The Princess of Montenpsier

I am genetically predisposed to love any movie about royal intrigue. Especially, as in this one, where it also involves forbidden romance, masquerade balls, sworfights, duplicitous family politics and scandals, and, just for kicks, religious wars. It really has it all. And it's set in beautiful, verdant, rural France. And its one of the rare movies that make interesting, purposeful use of color photography, as the yellows, greens, reds, and purples just pop right off the screen.

Lambert Wilson plays a once-ardent religious warrior who has seen too much and decides to lay down his arms and embrace pacifism and a role as advisor in the court of the Prince of Montpensier. He is viewed suspiciously by both sides of war, seen as a traitor by those he leaves behind, and a possible interloper by those he now moves among, but never betraying his core conviction that killing in the name of God is wrong, no matter which side. Between this and his role in Of Gods and Men, he makes the strongest case for real, contemplative faith seen in one cinematic year that I've seen.

                                                     (does this not look like a painting?)
The religious war between French Catholics and Huguenots rages and is filmed intensely, but as with just about every war movie since The Steel Helmet, struggles to balance showing "the absurdity of war" with images of bravura heroism glamorizing it. But the more interesting war rages within the titular princess, trying to fight the urges she has toward her husband's cousin, with his chiseled jaw and flowing locks. She can't help herself, try as she might to stay away from him. That obsessive attraction coupled with an intense desire, and need, to resist is fascinating to watch play out. As Little Richard once sang, "the girl can't help it".



In case you're not up on Little Richard:

Take Shelter

Something's coming. Terrorists. Climate change. Financial collapse. Something's just not right. Everyone feels it. The world is closing in around us and we aren't safe. Don't say you weren't warned.

In Take Shelter, Curtis' sleep is curtailed by uneasy dreams. Storms of viscous, oily rain, strangers kidnapping his daughter on the road, his own dog attacking him. Then he wakes up feeling the latent effects of his dreams. He feels the dog bite from his dream all day the next day.

The movie not only deals with themes at a subtextual level, it also plays topically with the issue of health care. The daughter needs a surgery and an appointment is scheduled. Curtis has a steady job and good insurance. Then he takes out a large loan, gets fired, loses his insurance. It all seems to happen in an instant. His delusions (or premonitions) have direct, tangible consequences. It's not just his potential mental instability or financial difficulty, but his daughter's ability to hear could be permanently compromised.

This is the second collaboration between star, Michael Shannon, and director Jeff Shannon. Their first movie together was 2007's Shotgun Stories, a family saga about retribution among the estranged sons of a father's two families and it's every bit as good as Take Shelter, so I recommend you seek that one out too. I might even let you borrow it if you ask nicely.

Of Gods and Men

"I didn't become a monk to be a martyr."
"You've already given your life. You gave it by following Christ."

This movie is about faith and doubt. It's also one of the most suspensful movies I saw this year, even when the outcome was never in question.
The plot concerns a group of Trappist monks living in Algeria in 1996. Islamist extremists are terrorizing the surrounding villages, the army is either powerless to stop them or complicit, we are never certain. The powers-that-be want the monks to leave, or at least accept their 'protection' at the monastery. Father Christian, the abbot, puts it to a vote. He asks them if they should leave or if they believe they have been called by God to this place to do a particular work and accept whatever fate may befall them, not to be heroic, but to be faithful. Willingness and want are to different things. No one wants to die for their cause. Even Christ prayed in Gethsemane to not have to endure the Passion:

He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him.

"yet not my will, but yours be done." just as he instructs in what's come to be known as The Lord's Prayer, "your will be done". Its one of the hardest parts of the life of Christian faith, to say or pray those words and truly mean it. To give up one's own will to God, not knowing what his will actually is and if it lines up with yourself. But it is required. It is the only way. Father Christian learns that his attempt to impose what he sees as God's will is not the same as allowing the brothers the chance to reflect and come to such a place for themselves if they are indeed to face what is to come willingly and with resolve.

One way the film projects thematic material is through passages of the monks chanting/singing. Its entirely possible that they sing/chant these words regularly, but the situation in which they are now placed gives them a new prism through which to reflect on the words.

Also, the narrative about encroaching Islamic extremism is naturally topical for the world today. Quoting at length from Andrew Sullivan:

There is a Christmas scene in which local Jihadists assault the monastery and demand medicines. Christian insists that he will not speak with anyone with weapons inside the monastery walls. This is a place of peace he insists. He is unarmed and defenseless but his manifest integrity disarms the thugs temporarily.

And outside, he calls the Jihadist leader's bluff by knowing the real Koran as well as he does. The name of Jesus literally defuses the conflict. This is the moment of hope here - before darkness descends again: a mutual Muslim and Christian reverence for Jesus. From that moment on, the monks' faltering, doubt-riddled, fear-ridden, gradual decision to risk martyrdom rather than compromise their faith seems to come from almost outside of them, beyond them.

Here's a great vlog review by Father James Martin for PBS:

Watch Father James Martin on "Of Gods and Men" on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The Tree of Life

What I loved about The Tree of Life was the headlong rush of images at times. Terrence Malick & Emmnauel Lubezki's probing camera, looking deep into, around, and through space and time to find a way to make sense and meaning of everything (in a sense, literally).

The discussion around the movie tends to center on its theology, or perhaps, teleology. If  you haven't seen it, the movie features a 20 minute passage near the beginning that starts with the big bang and shows the process of formation of the cosmos, the planet earth, and the beginnings of life from amoeba to aquatic creatures crawling out of the sea to dinosaurs and on to humankind. The argument is whether the guiding force in evolution/nature is grace or random chance/chaos. This is certainly a valid argument, but I think Malick is less interested in this argument, than showing you that whatever the animating force, he wants you to see that life is indeed progressing in a forwardly direction; rushing forward, in fact, which circles us back around to what I loved about the movie: the images. The images of the mother at play with her children in and around the house in Waco. The images of a domineering father struggling to hold his family together. The cold reflective surfaces of the skyscrapers of Downtown Dallas. The waystation at the end of life on a beach where loved ones who've passed away can be reunited. Sartre said "Hell is other people." This film says so is heaven.

The scope here is certainly ambitious. The movie tells the story of existence in the universe through the frame of one person/family. Your one life has Meaning in the grand sweep of EVERYTHING because you were here at all, and if you hadn't been here life, quite simply (simply!) would have been infinitely, and infinitismally, different.

Young Adult

Most people never move away. Statistics show that there is less geographic mobility (that is, people moving from one place to another) in each decade since they started tracking such statistics in the late 1940s. In 2004, only 18% of people moved, and of those 58% moved within the same county; only about 1 in 50 moved to a different state or country. The numbers are even lower as you go down the income ladder.

Everybody stays somewhere.

For most of the residents of Mercury, Minnesota they stayed in their hometown, took a job their mom or dad probably had before they retired, got married, sent their kids to the same schools they went to, and now watch soccer games from the sidelines of fields they once played on. Mavis Gary moved away, went to the big (relatively speaking) city, became a famous (relatively speaking) author. She was the one that got out. At least geographically. Emotionally, she was stuck at Mercury High (home of the Injuns! [ever interested in details, writer/director team Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman include the point that the mascot had been changed to  Indians in the name of cultural sensitivity to local peoples.).
She is forever 18. Even the once-popular series of YA books she ghost-writes are high school dramas. The movie opens as she struggles to write the last book in the series. How does she write what happens at the end of high school if she never got there herself? How does she show her character has grown up after all this time, is moving on, putting away childish things when she still walks around in Hello Kitty t-shirts?

The idea of being stuck in a rut vis a vis personal development has been a topic of much discussion in our culture, what with the rise to prominence of the Judd Apatow man-child movies. Here’s a movie that reminds us that woman-child is just as possible and problematic, only Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody have the conviction of not letting her off the hook with a hunky, responsible white knight who redeems her. Her only meaningful connection in the movie is Matt, a character who, by being not dissimilarly stunted in the area of personal growth, offers her self-reflection. She claims to be in Mercury for Buddy, but she doesn’t have any interest in Buddy. What (not insignificantly, mind you, I wrote what, not who) she wants is "Buddy", the 18 year old big man on campus, the one that inspired the love interest in her books. When she tells him he might recognize the character based on his 18 year old self, you wonder if he would, and if he did if he would do so with the same approbation Mavis does.

There are conflicting impulses for people who leave home, especially when home is a small town: They want to get away and measure themselves against the world, but they also don’t want to feel like they are missing out on what’s going on back home. They want to come home and be a hero, an object of admiration. To come back and find out no one thinks about you much, they aren’t following your every move with baited breath can be humbling. What are they doing that’s so great, that I’m not THE topic of conversation?

In the end, Mavis has no great revelation or growth or change. In the first act we see her on a date with someone she met online; she's bored, barely listening (if at all) to what he says, but wakes up with his pasty arm draped over her just the same. At the end of the movie, she drunkenly, desperately, decides(?) to sleep with Matt. She wakes up with his pasty arm draped over her and maybe for the first time realizes that her station in life might be self-inflicted. This is the scariest thing. It's bad enough when things aren't going your way, worse still when it's your own fault.

Attack the Block

This is the alien-invasion movie people should've been watching this summer instead of Super 8 or Cowboys and Aliens. For my money, this was maybe the most pure fun movie of the year. A gang of up-to-no-good teenage punks in London are in the middle of a mugging when an alien falls from the sky. It attacks one of them and runs away. They chase it down, wound it and carry it off as a prize to their sci-fi loving friend to see if he knows what it is. Soon they see what appear to be dozens of meteors falling from the sky, they figure its more aliens and since they'd dispatched the first one with such ease, figure its time to go alien-bashing (wielding bats mostly, and, in one instance, a sword) they don't take kindly to anyone/anything invading their neighborhood, regardless of species/planet of origin), but things don't go as expected when they turn out to be a pack of pitch black creatures with glow-in-the-dark fangs (see above) which are a good deal more fierce than their initial conquest, and soon they are being hunted, hounded, really. Alien invasion, in the modern cinema, generally involves grand governmental plans to thwart attacks, surging, panicked crowds, momunets being destroyed, breathless TV reports, etc. Attack the Block envisions alien invasion on a much smaller scale. Much like the movie Monsters last year, it is a film where the limited budget requires the scope to be smaller, but the imagination to flourish. Also, those monsters are pretty awesome.

Literary Interlude: Hardboiled Edition

      A door squeaked behind me. I whirled, but I needn't have bothered. A hard voice, about as English as Amos and Andy, said: "Put 'em up, bud."
     The butler, the very English butler, stood there in the doorway, a gun in his hand, tight-lipped. The girl turned her wrist and shot him just kind of casually, in the shoulder or something. He squealed like a stuck pig.
"Go away, you're intruding.", she said coldly.
He ran. We heard his steps running.
"He's going to fall", she said.
    I was wearing my Luger in my right hand now, a little late in the season as usual. I came around with it. Old man Jeeter was holding on to the table, his face gray as a paving block. His knees were giving. George stood cynically, holding a handkerchief around his bleeding wrist, watching him.
"Let him fall," I said. "Down is where he belongs."

• Raymond Chandler, "Trouble is my Business" (1939)

United States of Space

I love conspiracy theories!

Two former participants in the CIA’s Mars visitation program of the early 1980’s have confirmed that U.S. President Barack H. Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and was among the young Americans from the program who they later encountered on the Martian surface after reaching Mars via “jump room.”



Andrew D. Basiago , 50, a lawyer in Washington State who served in DARPA’s time travel program Project Pegasus in the 1970’s, and fellow chrononaut William B. Stillings, 44, who was tapped by the Mars program for his technical genius, have publicly confirmed that Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and that each later encountered Obama during visits to rudimentary U.S. facilities on Mars that took place from 1981 to 1983.

http://m.examiner.com/exSeattle/pm_76001/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=UniWuhAE