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Quantum of Solace 11.14.08 Either this is what happens when one ages or this is a profoundly flawed film. I often have trouble understanding dialogue these days. Thanks to the digital recording device on the television I can up the volume and replay until I either get it or tire of the effort. I do it often enough that I think to it in the movie theater, even the concert hall. Occasionally I imagine using it in dinner conversation but only for laughs. Like when this self-absorbed fellow decried the worry over running out of oil. Every year we find more proven reserves, they find more and then they go in and prove it, he says. I ask if he thinks the supply of oil is infinite. Talk radio sycophants so often make their point with no real understanding of the "argument" they purport to make. Does the find of some more oil somewhere mean worry over running out is unfounded? A recent acquantance spoke of his worry over Obama's "associations." Do you think he secretly hates America and wants to be President so he can destroy America from the top down, I ask. No? Well then, what are you saying? What are any of them saying? That they're scared. Arugula? No, thank you, it is a food with which I am unfamiliar and therefore fearful of, they say. Or should. But I digress. The latest Bond film, with the best Bond since Sean, isn't as much an audio challenge as a visual one. It begins, of course, with a car chase and automatic weapons with six hundred bullet clips. The car being chased is Bond in an Aston Martin (is this how fealty to the original books is maintained) and the chaser is never more than twenty feet behind firing constantly. Several hundred bullets hit Bond's car, the driver's window is shot out, the rear and passenger windows, the doors are riddled, the trunk, everything gets a bullet except James, of course. When the police give chase the bad guys fire a quick burst at them and poof. When Bond retrieves one of their machine guns as it slides down the pavement and fires a quick burst at them, poof. The gun was sent sliding when Bond used his door to, well, I really don't know how it happened. Nor did I have a clue how he got rid of the several speedboats later in the film. They were all about him and he spun his mini-shrimp trawler about and between and over them until they were all gone. The number of edits in the action sequences would make Psycho's shower scene look like the opening shot for Frenzy by comparison (the opening scene of Frenzy is an incredible shot from above the Thames, under the bridge, into the city, down an alley, up a set of stairs, and to a door, and out again without a single edit, the shower scene a compilation of a hundred edits). I could tell Bond was in the sequence, that water was involved, and the bad guys were in black, I think. Beyond that I haven't a clue what happened. I am aging, certainly, but I don't think that was what was up here. One of the two "Bond girls" (what a shameful nod to sexism) dies from being covered in oil, an update to the gold paint murder from Goldfinger, and references to Bond's girlfriend who betrayed him and died for him were ubiquitous but I haven't any idea who she was - did I miss a Bond film? On the positive side the bad guy, Greene, was played by the brilliant Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), the evil plot was to purchase Bolivia's water (previously accomplished by Bechtel Corporation), and Judi Dench made it all seem real and I wish I'd recognized Alicia Keyes and Jack White as the title credit songsters earlier. Ultimately, though, Quantum of Solace is cotton candy flying out of the tub in all directions, a tasty treat turned into a nasty mess in the finishing. Gifted writer of screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal SUnshine of the Spotless Mind sits in the directors chair for Synecdoche, New York. Charlie Kaufman irregular mind produces yet another strange story of a small scale theater director suddenly endowed with a genius grant. Freed of the mundane limitations imposed by budget and timelines Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) sets out to make something truly meaningful. He rents a warehouse and brings his theater company along for what turns into a fifty year odyssey. Eventually hiring actors to portray himself and his assistant in his quest for something meaningful, he steps back from the production. The actor playing Cotard eventually hires another actor to play himself and we begin to lose the thread of the narrative - at least I did. I began to suspect that Kaufman was letting us in on what happened to him when he was given the director's reigns. As director of one of his bizarre stories he was freed of the mundane limitations imposed by script and story and set out to make something more. If he did, it slipped past me while was busy figuring out whether Dianne Weist was playing her daughter, the cleaning lady, or Cotard. No matter, I got to watch Samantha Morton and that was enough for me. Surely one of the great ironies of my lifetime will be the election of a black man to the presidency within three years of the time we allowed a major American city and its black population to drown. Countless millions of us watched in horror as our desperate fellow citizens waved banners from rooftops and highway overpasses begging to be saved. Ordinarily cool media anchors broke down on camera or lost control talking to the distant authorities as they listened too long to the insistence that everything that could be done was being done. Not too long after we were all outraged again when a military junta refused to allow humanitarian relief to their people devastated by another hurricane. Few made the connection but both "authorities" were being served by the devastation of elements of their population. Hungry, subsistence level men, women and children from a third world were suddenly on a par with hungry, subsistence level men, women and children from the ninth ward. Three years later and most of the white population has returned to New Orleans while the black population has been "resettled." Our President's mom said they never had it so good as they did sleeping on cots in the Astrodome, those responsible for rendering aid blamed the victims for not evacuating when they had the chance. We hear the truth from amateur filmmaker Kimberly Rivers Roberts as she and her husband remain behind as neighbors and relatives drive away. They have no car and no means. They can no more evacuate than could the fisherman and his family in the Irrawaddy delta in Burma. But Kimberly has a new digital camera and way too much personality to hunker down. She's in her attic, in the storm, at a shelter showing and telling us all, as it happens. In the shelter she runs into a professional documentary film crew and tells them, "no one's got what I got on this camera, this is it, baby." The pros, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin accompany Kimberly and her husband as they return to the ninth ward weeks later. Merging Kim's film with theirs, the result is a cinema verite of the highest order and a haunting commentary on our dysfunctional, schizophrenic society. None of us should be surprised if the signal comment on our time is the sad spectacle of our abandonment of our fellow citizens coupled with our proud celebration at transcending racism in electing a black man president. Really.
I wonder what it means that I remember so few books. I watched a scene from Atonement the other day and was particularly taken by the blocking in the scene where Robbie confronts Briony and Cecilia acts to keep Robbie from striking her sister. I was watching because I had come upon it near the end and couldn't remember the vehicle employed to reveal the awful truth of Robbie and Cecilia's fate. I couldn't remember reading the book at all but I'm told I did. Interesting how much of one's consciousness can be transferred to another, isn't it? I never know where the car is parked when I'm with someone else. Alone I find myself scribbling notes or maps so I can find it later. The worst thing is I fear this is a function of advancing age and I'm all too keenly aware of it. But I digress. I recalled a scene or two from The Secret Life of Bees but had no recollection of any of the characters. Alicia Keys as June Boatwright was captivating but then she must be if Bob Dylan is searching for her clear through Tennessee (what IS that line from Thunder on the Mountain about). I had certainly forgotten that so many horrible things happen to so many broken people in this story. A reminder for us that real life is filled with misery and pain. And few of us can wander off down the road and find three strong women to take the place of our too fragile mother - broken again and again by too young parents, a too shallow husband and two too sensitive children. Rachel Getting Married 10.18.08
Anne Hathaway charmed us in The Princess Diaries, worried us when she signed on for its sequel, gave us a hint of her depth in Brokeback Mountain, held her own with Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and assumes her position in the first tier with her portrayal of a dark and desperate Kym in Rachel Getting Married. I just sat back down after turning down the volume on CNBC's breathless watch over the market and noticed Amy Adams on the cover of Vanity Fair. Has there ever been a time so full of profound female talent? Meryl Streep isn't done yet, Winger continues to remind us of her extraordinariness, Nicole Kidman seems to be in full long stride, Michele Williams is only scratching her surface, did you see Naomi Watts in Ellie Parker or 21 Grams or We Don't Live Here Anymore, Amy Adams Junebug character is now eternal, and Anne Hathaway shows us chops second to none of them. I don't care if the market collapses as long as I can see any of these actresses again. Go see for yourself. Vicky Cristina Barcelona 10.11.08
I hate feeling stupid. Especially at the hands of someone who I fear thinks we are all stupid. Just so you won't - Vicky is Rebecca Hall, Cristina is Scarlett Johansson and Barcelona is one of the coolest looking cities on the planet what with all its Goudy architecture. I thought the whole title was someone's name... Patricia Clarkson (unforgettable in Pieces of April) and Javier Bardem (as a hedonistic artist - a role much more suited to him than psycho-killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?) fill out the cast. As in most Allen movies, of course, it isn't about the acting, it's the dialogue, stupid. This is a much better effort than we've seen from Mr. Allen in a while but still has the automaton feel, as if he's just going through the motions. Maybe someone should tell him to retire. But then he could play Lance (or Michael or Bo) and un-retire to everyone's embarrassment. Except the one who should be embarrassed, the over-the-hill talent desperate for one more shot of adulation. No wonder there's panic in the industry, I mean please! Blindness 10.08.08 I think I've always thought we would be better off with women in charge. Women have so much more sense, so much less blind bravado. But patriarchal we are and patriarchal we will likely remain. Not because the latest two samples of women as leaders are so problematic, Hillary with her stubborn unwillingness to recognize a loss when staring vertically at it (staring vertically - a loverly turn of phrase used by some nameless British financial analyst referring to the glob of twisted derivatives we once called our financial system), or Palin, the result of a bar so lowered her calculated ignorance is called folksy, but because t has always been so. The most interesting part of The DaVinci Code I thought was the polarization visited on the two key female figures of the Bible, Mary Mother of God, saint, virgin and Mary Magdalene, whore. No place here for complex figures, no noble King David with his dark side, no Moses with his stammering, just saint or trash. Jose Saramago would appear to agree. His novel, Blindness, serves as the basis for the film starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Sonia Braga's niece Alice Braga. Julianne Moore once bristled at questions about her role as an incestuous mother in Savage Grace because the questioner opened with, "As a mother" Big mistake. Since she hadn't heard too many "as a father" queries of her co-stars she told the reporter, "I resent your question" and explained why. The film leaves her as the only sighted person in a world gone blind. The second female lead is a very strong Alice Braga as a prostitute who opts to wear dark glasses even before she is struck blind. The men are either ineffectual, evil, or old and pathetic. The society quickly dissolves into a Lord of the Flies culture where food and sex are the only currency. Disturbing but not surprising assessment of our barely functioning world. I thought this was going to be all about the beautiful Yangtze River and I could learn a little bit more about China to help me appreciate it more. Well, instead it's about China's effort to build the largest hydro-electric facility in the world by damming the Yangtze and flooding an area the size of Montana, or Connecticut or whatever - some huge chunk of land. The residents have been told to leave and we get to know a sweet couple and their children as they come to grips with the end of their lifestyle as they know it. They had managed to eke out a subsistence level life from growing a handful of vegetables on the riverbank and consuming them in their ramshackle "dwelling" pieced together from flotsam, blankets, and twine. The parents confront the reality that their eldest daughter won't be going on to middle school despite the government's emphasis on education as the key to China's future. She will have to get a job. The only jobs available are on the tour boats loaded down with bloated Western passengers come to see the beautiful Yangtze River valley before it becomes lake swill once the dam is finished. The sides of the valley are dotted with huge signs indicating the level to which the soon to be dammed Yangtze will flood. Their little shack is well below the flood line. They have nowhere to go. They do end up dragging their few belongings up the side of the river bank toward the end of the film. By then, though, we are so utterly depressed all we can do is whimper quietly as the father straps a two hundred pound amoir to his back and stumbles up the bank. This is an unimaginably sad film and puts one in mind of one of the better novels I've read in years, Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins. It is set against the backdrop of the impending flood of the Tennessee Valley for other hydro-electric projects from Depression era USA. Both are rich, poignant, and unbearably sad. I'm typing slower and slower as I get sadder and sadde Suspense thrillers. An under-appreciated genre. Hitchcock did them so much better than anyone else he relegated the rest to a second-class of relative obscurity from which only a few rise to the level of art. Or maybe it's the mechanical nature of their plot development that makes the suspense thriller so prone to disrespect. Characters are secondary in the suspense thriller, it's the who-done-it or when-will-it-be-done or to-whom-will-it-be-done that dominates. They don't have to be second class, though, and in the rare film where actors of brilliance meet the director of ability executing a story of sophistication, the whole transcends the genre. French film starring Francois Cluzet (absolutely first rate actor) and Marie-Josee Croze (we saw her in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly last year which she made before Tell No One, but because the US film industry is completely disconnected from the rest of the world and the Houston market even more discombobulated, we saw them here in reverse order of their French releases here) are the actors of brilliance and the director, Guillame Canet brings his own screenplay to life and Tell No One sweeps you away in a frantic haze of fear and uncertainty all the while making you care about what happens to the characters. Delightful experience. Chris & Don: A Love Story 09.05.08
Three for the price of one. That's what you'll get from Chris & Don: A Love Story. Part One is the love story as told by the surviving partner, Don Bachardy. Chris is Christopher Isherwood, of The Berlin Stories, the novel from which sprang the play and film, Cabaret. Isherwood and the literary and screen giants with whom he cavorted is Part Two. Part Three is just barely below the surface and it is the story of an eighteen year old star struck California teen-ager falling in with a worldly, nay other-worldly, sophisticate thirty years his senior. The love story is told by the now seventy year old Don Bachardy, with the aid of home movies of the two of them, stills, and the Michael York narration of Isherwood's diary. Bachardy's devotion to Isherwood is palpable. At the end of Isherwood's life, Bachardy, by then a respected artist in his own right, drew the dying Isherwood relentlessly. Bachardy takes himself, and us, back to that time through his drawings. It is painful and touching. Leslie Caron and Liza Minnelli are interviewed, Igor Stravinsky and W.H. Auden appear in rare home movie footage, film greats float in and out of Chris and Donıs lives as they make southern California their home. Isherwood's fame helped shield them from the repressive American culture of the late 50's and early 60's. Chris and Don were out and proud before the expression had even gained currency. The most challenging aspect of Chris & Don, though, is in the dynamic of their lopsided relationship. An admittedly star-struck teenager meets a star magnet well more than twice his age. Isherwood speaks to Bachardy's impressionable youth in his diary. He and Bachardy confront the problem directly on more than one occasion. Their love, their fame, and their struggle together make for a spellbinding story. A complex story, a story of youth and age, of fairness and injustice, of joy and pain, a love story. When a character in a film asks, "to what shall we drink" and is answered "death," I worry that Iıve stumbled into an Ingmar Bergman revival. I had intended to see The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite), nominated for best film and winner of best screenplay at Cannes in 2007. Written and directed by the same man who six years ago delivered the freshest romantic comedy since The Philadelphia Story (2002ıs In July), The Edge of Heaven is a long way from the desolation of Bergmanıs Nordic vision. The man responsible for both films is Fatih Akin, the German born son of Turkish parents. Akinıs films often reflect the challenge of preserving an identity in the face of powerful and contrary cultural imperatives. He uses this "stranger in a strange land" backdrop as the starting point from which to weave a rich tapestry of thematic elements around an intriguing, intricate and novel plot. The Edge of Heaven is told in three parts, The Death of Yeter, The Death of Lotte, and The Edge of Heaven. The central character, Ayten, Yeter's daughter and Lotte's lover, careens between Turkey and Germany fomenting revolt, avoiding arrest and generally wreaking havoc. Yeter's lover's son, Nejat, embarks on a quest to find Ayten and maybe more. It is through Akinıs dense thematic tapestry where The Edge of Heaven ascends from good to great. The abiding significance of mere chance to direct and control our fate, the struggle for identity in an alien world, sacrifice, repentance, and finally, the power of death to wrench open the doors we thought long sealed infuse a captivating story with richness and meaning rarely encountered in film.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe 07.26.08
I don't want to believe the target audience for this film is real. I want to believe that the enigmatic Chris Carter and his writing buddy Frank Spotnitz weren't writing to a specific demographic. The bad guys in this film include a pedophile Priest (who turns out to be a good guy), two gay Russians recently married in Massachusetts, an African-American FBI agent, and another Priest hell-bent on turning innocent children away from the Hospital (Our Lady of Sorrow, no less) to die alone in squalor. The only good guy, other than Scully and Mulder, is a really cute FBI Special Agent in Charge who thinks Mulder is the greatest. Imagine, you walk into a conference room full of FBI agents and laptops and the sexiest, youngest, and most charming one jumps up and introduces herself as special agent in charge. It does strain credulity, but not as much as bringing this franchise back to life for an entirely pedestrian story of crazy Russian surgeons playing Cryillic Frankensteins. At least when the TV series lapsed into the mundane we still had the alien back story to fall back on. All gone now. Just Scully and Mulder in domestic bliss contracting out to the FBI one more time. He papers the walls of his study with newspaper clippings of likely x-file stories and she is a gifted and groundbreaking brain surgeon at the local Catholic hospital. No aspect of the original story is revived or put to rest. Mulder's sister gets bandied about but it's all for naught. Like James Joyce coming back to life and adding a scene to his play Exiles. No Ulysses commentary, no epilogue to Finnegan's Wake, just a bit more of one of the lesser pieces. I alluded to the silliness of Amanda Peete as Special Agent in Charge but where in the world did they get the idea that rapper Xzibit would work as her FBI partner. I mean, please. Even the Mulder wise cracks were little more than perfunctory. Hold up, I almost forgot, Scully and Mulder have a child that's dead. And they live together. And they kiss at the end. Had someone sent me a text message of the last three sentences I could have saved the seven bucks and spent the time doing something productive. A few years back a friend asked me to install some sort of ranking system for films. I'm not sure if that was because she didn't want to waste time reading about bad films or if when she read some reviews she couldn't tell if I liked the film or not. As I am often conflicted about film, both in the general and specific, I minimized the choices I had to make when inserting those little tickets adjacent to the film title. One means do not see this film, three means you must see this film, and two is everything else. As I start this review I have three tickets next to the title. For only one reason, Heath Ledger. Because it is so sad and creepy to watch his performance knowing he died before the film's release, I may end up striking one. His is an iconic performance. Like Anthony Hopkin's Hannibal Lecter (Ledger said he used it in his realization of the character), Brando's Godfather, Streep's Sophie, or DeNiro's Bickle, the character enters your consciousness in the film and will likely remain there forever. Christopher Nolan last worked his predilection with the occasional difficulty discerning the line between good and evil into his brilliantly constructed film Memento. In The Dark Knight he has nearly all the characters representing the correct side of that line often step over it and a few don't come back. Only one or two of the bad guys step over but probably because he doesn't think we're ready for the truth. Much of the horror of our history was visited upon us by people convinced they were acting righteously. If someone believes they are doing what is right, how are they any different from someone else doing what they believe to be right? As difficult as it might be at the moment, try comparing Osama Bin Laden and Dick Cheney. Both are directly responsible for the deaths of innocent people. Bin Laden with the Towers attack, of course, and Cheney for engineering a war against a country that did not attack us. To those dead innocents, do the justifications and explanations of either man make any difference whatsoever? Those who remain get to parse intent and historical justifications, and ultimately each of us is left to make our own subjective judgement about who was right and who is wrong. Hand carved stone tablets, golden plates and implanted dreams aside, is it that simple? Is one right and the other wrong? Can they both not be right and both wrong? The character of The Joker lays claim to a position outside the duality of our traditional scale of judgement. He purports to represent chaos. He represents it well, disrupting the plans of police, criminals and ordinary Gothamites. But it isn't the character that is the focus, it is the actor. Nolan's treatment of the long running philosophical issues underpinning ethics and morality breaks no new ground, nor does it deepen our understanding of our own choices. What does elevate The Dark Knight from the genre of comic book and graphic novel film is the performance of Heath Ledger. The saddest part is the loss of Ledger's ability to conjure a character so clearly and believably that we can see the world the way The Joker or Ennis sees it. Left to my own imagination I am the poorer for it. Almost impossible these days to avoid film characters from comic books, graphic novels, even toys. Ken and Barbie are supposedly in negotiations with Jerry Bruckheimer for a Christmas release of their honeymoon extravaganza. Imagine my surprise when I see a preview for a drunken bum super hero. A glimmer of imagination appears. Only to be doused by a crazy stupid back story of a three thousand year reign of superheros winnowing down to Charleze Theron and Will Smith. Oh, did I spoil it for you? Relax, you want to know this going in, it relieves some of the disappointment when you realize where this insipid story is headed. The first half isn't wasted with Will Smith, the most charismatic actor in several generations, playing a rude, inconsiderate drunken super hero challenged by flying drunk and prone to really bad landings. He meets up with a do gooder marketing executive (Jason Bateman) intent on repairing his bad public persona. When Charlene (as Bateman's wife) reveals herself as Hancock's better super-half, the film takes a dive from which it does not recover. Mister Lonely 07.07.08 What is it about film that makes us demand clarity and narrative cohesion? We make no such demands of painting. Or poetry, or music. Goya's The Third of May stands as a masterpiece without the accompanying narrative detailing Marshall Murat's directive to round up and shoot all those guilty of protesting the French occupation of Spain. Or the awful irony of the slaughter of Spanish peasants at the hands of their French brothers in revolution. Eliot's The Wasteland is a powerful poem of desolation and isolation even if the reader doesn't grasp the myriad literary allusions. Whether Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is about LSD or John Lennon's daughter's drawing of Lucy in the sky has no effect on the surrealist images or crystalline beauty of the song. The opening scene of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely presents a Michael Jackson character, red shirt, white gloves, white surgical mask, aviator shades and yellow helmet, towing a puppet monkey with tiny wings behind him while riding a micro motor bike, all in super slow motion. An entirely mesmerizing scene, seen again at film's end. All this to the tune of the Bobby Vinton doo-wop classic Mr. Lonely. Mr. Lonely is an achingly sad song. Spend the dollar and download it sometime, it will give you an entirely different perspective of the 50's. Perspective certainly plays a key role in Mr. Korine's altogether different film. I've struggled with it for two days now and have concluded it doesn't make sense, there isn't a connection between the island of impersonators (Diego Luna's Michael Jackson is joined by Samantha Morton's Marilyn Monroe and a host of others) and the Werner Herzog (as a burned out priest) gaggle of South American missionary flying nuns. This isn't a comedy. It is an exquisitely painful walk through the lives of seriously dysfunctional people, from a sadistic Charlie Chaplin to a cruel agent to a desperate drunken priest. The luminescent talent of Samantha Morton draws us in and makes us care so Harmony Korine's twisted world view can break our spirit. I still don't know what it means. I do know it hurt, it makes me sad, and I will remember it. Take a few minutes and look closely at Goya's Third of May, or read the first line of Eliot's The Wasteland, or listen to the awe and wonder of Lucy in the Sky and know it was taken from us for no reason at all, you'll feel the same and be better for it. Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and they cross the Channel to a commune of impersonators led by the Pope (James Fox), Abe Lincoln, and Marilyn's husband Charlie Chaplin. In an entirely seperate story, Werner Herzog plays a burned out Catholic priest leading a gaggle of missionary nuns. One accidentally falls out of the plane as they drop bags of rice to hungry South American villagers. She falls unhurt to the ground and tells her sisters God would have them all jump from the plane so the world could see miracles on the present time. This is ostensibly a film about identity. The second story of the flying nuns doesn't seem to be about identity but rather blind faith. Wanted 07.05.08 As I told the friend who accompanied me, these films have a built in defense. The moment you start picking apart any of the huge number of inconsistencies in the story, like why did we get a close-up of the evidence of his best friend cuckolding him, or does any variety of loom produce coded versions of fate (Terrance Stamp [isn't he dead yet?] had a small version that seemed to work just as well as the big one Morgan Freeman used), or what did a couple dozen assassins do with all those side of beef, the obvious answer is, "well, it's a comic book/graphic novel not bound by such pedestrian limitations as plot or narrative." That being said, Wanted was great fun. The same way a boxed and shrunk wrapped container of bite size Butterfingers are fun. Delicious going down but the damage done at the molecular or even endocrinetic level not worth the price. Even if we did have to suffer lines like, "you're just a thug that can bend bullets." Bending bullets was a huge part of Wanted. Oh yes, and why Wanted? Because that was the headline on the New York Post the morning James McAvoy decides to ditch the account manager job and become the world's leading assassin? And my god Angelina, the tattoos! What were you thinking? Worst of all, though, was having to watch a corrupted Morgan Freeman. Like seeing Lassie play Cujo. Too painful. The Children of Huang Shi 06.20.08 What the Japanese did at Nanking in 1939 defies belief. I read an account of the ordeal a few months back and was depressed for weeks. Using it as a backdrop for a story of heroism and sacrifice reminded me of Vonnegut's use of Dresden as the backdrop for Slaughterhouse Five. Certainly we all somehow benefit from knowing the depth of depravity to which we are capable of descending. But as backdrop? Some things are too horrible to use in this way. Dresden as the poster child for the mindlessness of total war and Nanking as the end result of demonizing the enemy deserve better than footnote treatment in feature films. This is the story of a journalist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) leading a group of orphaned Chinese children seven hundred miles along the Silk Road (Huang Shi) to safety. Yun-Fat Chow, Michelle Yeoh and Radha Mitchell help the story and journey along but the children elevate the film above pedestrian status. Filmed largely in China along the Silk Road (the market route between the East and Europe used by traders, bubonic rats, and the Khan clan) scenes of overwhelming majesty fill the screen. Painting the Japanese as inhuman monsters (they earned those adjectives in Nanking) and the Nationalists as bumblers (they were), and Mao's fledgling Communist revolution as nearly invisible (oh, really) must have been the price extracted for allowing the Australian film crew access. Little matter. The real story here is what can come from sacrifice. Not a lesson we teach anywhere I've been. Even a religion based on a single act of sacrifice has become a faith of wealth and self satisfaction. I was surprised recently to see my church busy giving the bum's rush to the homeless in the neighborhood. And feeling good about it. So much defies belief these days... |
