Cantoris-2 Reviews

Good Boys (2019)

Cute but decadent

[4/10 · 17 August 2019]

When a friend pointed out a preview on Youtube, my response was "cute but decadent." After seeing more clips and outtakes, the movie began to look promising, and I entered the cinema with high hopes, really wanting to like it.

Every boy nowadays should be well warned, before his first day of school one fears, that these are not the best of times to be one. He will have a long uphill fight and sooner or later be blamed and punished (not to mention drugged) for perfectly normal behavior. Feminism, whose claimed goal of "equality" rings hollower every year, has stacked the deck heavily against him. To name just one way: thanks to various educational practices, he now has at least 1/3 less chance than his female classmates of getting into college. Lotsa luck finding a feminist who will admit that this situation is in any way unjust, problematic, or unpropitious for society's future. Furthermore, he is best advised to postpone indefinitely a relationship with the opposite sex. This is the advice not of prudery but prudence, just as prudence avoids Russian roulette. Read the not-so-fine print about the probability of divorce, who usually initiates it, and the usual fate of a husband in family court-- assuming that a relationship even gets as far as marriage before a guy is me-tooed. In summary: Masculinity itself is toxic, haven't you heard?

So a film whose title asserts that there is even such a thing as a good boy and undertakes a sympathetic look at his life should make a welcome contribution to the culture. But lamentably, in this case it stops there. With a heavy sigh, I must return to my verdict at first sight.

By "decadent" I'm not referring to a decline in morals. Yeah, way too much dirty language comes out of these youngsters' mouths. Once in awhile it is funny or otherwise purposeful, but usually just gratuitous. As Peter Hitchens wrote, some people use profanity for punctuation, and one suspects that it is the only punctuation they know. Never was there a sillier misnomer than calling it "strong language." It is actually weak language. And this applies to screenplays as well. Although I would not exaggerate it as a moral violation, it is a tangible example of decadence: a line has been crossed in a very cheap manner, after which what in this way can anyone do for an encore?

Otherwise, this film is conspicuously moral. Look at the checklist. Racial equality, check: one of the three close friends among our young protagonists is African-American. Drugs, check: don't take them or deal them, and at least consider reporting anyone who does. Sex, check: get a girl's consent before making a move. And when you're eleven years old, daydream about giving a girl a kiss someday. Sweet.

No, by decadence I have in mind an artistic crudity, insincerity, and shameless loss of subtlety and craft that eventually becomes a race to the bottom. After just five minutes I was thinking, "this director doesn't know how to make a feature film." But it's been awhile since I've even bothered to see a Hollywood movie on account of the same traits, so maybe he's a typical contemporary Hollywood director, how should I know? Am I just showing my age?

The issue is style. First, the pacing is absurdly frenetic throughout. Second, these boys simply screamed much of their dialogue. Given the highly competitive market for child actors, I'm sure that casting came up with more talent than we see here-- if they didn't, it's sheer incompetence again. More likely, the star trio has talent but the director never brought it out of them. The occasional exceptions to the yelling appear in tender scenes, which come up abruptly: Suddenly the camera pans into a close-up and the music changes. Now This Is A Tender Scene, See? Then after a moment it's back to the razzle-dazzle rat-race. Put all this together and you get utter failure to suspend a viewer's disbelief. The effect is reminiscent of minimalist music which is obnoxious when it takes a moment that sounds like a symphony orchestra's reaching the climax of a score, and then repeats the passage twenty times, so that it all becomes a spoof.

For those who enjoyed this movie: fine, more power to you, I won't hold it against you. But do you have any idea what a starvation diet you are subsisting on? Will another film about this age group ever rival Stand By Me (1986)? For my money, Hearts in Atlantis (2001) almost stands by it. Granted, Gene Stupnisky's aim in Good Boys was more comic. But even effective comedy requires having summoned some emotional involvement with plot and characters. If it's not irreverent to suggest comparing it against these two predecessors, doing so will make it obvious how signally he failed.

Boychoir (2014)

Brothers, sing on?

[7/10 · 18 May 2015]

Anyone attending a graduation ceremony at the American Boychoir School, as I did a few hours before seeing this film in Princeton, would be impressed with its tremendous and infectious school spirit. It is a joyous group of young people who uphold one another and love being together. Their enthusiasm has been buoyed up, and deservedly so, by the choir's glowing work in this film. As others have already noted, the singing is glorious, and one hopes is an audience's most lasting takeaway.

One's heart goes out to Stet, at first sight perhaps not the kind of boy one would expect to be smitten to the core within a moment of hearing such music. But he was! Given a chance to join, he is afraid to try at first, because failure and rejection would hurt so much. Time and again, it was the exquisite beauty of what he heard around him that drove him on, even when it seemed out of reach.

Aside from that-- I very much wanted to love this movie more than I'm ultimately able to do. Especially given its every suggestion that it is a portrayal of life in the American Boychoir School (or any choral foundation for that matter), we must bear in mind, IT IS FICTION! For according to the movie, this is a grim life in a hostile place, in which a boy might find no friends, no teamwork, and even a faculty member or two implacably opposed to his very presence. We see only merciless competition and rivalry, sometimes descending to unscrupulous malice for which the guilty peer gets only a slap on the wrist. This is not the stuff of which a great ensemble, as the American Boychoir clearly is, can be made. Alas, in this respect I fear that the scriptwriter and director have done a disservice to the art and institution that they meant to promote.

This is a serious matter at a time when plenty of choir school graduates go on to the most prestigious high schools in the country, and plenty of parents dream of exactly this outcome from the moment their child is born. To a large extent, it is the immersion in great music that does this. Yet the dots don't get connected: there is a shortage of applicants to choir schools, among other excellent boarding schools for children of this age, both here and abroad. Interested families understandably want to be assured that they will find a supportive, nurturing atmosphere in which every pupil is almost guaranteed to flourish happily. This is what such schools provide, as their students and alumni enthusiastically report. Reading music is patiently taught, not a prerequisite for admission. But you'd never guess it from the film.

If others feel that this single reservation I have expressed is too harsh, nothing would please me more. Boy goes to choir school and becomes a success. "Predictable", people say, as if this were a criticism. But oh how right they are.

Boys Don't Cry (1999)

Of the low life in flyover country

[5/10 · 17 July 2010]

Having somehow missed all the media coverage of the Brandon<->Teena murder case when it occurred, I watched this film unaware that it was based on a true story. After slogging the entire way through the ugly, depressing, predictable ending; and wondering what, beyond its undoubted brilliance in acting and cinematography, was the point, I discovered this fact only by reading on the screen, just before the credits rolled, that the perps were serving life sentences. Oh. That changes everything. Or does it?

My hypothesis was confirmed, incidentally, that (with just a few exceptions such as the refreshingly un-PC _About_a_Boy_) the unlikeliest recent book or movie to feature a real boy character is one with the word "boy" in the title. Have you noticed?

Being transgendered must be a very difficult card to be dealt in life, much more painful than being merely gay. Brandon easily won my sympathy on those grounds, but it was strained by the company he chose to keep. The moral of this story is very clear: Any young person with his condition and lack of career ties, with or without his stated ambition to live in Memphis or some-such metropolis, should head there immediately-- by sticking out a thumb on the highway if necessary-- rather than hanging around small towns in the American "heartland."

There is a reason why gay people are such a presence in New York and San Francisco, and why they gravitate to urbane "cultural" occupations: while we will inevitably encounter individuals who don't like us very much, at least they are civilized enough not to stoop to actual mayhem and murder. And there's a reason why "civilized" derives from the Latin for "city". We have appreciated this for decades if not centuries. Many of us have also read _Lord_of_the_Flies. In this sense, the adjective "disturbing" for this film and its denouement is not only a cliché but a curiously naive one. Would someone who finds the word insightful please elaborate as to which of their assumptions it has disturbed?

There is some cold comfort, I suppose, in pondering that social developments may soon, for awhile, make Teena's affliction obsolete. Other than semen, whose necessity biological research has not yet managed to eliminate, there is less and less said for maleness. One reads, for example, of a revival of beekeeping as a hobby. Is it surprising that many of the revivalists are women who readily explain how they admire the social structure of the hive? From the queen on down, most of the work is done by females. The drones are luxuries, grown in great numbers during prosperous times, but idle, powerless (literally with no sting), and summarily banished and left to starve or freeze as soon as the weather changes.

In the post-industrial West, too, women's liberation means the ability to go anywhere and do anything, reducing masculinity to ornamental pastimes (often via tough and noisy motor vehicles) which our feckless Johns, Toms, and Brandons pursue with ever-more-desperate swagger. They may live in a midwestern backwater (which Mark Twain, I think, said would be the best place to be when the world is ending, because everything happens ten years later), but even they are by now children of their time.

In one regard, however, Brandon's instincts were old-fashioned: when appealing to the "opposite" sex, he was all courtesy and chivalry-- and, despite having from all appearances yet to reach puberty, this approach was successful. Maybe there's hope yet.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

Out of the mouths of babes...

[10/10 · 23 November 2008]

The numerous negative comments on the cast's "British accents" leave me disappointed in my fellow Americans who are still in denial that the world no longer revolves around them (if it ever did).

A country a few thousand miles east, across the Atlantic ocean, happens to have made this film (notice "BBC" in the credits?) and they did not set out to speak in a "British accent." They talk in the film the way people talk in that country. And why not? What were the alternatives? Should they adopt an American accent just to please us, leaving their own countrymen to wonder, with a sense of the surreal, just what (beyond the infamous gulags that our society seemingly needs to maintain order) America has to do with the story? Should they contrive German accents? What would be authentic about that? Germans don't normally speak English in a German accent; they speak German. So maybe everyone in the movie should have used German and given the audience subtitles to read? One can imagine how happy that would have made these critics.

No possible "accent" could be transparent for all Anglophones, but how the cast spoke was at least natural to themselves and to their primary audience. Why they were right to do so goes much deeper than convenience. Asked how he would portray the Nazis in his film Der Unhold (The Ogre), Volker Schlondorff replied, "as the most exciting people in the world, of course." Hence he showed them not as strange or alien in any way, but in living color. That Abel, his childlike hero, would be immediately converted to their cause was almost inevitable. How slowly did disillusionment ensue with innocence lost and uncomfortable facts accumulating.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas calls for a similar approach to the allures of Nazi images, ideologies, and institutions, because (among other similarities) they share a theme: a naïf's loss of innocence amidst unpleasant truths gradually emerging. The question is not so much "how did this happen to the Germans?" but more universal: "how might it happen to us?" As the historian John Lukacs wrote, understanding history requires self-understanding.

To be sure, Bruno, more than Abel, had early reasons for ambivalence. He never wanted to leave his home and friends in Berlin. He noticed that his grandma didn't approve of these new developments, either. The new house in the country didn't appeal to him, nor did his confinement to the walled front yard. The regimen of his tutor predisposed him to resist the propaganda he was fed. Mark Herman has apparently read his Dickens, whose _Hard Times_ had the poor Gradgrind children subjected to precisely the same grim pedagogical philosophy: out with fantasies and adventures, in with facts and almanacs. Our little explorer felt imprisoned mentally as well as physically. Is it any wonder that he could just as easily greet the camp's barbed-wire fence as another restraint upon himself, rather than upon anyone he saw on the other side?

Set against all this privation was a child's natural trust in his parents, that what they were doing was right or at least necessary. We see that this trust was not always absolute and was sustained in part by lies. Bruno seemed surprised when Schmuel said that he never doubted that his own father was a good man.

Most of the critics and commentators I have read tend to treat Bruno as an ignorant, confused little boy. This may be true at first, but let's not overlook the developments that show him becoming a resolute and courageous hero. I'm sure that when you see this film, you will not miss a brief moment at a dramatic halfway point in the story, which is almost as shattering as the much adumbrated ending. Among the evidence for the pivotal significance of this scene is when, after having sulked for weeks over living in this house, he amazes his family by voting to stay rather than leave. Does any earthly rationale explain this change of heart? The only rationale is heavenly: he is intent upon staying for Shmuel's sake.

However coincidental, it is extraordinarily apt to have seen this film on the Feast of Christ the King, in whose Holy Gospel Jesus discloses the contents of our final exam. It is about feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners. Oh, and clothing the naked (which raises again the question of who the prisoners are in this tale). It's as simple as that, huh. Even a child can do it. Yet how seldom most of us bother, even though it would be easier for us than it was for Bruno.

The United States Steel Hour: The Duchess and the Smugs (1962) Season 10, Episode 9

Should be aired again!

[10/10 · 29 May 2008]

Although my family didn't usually watch the U.S. Steel Hour-- indeed thanks to Mom's wisdom, we watched relatively little TV aside from a few favorite shows-- we happened to catch this episode. I was the same age as the heroine. It has haunted me ever since. But I couldn't remember the title. After trying to track its identity down over a period of years, and failing, in desperation I finally posted an inquiry on IMDb's mind-numbingly active "I need to know" forum, recounting the few specifics I could remember, and hardly expecting an answer. Was this marvelous story I thought I'd seen just a dream I'd had? But wonder of wonders, a few days later a kindly and vigilant fount of wisdom replied, and quietly nailed it. Heaven-only knows how many hundreds of other forlorn queries she has taken the time to read, and for no recompense beyond the satisfaction of occasionally helping total strangers satisfy their curiosity. There are miracles and unheralded saints in cyberspace.

A Google search on the title, once established, revealed that it is originally a short story by Pamela Frankau published in Harper's, August 1952; that this short story was widely enough admired to have been often taught in high schools; and that its adaptation for United States Steel Hour was so conscientiously produced, or perhaps so controversial, as to leave the amplest archival documentation of the entire lengthy series. By these measures alone, the fact that it might make a deep impression on a young viewer should come as no surprise.

But now on to the story: it's about an adolescent-- about all adolescents: people at the age when they *must* begin questioning all that they have experienced or been told. So they take a few steps into the big world, bump into a fence, and wonder whether the grass isn't greener on the other side. Penelope is a little different from her age-mates, or at least feels different, and (being a typical adolescent) she doesn't like that. Part of her difference is her freedom: she has never been constrained by the typical fences. Her father doesn't particularly believe in them. So the fence she bumps into is not hers, meant to keep her in, but someone else's: is it there to keep her out? Naturally, it occurs to her that maybe fences are better. What if the coolest people are those who live snugly (or should we say smugly) behind a fence of their own making?

I hope that by now you can see why this short story and the well-done TV drama based on it have so much to say to us once again. Americans in droves are entertaining the same hypothesis. A nation which had long prided itself on its freedom suspects that a great disaster happened to it because, both figuratively and literally, it didn't have enough fences, and the way to keep it from happening again is to build them. Are we thereby losing our taste for freedom, and turning into a nation of those Bradley-Smugs whom Ms. Frankau had satirized so eloquently in the 1950s?

To make a short story shorter, Penelope proved to be a wonderful kid with a great dad. What she needed was self-confidence. With that, she quickly came to her senses and began cherishing her own heritage gratefully. Her lesson is one America is in danger of forgetting and would do well to review.

Heart of the City (1986–1987)

All good things come to an end...

[8/10 · 22 August 2005]

Especially when they happen to wander into the pop culture of middle America.

Mr. Grand, if you ever change your mind, I'd love a copy of your tapes of this abandonware. Seeing this program when it first appeared, I immediately recognized a class act, watched every episode I could, and was very disappointed, even angry, when the powers-that-be canceled it. "Heart of the city" (I suppose referring to Officer Kennedy, who definitely had one) was head and shoulders above most commercial TV fare, for which I've not had much time ever since.

In addition to the actors already commended, several of the last episodes featured a troubled boy 13-14 years old in which officer Kennedy took a special interest. Guest star Andre Gower so smoldered in that role, that I expected him to burn a hole in my TV screen any moment.

I'd be more of a fan of the police if I had any confidence that most of them were menschen with hearts like Officer Kennedy in this great series. Sadly, We the People are sticking them with such randomly and senselessly vindictive laws to enforce nowadays, and turning the American gulag into such a growth industry for opportunistic corporations, that any mensch must have more and more trouble doing such work in good conscience.

Entrusted (2003 TV Movie)

A beautiful glimpse into the tragedy of WWII

[9/10 · 17 June 2005]

This film has so captivated me that I have read the original novel, "Daddy", by Loup Durand. Although it shares with the film most of the supposed plot holes pointed out by others, it has been acclaimed by readers familiar with the genre on both sides of the Atlantic.

While I know few details of the esoteric intricacies of Swiss bank accounts, history records that the children and other heirs of many Jews put to death in the holocaust were often unable to recover the funds their ancestors had deposited there, because they could not produce the necessary death certificates. Thomas's great grandfather (grandfather in the film), a banker, had devised a labyrinthine scheme to circumvent these routine requirements so that funds could be released to anyone who presented the proper credentials and codes under the designated circumstances. It was very secret, involving international arrangements and surrounded with such safeguards that the Nazis had never managed to crack the system open to their benefit, despite many attempts.

Hence the need for Thomas to appear in person and to verify mutually (through secret codes committed to everyone's memory) the identity of everybody-- including several bank officials-- present simultaneously during his recitation. Its power could not be transferred to any single individual by telephone or in writing. In other parts of the book, Durand reveals enough knowledge of the often shameful record of global high finance during World War II that I can credit the plausibility of this premise, given the absence of objections from knowledgeable readers during all this time.

There are many differences between the film and the book. I am impressed by how, at least for the cinematic environment, many of these differences are actually improvements. The story has been not merely simplified of necessity, but tightened up. For instance, in the book Laemmle was just a brilliant but jaded, world-weary professor with suicidal thoughts, who had been pursuing "the Von Gall case" for years mainly to avoid being literally bored to death. But in the movie he was Maria's former teacher and would-be lover, with whom he had played so many expert chess games that he could recognize her distinctive style anywhere. This experience gives him a crucial clue in the film.

Catherine Lamiel has a much larger role than in the book. And whereas the time span of the novel is about a year (by the time it ends, the war is winding down), in the film it has been compressed into a couple of weeks-- befitting the urgency of the secret that Thomas carries. The principal characters and their conflicts, however-- both among one another and within themselves-- are remarkably intact.

With all due respect to the novel, a film faithful to it would need to resemble Indiana Jones. I do not admire the Indiana Jones movies and feel that their influence on American film-making is baneful. What we get here is subtler, more atmospheric, coherent, and I for one think more believable. It is also earnest: one critic said that it is reminiscent of a film of the 60s or even earlier, especially in the acting of Ms. Mezzogiorno and Mr. Moyer. Whether you will like this film depends on whether you like that. Well, I guess I do.

Finally, one must mention the unfortunate (if less than obvious) fact that we in what the powers-that-be have defined as "Region 1" are being treated in this product to only 2/3 of the original miniseries. I daresay the cutting has been about as well done as it can be. Nevertheless, under such conditions, anyone is forgiven for perceiving plot holes and puzzlements. The full original is available only elsewhere, or to North Americans who have taken the step of acquiring a "region-free" DVD player and then patronizing a vendor overseas for a more obscure offering. I would recommend all lovers of freedom to do at least the former-- it's not particularly expensive, not yet anyway-- and meanwhile to reserve judgment on any production seen only as mutilated by third parties.

A bit of trivia: Laemmle cites Bossuet (in the full version explaining that he was "the Sun King's favorite preacher") for a view that he apparently shared, that "childhood is the most vile, abject form of human nature." Indeed, a web search turns up an aphorism of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet's: "L'enfance est la vie d'une bete" (Childhood is the life of an animal).

The Barchester Chronicles (1982)

Idyllic and exemplary

[10/10 · 18 April 2005]

That any miniseries as exquisite as this, dating from 1982, would be long unavailable in the U.S., and then appeal only to a small audience, while American rather than British TV and cinema from all reports take the world by storm and set the standard, is cause for amazement if not alarm. Need anyone look further to sympathize with the conservatives in this story, who are wont to feel, in Mr. Arabin's words, that all virtue is disappearing in the wake of modern "progress"? On the other hand, the author Anthony Trollope's star has risen recently among critics and academics; and, even if you have yet to read him, this adaptation will at least afford you a breath of relief that something is therefore going right.

As the only (and minor) negative already noted by others, the character of Arabin is underdeveloped and perhaps miscast, or at least not well conceived and made up. We can even imagine that a scene or two written to this end were dropped at the last minute to save running time. Eleanor's eventual attraction to him surprises us, along with others in the story, almost enough to have _deus ex machina_ written all over it. While we must remember that a filmmaker cannot as easily as a novelist take a detour to acquaint us with an important character entering late, a problem remains for the audience here and something should have been done to solve it.

Now back to the positives. The script is full of quotable lines worthy of the IMDb database. I'll work on it. I also admire this production as a celebration of music. Several times we glimpse Mr. Harding conducting or training one of the finest choirs in the world. Although I doubt that a cathedral precentor even in the 19th century would be directly responsible for this work, it is peculiar that anyone who is, precentor or not, would be consigned to poverty: but, as we know, such is often the way of things. Mr. Harding's musicianship is nevertheless a great source of joy to himself and others. As he tells his daughter brightly when they must move to humbler quarters, "But we shall take the music with us!"

We must recognize in the cast, as Miss Thorne, the daughter of a great composer: Ursula Howells's father Herbert was the dean of cathedral music for two generations, leaving us a cornucopia of liturgical repertoire radiant with a distinctively Anglican mysticism. All concerned must have regarded her part in this production as a mutual honor and privilege. Along with the closing credits rolls a setting of the Jubilate Deo (Psalm 100) almost worthy of his pen, distinguished by a wistful violoncello part evoking the roles of all our Mr. Hardings.

A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery: Have His Carcase: Episode One (1987) Season 1, Episode 4

Well worthwhile

[9/10 · 14 February 2005]

After seeing the miniseries of Sayers mysteries starring Ian Carmichael as Wimsey, I wasn't sure whether I would enjoy another actor's characterization. The first Petherbridge episode I watched was "Gaudy Night" (even though it is the last of the trilogy) and judging from the first few minutes, I didn't like him. He seemed to be a precious twit at first, and I daresay I'll always find this opening rather a mis-step. But by the end of the story, he had won my affection, and only increased it through the other two.

Wimsey is a gentleman amateur sleuth. Carmichael (who is after all known as a comic actor) emphasizes the gentleman and amateur, full of hearty bonhomie. Petherbridge's Wimsey, on the other hand, is much more reticent, sensitive, even melancholy, while capable of merciless confrontation when he has cornered the villain. Bunter observes that he has a mind like mousetrap. Compare the climactic interview in "Strong Poison" with its counterpart in "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club." He is first and foremost a man of keen observation and penetrating intelligence, an avid disciple of Sherlock Holmes in his intellectual and emotional makeup as probably in his appearance. Underneath his sometimes frosty persona, however, beats a compassionate heart that doesn't fail to go out to various characters whom society exploits while considering unsavory because... well, just because.

I will recommend and continue to enjoy both series, thankful to be able to do so. The sharply contrasting pictures which two talented actors can paint of a single character only increase the interest.

The Harriet Vane stories lead one to speculate that Dorothy L. Sayers might have put herself into this character, and drawn Wimsey as an imaginary ideal mate. She was herself a pioneer as a sterling academic in a time when many assumed that women were incapable of such a role; and her own marriage, though long and devoted, was far from happy.

Clouds of Witness (1972)

Good but not the best

[8/10 · 7 February 2005]

Of the three I have seen, "The Nine Tailors" gets a 10, no doubt about it. I'd have to give "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club" a 9 just because it isn't The Nine Tailors and I don't give 10s willy-nilly. So that leaves an 8 for this episode due to a few minor objections. It's been so long since reading the book that I don't recall whether it is responsible, or the production. But in any case...

In short, "Clouds of Witness" is a bit over-the-top. First, it gives us several quite histrionic scenes among members of Wimsey's family. Second, Wimsey heedlessly gets himself thrice into really life-threatening situations, from which he emerges as improbably as a James Bond or an Indiana Jones. Thirdly, a few critics call Wimsey "obnoxious" or "insufferable." While I don't at all agree in general, thinking he makes an exemplary case for the leisure class and would be a wonderful friend to have, in a few scenes here he deserves that criticism. I didn't admire his jaunty casualness in the House of Lords, after his derring-do has made national headlines, in conspicuous contrast to the solemn punctilium of all his peers. The impression is that he doesn't belong there. Wouldn't a real English gentleman and Lord go along with protocol as far as possible for courtesy's sake, even if he were to have a good laugh about it later?

It's great entertainment and recommended, even if a few false notes leave it slightly below its companions.

Sorrell and Son (1984)

I wanna see it again!

[21 October 2004]

It's been too long since we've seen this fine miniseries. From my recollection, this is a wonderful story of an ideal father and an ideal son together versus the world. The wife/mother is absent, I don't recall why. When son is about 12 years old, father and son make some promises to each other about how they are to cope with life henceforth: first and foremost, "no secrets:" their lives will be open books to each other. They are common folk, but father devotes his life to enabling the boy to become all he can be. He works like a dog to send his son to a good school. Son studies hard, flourishes, and in due course embarks upon a hard-earned career as a sensitive and compassionate physician. Not to indulge in spoilers, but among the ethical issues this story eventually tackles in due course, not melodramatically yet very poignantly, is euthanasia.

Several years ago, I pleaded here that the British miniseries "To serve them all my days" would be released on video; and whadya know, it has recently come to pass. God answers prayers. Dare I hope to get lucky twice?

Motorama (1991)

More absurd than surreal, with significant Christian symbolism

[7/10 · 7 June 2003]

(Some spoilers included:)

Although, many commentators have called this film surreal, the term fits poorly here. To quote from Encyclopedia Britannica's, surreal means:

"Fantastic or incongruous imagery": One needn't explain to the unimaginative how many ways a plucky ten-year-old boy at large and seeking his fortune in the driver's seat of a red Mustang could be fantastic: those curious might read James Kincaid; but if you asked said lad how he were incongruous behind the wheel of a sports car, he'd surely protest, "NO way!" What fantasies and incongruities the film offers mostly appear within the first fifteen minutes. Thereafter we get more iterations of the same, in an ever-cruder and more squalid progression that, far from incongruous, soon proves predictable. Not that it were, on the other hand, literally believable-- but it were unfair to tax Motorama in particular with this flaw, any plausible suspension of disbelief having fallen precipitously on the typical film-maker's and viewer's scale of values ever since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" became a blockbuster.

"Hallucinatory": How do we know what a hallucination is if part of having one is not knowing that we are having one? At any rate, some people know that they enjoy "hallucinogenic drugs"-- but if Motorama typifies the result of doing so, then I'm at a loss as to why anyone would take them more than once. There is, of course, the occasional bad trip. The movie must be one of those, pun and all.

"Juxtaposition of words that was startling": How many times can a ten-year-old startle you by uttering "Oh, my God!" when he likes something, or "Damn!" when he doesn't? These two interjections are about par for the course with this script. Sadly, any sense of the surreal in what passes for dialogue could only reveal, in direct proportion, one's naivete regarding the speech patterns of the rising American generation.

"A world completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense:" Motorama's world indeed makes no sense, but it is about as completely defined as a cartoon in an elementary school newspaper. The numerous guest stars in the cast all have cameo roles even less intelligent than our little hero who exclaims "Damn!" in the blink of an eyelash but needs several seconds to concoct the lamest lie. And even *his* character, despite appearing in nearly every scene, gets no significant development. Here's scant reward for any viewer who sympathizes, as I must, enough to wish to know him better and understand 'where he's coming from.' One vaguely senses a far better story and protagonist struggling to get out.

"Fully recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework." No, we see a succession of stereotypical and ever more dilapidated billboards, filling stations, greasy-spoon eateries, cheap hotels, and their lowlife habitues along country highways, exactly where they stereotypically belong.

"Largely responsible for perpetuating... the traditional emphasis on content." There is little content, moment-to-moment, in Motorama.

To sum up: Picture British millionaires dressed as clowns or pirates on the way to a posh costume party, sitting serene and mute as cautious chauffeurs inch their Rolls-Royces like fragile skiffs through a roiling sea of desperate humanity, Chinese who implore them through the windows and smear the glass with blood. Or imagine a stadium full of abandoned antiques, limousines like those above now rusting, and white pianos tinkled by ghosts. Into this detritus wander an exhausted boy and an ailing woman to whom he clings as mother-figure becoming girl-friend, who fall asleep side by side on the grass. He is awakened-- on the Feast of the Transfiguration, "white and glistering" day 1945-- by a brilliant flash on the horizon that is not the rising sun. Finding that his consort has become a corpse, he first believes that he has witnessed her soul going up to heaven. Later he explains only a little less innocently, 'I learned a new word today: atom-bomb. It's like God taking a photograph.' Now, *there* are just two samples of cinematic surrealism, surrealism whose ironies ripple out far enough to invade its film's very title: Empire of the Sun. If you seek surreal, *please* don't miss it. Alas, however hard he treads on the accelerator to race his chariot through and beyond the desert, no scenes so exquisitely strange, rich, subtle, or gorgeous await Motorama's poor little Gus in his quest.

None of the above necessarily constitutes a thumbs-down on this film. Though somewhat disappointed, I can't dismiss it, in view of the respectability of another genre that it does exemplify-- one influenced, to be sure, by surrealism, but also by expressionism, existentialism, and Franz Kafka's pessimism amidst omnipotent power structures. Let's try on for size: Theater of the Absurd.

Turning to E.B.'s article on this style, I am amazed by how, to the extent that Theater of the Absurd is a valid artistic style, the above objections to Motorama vanish like a puff of smoke. I'm tempted to quote the entire text as support of the identification.

Theater of the Absurd attempts to show "that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose... humankind is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.": Having instantaneously achieved his purpose of getting away from a depressing home life among bickering parents, Gus finds himself purposeless until he drives past a glittering billboard reading "Motorama" and decides to win the lottery that it promises. As others have already revealed, this ambition proves illusory: although the game "never expires", the sponsoring corporation has no intention that anyone should ever win, and has ways to trick, confuse, and leave crestfallen any aspirant to the reward. He, like others, is ultimately disappointed in his dream.

"Absurdist playwrights, therefore, did away with most of the logical structure of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic action as conventionally understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence... a timeless, circular quality emerges." "Language in an absurdist play is full of... repetitions... repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense." Underneath a sometimes "dazzling comic surface," we find "an underlying message of metaphysical distress." Gus's obsession with a silly game, his inane language, the plot device wherein he divines a bleak future and/or returns to an earlier moment and takes a different but still bleak turn-- so much fits now. While an admirer of the surreal would do better with some films, anyway, of Spielberg, admirers of Motorama as it really is should find fellow-travelers-- not instead but addition-- in the works of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet.

But one can't quite stop here. After his disillusionment with the game, Gus returns to "Phil" (i.e., Love), the first attendant he had met and the one person who had treated him decently, although he had also scolded him-- at a service station advertising "Be full-filled!". Under Phil's tutelage he learns a life of waiting for cars. We might note here that the absurdist playwright Beckett had entitled his most famous play "Waiting for Godot," and that for Godot we should read "God." God is one of Phil's preoccupations, too. Furthermore, as the indirect result of his previous encounter with Gus, Phil is badly maimed and goes about in a cast with his arms straight out horizontally. In the last scene, Gus, now Phil's protege, says that he wants to hear music. We hear none, but we see Phil wiggling his fingers at the end of his outstretched arm, beckoning Gus closer, and Gus responds. The End.

Finally, on to an author whom I happen to be reading currently, the Anglican theologian William Stringfellow. If this rebel-lawyer is not acknowledged as an architect or undergirder of Liberation Theology, which is more a Roman Catholic than an Anglican movement, perhaps he should be. Police brutality and corporate greed are a cliche in cinema and literature, including Motorama, but Stringfellow supports and illuminates such sentiments with impressive warrants from scripture, tradition, and reason.

His most significant work is an expose of the earthly activities of those fallen angels whom the Bible refers to as principalities and powers. Principalities, wrote Stringfellow, are behind all of our popular three I's: Images, Institutions, and Ideologies. All of these commend themselves to our worship by making false promises. The more deeply involved with an image, an institution, or an ideology any person becomes, the more his own personhood becomes "depleted" and be becomes a slave to them. Promising power, control, and immortality, they inexorably deliver helplessness, chaos, and death. As essentially fallen, defeated powers, they can do no more than that. Yet they beguile humans with that "dominion over the earth" promised by God in the book of Genesis, while in fact no one of us controls an image, an institution, or an ideology bent inevitably on its own hegemony and self-preservation. They take on lives of their own. "Dominion" happens to be a mistranslation: a more accurate rendering of the Hebrew would be "stewardship." But this is a quibble beside a more fundamental problem: Most of us neglect to notice that God had delegated this power to Adam *before* the fall. We have no reason to assume that we, his descendents, still exercise it now: on the contrary, it should be obvious that demonic forces have stolen it from us.

One might add two observations of C.S. Lewis: First, that "man's conquest of nature" is a mere illusion, and a ruse to cover the fact that one is really talking about the conquest of some men by other men with nature as the instrument; and secondly, contrary to popular belief, Satan is no kind of good-time Charlie. He may dangle out pleasures at first, but he is very niggardly with them and will withdraw them from any human firmly in his thrall, perhaps leaving his prey sitting in front of the fire feeling miserably sorry for himself and seething with resentment.

Now, applying these insights to Motorama, we seem them mirrored remarkably in Gus's experience. He is, if not nice, at least a pretty little boy prior to falling victim to the Motorama game. The first signs advertising it glisten glamorously. The longer he continues, however, and the deeper he journeys towards the sponsoring corporation's headquarters, the more shabby they become. He's lonely, meeting no one else who plays the game. The stations giving out the cards have either fallen into ruins or are staffed by zombies. The people he does meet along the way are more and more ugly, deceitful, and hostile. (The fact that the principalities answer to a common dictator does not mean that they can abide one another). Gus's humanity is leached out of him as he becomes not only totally self-centered and oblivious to the needs of others but partially blinded... disfigured... prematurely aged while infantile in the literal sense of linguistically challenged. Eventually even his precious Mustang is taken from him in a crash, and he must continue in a dead man's wreck. Yet at long last, having done everything he thought was expected, he presents himself to the principality in its proud tower to receive his prize. Using the biblical power to confuse wielded by those who have built such monuments to their own vanity, its agents evade him, disappoint, insult, and finally throw him from the top floor. He FALLS long and hard, landing, finally in a body of water. In other words, in classic symbolism, he DIES. He has met the inevitable bad end of anyone who has put his faith in such a deceiver.

But this fate proves to be only a warning look into a mutable future. He repents and returns to Phil, and upon seeing him performs the very first generous, selfless act we have seen from him for almost an hour and a half: noting that Phil is now handicapped and hardly able to insert a hose into a gas tank, he asks, "Can I help you with that?" Then, seeing the "help wanted" sign, he decides to apply for the job, explaining to the motorist with whom he was hitch-hiking that he reckons he'll get out here, because it doesn't look like too bad a place to work.

This interpretation is conjectural, of course, and it may surprise or even outrage the film's "cult classic" aficionados who see quite different points in it.

If Motorama isn't quite my cup of tea, I'm at least convinced now that it's hardly the worst film ever made.

The Black Stallion (1979)

More than meets the ear

[9/10 · 4 February 2003]

Reading the comments already contributed, I was aghast at the several reviewers who thought that this film was practically worthless. I think that it is a near-masterpiece.

Admittedly, I have not read the book, so I can't comment on whether the film was true to it. However, if a film is to be faithful to what lies behind an author's words, it must do so in visual ways. I'd ask, to be faithful to the book, wouldn't a script be something more than a transcription of dialogue? And wouldn't any worthwhile author have chafed constantly at the inadequacy of words-- let alone explicit dialogue-- to express what he or she wants to say? Some scholars nowadays, to be sure, regard the "text" or "discourse" as the starting point for any further commentary; but I doubt it.

Photographically this film is nothing short of lyrical, as many professional critics have noted. We get a full fifteen minutes that should stun and fascinate us with no dialogue at all; and many crucial subsequent scenes, too, are wordless. Me, I'm a musician, who can agree with observations that the score was sometimes a hodge-podge; I'm woefully incompetent at any visual art. But I'm not blind: I hope that I can at least recognize visual mastery when I see it. I, too, once felt that the second half of the film-- after Alec and The Black had returned to civilization-- was distinctly more prosaic than the first half. But repeated viewings have persuaded me otherwise: that when I'd thought that the film was becoming weak or inept, I was missing a point. Now I applaud the insight of IMDb's "Invariable Self," who entitled his comment, "A beautiful film about solitude, interdependence, survival, and achievement." That's it-- I'd even go further and say, beyond "solitude", "isolation": and it doesn't stop halfway through.

We see this first at the juncture: one moment The Black is being lifted (only at Alec's insistence) onto the rescue ship. The next moment, a little girl back 'home' in a suburban school assembly is reading her doggerel poem about how Alec and his horse had survived together. The young pupil did her best to describe their experience, and she captured a few essential things about it-- but we are impressed more by how much she missed.

For all her love and good intentions, Alec's bond with The Black is a mystery to his mother, too. This cluelessness is apparent most poignantly in a later scene when she and her son simply don't connect, and both are powerless to express themselves. Thrown back on words, Alec, half-orphaned in a terrifying catastrophe of which she knows no details, hesitates, stutters. His mutterings are more eloquent than any oration. 'Alexander's father... gave him Bucephalus... before he died... I have to ride.' Good woman, she nods, at last, in resigned affirmation of something in her son that she doesn't understand.

This isolation is maintained to the end. Later, Henry Daily admonishes Alec: "Secrecy! You and I-- we have a secret! Do you understand?" But is even Henry privy to the shared experience between Alec and the Black? Apparently not.

We might think that we have been vouchsafed the secret by the end if this film-- but there is a sequel. And, for once, it might be plausible to think: yes, the depths of The Black have not even yet been plumbed.

To Serve Them All My Days (1980–1981)

Encore!

[10/10 · 16 October 2002]

Hmm, except for not finding Howarth at all pathetic, and for the fact that his hospital plea to die at Bamfylde is there-- briefly but poignantly-- I agree with all the previous posters' compliments. So what can I add?

One of the most interesting sub-plots, thus far unremarked, is the changing relationship between Powlett-Jones and the science teacher Carter. First, I daresay that in those days the place of science in the British public school curriculum was still considered rather parvenu or peripheral. It was also relatively expensive; and Bamfylde, as a lesser-ranked school with, as Herries laments, few "high fliers" among its old boys, was surviving hand-to-mouth. So a dedicated science master would need to fight and connive for the good of his department, and that is what Carter did.

Spoilers: When the aptly named Alderman Blunt, a local nouveau-riche industrialist, began taking a shrewd, potentially philanthropic interest in the school, Carter eagerly cultivated him-- not to put too fine a point on it, he sucked up to him. So Blunt wanted to initiate his largesse with a useless, pretentious, self-serving war memorial in the middle of the quad? Fine. Treat him right, Carter said, and science labs and other valuable facilities would follow.

The hot-headed Welsh veteran Powlett-Jones, however, knew that Blunt was a war profiteer whose shoddy products had caused British soldiers to suffer and die. Standing on principle, he wanted nothing to do with the man, especially when his overtures smacked of self-aggrandizement; and he dismissed Carter as a brown-nosing cynic. His opposition developed into an active campaign, thoroughly alienating Carter as well as Blunt, and forcing an administrative showdown in which he was vetoed by his beloved headmaster for the good of the school.

After this event, the enmity between Carter and Powlett-Jones festered for years. Carter maintained a stuffed-shirt military bearing to cover for the fact that, for health reasons, he could not actually fight in the war. Powlett-Jones taunted him with this fact, and eventually their animosity literally came to blows. In a dramatic scene Herries, valuing them both as two of his best teachers, had to play peacemaker and forge a wary truce between them.

When Herries' retirement approached, the rivalry between Carter and Powlett-Jones continued, now under a gentlemanly veneer, as both of them became final candidates to succeed him. Each assumed that either himself or the other would be chosen. The crucial turning point in their relationship occurred at the moment they realized that the board was rejecting both of them in favor of a smooth, icy, exotic outsider. Over months and several years to come, they would discover how much they really had in common, forming an awkward but fervent alliance as they watched this man steadily undo what both of them cherished in the school. While never forgetting that they were two very different people, they came to see themselves as complementary, even like team-mates. I will not add to the spoilers I have already committed by describing their parting, but it was very cordial and even touching.

This is just one of many inter-woven threads in this miniseries' intimate saga. Over and above entertainment, the drama also offers an eloquent witness to Americans as we deliberate over our tottering educational establishment. If PBS would only release it on video, among many other sterling programs in its archives, it should have considerably less need of quarterly fund-raising appeals.

Goodnight Mr Tom (1998 TV Movie)

A man and a boy flourish together

[26 July 2002]

This film rates a 9 of 10 or maybe even 10 from me, an accolade that I do not bestow generously. Anything is regrettable that makes one glad *not* to have read a book, but those whose acquaintance with the literary original has spoiled their appreciation of this production beg that very sentiment.

Their objections are as follows:

* Mr. Tom is not as they picture him in the book. (No details). Tough. John Thaw is a great actor, who should be allowed some scope in developing his character and should not be faulted if he doesn't happen to look alike. Jeez, some critics also objected to Daniel Radcliffe simply for not having green eyes like in the Harry Potter novels. What do you want, a talented actor who enjoys the author's own enthusiastic endorsement and brings a character to life, or a green-eyed duffer?

* Giving William his favorite breakfast, just once, and telling him what a beautiful baby he was made his mother too nice. I found the mother thoroughly horrifying, so much that an occasional calculated indulgence would be all the more insidious and discomfiting. We have to wonder what manipulative treachery she's up to now. Maybe she was trying confuse her son into suspecting even a gesture of kindness and pleasure as inevitably leading to misery. As for telling him how nice he had been-- when someone is out to tear all your self-esteem to shreds, observing that you used to be better makes it even worse. Make no mistake, we have here a movie mother from hell right down there with Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. I can hardly imagine a more chilling woman. The silver lining in the cloud is that when Mr. Tom later comforts William by explaining that she must have been "very sick" and wartime conditions kept people from noticing or coming to help, he could more easily believe him.

* The film named Mr. Tom's own son John rather than William. Point well taken, I don't know why this would have been changed, although it is rather trivial. One might claim it as an improvement, or at least an appropriate concession to the medium. Mr. Tom always let William be himself, loved him for himself, and wanted him to know this-- hence he wouldn't want to suggest that William reminded him of, or was standing in for, another child. Books are able to explain what goes on in a character's mind, but films must confine themselves to what can be seen and heard.

One of my favorite scenes: Mr. Tom announces that he plans to go fishing the next day. William begs to go along, too, and Tom agrees with a sigh of feigned reluctance. Then we see him marching through town with a determined poker face, pretending to pretend that he is oblivious to a long retinue of boys and girls behind him: that they have nothing to do with the Old Grouch, they just happen to be going the same way in single file with their fishing poles. Several neighbor women on the sidewalk exchange amused winks with one another.

Someone dismissed the story as predictable. Huh? I can only quote the ten-year-old in another wonderful film, who was just as desperate as William for someone to care: "You might have been ordinary once, but you're not ordinary now. Not many unmarried men want to adopt." This was Jamie in "Second Best." Only a third comes to mind treating this situation with nearly as much sympathy and probity: the all-too-obscure "Marvin and Tige." When an industry so addicted to the predictable and formulaic as Hollywood fails to mine this vein any more than it has done to date, one must doubt that any such accusation applies.

Frailty (2001)

Soooo Texas! (?)

[31 May 2002]

This movie treats us, for the most part, to well developed acting, a production evoking effective atmosphere, and a cunning screenplay.

After the plot began to thicken I wished, just as someone else here predicted, that I had paid more attention to the beginning. Of course I was on the lookout for red herrings-- it just couldn't remain as pat and straightforward as it started-- but for the most part I couldn't spot them in advance. At this level my suspension of disbelief was strained only by the spectacle of a cop letting himself be inveigled out of his headquarters in the middle of a stormy night, bound for parts unknown, alone with an apparently invaluable but sinister-acting witness. FBI agents have a lot of egg on their faces lately, but they're not *that* stupid, are they?

In a vacuum, this is altogether a well-done thriller. Perhaps examples of the genre should be left at that. But I can never do so. After seeing any film or drama, I wonder what it means. What truth is it showing us? At least, the shores of what island ineffable is it lapping us around? If none, then the experience is a waste of money at best-- but we must even suspect a meal of lies, to be warned against as surely as children from poisons under the kitchen sink.

I have spent my life in several regions of the U.S., but have never lived in Texas. I'm afraid that my impression of this state is unattractive. It looks like the home of upstanding citizens supremely confident in their own righteousness, striding less easily than appears atop a criminal class so singularly violent and incorrigible as to call for the country's most butt-kicking enforcement apparatus. The last part of this image is demonstrable enough. As it is of the Texans' own making and theoretically mutable (albeit characteristic of such creations to outstay their welcome) they are presumably proud of it.

Needless to say, a governor of Texas who never contravened a death sentence now sits in the Oval Office. His Attorney General cries out for more and more police power nearly every time he opens his mouth.

This is not entirely, er, a dead issue. Life imitates art.

Yet perhaps the first part of this impression is just one ignorant Yankee's prejudice. Frailty, however, is set in Texas, and one can't see it fitting anywhere else. A viewer can say, "ah, yes, well, at least this impression is not mine alone." Truth or lie? Among the many verdicts and analyses that have had the opportunity to emerge after a couple months, maybe I missed some chorus of protest from Texans that it has traduced their state.

The film presents an interesting character: the two polar opposites above fused into a single individual. It bids us wonder, is this union as improbable and fantastic as at first blush? Or is it (at least in Texas) plausible-- perhaps, even, as radically inevitable as the two sides of a coin? As if this question were not intriguing enough in itself, add that the catalyst for the fusion is a remarkably rootless and solipsistic sense of religion. This is another phenomenon for which Texas seems especially hospitable. Remember Koresh in Waco?

Here's where the film might be said, if not to tell lies, at least to skirt dangerously close. We see two brothers walking home from school, past tidy white halls with steeples, singing (one distinctly more eagerly than the other) a song that people learn to sing in there. Aren't we to think that they have enjoyed a Christian upbringing? So when their loving father starts talking, one night, of a grisly mission from "God," as revealed to him by "an angel", are we or are we not meant to think that this conceit has something whatever to do with Christianity? I'm here to say that it has nothing to do with Christianity as I know it, nor as history knows it.

Whatever religion it is, one critic (not, I pray, a representative Texan) was impressed enough to say, this film will make you believe.

Believe what? That some who walk the earth in human form are not humans but demons, and that the God of either Christians or Jews appoints certain followers to take the law into their own "Hands" and destroy them? This I must take to be a lie. "God's Hand" may, indeed, have been visited by an angel. But not all angels speak for God.

There is another interpretation. "Believe" indeed: that there is nothing to which a religious fanaticism unchecked by scripture, reason, tradition, and a sense of sacred community might not impel a deluded follower. And that here we see a human/demon dichotomy exposed as a _reductio ad absurdam_, which less clearly exposed fosters and drives the criminal justice system of-- well, I guess it's up to all citizens, isn't it, to determine where.

If this is what "Frailty" teaches us to believe, I'm ready. Like that of "Apt Pupil", it is a thoroughly unpleasant message. But if the message is true, far be it from me to kill the messenger.

About a Boy (2002)

I couldn't have written this without seeing it

[9/10 · 28 May 2002]

Critics who have seen many more films than I agree that this is among the smartest, most delightful comedies of this or any recent year. Especially refreshingly, this distinction comes the old-fashioned way: with a solid and intelligent script, fine acting, and direction with a sense of-- well, direction. We see an honest, intimate comedy of manners, with no overlay of untoward pretentions like flashy special effects or a budget to vie with third-world countries.

Furthermore, its release date is a fittingly cheeky gesture itself, juxtaposing this tidy little work of art with its opposite, a sprawling, spectacular episode of Star Wars. The world is, alas, not always a reasonable place, but there is no *reason* why it should thereby suffer from its competition at the hands of anyone who attends more than one movie per season. There are various sorts of good movie. If perchance two are showing simultaneously, is it too much to expect that we see one and return for the other next weekend, blessing our good fortune and storing up such unaccustomed pleasure in one's hump? Treks between the desert's oases seem to lengthen over time.

But now to differ a little with the critics: I even sympathized with the character of Will. A "blank"? Yes, seemingly he is. But "a bastard", whom audiences "love to hate"? Where have folks been since 9/11? "First do no harm" is a similarly blank, or negative precept, yet as a basic ethical hurdle it fells many even whom we don't usually love to hate. I suggest beginning with it.

Will stands in the tradition of generations of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who live quietly in their homes and let others do likewise. Further, awhile back we all might have enjoyed the reminiscent comedies of, say, Noel Coward, who portrayed such with a smile, complete with equally creative strategems to beguile the opposite sex. As for us, typically we save up because by age 65-- or 60 if we can possibly manage-- our life's ambition is to attain to Will's situation; whereas he is, shall we say, retired at 38. There gapes the gulf between us.

Yeah, Will likes his sports car (although not too much to consign it to a daft woman when rushing out to save a daft boy), but apparently he doesn't habitually burn up irreplaceable resources gallivanting around the world in jets or yachts. Such self-indulgence, hardly confined to the leisure class anymore, irreversibly deprives all posterity of not only energy but plastic. Otherwise, money that passes through his albeit frivolous hands cyclically provides employment and livelihood to others, making his lifestyle no more malign than that of most Londoners.

Meanwhile, Will schemes no scams to weasel into the wallets of unsuspecting fellow citizens. He is not selling drugs. He doesn't blow up buildings or teach kids to kill Jews under the pretext of some exotic religion. We might wish that he weren't quite so stand-offish for so long towards the lonely and needy like Marcus (who, I agree, with most but not all, is nicer than Will). But, then, to such lengths one must go nowadays to ensure that gestures towards the young aren't misunderstood. Good-old Will even passes that test-- under the eagle eye of a mother who, over this issue, suddenly jolts herself out of her free-thinking, nostalgic, bipolar haze into a shocked vigilance, in the finest tradition of properly instructed, up-to-date 'parenting.'

In the sense that these scenes don't fit her character, they don't work. But I bet the directors knew and intended this incongruity full well. Given the Stygian streams that cultural spelunkers James Kincaid and Judith Levine have mapped at last, and the ritual coin in the mouth for the boatman before contemporary audiences can sit back and enjoy an intergenerational relationship, theirs was so abrupt and blatent as to constitute satire. As Marcus would trill, this stroke was "brilliant!" Quentin Crisp would agree, who advised: if and when you must start going bald, the cool thing to do is shave your head.

So, by today's real standards (i.e., divested of vestigial Marxist lip service), we have, er, what to hate in Will Freeman? Two generations ago we admired undisguised leisure and a modicum of independent wealth. Now, our blue noses ever to whomever's grindstone, we affect to despise them. If this change came from living in a society become generally freer, more just, more promising, and more gracious than then, I'd agree: fair enough, goodbye and good riddance to Will and all his ilk. But that is not what I see outside theaters. Do you?

Does the inferred distaste arise from the fact that-- unlike countless others who live too high on the hog to maintain straight-faced that they earn their keep, however chronically "stressed-out" they may become on behalf of their chosen standard-- Will is a *single man*? Does a T-shirt glimpsed in the film's first minutes say it all? "Lorene Bobbitt for Surgeon General" reads the chest of a woman obviously eager to proclaim her independence from men, but perhaps less eager to return men the favor.

From Hollywood's ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, things that go bump in the night, and earnest turning-over-new-leaves by dramatically converted protagonists, good Lord deliver us, as the Weitzes have already done. Not for them the conjuration of lightning flashes. Freemasonry, it is said, quietly takes good men and makes them better. Once he'd doggedly pounded his way in, 12-year-old Marcus quietly took a blank man and made him good. I'm happy. Maybe even, someday, Will Freeman Will Freemason, but that's another movie (always leave room for a sequel, in which he could even defy American-imperialist bugaboos enough to give Marcus a hug the next time the kid fears for his mother's life). Meanwhile, both man and boy-- or is it both boys-- could do worse. Like most movies.

The Magical World of Disney: The Boy Who Stole the Elephant: Part 1 (1970) Season 17, Episode 2

Delightful variant on the book

[29 October 2001]

I'm not sure why Mark Lester is listed in the cast as though he had a bit part, because he is the star. The IMDB information does not list the studio, but I think if it's not Disney it is an adaptation that he could have made-- considerably prettified and sugar-coated compared to Julilly Kohler's novel. But I won't complain, because it works.

A modification is required right off to explain how a clearly English boy comes to be a runaway waif in the middle of the late 19th-century U.S. Further, in the novel Catfish Williams, his boss, is a brutal drunkard, an incompetent circus manager, and an all-around S.O.B. In the film, he is a lovable avuncular sort with one Achilles heel: a weakness for gambling. The film casts the owner of the circus that owns the elephant as a dashing woman with a long-standing soft place in her heart, maybe even a romantic interest, in old Catfish.

Kohler, a member of the family of plumbing-appliance magnates in Wisconsin, whose company underwent a famous worker's strike around the 1950s, is not particularly famous as a children's author, but I think that my father once met her at a writer's conference and brought this book of hers home to me as a small child. I've always liked it, and so have other children to whom I have introduced it. The film is a nice honor to her work, even if it was changed in some respects. If you enjoy the film, try to read it.

The Quest (1986)

Very creepy!

[5 August 2001]

Cody Walpole (Henry Thomas) is a scientific, mechanically-minded, and ruggedly individualistic 14-year-old loner. He is also brave to the point of foolhardy, quite the daredevil-- except that he doesn't let anyone tell him what to do. Extremely inner-directed, what he dares and endures are come out of a quiet but fierce determination of his own prompting.

He stumbles upon a seemingly haunted, God-forsaken spot in the Australian wilderness, a long-abandoned mine or quarry flooded with filthy brown water. He knows of an old hermit who spends his vacations living alone in the area. After seeing none-too-recent evidence of this man's presence, he calls out and searches for him and eventually finds his skeleton. It looks as though the man was literally scared to death. This place is not on any map and, after some further investigation, he hears that the local aborigines shun the spot as the legendary lair of a monster living in the murky pool, a being so horrible that the mere sight of it kills. The place seems to exude bad luck and gives everyone the creeps who goes near it.

Cody believes that there must be a rational explanation for this phenomenon and becomes obsessed with the site and discovering the true nature of the creature in the water. This mission requires him to defy and disobey everyone in the local village, even his guardian, another individual so laconic and independent as to be a soul mate, who usually lets this resourceful boy do whatever he wants. Cody's steps in solving the mystery are breathtakingly lonely and dangerous.

As much as I admire individualism and independence, it is difficult for me to sympathize with courage carried to such an extreme for no compelling reason. Although others have recommended this film for children, I can't agree. It is the stuff of which nightmares are made-- I think it could even give me some. And Cody's reckless behavior, despite his admirable traits, makes him something of an anti-hero.

There is no denying, however, that the filmmakers have done a superb job with atmosphere and have captured some gorgeous wilderness scenery. I can understand this being among someone's favorite films. It is certainly different.

Billy Elliot (2000)

Triumphant

[17 January 2001]

I don't understand the verdict of some critics and commenters that this film is flawed because of something far-fetched, derivative, or on the other hand predictable, in its basic premise. This assumption can only come from ignorance or prejudice.

The fact is that as long as ballet has existed, so, necessarily, have male ballet dancers, and in considerable numbers, although of course they are not ballerinas (a term reserved for the female). This is an honorable and demanding fine art whose adepts must be, among other attainments, athletes of a high order.

Female boxers also exist, but we can be thankful that they are an aberration. Real-life Lynn Snowden Picket was, for awhile, just as serious about boxing as Billy Elliot was about dancing. She trained for months at that crucible of the gloved greats, Gleason's gym in Brooklyn, where she insisted on a real coach, not the staff member that such places maintain especially to mollycoddle the dilettanti who like to hang around. After proving herself by winning a professional match, she concluded that boxing is bad stuff both physically and psychologically, gave it up, and wrote a book about her experiences, _Looking_for_a_fight_, to dissuade not only women but everyone in general from this pursuit.

Now, anyone IMHO who notes a symmetry between two films in which, respectively, a girl aspires (if one can call it that) to a detrimental practice that most have the good sense to leave to misguided males, and a boy aspires to a noble art only reputedly dominated by females, only to maintain that the latter must be little but plagiarism simply on account of the calendar, didn't look or think very carefully and has a lot of explaining yet to do.

The historic coequal presence of women and men on the ballet stage being obvious from the most cursory observation, one must go on to ask where the men came from. Surely some arose from poor and lower-class backgrounds. Although one need only click on this Web page to appreciate that the impoverished and culturally deprived have no monopoly on misunderstanding ballet, at least they have some excuse for it. All the likelier it is, then, that some, at least, of our actual male ballet stars had as boys to deal just as heroically with an environment like Billy Elliot's. (Hence, I was glad to see that Billy's sexuality remained ambiguous. He can be hetero, homo, or bisexual as each viewer wishes. As he observed, one does not have to be gay to dance well. Neither must one be straight to be admired for it.)

I submit, therefore, that Billy's story is, in principle, both true-to-life and worth the telling, leaving it to others to dispute, if they can, the verisimilitude of details. It is worth noting, however, that few of those all-too-happy to consign it to the dustbin over some a-priori objection have actually dared to engage themselves with what is on the screen in front of them.

Pay It Forward (2000)

Shadowlands meets The Man Without a Face

[7/10 · 24 October 2000]

This movie is, I agree, good and commendable for all, but a subtler script and more satisfying conclusion would improve it. Times were when you knew before entering a theater whether you would see a comedy or a tragedy. While one may doubt that the abrupt, gratuitous unhappy ending here (not Deus but diablo ex machina) rises to the stature of proper tragedy, it certainly isn't proper comedy, either. I can add nothing to what others have already expressed along these lines.

But, unless I missed something, no critic here has yet mentioned interesting parallels to two other films, The Man Without a Face and Shadowlands.

Mr. McLeod, the title character of The Man Without a Face is, like Mr. Simonet, a devoted teacher bearing horrible burn scars on his face and chest, to whom Chuck Norstadt, a boy Trevor's age and, like him, fatherless, turns for particular mentoring and deliverance. In Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis is also a formidable teacher: a renowned Oxford don and author of books on many subjects. All three teachers are refreshingly old-fashioned in their academic values and methods. The sterling character of what they staunchly purvey helps make them inspiring pedagogues.

These three men all see themselves as confirmed bachelors with little or no experience with women. Life having given them little beyond their intelligence, they have learned to ask little from it. They don't even ask for happiness as most of us define it-- only for the absence of pain, or ataraxia, in the form of sequestration from the dangers of human intimacy. They have convinced themselves that the popular song is mistaken: people who need people are NOT the luckiest people in the world. Like good epicureans, each has quietly staked a claim to a tiny plot of figurative ground, carefully tended it into a beautiful garden, and walled it off from the rough-and-tumble environs. Their epicureanism is incomplete, however, as long as they dare not look for a friend, whether man, woman, or child, whom they can invite in to share it.

From the standpoint of their leading men, this quest, at first fortuitous and reluctant, then committed irretrievably, is the theme of each of these films. There are no tangible rewards, and they all doubt sometimes that the intangible benefits of any relationship, however much they long for it, are worth the risks. Lewis becomes haltingly involved with Joy whom, together with her son Douglas, an alcoholic husband has deserted. In Justin McLeod's case, the turbulent figure is a boy himself with the same family background.

For Simonet, it is both: abandoned mother and child are obviously a package deal. Womanhood is by far the less familiar territory for him. "I've never been here before" he confesses to her. When she shows up in his apartment, he protests that a regular daily routine is all that enables him to cope. Her mere presence unexpectedly in his space epitomizes the upheaval that he dreads, and we can see him falling to pieces on the spot. In that many mentally ill people require very "structured" lives, it occurred to me that he may still be in precarious condition after time in an institution.

Mr. Simonet also hesitates to care for Trevor beyond the contractual obligations of a salaried professional. Trevor knows this well and points it out: "you do what you get paid to do." Mr. Simonet, for his part, tells as much about himself as about Trevor by describing the boy as exigent.

But how exigent are Trevor, Chuck, or Douglas? Their various demands are circuitous expressions of a single torment: the absence of their fathers, or of anyone else to take their place. Whether they cling to memories and fantasies like Chuck and Douglas, or whether their life depends upon facing hideous reality, as for Trevor, the prospect of parental abandonment is one of a child's worst nightmares, and for all three it has come true.

An expedient heresy is afoot in our society that fathers are optional. Too few have discussed how eloquently Pay it Forward (as well as the other two films) testifies to the contrary. Trevor was not entirely altruistic in marking down Mr. Simonet as his second beneficiary, trying to arrange a date for him with Mom. Few children in broken homes can long put out of their minds the dream that their families might somehow be made whole again. One can't hold that scheme against Trevor, as he was only working, however slender the chances, for something he deeply deserved. Protecting himself with a jocular air, Chuck Norstadt, too, once floated the unlikely idea of Mr. McLeod's taking an interest in his mother.

To me, the scenes in which Haley as Trevor reflected the progress or failure of this plan are the most effective and moving in the entire film. These range from intense curiosity (during their first encounter under false pretenses of his own devising), to the exultation of his cry "It worked!" early one Sunday morning when he discovers Simonet in the house, and his ebullience as the three of them merely sit watching TV, to his desperate pleading with Simonet after complications ensue. To suggest that these scenes were exaggerated or sentimental is to insult the very real, however oft repressed, anguish of a fatherless boy.

After noting similarities among three films, we must conclude with a regrettable difference. C.S. Lewis was a devout Anglican churchman, as the film showed unabashedly (and some felt that it was too restrained at that). A chapter in Isabelle Holland's book also portrayed, in no uncertain terms, McLeod as a practicing Catholic (either Anglo- or Roman). Although, alas, no such scene found its place in the film, a crucifix hanging prominently in his house proclaims the fact.

Pay it Forward, however, betrays no suggestion that Sunday morning means anything more to its characters than an opportunity to sleep late. It would have stolen their thunder to introduce any reminder that paying it forward has been going on for centuries. It is called the Church. Naturally, only someone ignorant of this tradition (literally, handing on) would see a need to invent it.

The Ogre (1996)

Beauty in malign inversion, per Tournier

[9/10 · 11 September 2000]

One published reviewer said that Goring's character was written, and played, for comic effect. This complaint sounded plausible, but a glance in Encyclopedia Britannica reassures our confidence in the production's respect for authenticity. It suggests that Volker Spengler's characterization may be on the mark.

During Hitler's Putsch in 1923, Goring sustained a painful injury whose relief by means of morphine turned him into a drug addict nearly the rest of his life. This influence, in turn, made him "alternately elated or depressed; he was egocentric and bombastic, delighting in flamboyant clothes and uniforms, decorations, and exhibitionist jewelry." We see all these traits in Spengler's scenes, e.g. in his drunken alternation between a tirade and a blue funk at the fact that someone else had shot a stag that he wanted to shoot. When a soldier enters to bring him some really bad news, Goring is already so gloomy that he barely raises his hand from the table to salute, and his "Heil Hitler" is just a slurred grunt.

The article also establishes his corpulence and luxuriousness, to a point resented by his colleagues in the party. "His hunting interests enabled him to obtain a vast forest estate in the Schorfheide, north of Berlin, where from 1933 he developed a great baronial establishment" called Carinhall, full of artistic war booty, to which he retired whenever he could.

The film showed Goring as an often jovial man given, like Hitler, to occasional fits of imperious screaming. This behavior, according to one book I read recently, was to be expected of any top leader of the Third Reich not merely as a habit but as a deliberate technique. People outside of Germany were slow to take Hitler seriously as a threat because this conduct was so strange to them. They did not realize that German culture of the time regarded it as a standard part of the fatherly role. Therefore, as Hitler understood well, the more he screamed and shouted at his countrymen, the more closely they would identify him as a father figure and the embodiment of Der Vaterland.

Many superstitious beliefs have been associated with precious stones. The novel explains that Goring was not unique in imagining that plunging his fingers into a bowl of gems would drain away nervous energy and uncomfortable emotions. Other sources recount that when Hugo von Hofmannsthal's first poems appeared, under a pseudonym, they were so heavy with sensuous Weltschmerz that one critic declared they must have been written by an opulent old man while dipping his fingers in jewels. (He would soon be surprised that the poet was still a youth). So even this strange indulgence of Goring is in keeping with the ambient culture among those few who could afford the experience.

One could say much, much more about this complex film, but perhaps this elucidation of just one minor aspect suggests the multilayered care with which it has been put together.

A Perfect World (1993)

Valuable exploration of the many chambers of the human heart

[8/10 · 21 August 2000]

The temptation is natural to dig a deep, smug gulf between oneself and a criminal. It is so much more comfortable and reassuring to consider the latter as an inherent difference in kind, born evil, and somehow sub-human; than to assess the mixture of good and evil motives and potentials common to both.

But this caricature is dangerous, for either an individual or a society indulging in it. Films, therefore, which cross the chasm by exploring an anti-hero's moral ambiguities are particularly commendable. I suspect also that they require unusual sensitivity and skill to produce from all concerned, as well as above-average courage, since they will have an uphill fight on the way to popularity.

A Perfect World is such a film, and my hat is off to Clint Eastwood for the effort. As both actor and director, I think that he shows unappreciated subtlety. There is also humility here, as he takes a back seat on the screen to Kevin Costner and T.J. Lowther, both of whose acting is riveting (the latter not so much for delivery of lines, often deadpan, as for the amazing emotional intensity which this small boy summons in his face).

It is not an entirely successful movie (does such a thing exist?). I agree with critics who found the interplay of characters in Eastwood's party of cops and politicos relatively too shallow and undeveloped to prepare us for the crucial confrontation at the end. And I felt that Costner's cruelty in the climactic scene was off-the-wall: under-provoked, overdone, and somewhat counterproductive by forcing us to conclude that he really did have to be put away for life after all. The boy's continued devotion to him after this could only testify to a gaping emotional hole in his upbringing.

Anyone liking this film should try to see "Martin's Day" as well, and vice versa, as they are remarkably similar in situation and character development.

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Never forgot it

[19 August 2000]

I saw this film with my father at an outdoor theater when it first appeared.

Remember those?

When those two German cannons stretched across the screen, they must have been at least eighty feet long. The special effects of films in those days might have been primitive compared to now, but those days had a trick or two up their sleeve to make the most of them, that we can no longer experience.

And outdoor theaters might as have well have been invented and built for this movie. I can't remember a more suspenseful cinematic experience in my whole life-- or a more dramatic night out with Dad. I was glad that he was there, just a reassuring foot or two away, in case the terror became unbearable.

So it surprised me to learn here that Guns of Navarone appeared only in 1961. That would make me twelve or thirteen years old, not eight. If I remember it so vividly, how could I be so wrong about the time? Perhaps this is further testimony to its impact-- how small and vulnerable it can make one feel in its sweep of events.

Kid Colter (1985)

Schizophrenic

[5/10 · 9 January 2000]

This film starts out with a somewhat spoiled Boston city boy flying out to Oregon, none-too-enthusiastically, to spend a few weeks with his divorced father in his new house. Here Dad has set himself up to enjoy all the beauty of the wilderness outside and all the cozy comforts of civilization inside. For at least half an hour we see a routine but heartwarming renewal of a father-son relationship. There is no premonition of what is to follow.

Then, suddenly, on his way back to Boston, the boy becomes the unwitting possessor of an undeveloped roll of pictures so valuable to the spies who took them that they will coldly kill not only to get them back but to cover up all trace of the confusion. They kidnap him and deposit him with a pair of heartless roughnecks living up in the mountains, whom they pay to dispose of him. The plot and mood take a very dark turn-- as abrupt, unpredictable, and merciless as real life.

While perhaps not a masterstroke, I can buy this particular twist. Why dramas so seldom allow events to unfold in front of the viewer without foreshadowings every few minutes escapes me.

The trouble is that, having taken this turn, these movie makers can't decide whether they are producing a thriller or a comedy. The left-over hippies are clowns, but they are so nasty that laughter were tasteless. The 12-year-old hops into the driver's seat of their rickety pickup truck and peels out for a brief, and incredibly poorly edited, dirt-road spin. His captors chase him uphill and down, and everyone gets lost-- including all sense of direction in the film.

It is not difficult to understand why few have seen it and fewer still have bothered to vote.