finnegan’s film blog

I’ll review this one from two perspectives:

1) As a admirer of the book and author: I always imagined the world of Narnia a bit darker and more mysterious than it was depicted in the movie. There was no fear associated with Aslan. Right off the bat, he was this nice friendly lion. The woods were not in any way dark or mysterious (”even some of the trees are on her side”). The witches’ castle seemed almost like a nice place to visit (that’s not how I remember it in the book). The filmmakers bent over backwards to ensure there was no blood or gore in the film, but there clearly was in the book (Peter had to wipe the blood off his sword, and Aslan’s death was much more graphic in the source material… However, I didn’t mind the fact that Aslan didn’t fly and bounce around.

2) As a filmmaker and critic: The editing was terrible. That’s my biggest complaint. It seems that director Andrew Adamson was nervous about making a live-action movie and covered every scene from every possible angle during production, and in post, the editor used all of the angles instead of finding the best few and sticking with those. The pace and tone of the editing throughout the film was nervous and distracting. There are no scenes that simply flow at a natural pace. Everything feels cut short, like trying to watch TV when someone keeps flipping through the channels. Ultimately, the pacing keeps us from connecting with any of the characters.

Also, the acting was stiff. Granted, this may be the fault of the director and editor, but so much of the emotional value of this story relies on the childrens’ performances, and I never believed Peter or Susan. My guess is that Adamson shot each scene so many times from so many angles, the kids couldn’t keep it up.

On a positive note: I did like the beavers. I liked Edmund and the witch. The CG seemed to do Aslan justice. I’m also willing to admit that I might be holding the movie to some impossible standard because I liked the books so much as a child. Like I said, I’m planning on giving it another chance while it’s still in theaters.

Harry Potter has become a cultural phenomenon. Along with those rubber “causie” bracelets, cell phones, and iPods, going to see these movies is something every American (under the age of 60) does. Kids love them. College students love them. I look across the aisle on an airplane, and there’s a businessman reading one of the books. Even well-respected film critics seem to love them.

I’ve done my best to play along; to be agreeable and just enjoy the stories like everyone else, but I can’t. I’ve seen all four movies and read [most of] the first book and I can say with certainty that I do not like Harry Potter. Here are two reasons why:

1) The plots are ridiculous

Now, before you say, “they’re fantasy stories, you moron. They’re allowed to be ridiculous,” consider this: movies can be as ridiculous as you want them to be, but they have to adhere to their own rules of logic in order for me to suspend my disbelief. For example, if Luke Skywalker started flying around like Superman in Return of the Jedi and lifting up buildings and using X-ray vision to spy on the emperor, George Lucas could say “Luke’s just using the Force,” but Star Wars fans would know that was stupid.

In The Goblet of Fire, the instructors at Hogwarts are ceaselessly worried about the safety and well-being of their students. Most of the times that Harry has gotten in trouble are because he recklessly endangered himself or his peers on some unlikely quest. However, once a year, all the teachers get together and tell the students that three of them will be chosen to needlessly put themselves in harms way for some goofy treasure hunt. They will risk having their students burned to death by dragons, drowned at the bottom of a lake, or killed in some giant shrubbery maze from Hell. It’s simply not credible that the teachers would scold Harry for doing dangerous things on the one hand, while risking students’ lives for the sake of entertainment and tradition on the other.

Also, am I to believe that thousands of witches, wizards and other powerfully magical people get together to go to some giant magic festival, and can do nothing to stop ten KKK-looking guys who march through and burn the festival to the ground? Several thousand magicians couldn’t combine forces and come up with some kind of spell that would have saved the festival from a few hooded skull heads? I don’t think so.

The plots generally involve too many weakly-linked events. Why do we need to see the festival at all? It’s all in the interest of “keeping the plot moving,” but the chain of events often seems too long and tedious to keep track of. A groundskeeper who has nothing at all to do with the plot gets eaten by a giant snake. Meanwhile, Harry and friends hold hands a touch an old shoe, which propels them through a magic portal into a magic festival, where some scary face in the sky scares everyone away, which has very little to do with the rest of the plot. It’s too disjointed.

The story doesn’t flow. I don’t care if any of these characters die at any point during the movie, because we never get to spend any time really getting to know any of them. When [someone] dies at the end of Goblet, I was not emotionally moved in the slightest during the eulogy, because I didn’t even know who it was. In fact, I was kind of bored during that part.

2) The Deus Ex Machina

Every time Harry gets in a bind which there’s no conceivable escape from, he says some hocus-pocus and viola! He’s safe from harm. End of act. Everyone laughs and has a good time and eats magic jellybeans until something else terrible happens, at which point Harry will almost die (again) and one of his teachers will say some hocus-pocus and viola! A traitor is revealed. The new teacher isn’t who you thought he was! And I’m not just talking about Goblet of Fire. I’m referring to ever Harry Potter movie. With the exception of maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark, Deus ex Machina = bad writing.

But seriously, I don’t hate the movies. And I do respect the fans. I’m just saying I don’t understand the hype. Momma always said, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” So now it’s time for me to say something positive about Harry. The Prisoner of Azkaban was alright. It kept me pretty entertained. So there, don’t say I never said anything nice about poor ol’ Harry.

Those of you who are fans of the books might have additional information as to why a thousand wizards couldn’t ward off the skull heads. Maybe J. K. Rowling has everything explained perfectly in her books, and the movie studio screenwriters left it out of the movie. I haven’t read past the first book. But I have seen all four movies, and they don’t deserve all the praise they’ve received.

“Every war is different. Every war is the same,” says US Marine Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), and he’s right. Every war is the same. They all have soldiers and they all have fighting. But Jarhead is a movie about a company of soldiers in a war that didn’t provide good material for a war movie. So director Sam Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. did something a little different.

Their troubled antihero endures boot camp in the states, and is among the first US soldiers to set foot on Saudi sand in the military buildup leading to Operation Desert Storm. Swofford and his fellow Marines pitch tents and wait for “the suck” to begin. And wait. Back home, girlfriends cheat, the media reports, and wives divorce. And still they wait.

While Jarhead is not your typical war film, it’s not a typical anti-war movie either. Like HBO’s Band of Brothers, Jarhead is a first-hand account of a soldier’s life during wartime, plain and simple. It doesn’t avoid a point of view because Mendes is afraid to make a solid statement; it avoids definitive statements because the soldiers themselves are trained not to have any, and this is their story.

Jarhead will likely disappoint those expecting profound political statements, as well as those wanting to see the next Saving Private Ryan. Jarhead is part of a newer canon of movies that has already begun to erode our preconceived notions of what a war film should be. Where’s the climactic battle scene where the protagonist learns a valuable lesson? For that matter, where’s the battle scene?

As the nature of ground wars drastically change, so change war movies. What was considered anti-war in the 1970s has practically become standard GI indoctrination in the world of Jarhead. At a screening of Copolla’s Apocalypse Now, a room full of bloodthirsty Marines hum the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” and reenact every moment of the film with feverish intensity. The meaning of the original becomes perverted in the context of the scene. In another, the Marines–the very fingers of the Pentagon–dance around a bonfire chanting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” even though they are the power.

Mendes and company intentionally keep certain things cloudy, such as the point of the war: is it justified or is it evil? That’s not what the movie is about. But other points are clear: any inkling of glory and honor that may have been connected with wars in the past has been snuffed out. The soldiers are the antagonists. Like a pack of starving wild dogs, the Marines turn on each other in the absence of “the suck.” They prey on each others’ weaknesses for the lack of something better to do.

Jarhead is a war movie befitting the war it’s about, but it’s bound to leave people scratching their heads. Perhaps the point of the movie is to get us to ask ourselves “what’s the point?” What’s the point of war? Isn’t there something eerie and unnatural about modern man’s need for petroleum? Jarhead is a tough one to figure out. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And for the sake of our troops in Iraq right now, we had better try.

The title is inflammatory, the editing and cinematography are amateurish, and the star of the show is as much of a subjective commentator as the figurehead he’s targeting. In spite of all this, filmmaker Michael Wilson has created a critique of Michael Moore’s documentary films that is well worth watching. Michael Moore Hates America attempts to confront the king of contemporary left wing propaganda with a few of his questionable filmmaking practices. Wilson wants to debunk (his perception of) Moore’s notion that the United States is an irredeemable wasteland of dreams destroyed by greedy corporate fat cats.

There is a certain air of honesty throughout the film–even at the risk of looking powerfully uncool–that distinguishes Wilson from Moore. If you disagree with everything Wilson says, you should at least be able to appreciate the honesty and vulnerability with which he approaches the subject. He’s not above misleading interviewees, but he is big enough to apologize afterward and admit where he went wrong. Perhaps the most cogent point in the movie is Wilson’s discovery that the temptation to mislead and misrepresent is enormous, and the line between objectivity and spin is very thin indeed.

By including icons like documentary pioneer Albert Maysles in the movie, the film gives the impression that Moore isn’t necessarily “in solidarity” with his fellow documentary filmmakers (as a comment he made during his acceptance speech at the Oscars in 2003 might lead one to believe). If Wilson is a right-wing wacko, he hides it quite well. At one point, he even distances himself from the acerbic statements of conservative interviewee David Horowitz.

Unlike FahrenHYPE 9/11 or Celsius 41.11, Michael Moore Hates America is not a right-wing counterpoint to Moore’s films. Rather, it is a critique of the methods used by documentary filmmakers. If you’re among those “left of the American mainstream,” but are increasingly uncomfortable with Michael Moore as your spokesperson, this is the film you’ve been wanting to see ever since Moore laid that picture on Charlton Heston’s driveway in Bowling for Columbine.

I saw this documentary at Cornerstone Festival ’05 and I must say I was impressed. After meeting the filmmakers before the screening and finding out that they had no idea what they were doing when they made this movie—neither of them had ever used a camera or run audio before, nor had the editor edited video in his life—I was pleasantly surprised to find myself interested 60 minutes into the film.

Anyone who has ever been to a concert with their youth group, or questioned the line between “Christian rock” and “secular music” will appreciate the subject of this documentary. From emotional God-worshiping frontmen to the most jaded and cynical critics of the scene, the subjects of this film run the gamut. The filmmakers did a fairly good job of keeping even-sided arguments: I could never quite pin down whether they were for or against the Christian rock movement.

Much of the film was shot on location at Cornerstone Music Festival and many of the interviews are scattered between bands in their trailers and fans in the crowd. As the camera lens wanders throughout the festival like a mosquito, each person it lands on pitches in their two cents on topics such as burning your secular music collection, egotistical Christian rockers, and the decades-old “Christian band versus Christians in a band” debate. Between Steve Taylor, MXPX, Pedro the Lion, and Pansy Division, you’re practically guaranteed to see a familiar face at some point, even if you were fortunate enough never to have been to a youth group concert.

The critic in me wants to scowl at the poor lighting and frame compositions, or to roll my eyes at the muddled audio, but in the end, none of those foibles hurt the film. The only actual flaw I see is a structural one. Due to the long-standing nature of the arguments and the sheer number of opinions represented on screen, the talking points become repetitive toward the end of the movie. The last 10 – 15 minutes of the film feel like a stretch to reach feature length qualification… But for these three first-time filmmakers with no background in film, this is an astonishing accomplishment. One can only hope we will see more from them in the future.

Since this is an indie doc, it might be hard to find (it’s not listed at Rotten Tomatoes). It’s currently screening at small film festivals around the country and recently became available on DVD—though you may have to email the filmmakers to get a copy at this point. You can check out the website at rightrightrightfilms.com

This 1973 Franco Zefirelli biopic about Saint Francis attempts to show the flowery side of the riches-to-rags monk from Assisi. But despite the director’s best conceptual efforts, Brother Sun, Sister Moon paints too campy a picture of a this real-life historical figure to earn any real credibility.

From the opening scene, it’s clear that this is more European arthouse cinema than American studio narrative. Francesco, the son of a successful merchant, returns from the crusades in a feverous stupor, too traumatized to speak. Because we observe the passage of time through Francesco’s tormented eyes, it’s difficult to connect with anyone or identify with anything on screen until his war-profiteering father attempts to speak some worldly sense into his stupefied son.

Eventually Francesco’s peculiar motive becomes clear when he rejects not only excessive materialism, but publicly renounces the very foundation of Italian class society by shedding his merchant-class clothes in front of the local bishop. As he goes into self-exile and begins to rebuild an old church he gains a faithful following, ranging from fellow ex-crusaders to the poorest beggar in Assisi. The new communal collective lives a Christ-like life of simplicity, servitude, and brotherly love. Needless to say, the local bishop is not impressed with Francis’s DIY church community. The aristocracy and clergy do their best to snuff out the proto-Marxist flame before Francis’s “new” form of Christianity spreads like wildfire.

The weakest and most distracting element of this film is the music (composed and performed by singer-songwriter Donovan). Anyone who remembers the animated Hobbit movie from the 70s will know what sort of musical interference I’m talking about. In narrative films, music serves as an aid to the plot, magnifying emotions and setting the tone for each scene. In musicals the songs are the plot. But unfortunately Brother Sun, Sister Moon falls into that no-man’s-land between the two. The actors themselves usually don’t do the singing. Instead, an off-screen voice sings flowery hippie ballads about how great love is, scene after scene. Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a negative thing if the songs themselves weren’t so unbelieveably terrible. Donovan’s strummy guitar and corny lyrics are so high in the mix, they’re impossible to ignore. It’s all so… early 70s.

Saint Francis’s life story is a compelling one, full of love and self-sacrifice. Unfortunately this film falls short of showing us just how amazing his life was. If Zeffirelli’s aim was to make Saint Francis real in any way, he failed to do so. The end result is a bizarrely mediocre portrait of an extraordinary man.

It’s 4:30 in the morning. I just got home from seeing Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith.

I met up with my brothers, Nicole, Dan, and some other friends at the Regal 14 in Harrisonburg tonight around 10:00 and stood in line for two hours for the midnight premiere. The atmosphere in the parking lot was not unlike the revelry before a rock concert. When the opening crawl burst onto the screen–accompanied by John Williams familiar first movement–everyone in the audience cheered.

The film opens with a fireworks show of a space dogfight–a scene that could fit easily into episodes I or II. In many respects, the first part of the film is similar to the first two prequels: several stiff beats and plenty of comic relief. But much to my amazement, the story actually picks up and pulls you along at a much more natural pace than Star Wars fans have come to expect over the past several years.

One of the most surprising aspects of the film to me was the acting. Hayden Christiansen (as Anakin Skywalker) actually outshines Ewan MacGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi! No doubt Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine) deserves a portion of the credit for that reversal from episode II. The scenes between Anakin and Palpatine are so enthralling, you might forget for a moment that you are watching a Star Wars prequel.

One would think that a prequel doesn’t have much to offer in terms of information–we all know exactly how it ends. But Lucas and his creative team do an excellent job of putting poetic twists on the story in such a way that you will never look at the original trilogy the same way again. But more importantly, this film achieves the goal of all great dramas–the audience actually feels the emotions that the actors are portraying–something the other prequels failed to do. We both hate and empathize with Anakin.

Another aspect worth noting is the political innuendos vaguely linking the neo-conservative movement to Emporer Palpatine. No doubt many Rebublican fans will deny any such an implication is even suggested in the film, but it’s as plain as day to the blue state rebels. Anyone who is familiar with George Lucas’ political leanings will know that this is at least within the realm of possibility. True, there is a large difference between the Patriot Act or a filibuster ban and Palpatine’s exponential usurpation of democratic power, but the moral of the story is still there. Throughout history, the works of art that are remembered are generally going to be the ones that have something to say about the culture in which we currently live. MASH wasn’t really about the Korean War any more than Citizen Kane was about Charles Kane. And who really believes all those sci-fi alien invasion B-flicks of the 1950s were actually about extra-terrestrials? I seriously doubt that A New Hope would have been nearly as popular as it was if it had premiered in the sedated social/political climate of America in 1989.

In the interest of full disclosure, non-fans should know that I’m writing this review as a a Star Wars fan, not under the pretense of “objective criticism” (as if there really is such a thing). The original trilogy was a big part of my childhood. Trying to imagine pop culture in early 80s without Star Wars brings to my mind Bedford Falls without George Bailey. I might not even have gone to film school if I hadn’t seen that behind-the-scenes-special on TV about the making of Return of the Jedi.

What it boils down to is this: if you didn’t like any of the other five movies, you would be foolish to waste your time or money on this one. However, if you’re a faithful fan of the Star Wars universe, if you grew up with it and couldn’t wait to see episode I back in ‘99 like I did, the chances are pretty good that you’re going to like (or possibly even love) this film. It’s a space opera, a political fable and a Shakespearian tragedy all rolled up into a satisfying grand finale worthy of the name Star Wars.

As with Devil’s Playground, Hell House is a fly-on-the-wall documentary look at a fringe group of Christians in America. This time, it’s an Assemblies of God church in east Texas that puts on a haunted house every Halloween depicting the sins that lead to Hell.

Using amateur actors (primarilly Christian high school students) the organizers of Hell House orchestrate a series of despicable, highly emotional scenes that tour groups stop to watch. A girl takes drugs at a rave and is raped. Later she decides to commit suicide. A gay man curses God as he dies of AIDS on a hospital bed while the girl in the bed next to him (bleeding profusely from her uterus due to a botched abortion) asks God for forgiveness. An angel protects the girl as a demon drags the gay man to Hell. At the end of each tour, the sometimes traumatized tour group is given an choice: either walk through door #1 and pray with a prayer councilor who will help you dedicate your life to Christ, or walk out door #2 and hope that your relationship with God is good enough to save you from the horrors of eternal damnation.

The film briefly focuses on several members of Trinity Church involved in the Hell House–some of whom have personal histories similar to the characters they are portraying. Although the filmmakers do show angry teens who strongly object to the message of the production, director George Ratliff doesn’t attempt to show any real concise counter-opinion to that of the church organizers. One question left unanswered is: where does the money go? Hundreds of people line up and pay $7 to view these nightmarish scenes. If many of those people are already Christians, how is this not “Christsploitation” in the vein of The Omega Code?

Whether you agree or disagree with the tactics used by church organizers (and I’m betting that most of you will disagree) Hell House is one of those films that will undoubtedly spark opinionated conversation afterward.