FilmChat

Just saw the trailer for The Island. Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi and so forth? In an action movie about genetic engineering, with who knows how much fodder for moral discussion? This could be my kind of sci-fi.

I am very, very interested. I am also very, very apprehensive, as the film is directed by Michael Bay, whose extremely unsubtle, constantly violent, attention deficit disorder style of filmmaking got on my nerves during Pearl Harbor (and by “violent”, I refer not only to his obsession with bullets and explosions but also to his restless, fidgety use of cuts and the constant physical abuse he heaped on Ben Affleck during the “romantic” scenes), and whose last film, Bad Boys II, I found offensively immoral.

Ordinarily, I would turn to the screenwriting credits at this point to see what I ought to expect — but the IMDB lists the names of three people with whom I am utterly unfamiliar; one wrote Beyond Borders, the Angelina Jolie movie with a social conscience that I never got around to seeing, and the other two have worked on episodes of Alias, a TV series that I have never watched, though I hear mixed things about it from fans of the show.

So, I am utterly in the dark. Guess I’ll just have to wait and see the movie.

Gadzooks, can’t let a day go by without blogging. So I’ll just toss some box-office trivia out there.

With $498.2 million in the till worldwide, Meet the Fockers (my review) is now being touted as the top-grossing live-action comedy of all time — which is apparently a testament to how unusually popular this film is overseas, where comedies normally don’t translate as well as action movies and the like. I am not sure how I feel about this. I suppose another, even more popular comedy will come along some day and set a brand-new record. And for that matter, the accuracy of this claim may depend on how we categorize such amusing but action- and effects-heavy films as, say, 1997′s Men in Black ($589.4 million).

Meanwhile, Million Dollar Baby is still in the weekly top ten, and with a domestic take of $94.2 million to date, it has already passed Space Cowboys to become Clint Eastwood’s 2nd-highest-grossing film as director (after 1992′s Unforgiven, $101.2 million), and his 3rd-highest-grossing film as actor (after Unforgiven and 1993′s In the Line of Fire, $102.3 million). This is remarkable for a film that, by all accounts, Warner Brothers was very reluctant to produce, even with a budget in the tiny $25 – $30 million range. (I love the way Eastwood has talked about how Warner ignored his film and let it slip by under the radar while they focused all their efforts on the expensive mega-flop Alexander!)

Incidentally, it seems Eastwood’s biggest box-office success of all time — once the figures are adjusted for inflation — might be that orangutan movie, Every Which Way but Loose, which raked in $85.2 million way back in 1978. Only five of his movies have made more money than that, all of which came out after 1992, by which point ticket prices had gone way up and the dollar had gone way down.

Happy Easter to those of you on the western liturgical calendar!

I’ve been on the eastern calendar since meeting my wife just over two years ago, and while the two calendars do occasionally sync up — as they did last year — it is more common for Holy Week to come a wee bit later for the Orthodox than it does for Catholics and Protestants. (This year, Pascha takes place way off on May 1!) So, with all this Easter buzz in the air outside my church but no celebration of it inside my church just yet, I naturally think of movies — specifically, of watching life-of-Jesus movies.

Two years ago, I watched Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) — the first major studio film about the life of Christ produced since the silent era — and was so distracted by how much of the movie Jesus was not in that I began timing the length of his appearances; and yes, it turns out he is in less than half of that film’s running time. Less than half! Apparently the filmmakers were so unsure how to depict Christ that they did so as little as possible.

Last year, of course, was the year of The Passion, and I ended up watching or re-watching lots of other Jesus movies as well, as research for the various Passion-themed articles I was working on. I specifically remember sitting through all six-and-a-half hours of Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977) just so I could add a paragraph on that film to my essay on subjective and objective perspectives in Jesus films — and take it from me, that mini-series was not meant to be seen all in one sitting!

Zeffirelli’s film has its fair share of detractors — such as Lloyd Baugh, who says Zeffirelli “thoroughly banalized” the Jesus story — but even its fans are generally agreed on one thing: the film’s treatment of the Resurrection is pretty darn lame. I was reminded of this several days ago, and so I dug up some quotes that I had typed up a couple years ago which indicate that, yes, the resurrected Christ was pretty much an afterthought in Zeffirelli’s film.

Zeffirelli himself, on pages 95-97 of Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus: A spiritual diary, says he prepared and shot a resurrection scene, “But on film it lacked all credibility and veered our project toward the perilous shores of a Hollywood epic.” Somewhere along the way, a windstorm ruined his plans, too, I think. Then, on page 115 (and my notes may be a tad garbled here), there is this bit:

A few days before the finished print of the film, right there on the deadline, Zeffirelli started to rummage through the hundred and thirty hours of footage in a desperate search for a solution. . . . he found a photographic test of Jesus’ leave taking of the disciples after the Resurrection, a test shot a Meknes in the apostles’ hideaway, forgotten in that enormous heap of material. Suddenly, everything turned around: those few feet of film offered the simplest solution, honest and clear. It is the consoling farewell of Jesus to his disciples and to us all, and his exhortation not to fear, since he is with us for all days until the end of time.

So he definitely ran out of time, and possibly out of money as well. Interestingly, this description of the resurrection scene as a very-last-minute replacement is corroborated by an article from the October 1994 issue of Harper’s that I also added to my notes way back when — but it wasn’t until this past week that it dawned on me that, since the article in question was based on a book, I should probably check and see if the library had a copy, and see if the book had any more details.

And so, this week, I picked up Earl Shorris’s A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market & the Subversion of Culture. And the first thing I noticed was that this book was badly, badly edited. I had only looked at a couple of pages before I spotted some awkward grammatical errors, and then I discovered the reason I couldn’t find Jesus of Nazareth in the index was that Shorris had erroneously called the film The Life of Jesus — an error that Harper’s had corrected in their version of this story.

So, anyway, the book didn’t really have anything that the article didn’t have, but for those of you who have not yet come across this info, here are the relevant excerpts, taken from pages 207-211 of the book:

If the chairman of the board of General Motors hadn’t been a religious man, it might never have happened, and the effect on a television production of its many markets might not have been so clear. The time was the 1970s. As his reign neared its end, the chairman must have realized something about rich men and the eye of a needle, for he agreed to pay, out of the pockets of the stockholders, the entire production and broadcast costs for a television production of The Life of Jesus. . . .

When Protestant fundamentalists in the United States got wind of the Vatican’s veto power over the script, they began a national campaign against the mini-series. Thousands of letters were sent to General Motors promising never again to buy their products, if the corporation went ahead with the “papist” project. It fell to Waldo E. McNaught to deal with the Protestant protest. After one particularly difficult day, he telephoned me to complain. “The things I do for this goddamned corporation,” he began. “Today, I was down on my knees praying.”

Ever the vendor, taking the role of straight man, I asked, “What’s wrong with that?”

And he said, in a voice made tremulous by outrage, “With a Protestant!”

Propelled by fears for the future of American industry, McNaught, the chairman’s assistant John McNulty, and I went to London to have a look at the film, which was by then in the form of a rough cut, still lacking some opticals, music, and so on, but with all the voice tracks laid in. . . .

Within moments, the telephone rang. McNaught picked it up in his bedroom. “Shorris,” he shouted, “it’s for you. It’s that dame from NBC.”

I answered the phone in the other room. The woman from NBC asked, “How did you like the film?”

“Well…,” I said, dragging out the word, not wanting to offer a comment until McNaught, McNulty, and I had been able to compare notes, “…I just got here. We were going to talk.”

“It’s a piece of shit,” the woman from NBC said.

“You think so?”

“Sure, it’s a piece of shit, but it’ll get great reviews. No critic is going to attack The Life of Jesus.”

“You know more about that than I do.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know. We’re going back to New York tonight. I’ll see you there.”

“Sure.”

McNaught had been listening on the other phone. He came into the parlor wearing his Alice-in-Wonderland smile. “It’s so good to hear from our benefactors at NBC. And what is your opinion, Mr. Shorris?”

I had made notes about more than a few scenes; the most memorable of them had to do with the scourging of Jesus. Rod Steiger in the role of Pontius Pilate looks at the actor (since forgotten) who plays Jesus, and says of this bedraggled blue-eyed blond young Englishman, “Ecce homo!” then turns to the camera and explains, “Behold the man.” The woman from NBC had been correct about the quality of the film. But that had been clear from the beginning. What I had noted during the screening was a series of anti-Semitic statements, all of them gratuitous.

I made my case to the men from General Motors, saying as I recall, in a good-humored way, that if the film were to be presented without deleting or modifying those scenes, I would never again work for General Motors, nor would I even speak to anyone, meaning them, who worked for the corporation. McNaught raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, mocking my earnestness. McNulty merely nodded. He is a tall man, fair, and with a rather large nose for a leprechaun. “Did cha see anything else wrong?” he asked, Saint Thomas Aquinas speaking in the accents of Ireland and the farthest reaches of the borough of Brooklyn.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Did cha see anything wrong with the ending?”

“No. Was there something wrong?”

“Yeah,” he said in several syllables, “they didn’t resurrect ‘im.”

“Oh, my God!”

He paused for a moment, and then said for the only time in the twenty years that I’ve known him, “Ahem.”

The error, which had gone unnoticed by Anthony Burgess, Franco Zeffirelli, the Vatican, NBC, and even the egg-shaped lord himself, had been spotted by Jack McNulty. At his insistence, the producers reassembled the necessary members of the cast on location in North Africa and filmed a new ending, leaving no doubt that Jesus had been resurrected.

The egg-shaped lord and the operatic director had demonstrated once again that unlike other salesmen, those who run the film and television industries are not only willing but able to move heaven and earth to satisfy the desires of their customers.

Nothing satisfied the Fundamentalists, however. They mounted a great campaign of letters and postal cards. Along with the opinions of the woman from NBC and other crtiics, the Fundamentalists finally won out. A few days before the program was to be broadcast, Roger B. Smith, heir apparent to the chairman’s job, totaled up the amount of money GM spent on NBC. Then he called the network. The ironclad contract evaporated, NBC sold the show to Procter & Gamble at distress sale prices, and The Life of Jesus went on the air as scheduled, with some emendations and a new, happier ending.

I am not sure that these two accounts can be reconciled in every single detail — the Zeffirelli book does not appear to indicate whether the failed Resurrection sequence was attempted during principal photography or in re-shoots — but if anyone has ever wondered why the Resurrection sequence in this mini-series is so much less than what it could have been, well, now you know.

I have always liked the letter M. The M volume was my favorite of all the World Book Encyclopedia volumes, for it contained both “Mythology” and “Motion Pictures”. M is also the first initial in the first names of both my sisters. And it is the first letter of the last three films I saw that I have not blogged yet.

A couple nights ago the wife and I watched Munchhausen (1943), the film that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels commissioned in order to prove that the Germans, as enmeshed in the war as they were, could still produce sumptuous, colourful epics to rival the productions of Hollywood. In this, he succeeded; what’s more, because the film has a certain sexual frankness (Munchhausen sneaks away for a tryst with Catherine the Great, topless women frolic in the Sultan’s harem, etc.), it’s possible the international audiences of its day might have found the film even more impressive than the somewhat more constrained American films of that time. And thankfully, there is virtually nothing of the Nazi ideology in this film, beyond one or two relatively harmless references to the “fatherland,” so modern audiences can enjoy it without all that other baggage. FWIW, I have never read the original Munchhausen legends, but I recognized a number of story elements from the 1988 Terry Gilliam film (which, incidentally, I have not seen in years, though I was once quite a fan) — the King and Queen of the Moon with the detachable heads, the man who runs extremely fast, etc. — and I was impressed by how convincing some of the special effects were in this much older film. I also liked that servant of the Sultan whose only job is to swing a pendulum, count the seconds, and tell time; he’s a human clock. Definitely worth a look.

Then, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) — look, three M’s! — which I have wanted to see for some time because it was one of the first major Hollywood films to be made in the Vancouver area, thus paving the way for today’s much-vaunted “Hollywood North”. (Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, with Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, was also made here around that time.) I like seeing Warren Beatty in films that were made before he began acting as his own writer and producer and director, and Julie Christie is great as the Cockney bordello madam who knows exactly what her clients want and how to treat her whores right — the scene where she critiques Beatty for his ignorance and lack of class in such matters is a hoot. There’s also a very nice winter-y feel to this film, in scenes like the one where a guy throws a jug out onto the ice and then shoots around it to make the jug float, or in the final scenes, as Beatty plays cat-and-mouse with his would-be killer in the snow. Could be worth seeing again.

And then, last night, Moolaadé (2004), Ousmane Sembene’s deservedly lauded film about so-called female circumcision, and a woman who offers sanctuary to four girls who are fleeing such a ritual. The woman invokes an ancient spell to give power to her offer — the men dare not risk the curse that would fall on them if they were to enter her house and take the girls away — and it is interesting to see how everyone insists on the necessity of following their ancient and basically pagan traditions even as they try to justify those traditions in the light of their community’s conversion to Islam some centuries ago.

Interestingly, technology and the mass media are presented here as forces of enlightenment, though not necessarily at odds with religion: early on, a man says he wants to listen to the Koran on the radio; later, the men blame the woman’s rebellion on her radio, and so they round up and destroy all such devices; near the end, the woman boasts that she heard the grand imam say on the radio that female circumcision is not mandated by the Koran; and the last two shots in the film are that of an ostrich egg perched atop the mosque, followed by a similarly-angled shot of a TV antenna. (Has the antenna supplanted the mosque? Or does it supplement it?) This is a striking contrast to a lot of other films, which tend to portray such modernizing, globalizing forces as a problem that small, isolated villages would be better off without.

I am also struck, once again, by the very different rhythms of African life, as seen in the handful of African films that I have watched, and the way the villagers meet and greet each other through some fairly elaborate rituals; I was particularly reminded of Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s Genesis (1999), an Africanized version of the Bible, in which characters ritualistically recite the stories of their communities and the lineages of their ancestors; nothing in Moolaadé is quite that extensive, but there is a parallel in the formality of the characters’ social interactions.

And lastly, as one who got married just weeks ago, and as one who recently saw the documentary Inside Deep Throat — in which we learn that apparently one of the legal arguments brought against that famous porno flick by the prosecution was that it might give women the erroneous idea that clitoral orgasms are as valid as vaginal orgasms — I have to say I really, really don’t see why anyone would object to that part of the female anatomy. Why would American prosecutors expect any court of law to care? And why would the men in this tiny African village want their women to go without that kind of sexual pleasure? One of the very few potential drawbacks to Moolaadé is that we never hear anyone make any argument as to the reasons for female circumcision, beyond a repeated assertion to the effect that that’s just the way it has always been done, and therefore women who are not “cut” are less likely to find husbands. If the villagers have actual reasons for this practise — any awareness as to why their ancestors took it up — the film never lets us hear them. But then, I guess it’s always possible the villagers don’t have any reasons, which, itself, would be a part of the problem that needs depicting.

Just got home from Sin City, Robert Rodriguez’s film adaptation of the comics by Frank Miller. Still processing it. And since my official review won’t be up for over a week, I have time to process it some more.

In a way, I shouldn’t have to process it. I have never read this particular series, but I did read a number of Miller’s other graphic novels back in the day, and he’s got a pulpy style that is interesting and anarchistic but doesn’t really invite much thought. He can be kind of visceral, but not in the sickening, forensic way that Alan Moore is; there’s a wildness, a craziness, to his comics that just bleeds — no, sprays — off the page, and whatever else we might say about this film, Rodriguez does capture that element very well.

FWIW, I remember liking The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One a lot back in the late ’80s, and I loved Daredevil: Born Again when I got around to that one some years later, too. But my Miller appreciation took a serious dive when he wrote the screenplay for Robocop 2 — I loved the original Robocop and still do, but the sequel was a catastrophic mess, so much so that I didn’t even bother with the one that came after it, which Miller also wrote. Then again, he did write the Robocop Vs. Terminator mini-series, which was an interesting and creative attempt to bring my two favorite cyborg franchises together; and I developed a perverse interest in his Martha Washington series, which was fascinating not merely because it united Miller with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, but because of the way it married Miller’s chaotic ideas to Gibbons’s very precise draughtsmanship.

All of which is to say that, while I may not know any of the original Sin City storylines, I do recognize Miller’s style, and it’s all over this film.

In a way, that’s good, but in another way, it ain’t — this film tells something like five or six stories, some very short and some a little longer, and they all reflect that grim, morbid, sadomasochistic thing that Miller’s got going on, and while any one segment of this film might be an interesting watch in its own right, putting all of them together and sitting through them all in one go is a little much. You can only introduce, and then bump off, so many protagonists — and by that I mean the main character in any particular sergment — before it gets a bit wearying. And that’s before we take into account the sheer repetition of all the dismemberings, beheadings, and wounds to the male groin that take place over the course of this film.

Visually, this mostly black-and-white film is terrific, with the city itself looking like a monochromatic variation on those all-digital Sky Captain sets. I like the way the blood — and there is a lot of blood here — is given the red spot-colour treatment on some occasions, while on others it looks like bird droppings, a patch of white against someone’s black coat. I think there is even a scene of someone standing against a brick wall, and in the shadow, we see not simply a darker version of the rest of the wall, but more of a camera negative — dark bricks with white lines between them. Details like these nicely incorporate Miller’s visual style into the look of the film.

Some actors fit very well into this milieu, others less so. Mickey Rourke, of all people, is the stand-out as Marv, the ugly brute who is framed for the murder of a hooker who gave herself to him for free; he then tortures and kills as many people as it takes to avenge her death. I was startled and worried for Rourke when I saw the remake of Get Carter five years ago — it looked to me like he had taken enough steroids to kill a stable full of horses — but in this film, he’s one of the few actors who wears prosthetics on his face, and the added bit of freakishness actually makes him more human. His voice-over narration is pretty good, too. For my money, second place goes to Bruce Willis, who plays the only good cop in town, and whose stoic, years-long efforts to defend the life and honour of an 11-year-old girl are not repaid in quite the way he expected. He, too, does the voice-overs right.

I guess the only other major voice-over role goes to Clive Owen — come to think of it, yeah, it is only the men whose heads we get inside, here. The women are always something “other”. More often than not, the female characters are there because they need protection, the one glaring exception being the hookers who arm themselves to the teeth in order to fight back against the mobsters who are just itching to regain control of the prostitution business (the reason they don’t control it, at the moment, is because the cops have struck a “truce” with the hookers and have agreed to let them police the red-light district on their own; if the cops were to get involved, they would essentially be protecting the mob’s interests). And of course, the sight of skimpily-dressed streetwalkers toting swords and machine guns is intended primarily for the pleasure of male, not female, viewers — the point is not what the women think about all this, but how turned on Owen’s character is by the actions of his “warrior woman”, his “valkyrie”. It’s kind of like how we get good but brief glimpses of a couple lesbians’ naked breasts, but heaven forbid that we should see any of the male characters naked even when they are.

I’ll have to do some snooping to figure out which bits were directed by “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino. The film does feature a few of his alumni — namely Willis (Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms) and Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill) — in addition to Rodriguez alumni like Elijah Wood (The Faculty, Spy Kids 3-D), Josh Hartnett (The Faculty) and Carla Gugino (all three Spy Kids); for that matter, the girl that Willis’s character tries to save is played by Makenzie Vega, whose big sister Alexa was one of the Spy Kids. (You know what? This just may be Rodriguez’s first film since El Mariachi — which is to say, his second film ever — that does not star Antonio Banderas and/or Salma Hayek.)

Anyway, that’s as much as I can say without checking my notes. Though I can already sense other tangents wafting back into my mind — like the way the senator played by Powers Boothe says true power comes not from a gun but from getting people to play along with your big lie. (“Powers” Boothe is talking about “power”? And hey, Mickey “Rourke’s” character ends up going after a Cardinal “Roark”? Were these actors hired for the sheer punworthiness of their names?) In Miller’s world, authority of any sort — whether of the church or the state — is the “big lie”, but once this deception has been ripped away, there is nothing to take its place but pure demonstrations of power … and, occasionally, an act of self-sacrifice. I’m still mulling over whether these acts of self-sacrifice tilt towards something redemptive or something more resigned and fatalistic. But perhaps they’re both.

Give me time, and I could be a fairly big fan of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (a.k.a. “the Archers”). I already love 49th Parallel (1941) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), quite possibly the best and most self-critical war-time propaganda movies ever made — I devoted a few paragraphs to them in an article on war movies for Books & Culture — and I am intrigued by the spiritual implications of Black Narcissus (1947). But I wouldn’t say I know their works well enough to comment on them at any great length; I just happen to enjoy them.

A couple nights ago I had the privilege of introducing my wife to I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), which in some ways is a typical romantic comedy populated by eccentric, rustic supporting characters, but it’s got a wit and a charm and even a surrealism that make it better than most films in its genre. FWIW, Deanna and I generally roll our eyes whenever we come across any film about someone who falls in love with someone new just days before his or her wedding, but this film sets out its terms (people with money are shallow and snobby, people without it are full of life) so starkly and humorously that it doesn’t really matter — this is clearly fantasy, a grand myth, and not reality. And the dream sequence, in which Wendy Hiller imagines that she is marrying “Consolidated Chemical Industries” itself and not the man who happens to own or run the company, is beautifully strange.

A few things jumped out at me, both while watching the film and while watching the DVD bonus features. Apparently Roger Livesey came nowhere near the Hebrides during the entire shoot — all his seemingly outdoor scenes were done either with a stand-in or against a screen, and while it did seem obvious in a few shots, I never would have guessed that this was true of the entire film. It also seems that that wonderfully silly telephone booth by the waterfall is real, and still exists there. And that aloof, aristocratic little girl is played by Petula Clark, who went on to become a star of Swinging London in the ’60s, singing ‘Downtown’ and co-starring with Peter O’Toole in Goodbye Mr. Chips! (The Archers seem to have had a knack for finding female stars when they were young; a teenaged Glynis Johns appeared in 49th Parallel decades before her roles in The Court Jester and Mary Poppins.)

I am also struck by the segue which begins with the camera coming in tight on a train station employee’s hat, which then puffs smoke, before the image dissolves to a train’s chimney. It’s one thing for Hitchcock to make a simple cut from an image of a woman about to scream to an image of a train whistle, as he did in The 39 Steps, but it’s quite another for a filmmaker to rig up a prop to do something on the set as strange as that puffing hat!

Came across two articles on Millions today, via CT’s Weblog.

The Washington Times‘ Scott Galupo suggests that the film — which has been receiving good buzz and even raves from Christian critics — will “split” the audience that made The Passion a hit, because “conservative Protestants” will “find suspect” the film’s Catholic “message of deeds-based charity”. I haven’t a clue what Galupo means by this, as I grew up in a thoroughly evangelical environment — churches, private schools, Bible camps, concerts, the works — and donations to organizations like World Vision and Compassion International were always emphasized in all of those venues. Galupo is on slightly firmer ground when he says, “Evangelical Protestants, who believe all true believers are ‘saints,’ won’t dig the halos on all the capital-S saints,” but even here, I think most evangelicals I’ve known over the years would be happier to see even this form of Christianity affirmed so well on the screen than to see no Christianity at all; quite a few of my devoutly Mennonite relatives were huge fans of The Sound of Music, which is, of course, all about Catholics.

Now, it may be that director Danny Boyle told a reporter, “The film shows that we should have faith in people rather than icons or a particular brand of religion,” and there is certainly evidence in the film to support this sort of universalist outlook — the Mormon neighbours, the apparently Muslim bank teller, etc. So the characters live in a pluralistic culture, just like the rest of us do, fine. But the fact remains that the film is very much grounded in a Christian — and, yes, Catholic — view of the world, and it privileges Catholicism above all other religious perspectives. It is the Christian saints who appear to the boy and who even seem to have some sort of objective reality that others can perceive without realizing it; there are no similar apparitions by any of the Muslim or Mormon angels or prophets. So, to me, this film seems perfectly compatible with an inclusivist but still basically Christ-centred theology, as opposed to a universalist theology that promotes all faiths equally.

The one thing I do quibble with in the film is the scene where St. Peter gives a naturalistic, non-miraculous explanation of the feeding of the 5,000 — which is apparently the scene that most captivates the Chicago Sun-Times‘ Cathleen Falsani. She writes:

The miracle was not some magical multiplication of sardines and pita bread, St. Peter explains. The real miracle was that people in the crowd who had stashed food away for themselves decided to share it with one another. They were prompted to do so by a young boy who gave Jesus a sack of a few fish and a few pieces of bread.

The miracle was the change of people’s selfish hearts.

They were the miracle.

Well, there is certainly something miraculous about a changed heart, or about anything that turns us from self-centredness towards other-centredness and an appreciation of the “image of God” in other people. But to re-interpret the miracle of the bread and fish this way seems off, to me. This miracle happens to be the only one that appears in all four gospels (and in two gospels, it sort-of appears twice, since Mark and Matthew both talk about a feeding of the 4,000 that took place on a separate occasion). And if I’m not mistaken, this miracle was more than a mere act of generosity, whether human or divine; it was a sign of the Messiah’s coming, communicated via his ability to feed his people just as Moses had fed them in the desert many generations ago.

But I guess that understanding of the miracle would be a little too particularly Christian for the sort of film that Danny Boyle was making.

Mark Steyn is both a political pundit and an arts critic, so his review of The Passion of the Christ — re-posted on his website to coincide with the release of The Passion Recut — starts with a typical conservative denunciation of the forces that rallied against Mel Gibson’s movie. But, unlike most other conservative commentators, Steyn does not quite go on from there to sing the movie’s praises — instead, he actually puts on his film-critic hat and makes a few astute comments about Gibson’s limitations as a filmmaker. My two favorite observations of his:

The idea of embracing Christ’s life within His death is smart moviemaking, and a suppler director would have done more with it. But Gibson is something of a stolid storyteller and his picture settles into an almost mechanical rhythm: flaying – flashback – beating – flashback – nailing – flashback.
. . .
That’s another limitation of Mel’s movie. Although they’re speaking Aramaic and Latin, its real language is Hollywooden. So, for example, one of the flashbacks shows Jesus the carpenter making what seems to Mary like a “tall” table. Jesus explains that it’s for a rich man who likes to eat sitting down on “chairs” and mimes the position. “This will never catch on,” says Mary.

FWIW, there are things I like about this particular flashback — the way it paints the relationship between Jesus and Mary in almost romantic terms, a la the Renaissance artists; the way it emphasizes the physicality of Jesus, also a la the Renaissance artists; etc. — but the conversation about the table has always bugged me. It reminds me too much of the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where a soapbox prophet in the background predicts the invention of jumbo jets. So, nowadays, I generally refer to this flashback as “the jumbo jet scene”.

Thanks to Betty Ragan for tipping me off to this speech by Neil Gaiman on growing up with the stories of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. Two bits about Lewis’s Narnia books jump out at me in particular:

For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely over my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found myself realising that there were Certain Parallels. . . . I was personally offended: I felt that an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda. I had nothing against religion, or religion in fiction . . . My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place.

Apart from isolated passages that I’ve looked up here or there, I have not read the Narnia books myself in years (must correct that soon), so I cannot say whether I agree with Gaiman’s assessment — but as I hinted in my earlier post on the paganism of Narnia, I certainly think many of Lewis’s acolytes run the risk of prizing and promoting the “hidden agenda” aspect of his books more than their other, arguably better qualities. How often do we hear Christians praising Lewis for his superb writing ability and his knowledge of classic myth and literature, compared to how often we hear Christians praising his books for having a message?

Second, there is this:

C.S. Lewis was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made me aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the words, that there was someone telling the story. I fell in love with the way he used parentheses — the auctorial asides that were both wise and chatty, and I rejoiced in using such brackets in my own essays and compositions through the rest of my childhood.

I cannot say that I remember Lewis’s use of parentheses, per se, but I certainly fell in love with his writing style when I was young — not just in the Narnia books but also in his science fiction, his Christian apologetics, and his literary criticism — and I remember very vividly my father telling me that all writers, even Lewis, had to send their work to editors before it got published. I was disappointed, of course, to think that not every single word that appeared under Lewis’s name was necessarily put there by him — and, being only six years old or so, I was also a little discouraged to think that my words, such as they were, had to gain someone’s approval before they could see print.

But that was in the days before blogs, of course!

I like numbers, and I like comparing and contrasting different cultures, and last summer I discovered a website that posts the weekend box-office figures for both Canada in particular and North America in general. So, naturally, I began keeping tabs on this site and noting which films appeared to be more or less popular in Canada than they were in the States.

I actually first started thinking about this around the time I read a news report to the effect that The Passion of the Christ made about 7% of its money in Canada, a country that has about 10% of the combined Canadian-American population. And since The Passion had broken The Return of the King‘s record for a five-day opening, I thought it was striking that it had made, in Canada, only half of what The Return of the King made here.

However, it wasn’t until I began reading about Fahrenheit 9/11‘s popularity in Canada that I began to scour the web for some sort of freely available Canadian box-office report. After that, I kept tabs on the weekly top tens for that year at this other site — and now I’m going to do the same here. The totals for all the films that made the Canadian top tens in 2005 will be updated here.

FWIW, a few broad patterns have presented themselves already. Films with an African-American or “urban” angle tend not to do quite so well in Canada, while films with a British or Asian angle will do better here than in the States.

Some of the most glaring examples of this have occurred in just the past few weeks: On the one hand, Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened at #1 in “North America” four weekends ago, but — despite being distributed by a Canadian-owned company! — it was not released in Canada at all until last Friday, and it still failed to make a single appearance in our top ten. On the other hand, Bride and Prejudice — a Bollywood riff on an English novel — has been in the Canadian top ten for the past four weekends, yet it has never been higher than #15 in “North America”. (An even more glaring example would be the martial arts film Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior, which opened at #4 in Canada over a month ago but has never been higher than #17 in “North America”.)

So, without further ado, 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.

Bride and Prejudice — CDN $1,306,771 — N.AM $4,812,473 — 27.2%
Hostage — CDN $2,417,521 — N.AM $19,503,139 — 12.4%
Million Dollar Baby — CDN $9,075,366 — N.AM $89,943,692 — 10.0%
Constantine — CDN $7,018,363 — N.AM $70,382,151 — 9.9%
Hitch — CDN $14,946,875 — N.AM $159,325,368 — 9.4%
Be Cool — CDN $4,350,260 — N.AM $47,275,015 — 9.2%
Ice Princess — CDN $592,094 — N.AM $6,807,471 — 8.7%
Robots — CDN $5,408,455 — N.AM $66,067,739 — 8.2%
The Pacifier — CDN $5,328,603 — N.AM $72,270,940 — 7.4%
The Ring Two — CDN $2,338,706 — N.AM $35,065,237 — 6.7%

A couple of discrepancies: Bride and Prejudice was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #15 in North America as a whole), while Diary of a Mad Black Woman was #9 on the North American chart.