Movie Prayers: Les Anges du Peche

"Let me talk to you directly. Your saints will understand why. Look at me...listen to me! Take my anguish away from me. Tell me the burden you loaded me with by letting me know a desperate soul's secret is a test which will breed my purest joy. Protect me with your Hand. Deliver us from evil..."

"You who never sleep...you watch over me. Thank you for receiving me every night. They have filled the gap with thorns. For them, I'm a prowler...stealing bits of eternal peace. For you, I remain your child. Every night I leave my barn to come to you and [???] a world-wide audience. You are not a S[???] yet you desired to stay with us as long as possible like a sample human being...a simple brother. That is why I dare offer you...my miserable complaint before my prayers. Help me, my grief is too deep! And Teresa, Teresa who you entrusted to me...let me recognize her voice in that hymn...which I have no longer the right to sing. "[Faints]

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For The Record

For the record, yes, I have been banned from a certain website at which I used to post comments about spirituality and the arts. The moderator has denied several times that this is the case, and I'm mostly willing to say "whatever" and move on, but I mention it here because I recently received yet another "Private Message" from a user of that site to which I was unable to respond because he was using the site's internal messaging function which no longer works for my account.

Because several people have asked me whether or not this is just some cute semantic parsing or honest misunderstanding about terminology, by "banned" I mean:

1) I am administratively prohibited from posting comments at this site. (No, I have not asked to be banned from posting comments. Yes, I have tried to post comments. I receive a pop-up message saying, "Your posting privileges have been removed.")

2) I am unable to send messages using the site's messaging function nor to respond to messages sent to me. (No, I did not ask to have my messaging capabilities revoked. Yes, I have tried to reply to private messages. I receive a message that says I have exceeded your message limit and the message has not been sent, regardless of the fact that I do not have any messages in my inbox or sent folder.)

If you recently sent me a private message from this website and I have not responded, either:
a) I didn't get it.
b) I got it but could not respond to it because I don't have your e-mail address and you don't have it listed in your profile at the site in question.

Ken

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MacGuffins of Men--Contrarian Blog-A-Thon

Earlier this month at Matthew's House Project, I posted a response to the question, "What makes a good contrarian review?"

This weekend, The Contrarian Blog-A-Thon officially gets underway, so I wanted to participate by writing a contrarian take on a current release. The general consensus in the preparatory comments at Jim Emerson's blog seemed to be that it is easier to be a nay-sayer than a white knight, though doing either well (as opposed to being contrarian for the sake of it) strikes me as equally difficult.

As the title here suggests, my contrary take is on Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron's ninety-one percent "fresh" thriller that garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

I know some critics, especially in Christian media, have been knocking the screenplay for losing what is perceived to be the latent (or implicit) Christian content of James's novel, but my reservations are of a different sort.

I thought the film was, essentially, one long set piece chase scene. It was a cross between Terminator and The Gauntlet, with a strong, cynical male hero protecting an innocent female whose survival is more important than his own.

A MacGuffin (alt. maguffin, McGuffin) is a plot element which advances the story and/or motivates the characters but which remains ambiguous as to its details. Whether it be the papers in Casablanca (are the Germans really going to let them leave just because they have papers?) or the trial in Snakes on a Plane (does it really matter why they are on the plane?), the particular details of the MacGuffin (maybe even the internal consistency of them) are immaterial.

There is a MacGuffin in Children of Men; it is the baby. Oh, but someone might object, the baby is the whole point of the film--the survival of humanity depends upon its survival. Maybe, maybe not. The details as to the whether or not this baby is unique [or only its mother] and whether it will have a better chance of survival with the shadowy "Human Project" are largely absent from the film.

I actually like the way Wikipedia puts it: "A true MacGuffin is essentially interchangeable. Its importance will generally be accepted completely by the story's characters, with minimal explanation." With minimal explanation it is accepted by the story's characters that it is necessary that Kee and her baby survive and be delivered to the Human Project. Because minimal explanation is required, Kee and her baby are "essentially interchangeable" with any other object that would need to be delivered from point "A" to point "B" in order to save the future of mankind: a plague vaccine, a secret formula for food, war plans, a portkey to another dimension. The important point is not how Kee and her baby will save mankind but only that someone in the story--Clive Owen--believes they will.

In my preparatory piece at The Matthew's House Project, I argued: "[M]any of the best—or most persuasive--contrarian reviews I’ve read are the ones that reveal weakness or problems within a film that have been hiding in plain sight rather than the reviews that attempt to argue for problems that only the contrarian critic was sharp enough to spot."

To illustrate this point, let me indicate how many of the positive reviews mention--but overlook--the film's deficiencies:

"The infertility theme isn't explored in any depth. What exactly will it accomplish to get Kee out of the country? Since the future of mankind rests on this pregnant girl, we want details. "Children of Men" leaves too many questions unanswered, yet it has a stunning visceral impact. You can forgive a lot in the face of filmmaking this dazzling."--David Ansen, Newsweek

"...[T]akes the classic movie formula of a cynical tough guy required to see an innocent party to safe harbor, and shoots it to pieces."--Ray Bennett, The Hollywood Reporter (who calls the film "gripping"). While insisting that the film revitalizes rather than merely regurgitates the formula, Bennett doesn't exactly say which parts are new or how it is innovative (except that its vision of the future is different from that presented in recent films by "Richard Curtis and Woody Allen"). At another point, Bennett goes from saying in one paragraph that "there's barely a pause for breath" to claiming in another that the film "take[s] sufficient time to register the deeper impact of things that are troubling the world." These are not exactly contradictory claims, but their juxtaposition is suggestive.

"It contains evocative passages and some interesting and powerful ideas, but it often reads too much like an erudite potboiler." -- James Berardinelli, Reelviews (who awards the film three stars out of four).

"[T]he future he presents is so poorly conceived and full of contradictions, and is such a non sequitur coming just 20 years down the road, that we never buy it long enough to suspend disbelief."-- William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (who calls the film "a solid action movie").

My point here is not that Children of Men is the worst film of all time or that those who rated it highly are conscious hypocrites. My larger point isn't even about Children of Men at all but rather about contrarianism.

In this day of marketing hype and review saturation, the difference between a contrarian review and an assenting review is often little more than a matter of which the viewer trusts more--the consensus opinion or his or her own two eyes.

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Munich, Contrarianism, and Effective Arguments

Later this month (February 16-18) Jim Emerson (Scanners Blog) will be sponsoring a Contrarianism Blog-A-Thon. Among the questions Emerson asked film writers to explore: what makes a good contrarian argument? I like this question for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how reputation, marketing, and popularity affect our reception of commercial art and entertainment.

For the full column, click here to go to the Matthew's House Project.

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2006 FFCC Awards

So the big award ceremony you are all waiting for with baited breath is coming out...well, today, I was told.

Yes, it's the 2006 Faith and Film Critics Circle (FFCC) awards. This marks either the third or the fourth year I've voted in it, and if past performance is any indicator, generally nothing I vote for makes the top three in any category and there will be at least one award that makes me doubt my colleagues' sanity. (Lord of the Rings for best adapted screenplay?)[Ah, a quick peak at the archives suggests there is the rare synchronicity of opinion; I think I did vote for Philip Seymour Hoffman last year.] But I'm a member, and as long as they are going to keep counting my votes and not just throw me out of the group for not liking what everyone else does, I think I'm supposed to promote group activities...so here we go.

Aaaaaanyhoooo...for the three people who actually care about this that aren't, you know, in the the FFCC, below is a copy of the ballot I submitted. Can I give a shout out to Dennis Quaid? He almost did for American Dreamz what Johnny Depp did for the original Pirates of the Caribbean. If you are wondering what he's doing on this list, go rent the American Dreamz dvd and watch just the scenes he is in.

Pretty much everything else is either safely esoteric (I mean, if we lined up all the people who saw Climates on one side and all the people who saw Forgiving Dr. Mengele on the other--would we have enough for a girl's basketball game in the state of Iowa?) or so patently right that if you disagree with me you are, well....wrong.

MOST SIGNIFICANT EXPLORATION OF SPIRITUAL ISSUES

• 1) L'Enfant
• 2) Requiem
• 3) Forgiving Dr. Mengele

BEST NARRATIVE FILM

• 1) L'Enfant
• 2) Climates
• 3) Requiem
• 4) The Queen
• 5) Pan's Labyrinth

BEST DOCUMENTARY

• 1) Shut Up and Sing
• 2) Forgiving Dr. Mengele
• 3) When the Levees Broke
• 4) The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
• 5) Lake of Fire

BEST ACTOR

1) Jérémie Renier - L'Enfant

• 2) Edward Norton - The Illusionist

BEST ACTRESS

• 1) Sandra Huller - Requiem
• 2) Victoria Hill-MacBeth
• 
  
• 
  

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• 1) Dennis Quaid--American Dreamz
• 2) Rufus Sewell--The Illusionist
• 3) Paul Giammati--The Illusionist
• 4) Adrian Grenier--The Devil Wears Prada

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• 1) Déborah François - L'Enfant

BEST DIRECTOR

• 1) Luc and Jean -Pierre Dardenne - L'Enfant
• 2) Barbara Kopple--Shut Up and Sing
• 3) Sophie Fiennes--The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
• 4) Tony Kaye--Lake of Fire

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST

• 1)The Devil Wears Prada
• 2) Pan's Labyrinth

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• 1) Luc and Jean -Pierre Dardenne - L'Enfant
• 2) Pan's Labyrinth

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

• 1) The Illusionist
• 2) V for Vendetta
• 3) The Devil Wears Prada

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• 1) Gorkhan Tiryaki--Climates

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

• No vote

BEST FILM FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

• No Vote

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Movie Prayers: The Merchant of Venice

"Some god direct my judgment!"--Act II, Scene 7

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Paragraph 175 (2000)

A short (81 minutes) and somber documentary by the directors of The Celluloid Closet and The Times of Harvey Milk, Paragraph 175 details the internment and treatment of homosexuals during the rise and rule of the Nazi party in Germany.

Was it my imagination, the editing, or the participants that made me feel as though the participants had to break through emotional and psychological walls of reluctance and diffidence in order to relate their experiences? The film suggests that unlike other Holocaust survivors, gay men have not been an encouraged to tell their stories, have been met with rejection when they tried. Given the fact that Paragraph 175 was not rescinded in Germany until decades after the war, many of the homosexuals who were imprisoned were still looked at as criminals rather than victims.

The participants themselves range from the angry to the melancholy to the shell shocked, and it is surprising (at least to me) how many times we can hear stories of lives torn apart by war and yet not feel them to be rote or repetitive. There is always a cadence, a detail of memory, that personalizes the story and makes it seems very real, and a good part of the film's emotional impact comes from hearing the survivor's and experiencing their stories not as a unique part of history but as a part that was experienced emotionally as anyone would who lost a loved one.

One participants relates of spending a night with a lover only to have the Gestapo arrest his compatriot (but not him) the next morning. "It had a different value then," he says softly, "...a night of love."

Perhaps, though, a night of love always has the same value. It is we who feel (or fail to feel) that value differently depending upon our circumstances.

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