Reviewing Movies

Robbie Turner’s transgression was associating with people above his station in life. His mother’s employer may have willingly put his housekeeper’s son through school but having him affianced to his daughter would be quite another matter. When her younger sister tells an awful lie about him “the family closed ranks and threw him to the wolves”. Rather than rot in jail for an offense he did not commit he volunteers to fight in WW#1. The remainder of the movie shows scenes from the retreat to the beach at Dunkirk, and of the sisters serving as nurses in London Hospitals. As much as a romance craves for a happy ending in this tale none is possible. There are some hurts for which there is no atonement. No matter what she does Briony can never undo the hurt she has visited on her sister and Robbie.

The Holy Catholic Church is no longer universal, unfractured or particularly sacred if one subscribes to the point of view portrayed here. At the best of times the study of theology is a shattering experience but in recent times controversies that strike at the heart of the institution of the priesthood have added an entirely new level of stress. Given the 2000 + year history of Christianity celibacy has been a relatively recent accretion. While monks have practiced it for millennia before and after the birth of Christendom most religious leaders have had spouses and families.

As a follower of that heretic Luther I take issue with the pope on a number of planes. His stance on birth control and abortion, the place of women in the church, celibacy, his assertion that his is the only true Christian way, Mariology and the virgin birth, the silencing of modern Christian thinkers, and his love affair with Dogma are all turnoffs. With congregational attendance dwindling, priests in short supply and the average age of cloistered nuns in the mid-seventies the tradition role of the church is coming under severe fire. In Canada many dioceses have been nearly bankrupted by their participation in residential schools and orphanages as a result of the abuses they led to. The abuse of altar boys seems to be a world-wide phenomenon. Given all this the church seems bent on a course of repression, denial and cover-up. Are the transgressors venal or is there something inherently wrong about denying men in the prime of life a sexual outlet?

The young men at the centre of Conspiracy of Silence are caught up in this controversy in a deeply personal manner. With the eyes of the world and reporters in particular watching and looking for blood the church seems to expect its seminarians to both act and be seen to act in a manner that is beyond reproach. This at a time when these lads are on the eve of a lifetime commitment and attempting to enjoy their last few years of freedom. College students do what college students have always done. They have late night dorm room discussions, they go out to local pubs, they engage in sports. Can these young men be expected to be any different?

For the record, he may be a fellow Canadian but I do not find Jeff Speakman with his two-day stubble, flying hair and stocky features attractive—he looks working-class common. James Marsden is strikingly handsome with his trim build and chiseled features. This may simply be a matter of grooming and posture but in this case first impressions count.

Dan and Tom first met at a bar and before the night was over went to Tom’s apartment for a drunken one-night stand. Tom works at his family-owned restaurant and lives with his wife in the apartment bequeathed by his grandfather. He managed two years of community college before returning home to the family business. Dan is a university-educated film producer, a hustler, a metro sexual. Dan is bisexual, a man on the make and to him the encounter was a casual tryst soon forgotten. To Tom the encounter would seem to have been sexual experimentation that took place when alcohol had befuddled his better judgment.

Jump forward five years and the two meet again and end up once more at Tom’s apartment. This time, however the dynamic has changed radically. Tom has been stalking Dan because his wife died in a car accident just after learning she had AIDS and 24 days ago Tom learned he tested positive for HIV. Tom is certain his liaison with Dan is the only chance he had of being exposed and his observations of Dan’s lifestyle tend to indicate that Dan is at risk.

This sets the stage for a battle of wits, physical domination and moral suasion. Before Dan fully realizes the trap he has walked into he finds himself handcuffed to a chair and donating a forcibly removed blood sample Tom takes out to a lab for testing. As they wait for the test results these two equally matched young men spar verbally and physically with one another with words, cunning and fists.

I can only wish I’d had the opportunity to see the play with Noah Wyle starring as Dan on stage in LA. On screen the bi-play between these two is lost as the camera directs our view and we cannot see the physicality and menace that is exchanged between them. Interestingly enough despite being alone in an airless sealed apartment for two days these two young hunks keep their clothes on for the entire movie.

Well, tomorrow is St. Paddy’s Day. Moondance is a capricious madcap Irish brother movie in which two loving siblings take life as it finds them living a totally unbridled existence. They play hooky from school and church too as it happens, play cowboys and Indians indoors, and bath outdoors in a dory—the movie isn’t X-rated so they keep their pants on. Their idyllic lifestyle is upset by the arrival of Anya, a German girl here for the summer. Those Irish passions for Horses, Dogs and Ale also figure.

Unfortunately for the viewer too much of the back-story is missing and this leads one to ask uneasy questions. How do two minors get away with living alone and skipping school? How did their father die and why did their Mother go off to live in Africa? Why does their Aunt Dracula do nothing when her female charge shacks up with them? Why does the trio move to Dublin and how are they acquainted with Murphy the barkeep and dog racer?

True comic relief is provided when Patrick goes to work for the obviously gay duo of Dunbar and Dunwoody who cater to the Catholic trade in religious iconography, candles, and vestments. In a time when “Real Men don’t eat quiche”, one of the duo is heard to remark that he couldn’t wait to get rid of a pair of nuns as he’d just taken a quiche from the oven.

Although I can see the husky Chalky shipping off on a tramp steamer I wonder what use a captain would find for an under-age growing boy such as Dominic. He does have to pay his way to get on board. Mind you midshipmen have served on English battleships for centuries but the pretty Dominic might find need for Chalky’s support to save him from the fate midshipmen faced.

It seemed only fitting to follow one Coen brother’s thriller with an earlier opus. In Fargo Mid-Western corn-ball seems to be played almost to the point of parody complete with Paul Bunyon statue and Blue Ox roadhouse. If, as the movie claims, events are based upon actual happenings, the chief of a large urban police force being female seems unique. We do not get to hear the comments made around the station house in her absence about her artistic house-husband.

Being the wife of one of the co-directors can’t have hurt Frances McDormand’s chances but her acting skills are not in question in any case. Beneath that childlike friendliness lies a canny mind and a will of steel. When she bellies up to the all-you-can-eat buffet she really looks like she’s eating for two, being seven months pregnant. When she finally closes in on the killers she calls it in but proceeds without waiting for backup meeting the approaching cavalry on the way back with the cuffed villain behind her in the prowl car.

Although there’s little to like about his character in this film for some reason I just don’t like William Macy period. A hen-pecked husband held hostage in life by his wife’s father’s millions he is ineffectual even when he attempts a life of crime. His son Scotty does not even register in his plans.

One of the few truly comic moments is provided by the pair of hookers the abductors meet at the roadhouse. When interviewed by the sheriff the best description the blonde can come up with is that her john was strange, the only detail she remembers about his appearance is that he wasn’t circumcised. When questioned further she returns to strange.

The sheriff and her husband spend a good part of the movie in bed, an interesting location for a director to place his wife. The movie even arrives at its conclusion there.

A Coen Brothers movie is always a unique experience challenging its audience with these brothers’s singular take on the universe. This time out they have adapted a book by Cormac McCarthy set on the New Mexico borderlands. Drugs, drug money and murder are the themes. Killers in a Coen Brothers’ movie seem to be committed and totally unconflicted about their deeds. They proceed with single-minded purpose.

As Sheriff Bell Tommy Lee Jones not only plays an aging lawman, he looks that part. I date myself when I say that I remember when James Brolin played the youthful junior doctor on Marcus Welby MD but here we see his son, Josh, playing a middle-aged Viet Nam vet; it seems only yesterday he was playing a hunky twenty-year-old in The Young Riders. That feeling of time and events having passed one by seems to inform the movie. Sheriff Bell is a canny old lawman, but he does not understand the new spin drugs have put on crime. Life has passed Llewelyn by, the man lives in a trailer; he isn’t quite sure what he’d do with $2,000,000, but he wouldn’t mind finding out. As the man on his trail Anton is plodding, relentless, and taciturn allowing neither bullet wounds nor broken bones to stop him.

There are no chase scenes in this movie; simply a modern western in which one villain tracks another without passion or remorse.

I have now finished Season 1 of The Tudors. A teenaged Henry may have found it fun to be King but a supreme ruler soon discovers that it hard to decide whom he should trust. Heads do indeed roll and heretics are burned at the stake. Those who would manage a man with absolute power must walk a fine line lest the lion turn on them. Channeling that lion’s powers is a fine art which involves keeping the lion busy lest he move in directions his handlers would rather he not go.

In season one Henry becomes obsessed with producing a legitimate male heir. When his wife is unable to give him a son he seeks means to dispose of her so he can marry someone who can. The issue still hangs in the balance as the season ends but intrigue and counter-intrigues and machinations continue unabated. Henry’s desire for an heir begins when he is injured at Jousts and is given further impetuous when his nation is beset by plague.

Witnessing what passed for medical treatment in the early 1500ies makes one wonder just how antiquated we will find our present medical practice in another half millennium. Black Death was not finally eradicated from London until the Great Fire of 1655 incinerated the slums that bred it. For all our scientific advances the old saw still holds, “The six best doctors anywhere and no one can deny it; are sunshine, water, rest, fresh air; with exercise and diet.”

Henry is a man of many talents. He is a horseman, a swordsman, a bowman, an athlete, writes poetry and at one point we see him playing the lute and composing Greensleeves. How astute a judge of character he is may be in question. When he is persuaded to sack Wolsey he soon learns that a little graft may be acceptable in a man who is able to keep his finances balanced.

Interestingly enough the CBC shot a movie about England’s greatest king entirely in Ireland and chose an Irishman to play him. The sets and costuming seem authentic and there are no jarring modern anachronisms in view. It certainly does rain a great deal. If this series manages to survive through Henry’s six wives it will be interesting to see how the make-up department manages to transform the willowy John Rhys Meyers into the paunchy gout-ridden Henry we remember from our history books.

He may not have seen it that way but Chris McCandless was one lucky guy. His homelife may not have been stable but financially he lacked for nothing. Rather than coast through life he threw it all away—he literally donates his fortune to charity and burns the cash in his pockets, takes an assumed name, and goes walk-about. Mind you he starts out in his old second-hand car but parks it one night in a flash flood area and is awakened when a flood of water washes it away. Again he was lucky his adventure didn’t end right there. The story comes to a tragic end when his luck finally runs out. It is Chris’ lack of local knowledge that is his downfall in the end. He has no familiarity with animal migration or the fact that it occurs seasonally when insects make certain areas unlivable nor did he know that the small stream he crossed to get to his “Magic Bus” would become a raging torrent once the glacial melt waters from higher altitudes reached downstream watercourses. He dies of starvation when the food runs out and he can’t make it back to civilization. I give nothing away here as it’s all in Jon Krakauer’s book upon which this movie is based.

The importance of a stable loving family experience to ground a person is rarely so graphically illustrated. Rather than take the money and run as some people would have done; Chris is unable to cope with his inner denoms and throws away a potentially lucrative career in law to live a rootless vagabond existence. Rejecting his parent’s expectations he leaves home and makes no further contact with his family. His parent’s who have been too wrapped up in their own affairs to recognize the hurt in their son’s life suddenly, out of guilt or remorse, become obsessed with finding their wayward boy. The commentary supplied here by his sister tracks the origins of Chris’ rootless existence. The fact that he first ran away from home, mind you only 4 blocks, at four; that he spent his summer vacations hitch-hiking across America; and went on major cross continent treks during his college years. In the end the fact that others love you means nothing if you cannot love yourself and life has no meaning if you cannot find it. Happiness is unattainable if you cannot share your joys with others.

Emile Hirsch does a credible job of portraying Chris here. He’s an ordinary guy with whom an audience can identify. The list of filming locations occupies an entire page and ranges across the North American continent giving us countless panoramic views from mountain tops and the valleys below. Although the movie is narrated from Chris’ Sister’s point of view, we are never given an opportunity to meet her or experience first-hand the sense of loss she expresses—the movie is not about her. In the end we are left with a sense of loss—grief at the demise of a lost soul.

Rocky meets Officer and a Gentleman. What if a movie about the US Naval Academy got shanghaied by a boxing match? As one character declares in a deleted scene, “Can you believe we volunteered for this?” I find military discipline repellant and the treatment of new recruits in particular, appalling and reprehensible. I find the military’s methods objectionable and the need for them equally offensive—but then I’m a pacifist at heart. War is good for the economy and those who profit from it are not fussy about which side buys their toys. But I digress.

If you’re a fan of James Franco this movie gives you an unparalleled opportunity to view his taut naked bod. If those are actually his abs on display in one brief shot they are impressive indeed. No word on whether he or a stunt double performed the actual boxing scenes. The guy he’s up against looks chillingly like Mike Tyson. Gaining or losing weight to make another weight class seems to be a common theme in boxing and wrestling flicks.

This film milks all the clichés including the fat boy, the snitch, racism, bullying, name calling, the suicide, the obstacle course, calisthenics, drilling, bad weather, and sadistic officers. For good measure throw in the latest wrinkle of females in the military. Running away from home to the military to find yourself has a long tradition; problem being that you bring yourself along for the journey. Finding self-discipline by having an outside force impose it upon you seems a desperate move to me but it seems to work for some. Finding it in the military comes with the option of being brought home in a body bag as is graphically illustrated in one scene.

If you like boxing and are a James Franco fan this is an amiable time-waster—others may heed the critics advice and avoid.

Tom—we are never given his last name for he does not have one—was first molested as a nine-year-old by his adoptive father and is taken into care again when his mother discovers what is happening and uses a pitch fork on her husband. Molested again at 13 by a case worker he has been shipped from foster home to care centre all his life. When we meet him at 30 he is a stunningly handsome, six-foot two inch, extremely well-built Rent Boy closeted in a high-class West-End London Flat. It becomes apparent that upon reaching adulthood and being kicked out onto the streets he has returned to what he knows and become the sex toy of a London mobster who likes it rough, Tom’s body exhibiting the resultant scars.

When asked by a neighbour lady who befriends him what it’s like to accept sex for hire he is stumped to come up with a reply. When she later samples the goods and is disappointed by his lack of response he lays it on the line for her. Being treated like a hunk of fresh meat one learns to turn one’s body off and lose touch with what is happening to it; to become emotionally divorced. When one loses that detachment and actually thinks about it one learns to get good at finding that off switch. After 20 years he doesn’t know how to find that switch and turn it back on.

Daniel Newman, who plays Tom, has what in the Body Building trade is called a squatter’s butt—not a bad attribute for one who would play a male prostitute. He wears flashy clothes well and lives a life of indolent bored luxury. Of indeterminate sexual orientation Tom accepts rough sex as his job; not because he likes it or is too weakly submissive to fight back. The storyline of this movie is about what happens one night when he does resist.

The back story provided above is supplied us in flashbacks which occur mainly when Tom is exercising his “OFF SWITCH.” They occur in no apparent chronological order and the synopsis above rather than being a plot spoiler is the background I wish I’d had going into the movie. The production values and acting here are excellent; again, my only real quibble is with the difficulty this movie presents in attempting to follow the storyline. This is a movie that will improve upon second watching.

A remake of a half-century old movie this film could bring back the popularity of westerns as a genre. As the leader of a robber band Ben Wade played by Russell Crowe slouches through the entire picture without an apparent care in the world; whistling for his horse in the final shot as he is being taken away for the inevitable hanging. The most sinister and frightening character is his loyal henchman Charlie Prince played by Ben Foster; he most reminds me of Bosie played by Charlie Hunnan in Cold Mountain for his unflinching desire to hunt down and kill anyone who would get in the way of his ambitions. Not that Ben Wade doesn’t kill people, but he does it in such an off-hand workmanlike fashion that he is not seen to derive pleasure from doing so as his henchman obviously does.

Wade appears almost amused by his capture and makes only half-hearted attempts at escape; the scene in which he single-handedly rescues his captors fighting off hostile Indians stretches willing disbelief beyond all reason. As the rancher hired to help bring Wade to justice Christian Bale’s Dan Evans glowers his way through the entire piece. The character who steals the movie for my money is his fourteen-year-old son played by Logan Lerman. A fuzzy cheeked youngster he rankles at being asked to stay home and mind the farm stealing off to follow the posse. When he faces down the desperado who has the drop on his captors there is a fire in his eye that makes even Wade believe he means to use that gun in his hand. This is a mature man in a boy’s body. His father may have been beaten down by past injuries and life’s circumstances but he has the will to succeed against all odds.

With the amount of lead that is seen to fly around this set it’s a wonder that anyone survives. Entire frontier towns were built for this movie; it’s been so long since Western Sets were utilized they’ve all fallen into disrepair. The old steam train was trucked in piece by piece and reassembled. If this movie serves to give new life to the genre expect to see these sets again and again.

The James Dean legend is based on 487 minutes of film. East of Eden is based on the John Steinbeck novel; Rebel Without a Cause has become an iconic portrayal of teenage angst and rebellion. Due to its extreme length the sprawling Giant is not often seen on TV and on DVD the uncut four hour twenty-one minute version is a marathon.

James Franco who portraits James Dean in this biopic is already 6 years older than Dean when he died, is three inches taller and decidedly slimmer and lither of build. His depiction of Dean appears to be based on the movie persona. Aside from his relationship with his mother who died when he was nine and his life-long estrangement from his father little insight into his life is given. The bulk of the movie is taken up with his struggles to become an actor and scenes from the sets of his movies; in particular East of Eden. I will have to watch that movie again in light of the new insights I’ve gained.

Whatever his onscreen charisma if this film is at all accurate working with Dean must have been a royal pain for all involved. Given his penchant for motorcycles and fast cars no insurance company today would offer completion bonds for any film on which he worked on at any price. Rightly so as his two Academy Awards were both awarded posthumously after he died in a car wreck. Whatever the merits of this movie its ending seems rather weak and leaves one wishing for more.