities, can’t help checking on the progress of that planet seen in the opening sequence, subtly called Melancholia. Is it going to hit planet Earth, or simply provide a once-in-a-lifetime fly-by, as her fabulously wealthy scientist husband (Kiefer Sutherland) insists.

And so we wait. Is science right? Will earth survive this near calamity of flirting orbs? Or will all on Earth be reduced to ashes, rendering the best and the brightest a bunch of boobies who can’t even get the Apocalypse right? And if so, what were all those putative good things — like love and family and work and estates with golf courses and onion soup — for? What did they mean? Were they always meaningless, as Justine and Claire’s mother never tires of declaiming? Or do they just become meaningless in the face of mass extinction, which is just personal extinction with more running around?

Melancholia is an exercise in crapulous angst — not to be mistaken for existential angst. A tipsy filmmaker, a poor man’s Ingmar Bergman, assuming that poor man was Woody Allen on the set of Interiors, has decided to exorcise his demons by giving Charlotte Gainsbourg a role in which she’s not forced to perform her own clitoridectomy. Instead, the audience is forced to perform a lobotomy, at least if they’re to take the critics’ fawning over this empty pretentious twaddle seriously.

As for Kirsten Dunst, who won Best Actress at Cannes: She’s suitably morose and self-absorbed. And she’s nude in two scenes. And she stares out into the distance with an intensity not seen since Deepak Chopra’s cameo in The Love Guru. If she beats out Meryl Streep’s sure-to-be-spot-on but soulless imitation of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, I’ll punch a mime.

How seriously are we supposed to take these empty, two-dimensional, dullwitted characters? If they’re truly representative of humanity, at least a humanity with a net worth in the mid eight figures, who wouldn’t want to see them obliterated? Even their pain is boring. That’s the problem with a “dramatic” exercise in the meaningless of all things: your attempt to be meaningful is itself meaningless.

Don’t look for any religious undertones or spiritual yearning or even last-gasp efforts to seek the will or face of God. This universe is as empty as an Episcopal church on Stewardship Sunday. The very last image, of Justine, Claire, and Claire’s little boy huddling together under a teepee configuration of sticks with no external covering, is supposed to sum it all up in some pathetic way: all our attempts to hide from reality are merely so many twigs in a tornado. OK. Thanks for sharing.

This could have been an intriguing look at clinical depression from the inside — you feel like the world is coming to an end and you just don’t care about anyone or anything and why won’t it all end already. That may have been what initially motivated Von Trier, given statements he has made in interviews. The finished product, however, is not that. It’s clinical depression as the only grown-up way of looking at life full stop. And the only reason I don’t kill myself if because you won’t all join in and thus confirm how smart I am.

Again, I tried to imagine this as a comedy whose punch line was “Beware happy people, they don’t have enough information.” And perhaps Von Trier is, in fact, having us on. He’s known for being a prankster, pulling the public’s whiskers for a laugh.

Or maybe this is just a piece sullen, sulky dribble dressed up as a great meditation on the human condition and the inevitable planet that hits us all — death.

I’m sticking with dribble. So bring a lobster bib.

If you read the entertainment press at all, you’ll have noticed all the four- and five-star reviews and raves of Masterpiece! that Martin Scorsese’s latest, Hugo, has received. That the director best known for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Goodfellas was straying into Steven Spielberg/George Lucas territory was seen as a category mistake by some. Nevertheless, if the critics are right, Scorsese’s having temporarily abandoned the world of secret societies, strange codes of conduct, and loyalty above all has proved an eye-popping, impressive, and altogether successful venture.

But is the film really as good as the press?

Yes. And then some.

Hugo Cabret is a little boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Having lost his beloved father, a fixer, a mechanic, in an accident, he is taken in by a drunk of an uncle whose job it is to wind all the clocks in the station. When the uncle takes off one day, Hugo continues winding the clocks lest someone notice that he is all alone  and – off to the orphanage for him.

When he isn’t dodging the station guard, played with an almost Germanic rigidity by Sasha Baron Cohen, he’s pilfering food and, more important, spare mechanical parts from vendors in the station. One such vendor, a seller of toys, catches him in the act, and forces him to empty his pockets. Along with the gears and springs and screws Hugo has accumulated is a notebook filled with sketches of what looks like a robot. The toy seller, Monsieur Georges (played by the pitch-perfect Ben Kingsley), is horrified by the book and snatches it away, refusing to return it, despite the boy’s tearful entreaties.

That notebook holds the key to the one thing Hugo has left from his late father – an automaton, found in a museum, but that is in a poor state of repair. Hugo is determined to fix the broken machine and see whether it holds some hidden message from his father – and some clue as to his own destiny.

It most certainly does, especially when it is learned that the surly toy seller is none other than the great French film magician George Melies, fallen on hard times, and that the notebook was originally his. After the First World War destroyed his career, such that hundreds of his “sci-fi” and fantasy films were destroyed or lost, Melies is reduced to selling trinkets and trying to forget his true vocation, lost forever.

But both Hugo and Melies were brought together for a reason: both will ensure that past tragedies are redeemed and that the future still holds surprises and hope – the hope of realizing one’s true calling despite all the obstacles a cruel world throws in one’s way.

Scorsese moves his characters through the train station and each other’s lives with such dexterity and death-defying grace as to render you speechless at times. Moving, fun, and wise, Hugo will give you both a catch in your throat and much to think about. As Hugo ponders the meaning of the mechanical man he has been left by his father, he comes to see that machines work because each and every part, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, has a role to play in the larger scheme of things. Everything, in other words, has a purpose. Including the little orphan boy Hugo.

Sounds inspiring enough, until you contemplate the consequences for a bit. Doesn’t this reduce us all to mere cogs in a great machine? Doesn’t this risk viewing humanity as a grove of  clockwork oranges, with some parts damaged beyond repair, to be thrown on an overly efficient society’s junk heap, and others to be “fixed” in such a way that they become not their true selves but merely gears in the works of the rich and powerful?

While the film does not, Western Union–like, state it in so many words, certainly the implicit message is that such a fear, which literally haunts Hugo as a nightmare, can be assuaged by how we dream. Our imagination is what raises us above the mere machinery of the Industrial Age. Our ability to envision worlds yet to come, that may never come, at least in this life, so enlarges our perspective that we can never be merely useful. The dreamers are what keep us from being crushed by technology, even as that technology magnifies our capacity to realize and share those dreams.

Why hasn’t Hugo done better at the box office? Because it’s a kids’ film for adults. What kid has a love of the old – old movies, old books, old tales of adventure and daring do. Not the telling of the tales – but the mere remembering of the tales, and the world in which they were first conjured.

It’s also a film about the “magic” of the mechanical, the makeshift, and the gear-laden. The 1920s saw machines beginning to dominate industry, manufacturing – newfangled automobiles and automation and auto-everthing would at the close of another war see even more home-spun dreariness evaporate with the click of a switch. Yes, there was a time when one could still marvel at the possibilities.

Now we take this all for granted. What is there for kids to truly stare wide-eyed at anymore? With videogames and iPods and digital this and 3D that, any six-year-old can download an app or piece of software and zoink! — the miraculous right before his or her already bored eyes! The only advance is how quickly you can pull the rabbit out of your high-def hat.

To remember a time of such innocence, for lack of a better word, or perhaps the quotidian, when a wind-up toy, a mechanical man, and the movies as movies could still beguile is not for kids of 10 or 14. You’d have to at least remember buying records and videotape players and roll-up windows in cars. And what a big deal Star Wars and the first Superman were – You’ll believe a man can fly! Sheesh, today, you’d better make me believe I can fly.

So with or without the kids, run and see Hugo today. I’m hoping word of mouth will keep this in theaters long enough to see a decent return on investment. I see no real advantage of the 3D version over the 2D, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, if I was already convinced that 3D is a waste of money and Tylenol, Hugo did nothing to dissuade me. Talk about gilding the lily. The “magic” of 3D is a bit of a cheat and adds nothing to what the story – and the stories within the stories, those of Melies, and Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and all the great innovators and early artists of the silent-film era – already provides. 3D can never replicate the feeling those first movie audiences had when it looked like a train driving into a station was going to burst through the screen and plow right into them! We’re too jaundiced for that. Hugo is best experienced by way of God’s greatest special effect: the unaided human eye, and of course, imagination.

Whatever you do, don’t mention … Mozambique when you’re in the presence of … Johnny English. You’re certain to send the world-renowned British spy into eye-lid sputtering paroxysms of fear and regret. It was because of … Mozambique that Sir Johnny English is now merely … Agent Johnny English.

So be it. His nation needs him. And when MI7, now owned by Toshiba, calls, Johnny English — played by England’s own Rowan Atkinson — is at the ready. The mission this time? Find the triad known as Vortex and keep them from assassinating the Chinese premier on his trip to London. Complicating matters: one of the dastardly trio is a British-intelligence mole (or vole, depending on one’s dictionary).

Playing M to Atkinson’s Bond is Gillian Anderson (The X-Files), here called Pegasus, who has come into the agency to do away with the macho gun play that has defined men like English (something Judy Dench made plain to Peirce Brosnan in Goldeneye—the post-Dalton reboot of the master franchise). And to make sure English loses his lone-wolf attitude, he’s given a partner, Tucker (Daniel Kaluuya), a young agent eager to prove his mettle to the veteran know-it-all.

Of course everything goes all pear-shaped, with English unable to recognize what’s right in front of his face — that is, until the obvious becomes obvious even to him. Finally, his keener instincts, higher self, and one heckuva kiss from the lovely Rosamund Pike set everything right, even … Mozambique.

The Bond spoof is almost as old as the Bond films themselves — from the Derek Flint films to Dino’s Matt Helm, the Mel Brooks/Buck Henry creation Maxwell Smart, Spy Hard, and Mike Meyers’s Austin Powers. (Not to mention the one Bond film that was its own spoof: the David Niven/Woody Allen Casino Royale.) Barely a year or two passes without someone channeling 007.

And that’s the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

In the spirit of The Best Man (1964) and The Candidate (1972), George Clooney brings us — as director, star, and co-screenwriter — a film about an idealistic Democratic candidate who’s almost undone by compromises and dirty politics. And while the hero’s no innocent, the real villain remains offstage — stage right, to be exact.

Pennsylvania governor Mike Morris (Clooney) is running for president in a tough Democratic primary race in Ohio, which will almost certainly guarantee him not only his party’s nomination but also the presidency should he prevail. Why the presidency? That’s the really interesting part of this deeply flawed, narcissistic film.

Morris is running against a guy named Pullman, who at the beginning of the film is needling Morris in debate about how “religious he is.” Morris insists that he is neither a Christian nor an atheist, Jewish or a Muslim. His religion is the U.S. Constitution — his faith, in America (shades of Glenn Beck!).

And what are some of the fundamental doctrines of the U.S. religion, as professed by Morris? Bring the troops home. Gay marriage. Getting the wealthy to pay their fair share. A green future. Making America the No. 1 in technological innovation — presumably by breaking it of its addiction to foreign oil — not by drilling here, needless to say. (WARNING: Spoilers ahead!) Read the rest of this entry »

So what I thought was to be a mere screening of this little inspirational-film-that-could turned out to be a full-blown world premiere at the Kimmel Center in Philly, with stars and dignitaries (including Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and Archbishop Charles Chaput) in attendance. If I’d known I would have combed my hair and thought of a more interesting question to ask star Carla Gugino than “Are you often confused with Maria Bello?”

The Mighty Macs, which opens October 21, tells the story of the Immaculata College women’s basketball team and its come-from-nowhere victory in the 1972 national championships, this at a time when women’s college basketball was barely covered nationally. That an all-girl’s Catholic college supposedly on the verge of financial ruin and with barely a hoop to call its own could scale the heights reserved for world-class champions is what puts this tale in Rudy and Hoosiers territory. The question is whether it’s fit to play in that league.

The film opens as Cathy Rush (Gugino) arrives at the Pennsylnania campus of Immaculate college. Rush is quickly hired as head coach of the women’s basketball team for the simple reason that she is the only one to have applied. While she has no coaching experience per se, Rush is a former player herself and a ball of untapped hunter-gatherer talent looking for some game, and the Immaculata principal, Mother St. John (Ellen Burstyn), while having only a vague interest in or appreciation for the sport, knows that it has potential in keeping her students’ raging hormones in check.

So the single-minded Rush proceeds to play bull in the China shop, recruiting players during Mass and thinking nothing of employing men’s-style tactics on even some of the delicate flowers that are these samples of innocent Catholic feminine virtue.

With a basketball that looks like it’s part of the geological record, and a gym that is nothing more than a pile of ashes, Coach Rush has a hard time inspiring these girls about the importance of dreaming big dreams: not just winning a game or two but going all the way in a sport few people care about at a time when women’s life roles were still pretty much tightly circumscribed. What would success even mean if it didn’t usher in a husband and babies?

But like any good coach, especially of the cinematic variety, Rush refuses to allow this ragtag team of underachievers to give up on themselves. And slowly but surely they go from losers to winners, with nuns jumping for joy in their bonnets and high-top Keds.

The end.

And that’s the problem.

Here’s what you would never know had you not had a chance to speak with some of the stars and their real-life counterparts before the movie started: the character of Trish Sharkey, played by Katie Hayek, was based on Theresa Shank Grentz, who was considered the “Jerry West” of women’s college basketball, an athlete of extraordinary ability who was named to the U.S. national team in 1974 world championship. As portrayed in the film, she is a mediocrity who gets a little better. The college was never as close to closing as depicted, nor was the president of the college the stereotypical crone that is the stock-and-trade of movie-mother-superior types. (In fact, when some of the real-life Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) sisters remarked on the harshness of the portrayal in the first cut of the film, they were told by the director that “movie audiences love mean mother superiors.” Great.)

So what do we have here, really? An oft-times charming, goodhearted movie that cherry picks cliches from other heart-in-your-throat sports favorites but never manages to cobble together either a convincing or a thrilling narrative. Rush’s thoroughly forgettable film husband (David Boreanaz), a basketball coach himself, is against his wife working (this is 1972 after all). Then he warms to her successes and comes to support her. Why? Well, that’s what decent husbands do.

The principal of Immaculata seems clueless about the importance of the basketball team to these girls — and ultimately, presumably, to the college — and anyway she has much bigger burdens to bear staving off the closing of the virtually bankrupt institution. Then she begins to cheer them on and even helps raise money to get the team airline tickets to the nationals (in one nice touch of a scene, we find out what the former poker-hustling nun has done with all her winnings over the years). Why the change of heart? What’s going on in the inner life of this woman reaching the end of a long vocation and career? For that matter, what do these nuns think about the new opportunities suddenly opening up for young women? Who knows? None of it is in the film. And despite what first-time director Tim Chambers and co-screenwriter Anthony Gargano probably thought, they need to be, to thicken these characters and deepen our appreciation for their accomplishments, their perseverance, and their character.

We go from a string of losses to some tough drills to some unexpected victories to a big loss to a big victory and so on, with lots of generic inspirational talk peppered throughout. This is movie-of-the-week stuff. I half expected to see those whirling newspapers that suddenly stop to blurt out headlines to tell most of the team’s story, except that interest in women’s college basketball circa 1972 was relatively limited and local, so there were no headlines being generated.

The Mighty Macs walk the red carpet

Again, if you had a chance to talk to the original Immaculate players — and even their actor counterparts, some of whom were products of Catholic schools — you would have come away with anything but a stereotypical notion of an all-girls Catholic school. One after the other told of how the nuns encouraged them to pursue their dreams, to use their brains, to go out into the world and be both ethical and successful. And those young women, supposedly indoctrinated in the medieval patriarchal paradigm of the wretched Roman Catholic Church, went out into the world and became doctors and lawyers and scholars — and yes, highly successful basketball coaches. And without whining about how they’re now “recovering Catholics.”

This was a another kind of feminism at work in the lives of American girls, one that did not pit women against men (or even against other women as they vied for sparse opportunities) but women’s poor expectations against their highest aspirations. (One of the surviving IHM nuns talked to us about the virtue of friendship and how that informed the education and the characters of the nuns’ young charges.)

There’s a great story here in The Mighty Macs. Carla Gugino is quite engaging as Cathy Rush, and spending some time with the real Rush before the premiere impresses you all the more with Gugino’s dead-on portrayal of the trailblazer’s winning spirit. David Boreanaz (Bones) has little to do here but start flying in the direction of the winds of change, Ellen Burstyn could have played this thin gruel of a role in her sleep (and there are scenes in which it seems as if she almost did), and the girls who play the Mighty Macs themselves were chosen more for their basketball-playing ability than any acting experience. And, of course, you have the pitiless Irish monsignor (are there any other kinds? I mean, in the movies?), played with adequate heartlessness by Malachy McCourt, who is basically in charge of deciding the school’s, and these women’s, fate — until he isn’t.

Marley Shelton (pictured left) as Sister Sunday, the novice doubting her vocation until Rush presses her into service as her assistant, does a lot with a little, I thought. She’s not Amy Adams in Doubt, but then again, she didn’t have that kind of material. Yet there’s a spark there that ignited by a decent script could result in a blaze of a career. And Kim Blair as the player whose highest goal is to marry her long-time sweetheart also shows a lot of promise. There’s a sharp intelligence and biting humor that you remember, and I have no doubt that, given the right breaks, we will be seeing her in meatier roles.

So there you have it. I hope this film does well, although I fear the critics will be terribly unkind (and I hope I haven’t been aggressively so). Director Tim Chambers and his business partner Vince Curran deserve a lot of credit for raising the $7 million budget, hooking some fine talent (including A-list cinematographer Chuck Cohen, whose credits include Jerry Maguire and Any Given Sunday), and persevering for four years to get a distributor. But here’s the dilemma of covering films like this. You want to see these Christian-themed films do well so that more Christians will be encouraged to pursue the arts — and also so that studios and production companies will be convinced of the films’ box-office viability. This, in fact, has been a banner year for such films: from the glorious Of Gods and Men and The Tree of Life to more sentimental fare like Soul Surfer and the preachier Courageous — even now The Way — films with significant Christian content are proving to be winners, some with the critics, some with audiences, and some with both. (Which is probably why Chambers was able to convince his distributor to open the film on 1,000 screens and not the original 250-300.)

And those of us who care about such things are crying, More, more, more! Not all of them will be winners, but look at what Hollywood produces in general, certainly many more misses than hits. The point is to have a surplus of options so that we can afford a couple of losers without the entire industry going See? No one wants to see that stuff but a few born-againers in the Bible Belt or some Latin Mass Catholics.

So despite my reservations about The Mighty Mac, I can’t help but urge you to keep it on your radar and check it out for yourself. It’s flaws are those more of omission than commission — that is, I wanted more from these characters and their inner lives and barely articulated dreams, not less. I wanted more made of how women’s basketball was virtually put on the map by Immaculata and Cathy Rush’s three consecutive championship seasons. And I wanted more about what this specifically Catholic education meant in the lives of these young women.

Catholic filmmakers generally are more fearless in producing films that compare and contrast Christian and secular values. Too many evangelicals are still stuck in the mindset that every film has to end with a Billy Graham-esque come-to-Jesus moment or they will have disappointed God, compromised their beliefs, and given the Hollywood Great Satan a foothold in their hearts. Protestant filmmakers can learn a lot from their Catholic counterparts in this respect, although the Catholic view is usually more expansive than many evangelicals are comfortable with.

What do I mean by that? Here’s an example: There’s a gut-wrenching scene toward the end of Of Gods and Men in which one of the French Cistercian monks, contemplating his possible fate at the hands of Algerian Muslim terrorists, rather than raging about Islamic jihadism, the collapse of the West, and the culture wars, says this in narration:

Should it ever befall me, and it could happen today, to be a victim of the terrorism swallowing up all foreigners here, I would like my community, my church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to his country. That the Unique Master of all life was no stranger to this brutal departure. And that my death is the same as so many other violent ones, consigned to the apathy of oblivion. I’ve lived enough to know, I am complicit in the evil that, alas, prevails over the world and the evil that will smite me blindly. I could never desire such a death. I could never feel gladdened that these people I love be accused randomly of my murder. I know the contempt felt for the people here, indiscriminately. And I know how Islam is distorted by a certain Islamism. This country, and Islam, for me are something different. They’re a body and a soul. My death, of course, will quickly vindicate those who call me naïve or idealistic, but they must know that I will be freed of a burning curiosity and, God willing, will immerse my gaze in the Father’s and contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them. This thank you which encompasses my entire life includes you, of course, friends of yesterday and today, and you too, friend of last minute, who knew not what you were doing. Yes, to you as well I address this thank you and this farewell which you envisaged. May we meet again, happy thieves in Paradise, if it pleases God the Father of us both. Amen. Insha’Allah.

Can you even imagine something of comparable beauty — whether you’re comfortable with that final Insha’Allah or not — from the people who brought you Fireproof or the Left Behind movies? That is a truly catholic view that I, frankly, am only vaguely capable of and that I daresay many Catholics may find troubling (although I sincerely doubt the Cistercians are a raging order of relativists). But man if that doesn’t set you to thinking about the deep, dark, and secret things of God.

Hall of Fame coach Cathy Rush, talking to press

Even in the little Mighty Macs effort, when Sister Sunday learns that Cathy Rush is not Catholic but — gulp! — a Baptist, she immediately asks: “But you are a believer?” To which Coach Rush replied, “Above all things.” Sister Sunday thinks a moment and then says, relievedly, “Then we are sisters.” There is enough in those four little words to offend all manner of man and beast.

First, the fundy Protestants who have written off Catholics as Christians to begin with. Second, the rad-trad Catholics who must bristle at this Second Vatican ecumenism. And third, and most important, the secularists who despise the notion that faith in a creed should be what draws these two women together as sisters. Shouldn’t it be their sex? Their class? The struggle for equal pay for equal work, for sexual liberation — for liberation from the Church and its sexual mores?

Christians are poised to produce not just G-rated and inoffensive fare but some major cinematic works — even aht — that will get tongues wagging for all kinds of reasons, and about issues that Hollywood and even indie fare (Higher Ground being an honorable exception, I thought) don’t understand and can’t touch. Despite the narcissistic rages of the New Atheists, now is the Christian Moment in Film. But it will be a fleeting one if we don’t come out and support this work — not as uncritical cheerleaders, as I hope my above review makes plain, but rather as people who once again want to leave a cruciform impress on the culture, even high culture.

What a mess. Sudan. Its civil war: Muslim North vs. the Christian and Animist South. Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of civilians massacred by militia groups, including Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), whose heinousness includes impressing children into his rebel army, sex trafficking, and torture.

And what a mess. This film, based on the memoir Another Man’s War, which tells the story of the title character, the Machine Gun Preacher, Sam Childers. Its heart may be in the right place, but its script, and soul, is an exercise in gory manipulation and banality.

When we first meet Sam Childers, he is just being released from the can. We quickly learn why he was there in the first place when this foul-mouthed thug threatens violence against his wife, Lynn, because she has stopped stripping for a living and has “found Jesus.” He quickly flees the family home to hook up with old friends, including his buddy Donnie (Michael Shannon), a fellow heroin addict.

Before long, Childers and Donnie are ripping off dope dealers at point of shotgun. (Just to demonstrate what a reprobate Childers is, he adds insult to injury by spewing racist abuse at the guy he’s robbing, better to impress upon the audience the depth of his coming conversion, no doubt.)

It’s not until Childers becomes convinced he’s killed some hitchhiker he and Donnie pick up as they speed down a highway high as kites that Childers turns to his born-again wife for aid.

So off to church they go. And when the preacher asks for sinners to walk the aisle to confess Christ and be baptized, well, Childers, who has been mulling this apparently for a good 30 minutes, does just that. His wife and mother and little daughter, Paige, are enraptured. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a penchant for macho shoot-em-ups, with slick car chases, fantabulously choreographed set pieces, witty and cutting banter, and a satisfying explosion of an ending, do not go to see this film.

Why?

I’ll tell you, if you’ll stop interrupting.

Killer Elite has almost none of these things. And I say almost none because the thing picks up speed toward the end, which is where I suggest you begin when you stream this film on Netflix or iTunes of Amazon.

I’ll catch you right up to the point where you can start watching the film:

It’s 1980. A covert op goes bad. A child dies. One of the “killer elite,” Danny (Jason Statham), swears he’s done with the killing business. Finished. He’s seen enough. he’s through.

It’s 1981. Danny’s living a quiet life with his girl. But just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. His comrade in arms and good friend Hunter (Robert De Niro) has been kidnapped by a sheik who has been ostrasized by his people for refusing to avenge the deaths of three of his four sons at the hands of British SAS (Special Air Services) agents during the Oman war of the 1970s. Before he can return to his desert homeland (and, as it turns out, offer some nifty oil contracts to the British government), he must have these three now-ex-SAS agents eliminated with extreme prejudice. Read the rest of this entry »

How much are you worth? Do you know your own value? If so, what metric did you apply to arrive at your conclusion?

It would seem that most professional athletes know their value: roughly what they’re being paid. And since most are paid extraordinary salaries by mere human standards, it should come as no surprise that their egos are as large as their paychecks.

But what if there was another way to determine value—value no one else can see? A less intuitive and more scientific way? And what if this method could give poor teams an opportunity to level the playing field against gargantuan franchises with pockets you can dig in to China?

That’s the crux of Moneyball, based on the 2003 book by Michael J. Lewis and ably adapted for the screen by Oscars winners Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List). What was a “biography of an idea” has translated quite nicely into what will no doubt make many a sports fan/cinephile’s greatest sports-movie list.

It’s 2001, and the Oakland A’s have managed to win 102 games and make it to the post-season against the three-peat champion NY Yankees. It looks like the A’s might just rip a hole in the house that Ruth built except … they don’t. And to add insult to injury, when the season’s over, those very same Yankees lure away three of the A’s best players: Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen. More important than loyalty to a team, to fans, to a home town, is money: and George Steinbrenner has a lot of it — a payroll of $114 million per annum, to be precise.

So what’s a poor small-market GM like Billy Beane to do, especially when his A’s payroll is a paltry $39 million? A team with almost four times your resources will always be able to outbid you for an A-list player. Is America’s favorite pastime doomed to be nothing more than another business, where the almighty dollar always has the last word? Read the rest of this entry »