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Movies

An Unconventional Christmas Movie

December 9, 2006

If you’re interested in seeing an unusual film set at Christmas, and a good one, you might want to take a look at The Ice Harvest, which was released to theaters about a year ago and is now available on DVD. For more info on the film, here is my review from Breakpoint: A Film of Second Chances By S. T. Karnick1/3/2006 The Ice Harvest Just as crime statistics are a good measure for gauging the health of a society, crime films can reveal common attitudes toward current social conditions—and the spiritual ideas behind them. The recent release of the movie The Ice Harvest is an interesting case in point. Although presented in advertisements as something of a zany caper film, The Ice Harvest is, in fact, a modern film noir. The action takes place mostly at night, on Christmas Eve, in snowy Wichita, Kansas, which is presented as a dreary town typical of America today. Like many modern crime films, The Ice Harvest presents an America rife with corruption but holding great possibilities for redemption. In these films, America is the Land of Second Chances. Hence both money and religion are central to the story. The film takes

Gibson’s Apocalypto

December 8, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Upon hearing that Mel Gibson was filming a story set at the end of the Mayan empire and performed in an ancient foreign tongue translated into subtitles, one might well have wondered what possessed Gibson to undertake such an odd task. Indeed, many people wondered exactly that. Well, now we know, as Apocalypto premiered today in theaters across the United States. The film tells the story of a young father, Jaguar Paw, from a small tribe who is taken prisoner after a Mayan attack force destroys his village and takes the adult survivors back to the city to be sold into slavery or sacrificed to some alien "god." After a miraculous deliverance from the sacrificial blood altar, he escapes, pursued into the jungle by a Mayan SWAT team. At this point Gibson begins a remake of Cornel Wilde’s 1966 film The Naked Prey, and the action sequences are as good as in most such films. What is interesting about the film is how neatly it fits into Gibson’s career and the themes of his previous films. At the center of Apocalypto is a man on the run trying to protect his family from an oppressive, violent, decadent regime, as is

Mr. Capra Goes to Hollywood

December 1, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Turner Classic Movies is showing a five-movie tribute to director Frank Capra tomorrow beginning at 8 pm EST. Capra, whose career spanned the end of the silent era to the early 1960s, was one of the great American film directors. He’s best known for his classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, and he made numerous other fine movies such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (another real classic), Meet John Doe, the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, Dirigible, Lost Horizon, the poignant Lady for a Day, and the delightfully screwy comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. The five films to be shown tomorrow night are Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (interesting and good but not nearly as fine as Mr. Deeds), You Can’t Take It with You (yuk, even though it won an Oscar—see below), American Madness (very underrated film starring Walter Huston), Lady for a Day, and Arsenic and Old Lace. Capra was a very patriotic immigrant from Sicily who supported the Republican Party, which was just as unpopular in Hollywood then as it is now. His political and cultural instincts were a populist conservatism, and his usual cowriter was more of a leftist populist. (Capra generally did not get

Can We Judge Literature?

November 29, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?" It’s a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual’s chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it’s silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes. I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it’s true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the

Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction

November 22, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Two time travel movies are premiering today, and a none of those astounding mysteries of the universe that Hollywood creates every couple of months. Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (directed with his usual great skill and creativity) is the bigger-budgeted and promoted film, and will probably do well at the box office. Darren Arnofsky’s The Fountain promises to be a bit quirkier and probably won’t make as much money but might obtain more critical accolades. Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can’t say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality. I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we’ve all experienced things that

Casino Royale

November 17, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Ian Fleming’s James Bond is a much tougher egg than most of the Bond movies have portrayed him to be. Sure, he does impossible stunts and kills lots of villains, but he’s always cracking smart jokes, hardly breaking a sweat, and knows way too much about fancy drinks and what upper-crust people like to say at parties. That was a big part of Ian Fleming’s conception of the Bond books, of course, but at heart Bond was something of a thug—more Bulldog Drummond than a Dornford Yates smart-set spy. And that’s where the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, finds its inspiration. Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, is much more of a bulldog than the Bonds of the past, and the action sequences in this installment, though about as ludicrous as in most Bond films, have a gritty character that matches Craig’s roughness and fits well with the current trend in action films. The opening credits and initial scenes make this very clear: the credits sequence is all stylized images of violence, and none of the naked women reflected in shimmering water that have characterized the Bond series over the years. And the first scenes take up this motif,

Flicka Flick

November 6, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Critics tend to look down on movies like Flicka, the new film based on the oldtime bestselling novel My Friend Flicka, which has been filmed a couple of times previously, about an adolescent girl who adopts a wild horse against her parents’ wishes. Flicka fails to undermine bourgeois values, show the family to be an outmoded and socially destructive phonomenon, attack free enterprise as an invitation to greed and exploitation, and demonstrate the superiority of personal autonomy and pleasure-seeking over selfish, socially destructive notions such as duty, honor, and decency. But that is what makes the movie most interesting and gives it a certain amount of moral complexity. Flicka vividly depicts how individuals’ desires can conflict with others’ needs, but it comes down strongly on the side of duty, honor, self-sacrifice, and other such traditional notions. Alison Lohman plays Katy McLaughlin, a sixteen-year-old Wyoming girl whose family operates a horse ranch that is on the verge of bankruptcy. She finds a wild mustang horse which she wishes to tame and train, but her father objects. Naturally, Katy decides to defy him in secret, surreptitiously working to make the exceedingly wild horse trust her. Meanwhile, her father and mother struggle to

The Deep Meaning of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”

November 4, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

The Deep Meaning of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”

Naturally it’s tempting for critics to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan as a satire against political correctness, as Peter Suderman has gamely attempted to do on National Review Online. When something gives us pleasure, we really want to believe that it is good. But that’s simply not the way things work, and it is certainly not the way Borat works. Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian who wrote and stars in the film based on his HBO TV show, makes no attempt to tie the film’s vulgar humor to American "political correctness" codes or any other political meaning. On the contrary, the film is simply a string of jokes based on the grotesqely ignorant central character’s lack of decorum regarding bodily functions, presumably as a result of his being brought up in a primitive, poverty-stricken country in southwest Asia. What the movie really delivers is lots of jokes about sex, defecation, sex, religion, sex, mental deficiencies, sex, cruelty to all creatures less powerful than oneself, sex, ethnic prejudice, sex, and sex. Borat simply is not political, and there is in fact nothing useful that we can learn from it, despite critics’ attempts

The Future of Christian Cinema

November 2, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

In commenting on our discussion of Christian cinema (see posts immediately below), some visitors brought up a couple of interesting points. One is that any kind of Christian movie ought to be acceptable to both critics and audiences, and the other is that the economic realities of making Christian films today require a more encouraging stance than Barbara Nicolosi and I seem to have taken regarding Facing the Giants. Clearly both these observations are well-intentioned, but I think that adopting these recommendations would greatly harm any nascent Christian cinema, rather than helping it. Let’s examine them individually. First, the premise that any kind of Christian cinema ought to be good enough for Christians, with the implied corollary that any Christian film is at least better then what Hollywood puts out, ignores an imporatant reality: what is on the surface of a film does not always reflect what it all actually means. Many Hollywood films and TV programs, despite their often shabby surfaces, carry meanings that Christians should find quite appealing. If you have any doubts about this, click on the "Movies" and "Television" categories on this page and take a look at some analyses of Hollywood products showing how easily

A Bad Sign for Christian Cinema

November 1, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

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. In addition, Nicolosi argues, Facing the Giants is animated by a devotion to what is known as the Prosperity Gospel, a decidedly perverse notion prevalent among some Evangelicals, which holds that God wants believers to be happy and prosperous in this world (which is surely true to some extent), and that he will give believers such earthly success to the degree that they believe in Him and accept his promises. That is an absurd, unbiblical doctrine that is derived from Puritanism but puts an optimistic, positive spin on it. It is an idea, as Nicolosi notes, that utterly denies numerous direct statements in Scripture, especially the words of Jesus Christ himself. In sum, the Prosperity Gospel

Enchanting Within Limits—Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige”

October 23, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

Enchanting Within Limits—Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige”

The latest movie about magic and magicians, The Prestige, opened this past Friday to middling reviews but good box office, winning the weekend by an estimated $1.1 million over the number two attraction, Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. The movie is worth seeing if you don’t expect too much. The filmmakers have clearly tried very hard to make it both entertaining and meaningful, but The Prestige just barely manages to achieve either of those goals. The plot is complex, the characters’ motives are often fashionably murky, and the cinematography and visual effects are ambitious and largely diverting. The sets have the cluttered, dirty look that is now common to these period films, in a clear reaction against the tidy, stagy approach once common to Hollywood, the BBC, and PBS’s Masterpiece Theater but now largely gone from all three (cf. the most recent theatrical film version of Pride and Prejudice and last year’s PBS adaptation of Bleak House). The main performers—Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, and Michael Caine—use every bit of their formidable charisma to keep the viewer interested, and Rebecca Hall also puts in an excellent performance. (Scarlett Johansen, on the other hand, brings nothing special but her looks.) The

America’s REAL Top Sleuths

October 22, 2006

By S. T. Karnick

TV "Best of" lists are usually at best arguable and often fatuous, but the Sleuth Network’s program on America’s Top Sleuths is an especially annoying addition. The comments of the "experts" on the 90-minute program aired recently are nearly uniformly unoriginal, wrong, or both, and the program is thoroughly dull and silly. Its contribution to the public’s knowledge and understanding of the film and television mystery genre is absolutely nil, and in fact probably negative. After watching the program, an individual who knew nothing about the subject would know even less that is actually true than they did before. The choices of greatest detectives, voted on by visitors to the Sleuth Network website, were limited to American film and TV characters. Even so, the final list mysteriously omits many of the most important mystery characters in those media. The bias toward detectives who blunder along without actually doing much thinking is clear. Along with a few who actually belong—such as Sgt. Joe Friday, Lt. Phillip Columbo, Jim Rockford, Jessica Fletcher, Thomas Magnum, etc.—the list includes a large proportion of dubious choices. These include Maddie and Dave of the TV series Moonlighting, who may be amusing but are hardly sleuths at

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Movies

An Unconventional Christmas Movie

Gibson’s Apocalypto

Mr. Capra Goes to Hollywood

Can We Judge Literature?

Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction

Casino Royale

Flicka Flick

The Deep Meaning of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”

The Future of Christian Cinema

A Bad Sign for Christian Cinema

Enchanting Within Limits—Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige”

America’s REAL Top Sleuths

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