Everyone in America either watched the Super Bowl or went to the Miley Cyrus movie last weekend, as wholesome entertainment triumphed both on television and in theaters.
Movies
An Ode to the Power of Music
Correspondent Mike D’Virgilio reviews the musical film Once. Or is it more than a musical?
“Cloverfield” Leads Pack, Shows Value of Ingenuity, Human Scale
Cloverfield, the innovative monster movie directed by TV producer J. J. Abrams (Alias, Lost, Felicity), achieved the strongest January box office opening weekend in film history this past weekend.
An Anti-Christian Movie Criticism
I haven’t seen The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie, so of course I have no opinion on whether it is any good, but I found a fascinating assumption in Lou Lumenick’s review of the film in the New York Post. Lumenick suggests that a work reflecting Christian values must necessarily be bad. In an outline of what’s wrong with the film, Lumenick states the following: The CGI animation is crude, the humor is cruder, and the plot is Christian-friendly. Proceed at your own risk. My advice to all, including non-Christians: when reading reviews in the New York Post, proceed at your own risk.
Weird Comedies Take Movie Box Office Lead
Two comedies about decidedly unfunny subjects took the U.S. movie box office lead this past weekend.
Salute to Val Lewton
Turner Classic Movies is presenting a documentary on filmmaker Val Lewton, produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, tonight at 8 EST with a repeat presentation at midnight. Lewton (b. Vladimir Ivan Leventon in Yalta, Russia) was a highly talented writer and producer whose atmospheric suspense and horror films of the 1940s for Hollywood’s RKO studio are much admired by film critics and scholars and the more tasteful and well-informed of today’s filmmakers.
A Dangerous Mystery Writer
TAC Mystery Fiction Correspondent Mary Reed reviews a classic novel by English suspense writer "Sapper," now available for free online through Project Gutenberg Australia. H. C. McNeile, aka "Sapper," is one of the most popular and most reviled of mystery-suspense writers. Writing largely between the two World Wars, the former British military man brought an American-style hardboiled approach to British fiction with his popular character Bulldog Drummond, a wealthy, intrepid, honorable former military officer. The Drummond tales combined suspense, espionage, and detection, rather after the fashion of Leslie Charteris’s Saint stories. The character also appeared in the movies and on television and radio. Sapper also wrote straight detective novels, one of which is Ronald Standish, the item currently under review. Sapper’s books sold very well indeed, and readers enjoyed them immensely, but literary critics of later decades, especially since the 1960s, have criticized his books as representing an obsolete, politically damaging, and personally vile point of view—for the narratives frankly demonstrate that different types of people behave differently. This is a reality that contemporary thought (if it can be honored with that designation) would like to deny and ignore, consigning it to the ash heap through force of career destruction
Cheerful Juno, National Treasure: Book of Secrets Still Going Strong
The witty, charming comedy Juno, about an unmarried, pregnant teenager who decides to bear her child, moved into third place in U.S. movie box-office take this past weekend. In its second week of general release, Juno pulled in an average of nearly $8,500 per screen, significantly more than the healthy $5,376 gathered by National Treasure: Book of Secrets, which was once again the top moneymaker for the weekend. In just three weekends and the intevening weekdays, National Treasure: Book of Secrets has brought in a stunning $171 million in U.S. ticket sales.
A Hard Walk Through the Omniculture
Jud Apatow provides a comic history of modern American culture. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story has already dropped off the top ten list of movie box office draws, after only a couple of weeks in general release. It appears to have been held back by the lack of a big star, as although John C. Reilly gives a good performance, he doesn’t have the charisma to draw people into theaters to see him. That’s a shame, because the movie is both funny and pointed.
Two Entertaining Genre Films, with a Little More
A couple of 2007 films that didn’t get much attention but were at least entertaining and at best something more are The Reaping and Next. Both are available on DVD (info here and here) and HD DVD (info here and here), and I recommend giving them a look. The Reaping was the best new horror-gothic film I’ve seen since the first Saw film, which, alas, isn’t saying a lot. Like Saw, The Reaping had a strong foundation in something other than shock and gore. (And even the first Saw film was self-contradictory in the logic of its central premise, which The Reaping isn’t.)
A Bad Sign for Christian Cinema—UPDATE
A year ago, upon the release of the Fox Faith theatrical film Facing the Giants, I reported on an analysis by Christian screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi criticizing the film. It took me a long time to get around to seeing Facing the Giants, in large part because of the many negative reviews, but I saw it a few weeks ago and corrected the record in an addendum to the original post on this site from November 1, 2006. I think it worth placing the full text here on the main page, to give readers my own comments on the film. The original piece and my update follow: Screenwriter and script analyst Barbara Nicolosi is extremely disappointed by the Christian-produced film Facing the Giants. I have not yet gotten around to seeing the film, but I suspect that Ms. Nicolosi is quite right. She points out that Facing the Giants is the cinematic equivalent of Contemporary Christian Music, bland nonsense meant to make Christians feel good and thereby bring in a steady stream of money from a highly defined market segment, what is known in the entertainment business as a cash cow.
The Unusual Appeal of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets”
Most movies, even those that seem rather mindless, actually do have some serious thematic content behind the action, comedy, romance, and other surface elements—as I have observed frequently on this site and elsewhere. National Treasure: Book of Secrets initially seems very unusual in this respect: it appears to have no interesting thematic content whatsoever. It’s amazingly fluffy and superficial, and works as great, unserious Hollywood entertainment. It is thoroughly successful at that. Nonetheless, there is some serious thematic content to the film, which we would do well to see.
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