FilmChat

The wife and I just got home from Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Wowzers. It’s one of those films about the corporate culture that makes me glad I’m a work-at-home freelancer. And it’s one of those films that makes you wonder, If the powers that be are so good at lying through their teeth to us, then how can we separate the truth-tellers from the liars?

I also wonder about the worldview, for lack of a better word, of director Alex Gibney, whose only previous film (as producer, not director) that I have seen is The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

The film is about a serious topic — how a corporation earned prestige and respect and made millions for its executives by lying about the profits it hoped to make, and all while wreaking havoc with California’s energy resources and depriving its employees of all their pensions, etc. — but it also makes good use of sarcastic or ironic humour, supplementing the interviews with thematically appropriate music selections (e.g., after an archival clip of President Reagan saying something about the “magic” of the marketplace, the next scene begins with a song about “black magic”), inserting a close-up shot of a rabbit’s face into a montage when another person says something about the company “pulling rabbits out of hats”, and so on. My wife thought these things were a gratuitous and almost schizophrenic intrusion on an otherwise solid film, but for me, they brought to mind the similarly anti-corporate films of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock — except this time, the director refuses to make himself part of the story, so I found myself admiring the director’s restraint!

I also think it is kind of interesting how the very first shot of the film is of a church bearing the sign “Jesus Saves”, with a giant corporate tower looming behind it; and how one of the concluding interviewees is a local pastor who is still counselling families affected by the Enron meltdown; and how the point is made that former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was a big fan of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and apparently believed in fostering a highly competitive, Darwinian environment at the workplace.

… Arrrrgh. Blogger just deleted two paragraphs when I clicked on the “Preview” button.

I’m too tired to come up with two whole new paragraphs at the moment, so all I’ll say for now is that I do have some quibbles with the film — notably the stripper sequence, which is gratuitous and thus in my opinion compromises the moralistic and even spiritual implications of these other references I just cited, and the way two of the Bethany McLean interview clips begin with the camera looking somewhere else and then panning over to her. I like to think that the interviewees in the documentaries I see have no idea which parts of their verbiage will be used by the filmmakers, but you do get the sense that McLean, who co-authored the book upon which the film is based, knew she was “on” then.

Jeff Overstreet recently posted a news item regarding Left Behind co-author Jerry Jenkins’ new contract with Tyndale; apparently he’s going to write 15 new novels for them in the next five to six years — that’s a rate of roughly three novels per year.

One thing Jeff does not mention is that Jenkins has apparently already begun cranking out prequels to the Left Behind series, which we all thought — apparently mistakenly — had ended last year with The Glorious Appearing. (Or maybe Jenkins, a former ghostwriter, now has ghostwriters working for him?) That’s right, The Rising: Before They Were Left Behind is now upon us, and the official product description on the Left Behind website is a hoot:

Marilena Carpathia has only one dream: to be a mother. So when a mysterious clairvoyant promises the fulfillment of this dream, Marilena does not hesitate. Through genetic engineering and the power of the prince of darkness himself, Marilena is about to become a chosen vessel, one who will unknowingly give birth to the greatest evil the world has ever known.

Halfway around the world, God’s plans are subtly being carried out too. Young Ray Steele is determined to avoid one day taking over the family business. Instead, Ray sets his heart on becoming a pilot….

Soon Carpathia’s and Steele’s lives will intersect. And good and evil will clash in an explosion that will shake the world.

Writing a novel allegedly based on biblical prophecy about the birth of the Antichrist is one thing. Writing a novel based on biblical prophecy about how a young man doesn’t want to do what his daddy wants, he wants to be a pilot … and pitching it as though this young man were somehow going to be the Antichrist’s personal nemesis, with the full force of Fate or Providence behind him … well, that’s just ridiculous. Possibly even more ridiculous than revealing that Darth Vader built C-3PO when he was a boy.

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Hostage — CDN $4,992,240 — N.AM $33,408,000 — 14.9%
Sin City — CDN $7,279,578 — N.AM $61,300,000 — 11.9%
Sahara — CDN $3,332,830 — N.AM $36,446,000 — 9.1%
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous — CDN $3,756,657 — N.AM $41,561,000 — 9.0%
Robots — CDN $9,754,977 — N.AM $115,704,000 — 8.4%
Guess Who — CDN $4,846,962 — N.AM $57,573,000 — 8.4%
The Pacifier — CDN $7,946,019 — N.AM $103,727,000 — 7.7%
The Upside of Anger — CDN $1,122,017 — N.AM $14,975,000 — 7.5%
The Amityville Horror — CDN $1,643,769 — N.AM $23,300,000 — 7.1%
Fever Pitch — CDN $1,332,448 — N.AM $23,944,000 — 5.6%

A couple of discrepancies: Hostage was #8 on the Canadian chart (it was #14 in North America as a whole), while Beauty Shop was #6 on the North American chart.

I just realized something. I think I bought my first-ever non-English DVD today.

I know, I know, it’s awful that a cinephile like me should have gone without any foreign-language films for so long. But I have always tended to shy away from bare-bones DVDs of any language, just in case the films are re-issued some day with all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect; and the handful of foreign-language special-edition DVDs that I have been interested in have tended to be pricey Criterion sets and the like. So, as much as I love films like Ikiru — and I do! — I have been avoiding shelling out the big bucks for them.

Anyway, today I happened to be rummaging through the discounted DVDs at a local video store, and I noticed that they had the two-disc edition of Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions, and at a very reasonable price — and considering how high my late fees went the last time I rented it, I probably could have saved myself a lot of bother if I had just bought the film at this price back then! Besides, I’ve always wanted to check out the shorter version of this film. So, I snapped it up.

Technically, I suppose this is not a “foreign” film, per se, since it is Canadian. Then again, I live in “British” Columbia, and you are much more likely to hear Cantonese or Punjabi or any of a number of other languages here before you hear any French!

ADDENDUM: Something else occurs to me. The DVD cover art pictured here is from the American Amazon site. But while it resembles the cover art on my DVD, it is not the same — for example, the central picture on my disc is not of the man and woman kissing, but of the man resting his head against that of his terminally ill father. The American edition goes for the sex appeal, while the Canadian edition goes for something truer to the spirit of the film. And then there is this third version, which hints at the film’s theme and tone in an even more provocative way; I have not yet seen this image on any video-store shelves, though it does form the cover of the booklet that comes with my DVD.

Here’s a groaner that had somehow never occurred to me before. Jeff Overstreet’s blog includes a link to this interview with Douglas Gresham, the stepson of C.S. Lewis who is overseeing the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, hopefully the first of several Narnia movies. And somewhere on that page, the interviewer asks this question about the film’s director:

What has it been like working with Son of Adam (Andrew Adamson) and the rest of the film crew?

Get it? Get it? “Adamson”? “Son of Adam”? I don’t know why it took me this long to notice this play on names, but there it is, now. Almost makes you wish there was a director with the surname “Evesdaughter”, just so they could get a theme going here.

I happen to be in the middle of researching a story on the arrival in Canada of video services that edit films to make them more “family friendly” — and lo and behold, there just happens to be an editoral on the subject in today’s Wall Street Journal.

I am, as often happens, of two minds on this particular topic.

In general, I oppose the impulse to make all films “family friendly,” and I agree with Pop Culture Wars author Bill Romanowski and others when they say that this impulse has historically stunted the maturity of American cinema. I am all in favour of helping those who watch movies to grow up — to go from the milk to the meat, as it were. I also believe that audiences need to learn how to “receive” works of art as the original artists intended them to be received, and I am concerned that hacking films up into “family friendly” versions is just another way of catering to the individualistic self-gratification that is so typical of our age.

But, at the same time, now that home video is upon us, I can’t say there is any reason people shouldn’t have the freedom to watch the videos they have bought in any way that they want to watch them. We already have alternative audio tracks and up to three versions of a film on a single DVD. I videotaped movies off of TV when I was 12 years old and deleted scenes that I did not want my 4-year-old brother or 3-year-old sister to see. My wife often fast-forwards through movies that start to bore or annoy her. And films are already edited all the time for TV or for exhibition on buses and airplanes. Flexibility is the order of the day, and one of the consequences of the democratization of media technologies is the fact that, not only can people say whatever they want to say, but they can also hear whatever they want to hear.

And then there is the fact that copyright laws are so out of control. On that basis alone, I am inclined to say, “Stick it to the studios!”

Really, it’s intriguing to realize how the first American copyright laws gave exclusive rights to intellectual property for only 14 years, or possibly 28 years if someone successfully applied for an extension. If that were still the order of the day, then we would be in a position to restore the original Star Wars to its proper, original form in just a few months, and there would be nothing George Lucas could do to stop us! (Which reminds me, I still have never gotten around to seeing The Phantom Edit…) As it is, though, major multinational corporations now “own” films that have been part of our cultural memory for decades, and they are free to meddle with them as they see fit, and they continue to reap all the money for the work that was put into them by people who died years ago. Say what you will, but that’s just ridiculous.

But now I’m off on another tangent…

Just a quick link to the OC Weekly‘s latest story on the soon-to-be-premiered Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher; this time it’s basically an interview with Lonnie’s ex-wife Connie and director David Di Sabatino. BTW, FWIW, I think that longer Q&A; I keep promising will be up some time early next week, but I’ll post the link when it comes.

Just a note to say my review of the new version of The Amityville Horror is up at CT Movies. I had not realized until a couple days ago that the film was directed by the same man, Andrew Douglas, who made Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003), a documentary that I almost saw at last year’s festival, but missed. Now I wish I had seen it, of course.

For some reason, this reminds me of how Joe Berlinger — one of the documentarians behind such pretty good films as Brother’s Keeper (1992), Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004) — also happened to make the inferior Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000). Or, for that matter, of how Errol Morris made one fiction film, The Dark Wind (1991), in the middle of his otherwise exclusively documentary-oriented career-to-date.

Some filmmakers have had great success in both fiction and non-fiction — whether they move back and forth between the two throughout their careers like Werner Herzog, or whether they start in one and then pretty much give it up for the other like Denys Arcand — but it is interesting to see how some non-fiction types only get a chance to get one fiction movie out of their systems, and how sometimes the only way they can do this is to latch onto a franchise that just happens to be going through the motions of sequels and remakes for a few extra bucks.

Thanks to my colleague David F. Dawes for pointing this out to me. Apparently the first feature-length Italian film was an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno released way back in 1911 — and now it is available on DVD, with a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. Check the trailer here — the effects are very impressive!

Don’t know if it comes through, but I’m going for a Star Wars style “the saga is now complete” tone with that title there.

Anyway, in all my years of trawling the internet, I have come across only one person whose enthusiasm for film adaptations of the Bible rivals my own, and that is Matt Page.

So thanks to Matt for tipping me off to the fact that a teaser for the Visual Bible’s Gospel of Mark is now available here — you have to wait until the front page finishes loading, and then you have to click on “video clips” and wait until that screen finishes loading, but the teaser is there, just waiting to be found.

Interestingly, as Matt notes, the filmmakers appear to be going back to actor Henry Cusick and narrator Christopher Plummer, who both worked on The Gospel of John, and if so, this would appear to mark the first time since the 1950s that an actor has played Jesus twice (assuming we don’t count Bruce Marchiano’s cameo in the Visual Bible’s Acts, following his starring role in their Gospel according to Matthew) (my reviews). It’s a shame, in a way, because each gospel has its own character, and it might be good to heighten the differences in emphasis between the gospels by casting different actors and using different voices.

Another interesting question is how this film will deal with the multiple endings of Mark — which manuscript will it run with? Of course, word-for-word adaptations of any biblical text have to deal with these issues, when there are variations in words here or there; it’s just rare that you find variations in entire passages. (Incidentally, that famous incident with the adulterous woman in John 7:53-8:11 actually appears in a few different places — not just in John but also in Luke! — depending on the manuscript.)

And why do I say “the gospels are now complete”? Because Mark is the last to be given the word-for-word treatment. In addition to the Visual Bible’s adaptations of Matthew and John, there was also the Genesis Project’s adaptation of Luke in the 1970s, which was condensed into what is now widely-known as “the Jesus film.”