Terry Mattingly has an interesting column up now on the question “Should Jews believe Judaism is true?” The column is based on David Klinghoffer’s new, and apparently controversial, book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History. Mattingly’s column includes this interesting tidbit:

What Klinghoffer finds disturbing is that the doctrinal lessons of Passover are incomplete without those taught by Shavuot, a holiday that comes 50 days later. Shavuot recalls the revelation of the Jewish law — the Torah — to Moses at Mount Sinai.

Without Shavuot, he said, Passover is meaningless. Without the truth contained in the Torah, Jews have no identity.

Yet few Jews celebrate Shavuot and many hesitate to defend their own faith.

Because all things must remind me of movies in some way or other, this particular quote reminds me of how Cecil B. DeMille made a point of going beyond the Exodus, in both versions of The Ten Commandments (1923, 1956), to emphasize the giving of the Law and the punishment of the idolatrous Israelites. DeMille balanced the message of liberation with a message of righteousness — and this message of righteousness had already been made implicit throughout the first part of the film (long, long before Moses receives the Law) by the way Moses, as an Egyptian prince who does not yet know the Hebrew God, still demonstrates his virtues vs. the vices of his adopted half-brother Rameses.

By way of contrast, The Prince of Egypt (my review) merely gives us the message of liberation. The Israelites are set free — yay! The end. Sure, we see Moses walk out of the light with a couple of stone tablets, but the implications of this are never fleshed out. (Cf. the quote from Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman in this article on responses to the film that I wrote way back when.)

Incidentally, it occurs to me that, just as Shavuot comes 50 days after Passover, so too Pentecost comes 50 days after Easter — could one argue, then, that the doctrinal lessons of Holy Week are incomplete without Pentecost? What does it say about our culture that there are so many films about the crucifixion but so, so few about the coming of the Holy Spirit? Hmmm, I guess one could also ask why there are four Gospels and only one Book of Acts; then again, maybe the Epistles make up for that. I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, just thinking out loud, just taking an idea and running with it for a bit. I tend to do that.

Jeff Overstreet has seen the trailer for the upcoming Narnia movie, and he reports this bit of unexpected news:

The big breaking news concerning this though is that Bryan Cox is NOT going to be the voice of Aslan. Got this straight from the head of Disney voice casting. Cox *was* cast, but then he came in to do the lines and, because he had recently lost 40 pounds, his girth was significantly reduced, and that has affected his famously brusque and burly tone. His pre-weight-loss voice was an ideal voice for Aslan; his post-diet voice is not.

And so Cox, who is often cast as the villain — in Troy (my review), in X-Men 2, in the Bourne movies (my review), etc.; he even played the original Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter — will no longer have this opportunity to shine in the ultimate good-guy role.

On the plus side, maybe he won’t be typecast as “the heavy” any more. (Wokka wokka wokka…)

As I mentioned when I posted the link to my review of The Interpreter, I had to get the review done within hours of seeing the film, and I did this while I was a little under the weather, so I didn’t put quite as much thought into it as I might have liked.

I do recall thinking, as I neared the end of the review, that I had spent so much time analyzing the performances and other aesthetic points (like the lack of suspense, or Nicole Kidman’s hair, which I notice quite a few other critics have zeroed in on too) that I hadn’t said a whole lot about the politics of the film, apart from an opening remark about how movies made with the help of the Pentagon are basically military propaganda and therefore it stands to reason that movies made with the full support of the United Nations will be propaganda of another sort, too. But I also didn’t know how much I could say without giving away spoilers and the like. (I wish I had been as brilliant as the Boston Globe‘s Wesley Morris was in bringing these two aspects of the film together: “Kidman becomes the face of genocide, and I’m dismayed to report that atrocity has never looked so lovely.”)

So I wrote that the film “is conflicted by its need to promote a message of international cooperation even as it delivers the blockbuster goods, whereby we in the audience get our emotional satisfaction from watching one person act outside the law.” And since these reviews come with “talking points”, I added this:

Silvia says “vengeance is a lazy form of grief,” and she describes a Matoban ritual in which someone who commits a murder is almost drowned, and the family of the victim has the option of rescuing him and bringing resolution to their grief or letting him drown and mourning forever. What do you think of this ritual? Is it justifiable to risk even a murderer’s life like that? What would you do, rescue the person or let him drown?

Now I begin to wonder if I should have been more bold. It seems a number of people have been drawn to the idea that this film represents peace, forgiveness, working within the system, etc.; the BoxOfficeMojo review even claims the film “mixes pacifism with suspense.” But it seems clear to me that one of the lessons of the film, however unintended, is that the forgiveness and whatnot can only occur when there is a very real threat of violence, and when the entire community accepts and endorses that threat of violence. That, at least, is what the Matoban ritual would imply. And it is clear, not only in real life but also in the film, that the United Nations is not the agency that can provide this threat — hence Rwanda and Sudan, etc., and hence the need for one character to work outside the law, as I did note in my review.

After I filed the review, I also found myself wondering about the people of Matobo themselves. The film presents a despotic leader and two opposition leaders, one capitalist and one socialist, and by the end of the story they are all out of the picture in one way or another. So what will happen to that country? Should we be satisfied in the knowledge that the tyrant can no longer rule? It’s not like the movie gives us any sort of reason to believe that the country itself will get better, now. (It’s kind of like how the Star Wars series depicts the destruction of a corrupt Republic at the hands of an evil Empire, followed by the assassination of the evil Emperor. Is this the happy ending? How will the Rebels rebuild their galactic society? What about all those regional governors who will now, no doubt, turn into competing warlords?)

Anyway, like I said, I don’t think the film is intentionally exploring any paradoxes here; I think it was just badly written. And when you consider that five men are credited with the script, one of whom wrote the awful, awful movie The Life of David Gale, I think it’s safe to say that The Interpreter is simply badly written.

My sister once said her favorite movie of all time is Hobson’s Choice (1954). And my own third-favorite movie of all time is an obscure British film called The Family Way (1966), which has never been released on VHS or DVD in North America, despite having a fairly impressive pedigree; it was written by Alfie playwright Bill Naughton and its score, by Paul McCartney, was the first-ever solo Beatle project.

What do these movies have in common? Sir John Mills as a decent working-class bloke who’s a little slower on the uptake than his wife, for one.

Actually, there’s not a whole lot that these two films do have in common. But we grew up with these movies, and The Family Way in particular caught my eye in late adolescence because it co-stars Mills’s real-life daughter Hayley as his brand-new daughter-in-law. (Alas, neither of them is on that VHS cover, and the DVD cover is even worse.) After seeing Hayley Mills as a child and teenaged star in several Disney films — Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, The Moonspinners, That Darn Cat — it came as a bit of a surprise to see her playing a newlywed bride who worries that her husband doesn’t find her sexually appealing. She even has a nude scene! But I always figured it was okay, because her dad was in the film, giving his approval to her maturation as an actress.

In fact, while the film starts out as a story of frustrated newlyweds, what I have always liked about the film most is how, in the third act, it turns the focus of our attention slightly away from the newlywed couple and over to the groom’s parents. There are some absolutely fantastic moments as the Mills and Marjorie Rhodes characters discuss the rather strange honeymoon they had, or as Mills mourns the loss of his best friend and his youth.

And it’s also a rather funny film, too. I cannot help but smile just thinking of the way Mills, who always reads his newspapers, serves the newlyweds breakfast in bed with the words, “There’s four Russians and a monkey up there.” “Up where?” asks his son. Mills replies, “Well where d’you think? In outer space!”

Anyway. Mills made his big-screen debut in the 1930s, and he won an Oscar for his role in Ryan’s Daughter (1970), one of the few David Lean films I have still not yet seen, and he kept on working for quite a while after that. I also knew him from his roles in In Which We Serve (1942), I Was Monty’s Double (1958) and Gandhi (1982). Even recently, I still saw him on the big screen occasionally, chairing the board in the film version of Bean (1997) or taking cocaine at a party in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things (2003), but he usually had extremely little to do and it was clear that his health was in decline.

And so, it comes as no surprise to hear that Mills died today. He was 97 years old. You had a good long life, John, and you gave us some great performances. Thank you, and may you rest in peace.

UPDATE: A new version of that Associated Press story.

Still fighting this really bad cold that hit me a couple days ago.

It’s making writing very difficult. I spent some time last night hacking an interview down from well over 3,000 words to something less than half that length, but that sort of task is more methodical than creative, and it doesn’t require too much brainpower. Coming up with new things to say, though — ah, that requires a clear mind, which I currently do not have because it feels like someone’s popping bubble wrap inside my head.

So, my professional writing has slowed down a bit, and my blogging is kind of on hold at the moment.

I have, at least, begun watching movies for fun again, after a few weeks in which it seemed like everything I watched had to be work-related in one way or another. And I figure I might as well take advantage of my under-the-weatherness to post a few not-very-creative comments on them.

On Thursday, my sister and I caught Sahara, which I found a little noisy and long — when Steve Zahn says he’s tired of being shot at, I found myself nodding and sharing his exhaustion — but overall it’s a fun ride. It may not be up to the heights of the first Indiana Jones movie, and it may tangle too many plot threads together for its own good, but the actors are clearly having fun, and charisma can go a long way towards overcoming bad writing and clumsy direction, in my books. And if anything, Mark Steyn’s criticism that the film tries to fuse the old Crosby-and-Hope Road movies with the James Bond films actually enhanced the movie for me. (Re: the length and plot threads. My wife, who saw the film with her brother a few weeks ago, said it seemed like the filmmakers wanted to start a modern adventure serial, to which I replied that they shouldn’t have put the entire serial in one movie.)

I also liked a few bits of dialogue here and there. For some reason the one that sticks with me most is the scene where Matthew McConaughey shows Penelope Cruz some shells that glow underwater. He says “modern science” can’t explain why they do this, to which she replies, “There has to be a reason!” He then replies that, until science can come up with an explanation, his own theory is that they glow “because they can.”

There’s something about the anthropomorphizing of nature, or ascribing intentionality to basically inanimate objects, that just kind of tickles me — partly because I suspect much of the point of modern science is to reduce all human beings to clusters of inanimate objects, nothing but particles and chemical reactions, etc. If we humans are to have any intentionality or spirit at all, then it must essentially come from “above,” so to speak, for it cannot simply rise up out of our building blocks “below”. And once that intentionality hovers over us and the matter of which we are made, it must somehow lurk behind everything else, too.

Thinking about this now, I find my thoughts going back to that bit in the Narnia books where one of the children meets a being who calls himself a “star”, and the child says that, in our world, a star is just a ball of hot gas, to which the Narnian star replies that, even in our world, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. Or how about that line in Chariots of Fire about running fast and feeling God’s pleasure? Why does God make the shells that glow underwater? “Because he can.” Works for me!

Then, last night, the wife and I watched the film version of Oklahoma! (1955), and I once again experienced that thrill of watching a movie made in the 1950s that just happens to have a fair bit of sexual innuendo and even titillation; the song about the women in Kansas City who seemed to be wearing clothes with lots of “padding” but who then began dancing in a way that made the guy think that all those curves were “actually real” is particularly striking, given this was in the days before surgical breast enhancement and whatnot.

I’m not entirely sure why my wife happened to take this film out of the library, but I did have a few reasons of my own for wanting to see it. (You know how sometimes a variety of impulses all converge on a single decision? Kind of like how I saw the 1951 version of Quo Vadis? for the first time ever about a decade ago because I was just beginning to research Bible movies and I was going through a major Deborah Kerr phase.) For starters, I was curious to see certain actors that I had just come across in other films; I had recently seen James Whitmore, who plays Ado Annie’s amusingly stern dad, in Kiss Me Kate! (1953) and Rod Steiger, who plays the creepy, jealous Jud, in the original Amityville Horror (1979). But most significantly, I had read about the historical significance of Oklahoma! to Broadway theatre in Mark Steyn’s book a couple months ago, and the other day, he re-posted an article of his on the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, during which he just happened to be in town for an unrelated musical. Along the way, of course, Steyn talks about the Oklahoma musical, and given how the media originally assumed the bombing was the work of Muslim terrorists, before Timothy McVeigh was caught, he makes this interesting point:

In Oklahoma, most of the Muslims are black and most of the Arabs are Christian. Even Rodgers and Hammerstein understood there was more to the state than farmers and cowmen: in the show, Ado Annie, the girl who cain’t say no, is much taken by a pedlar called Ali Hakim.

Interestingly, in the film version at least, Ali Hakim is described as a “Persian” and he talks about his polygamous brother and he sells one of the women a potion called “the elixir of Egypt” — but Eddie Albert, who plays the character, doesn’t seem particularly Middle Eastern, despite his accent. FWIW, I also got a kick out of Shirley Jones’s chaste nude swim, which predates Jean Simmons’s similar scene in Spartacus by five years. Scenes like these — and the suspicions of infidelity frequently voiced by Ado Annie and Will Parker — are why it always amuses me when people today say that movies used to be so clean and family-friendly in the 1950s.

And then, this morning, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). I hadn’t watched my Star Wars DVDs since they were brand new, but I have been listening to the soundtrack to this film an awful lot lately, and it just sort of occurred to me that I could put the entire film on while I read the morning paper. So I did.

It’s still a fun film, it’s still impressive, it’s still the film that suffered the least when George Lucas put out the “special editions”, and it definitely remains the most satisfying film of the entire series, not least because the climactic duel between Luke and Vader is part of a major mythological story arc that matters very deeply and personally to these two individuals; contrast that with the duels at the end of, say, Attack of the Clones (my review), which were tacked onto the end of a rather boring political conspiracy plot.

Let’s put it this way: I noticed a few plot holes in Empire today, and not for the first time (how does Luke make it past the Imperial blockade around Hoth without any opposition whatsoever? how can Han get from one planetary system to another if he cannot make the jump to light speed? etc.), but they don’t matter because the story is really about other things. The problem with the prequels is that they are all about plot, rather than character; and they do dwell just a little too much on precise scientific details like gravity wells, etc. The prequels lack the spirit that lifts the story and helps it fly over and past these problems.

Still, it’s interesting to watch this film while trying to keep the prequels in mind. I don’t believe for a second that the prequels are giving us the exact back-story that Lucas had in mind when he made the original films — reportedly, Lucas decided to make Leia the twin sister of Luke and daughter of Vader at the last minute, before making Return of the Jedi, and that sort of thing is certainly bound to change things — but I find that, e.g., I look at Darth Vader’s pompous arrogance in a whole new way, now that I try to imagine sulky Hayden Christensen underneath that costume.

And I can only wonder what it would be like to see all the footage for any of these characters in chronological order. No doubt the last time we see Yoda in Revenge of the Sith, it will be a somewhat depressing moment. And I can only wonder what it would be like to go straight from that to the cackling muppet who makes his entrance in this film!

Just some links to some new articles of mine.

First, my review of The Interpreter, which I saw two nights ago and had to review yesterday despite a terrible cold.

Second, my article on Kingdom of Heaven director Ridley Scott and leading man Orlando Bloom, which I wrote for BC Christian News and modified somewhat from an as-yet-unprinted article that I wrote for ChristianCurrent; I would call the article an “interview” except it was one of those junket things where I sat in a room with one or two dozen reporters, instead of doing the sort of one-on-ones that the word “interview” implies, to me.

Third, I have added the full transcript of my interview with director David Di Sabatino to my earlier post on Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher; it’s pretty link-free at the moment, but I might add a few in the future.

Actor-comedian-musician Jack Black and actor-writer Mike White, after collaborating on the so-so Orange County and the much-better-than-it-had-a-right-to-be School of Rock, are at it again — this time in a Nickelodeon movie about “a Mexican priest who secretly moonlights as a masked wrestler in order to save an orphanage from closure.” And it’s “inspired by a true-life story”!

Those who like to keep an eye open for religious connections in film, however weird or obscure they might be, might be intrigued to know that White is the son of Mel White, an evangelical author who came out of the closet several years ago and is now a gay activist who lives across the street from the church run by Jerry Falwell, whose autobiography he ghost-wrote. And the new film will be co-written and directed by Napoleon Dynamite co-creator Jared Hess, who reportedly is a Mormon himself but did not want his previous film to be known as a “Mormon movie”.

Oh, um, what about Black’s religious connections? Well, um, he played Sean Penn’s younger brother in Dead Man Walking, which is all about a nun who witnesses to a death-row inmate…

APRIL 24 UPDATE: Thanks to Amy Wellborn for finding this story on the real-life masked-wrestler priest who appears to be the inspiration for this film.

SEP 21 UPDATE: The film has a title: Nacho Libre.

NOV 20 UPDATE: And now the film has a photo.

I still haven’t seen Sahara — the wife took my brother-in-law to the preview while I was on the Kingdom of Heaven junket — but I have to say, after reading Mark Steyn’s negative review, I want to see it more than I did before. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Until James Bond came along in the Sixties, the most successful movie series to date had been the Road pictures with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. Sahara seems to be an ill-advised attempt to merge the two into one almighty eternal franchise. It eventually winds up with our hero and the gal running around the villain’s remote high-tech lair trying to figure out how to switch the ticking thing off before it blows sky-high. But before that there’s a lot of scenes in the desert with two buddies riding around on camels bantering. The guys are bantering, that is, not the camels, though the alleged sparkling repartee wouldn’t have been any less sparkling if they’d given it to the dromedaries. Penelope Cruz takes the Dorothy Lamour role, and Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn are Bing and Bob, and that’s where it all starts to go awry.

Well, what can I say. As one who grew up watching Bob Hope & Dorothy Lamour films (but not the Road movies, curiously; I was more into films like Caught in the Draft and My Favorite Brunette), any movie that can make a critic make this kind of analogy has to be worth seeing at least once!

This just in from the Hollywood Reporter: all six Star Wars films will be screened at Leicester Square in London on May 16, one day after Revenge of the Sith premieres at the Cannes festival and three days before the film opens to the general public.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect this will be the first time the special-special editions of the original trilogy (i.e. the 2004 DVD versions, as distinct from the special editions released in 1997, and as even more distinct from the original editions made between 1977 and 1983) will be seen in a theatre.

The question is, in what order will they show these films? In the order they were produced, or in chronological order? Which would make more sense? This could be almost like discussing the proper order in which one should read the Narnia books…

Good news for fans of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki — especially if you happened to discover him through Drifting Clouds (1996) or The Man without a Past (2002; my review), the first two installments in his “unemployment trilogy”. Agence France-Presse reports that Kaurismaki will film Vartija (The Guard), about “a security guard searching for happiness in the concrete jungle of Helsinki,” in May and June of this year. I really enjoyed the Kaurismaki retrospective at the Pacific Cinematheque a couple years ago, so I am definitely looking forward to this.