Cynical Cinema

There are many, many movies just like The Great Debaters, which comes out May 13th from Alliance Films. Movies that deal with race relations in the Jim Crow south. Movies that show kids in college achieving a greater understanding of the world through a special teacher and through competition. Many of which have starred Denzel Washington. All of which means The Great Debaters is nothing new. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent. What sets this film apart is the crafting of the movie, courtesy of Washington, who directs, and the performances that hold it together, also courtesy of Washington. He is terrific as the college professor who molds a team of Africa-American debaters into the most potent orators in the college world.

Also terrific is Forrest Whitaker, who now has to merit some consideration as one of the finest actors of our time. He plays a preacher at the same college as Washington, a fine orator himself and a renowned scholar. He doesn’t quite understand, the way Washington does, how best to harness his intellectual powers to effect true change, but he grows over the course of the film. But the character who does the most growing is his son, who is played by the aptly-named Denzel Whitaker. As the youngest member of the Wiley College debate team, Whitaker is both the emotional centre of the movie and the one character whose growth most mirrors the story arc. His performance as 14-year-old James Farmer Jr. May well be the best in the film.

Rounding out the terrific cast are Jurnee Smollett and Nate Parker, as the eventual other two members of the debate team. Parker plays a rebellious student, who is brilliant but tortured. Smollett is a driven, intelligent woman, who aspires to become only the third black female lawyer in the United States. Their story, (and romance) is incidental to the film, but it works. Denzel Washington’s story seems incidental as well, at first. When he isn’t working at the college, he is dressing up as a farmer and holding clandestine meetings in barns, attempting to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. This leads to him being branded a communist, and there is a backlash against him that comes from both the white establishment and his African-American colleagues. In the end, this is not simply an incidental story line, it is essential to the full fleshing out of the story.

The fact that this film is based on a true story might be the most remarkable thing about it. These people did exist, they did do this remarkable thing, and who knows - had we been there at that time, in 1936, it may well have been as powerful and inspirational as the movie itself. Now, I do have a quibble or two. If this were 1936, using a reference to Hitler to win a debate wouldn’t exactly have the gravity that it does now. In fact, it might have been a rather weak argument in 1936. Like making a Gearge-Bush-is-awful argument in August of 2001. Maybe you can see something terrible coming, but it sure isn’t there yet. And also, the top-ranked Harvard debate team seems to have had their lines dumbed down a little. They don’t make enough sense and they aren’t good enough points for such a highly-touted debating team. That being said, however, I would have really liked to see a little more of the debates themselves. They are all so compelling and so interesting that I could have handled another hour of movie if it was all debating.

As Wiley College mows down their opponents in Texas, and takes on the best Negro colleges in the States, a final showdown is set when Harvard agrees to meet the team and debate against them. Harvard is, of course, the perennial powerhouse team, the best in the country, and they are willing to meet this remarkable Negro team in an historic debate. Of course, this is the big, climactic, and inspirational finale of the film, and it’s fairly routine in the way it ties everything together, but it is set up and delivered so well that it doesn’t feel like a cliche or like the obvious ending, it just feels great. And so does the rest of The Great Debaters.

Alright Focus on the Family and like-minded Christians, I’m calling you out. You’re getting lazy. You spend so much time fighting against ambiguously gay television characters like Spongebob and Tinky-Winky, that you don’t have time for your own children. And why do you need to complain about these TV characters and movies like The Golden Compass? Because the only thing left to raise your children, what with all that time spent complaining, is the television. And you want to make sure that while being raised by that TV, your young impressionable boys don’t happen across the Teletubbies and all of a sudden start liking showtunes, lusting after Skeet Ulrich, and planning for a career as an interior decorator, or Kevin Fededline’s backup dancer. I know, I know, you COULD just spend time with them, making sure they watched only Christian-approved programming and maybe reading with them, but that seems like a lot of effort, doesn’t it? Better to write angry letters and volunteer at the latest Fred Phelps or anti-abortion rally, leaving your children in the care of (you hope) the VeggieTales.

So then what happens? Your kids are now addicted to cartoons and television. The only way to get through to them now is through other cartoons or possibly video games. And you want the to learn the bible, but they’re not going to be reading on their own or anything. So now, what, NOW what? Well, you hope that biblical stories get made into cartoons, so your kids can watch these cartoons and grow up to be just like you, and join you at the next Pat Robertson seminar. And lo and behold, here comes The Ten Commandments, the story of Moses, in cartoon form! And sure, you could always wait until Easter for the Charlton Heston movie to come on public access television, but then you would have to strap your children down with bungee cords and tape their eyelids open, because there’s no way they’re sitting through that one on their own.

Well, thank God for Christian Slater, Elliott Gould, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley, who have all provided their vocal talents to The Ten Commandments, (cartoon version), which came out May 13th courtesy of Alliance Films. This is one of those computer-generated “animated” movies where people kind of look like people, and kind of move like people, but they are mostly bald because animating hair would be that much more difficult. Again - lazy! Just because Yul Brynner was bald in 1956 doesn’t mean all ancient Egyptians were hairless, OK? Lazy, lazy, lazy. With The Ten Commandments, the story is already there. All you have to do is tell it in a cool, new way. But this movie hasn’t even done that. It’s just a cartoon remake, almost scene-for-scene, of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic! Down to the scene with the staffs and the snakes, and the slave labourers doing their thing, and the parting of the red sea while Moses stands facing it. That one is pretty much shot-for shot the same.

Which means that what we’re doing, in watching this film, is comparing it with Charlton Heston. And it comes up pretty darn short. Cheap, easy animation vs. a cast of thousands, with massive cinematography and epic storytelling? No contest. And Heston vs. Christian Slater? Come ON. Heston had the Moses voice. The deep, booming Moses voice. Christian Slater does not have that voice. In fact, he has a pretty sissy, weenie voice. Can you imagine, in a live action movie, Woody Allen playing Moses? That’s how this movie feels.

“Let my people go!”

“Umm…no.”

“OK, I’ll take my staff and I’ll leave.”

“Yeah, you’d best be going.”

And then there’s Alfred Molina, as Ramses, who calls for Moses like he’s William Shatner in The Wrath Of Khan. “Moooooosseeees!” “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!” And Elliott Gould as God may as well be…well…Woody Allen also.

So what it comes down to for me is this - why? Why make this movie at all? I wracked my brain long and hard before coming up with the laziness explanation. And I am fully aware, so don’t bother pointing it out, that the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments is more of a Jewish story than a Christian one. But I don’t see Jewish lobby groups complaining about Patrick Starfish. When I do, I will make fun of them as well. And this might not be the right forum for this, but…isn’t what Moses (and of course God) did to the Egyptian people…terrorism? The plagues - you can’t drink the water, it’s unsafe. The locusts have eaten your crops, so you can’t eat. Your civilians will die if you don’t…let God’s people go. We will kill all of the first born sons of Egypt. Yes. We will murder your innocent citizens if you don’t give us our independence. Umm…sound familiar? Perhaps in Palestine, the people might…OK. I was right, this is not the right forum for this. The Ten Commandments, stupid cartoon version, comes out tomorrow, May 13th, from Alliance Films.

Laurence Olivier is renowned as maybe the greatest actor who ever lived, and a large part of that reputation is due to his work in Shakespearean productions. But he is also perhaps the greatest director of Shakespeare on the big screen. And Henry the fifth is one of his greatest achievements as both a director and an actor.The movie is a stage production filmed and put up on the screen. It does not attempt to disguise this as the first three acts are clearly on the stage. As the movie progresses, however, the stage becomes bigger and the scenes take place in bigger and bigger areas, culminating with the battle scenes with hundreds of horses and people on the open plains.

Henry the fifth is, first and foremost, a military play. It was not done in the tradition of Shakespearean tragedy or comedy, but it retains elements of both. This is the play with many of the famous Shakespeare military quotes – Once more unto the breach, dear friends and so forth. And it’s Olivier’s performance that brings these lines to life with his excellent portrayal of the king. The battle scenes are reasonably well done for the time, but when compared to some of today’s similar scenes, like those of Braveheart, it pales in comparison. But Shakespeare was great not for the stories or for the scenery, but for the language his actors spoke. And no one understands this better than Laurence Olivier. Is this his best work? No. But it certainly ranks with his best.

If Shakespeare was like the Beethoven of the written word, Olivier is like a great conductor bringing his works to life. He is Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Not his best, but his most rousing and exciting.

I have read many critics absolutely slamming Death Sentence, the new Kevin Bacon revenge movie. And they are not entirely wrong. Death Sentence is definitely too simplistic. I is definitely filled with cliches. It opens with a montage of Kevin Bacon raising his son from the time he was a young boy, so that we know how much he loves him, and we feel bad when his son gets murdered. There is bad-ass music playing while he shaves his head to go on a killing spree. He does things that don’t really make sense, which lead to crazy action scenes. People conveniently end up near windows, so that they can be shot through said windows in a shower of glass. There are cheesy references to old western movies (Welcome To Hell is written on a clubhouse wall, either ripping off or paying homage to High Plains Drifter). The director was clearly attempting to create a sort of Death Wish - meets - Straw Dogs motif, but was unable to do so convincingly, and the whole movie smacks of effort.

Death Sentence is created from the same book as Death Wish, and in a lot of ways is a remake of the Charles Bronson classic. Kevin Bacon’s son gets killed in a gangland initiation ritual, and he goes all vigilante on the gang members’ asses. James Berardinelli says this: “Death Wish has taken its share of knocks over the years but at least it doesn’t pretend it’s something more important and meaningful than it is - a mistake made by Death Sentence to its detriment.” From Richard Roeper: “It’s terrible and it’s so disappointing because I love Kevin Bacon and I love Aisha [Tyler] and you have good actors here who are trapped.” Some halfhearted praise from Roger Ebert: “There is a courtroom scene of true surprise and suspense, and some other effective moments, but basically this is a movie about a lot of people shooting at each other, and during the parts I liked, the action audience will probably go out to get popcorn, or a tattoo or something.”

But that’s just it. There are actually parts I liked. And performances I liked. John Goodman as a crazy lunatic gun dealer, reminiscent of his roles in Coen Brothers films like The Big Lebowski or O Brother Where Art Thou, and Kevin Bacon, who broods and stews with the best (for a very good movie where Kevin Bacon broods and stews, check out The Woodsman). Although there is that cheesy I-love-my-kid buildup, the scene where his kid actually gets killed is nonetheless powerful. There is a solid courtroom scene that provides some surprises, and the scenes between John Goodman and the gang leader are well done. In the end, I sort of liked this movie. Of course, I will take Death Wish over Death Sentence any day, but that’s just because I enjoy Charles Bronson and his inability to show any emotion whatsoever. Death Sentence is just unfortunate because the action movie afficionados will not enjoy the slow, character-intensive parts (which are quite good), and the people who want to see quality in a movie will be put off by the gratuitous and nonsensical action sequences. There is something for everyone, but not enough for anyone.

In 1974, Richard Dreyfuss was a relatively unknown actor. He had appeared very briefly in The Graduate, and Valley of the Dolls, and had managed to score a starring role in American Graffitti. But his first truly challenging role came as the title character in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Ted Kotcheff’s Canadian film adapted from Mordecai Richler’s classic novel. The novel itself is one that took me an awfully long time to read. I started it in high school, just like everyone else in Canada. And, just like 99 percent of the people who are forced to read certain things in school, I had no desire to read it at the time. So I read chapters one and two, and then followed along in class just barely well enough so I could fake the book report when it was done. I never read any of the rest of it. Then, about ten years later, when I was moving for about the fifth time in my life, I rediscovered all the books I had carefully avoided reading in high school. And I sat down and read them all - the two that really stuck with me were The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

In the intervening years, I have endeavoured to read as much Mordecai Richler as possible. (I highly recommend The Incomparable Atuk, an absolutely hilarious satirical tale of an “Eskimo poet”.) What I love best about Richler is his satirical style, the way he is able to turn even the sutlest of phrases to change what could be a harsh sentence into a funny one. In the movie version of Duddy Kravitz, that satire is a little tougher to find. Richler was actually nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay, and he really did do a great job adapting his novel to the screen. The movie helped to revitalize Canada’s film industry (for a time) in the 70s, and brought critical acclaim to Richard Dreyfuss. He went on to roles in Jaws, Close Encounters, and dozens of other huge movies. Kotcheff went on to direct Rambo: First Blood.

Dreyfuss really is great in Duddy Kravitz, in that he makes what is really a rather unlikeable character strangely compelling. Duddy Kravitz, both in the book and in the movie, is not a likeable human being. He does some pretty awful things to the people closest to him, but somehow the novel and this movie are both able to find some kind of humanity and sympathy for Kravitz. Randy Quaid is excellent too, in one of his first ever film roles as Duddy’s simple and suffering right-hand man Virgil. And for the first time the film is available on DVD, courtesy of Alliance Atlantis. It gets released on Tuesday, and I certainly recommend picking it up. Not for the sense of Canadiana it inspires, but for the quality of the film. Unless you’re still poisoned against it from being forced to read the novel in high school.

Until now, I was convinced that Ben Affleck wouldn’t know a good script if it walked up to him and kicked him in the stones. Now, I am not so sure. Either he just doesn’t care, as long as he’s acting, or he is such a bad actor that he will ruin any script by himself. But there is a third option. Perhaps the script to Gone Baby Gone not only walked up to him and kicked him in the stones, it also bit him in the face, chewed off part of his nose, ripped out his nipple ring, stabbed him twice and then gave him the people’s elbow. Or maybe it’s a combination, because Ben Affleck’s wisest decision as a director in Gone Baby Gone was not to cast Ben Affleck in any role in his movie. How many directors can competently direct themselves? Clint Eastwood and…yeah. Maybe just Clint. So that was good decision number one. A questionable decision was to cast his younger brother Casey in the starring role. Casey Affleck, as far as I was aware, existed only in movies that starred Ben, and even then he played some minor throw-away role. How good could he actually be?

Well, the answer, it turns out, is VERY good. Casey Affleck plays a private investigator who looks as though he is thirteen. This is great casting, because Casey Affleck does indeed look as though he is thirteen. And when the situation calls for him to act the tough guy, it somehow really works. Not only do we not expect it, neither do the bad guys. And it’s pretty convincing intimidation when this young, babyfaced guy all of a sudden gets Dirty Harry tough. Everyone is taken aback, realiztically so. It’s a great job by Affleck of handling the character. Somehow, with that Good Will Hunting Boston accent, you get the sense that this guy is a lot tougher than he looks. His wife is played admirably by Michelle Monaghan, an actress who is rising to the top of the heap of late with roles in movies like this one and North Country. The best performance in the movie, however, is turned in by Amy Ryan, who plays the mother of an abducted little girl. She is a coke-head, a drug mule, a drunk, in short, one of the worst mothers imaginable for a sweet young child.

Affleck and Monaghan are hired by the little girl’s aunt to help find her. They are joined in their pursuit by a pair of cops, played by the excellent Ed Harris and John Ashton, and their search takes them through the seedy underbelly of Boston, dealing with drug dealers (some good and some bad) and general thugs who cause problems at every turn. Every time the movie seems to be reaching a certain conclusion, the script throws a twist into the plot, and all of a sudden Affleck and Monaghan are careening toward a different outcome. By the end of the film, the whole story becomes clear, and there is a final “showdown” that presents a Sophie’s Choice kind of ending, although not nearly so dramatic. This is the only minor quibble I have with the ending. The decision reached by the characters, the course of action they choose to take, seems like a massive moral decision that would cause most of us to really wonder what we would do in that situation. But a closer examination of that choice makes it seem obvious that there is really only one choice that could be made there, the choice Affleck eventually does make. I won’t tell you the details, I haven’t really revealed anything here, but you’ll have to watch the movie yourself. It is being released by Alliance Atlantis on Tuesday, and really needs to be watched to be understood. Watch this movie.

Becoming Jane is ostensibly the story of Jane Austen, considered by many to be the greatest female novelist of all time. Of course, we have to put the qualifier “female” in front of “novelist”, because it’s such a … well … novelty. Like “male stripper”. Never mind the fact that the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Margaret Laurence, Mary Shelley and Alice Walker have written some of the most enduring classics in literature, they are still “female authors”. And in Jane Austen’s time, being a “female author” was a pretty big deal. George Eliot clearly had to operate under a pseudonym (I actually have no idea what her real name was) because women couldn’t write stuff! Women cleaned and cooked and made babies! (It was a different time.) Now, as a big fan of Jane Austen and her novels, I know a good deal about her life. Enough to know how Becoming Jane ends. (I won’t tell you, in case you end up watching this film. And I hope you don’t.)

Becoming Jane, the DVD from Alliance Atlantis that comes out today, comes with a free coupon for Pennington’s. If you purchase 100 bucks worth of clothes, you get a 20 dollar credit - free! This should indicate something about the target audience for this film. Young women who just don’t know any better, apparently. Jane Austen, one of the towering literary figures in history, gets the Hollywood “bio-pic” treatment here. And like everything else in Hollywood, no great historical tale can possibly be told without cramming in a love story. No one in history was interesting unless they were in love with someone. Think Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and so forth. Jane Austen’s life was interesting only because of her love story, it turns out. You see, her family is trying to force her to marry a young, rich man so that they can have money and she’ll be happy, because marrying rich is a must, if it is possible. But Jane (played by Anne Hathaway here) has a MIND of her OWN, and SHE wants to marry for LOVE.

Wait…this is familiar. So Jane Austen had a life that almost perfectly mirrored that of several other movies I have seen? Movies like Titanic, The Notebook, The Princess Bride, My Man Godfrey, Van Wilder, Wedding Crashers, Sweet Home Alabama, Clerks II, and four hundred others I won’t bother listing? Of course she did! It’s a little known fact that Kevin Smith based his Dante character in Clerks II on the life of Jane Austen. OK, I made that up. All these movies have something in common. Or many things. The girl doesn’t want to be forced into a match, because she’s rebellious and independant and she has a mind of her own! The man she is being pressured to marry has money and property and wealth, but is either a complete jerk and cad no girl would ever like, or a simpering sissy no girl would ever want. Becoming Jane goes the “simpering sissy” route. The heroine then meets a lower-class, poor working man. Possibly a brutish sort who fights and drinks and doesn’t bathe or shave, but God help him he’s his OWN MAN! They hate each other straight away, but that hate quickly turns to love.

An aside - this is actually how I got together with my girlfriend. I didn’t bathe for weeks, I fought with everyone I met while in her presence, every time she saw me I was falling down drunk, and I called her many horrible names. I ran over her dog so we could start out on terms of “hate”, but I knew that that always leads to love, because I watch a lot of movies. Worked like a charm! At the end of most of these movies, the heroine of course marries for love. But we’re worried about her! How can she live so poor? She’s pretty, and pretty girls can’t be poor! So the guy usually ends up being incredibly rich, inheriting some money or winning the lottery or inventing a hilarious talking fish that proves to be lucrative. Now, she has the best of BOTH worlds! Thank God. She would really have regretted that whole “love” thing if she had to work for a living the rest of her days. She will be a princess after all.

These movies also suppose two things. First, that rich, high-class people are incapable of being fun and exciting without also being callous and evil. And poor people can never be intelligent and interesting unless they are also very good looking. In Becoming Jane, this interesting good-looking lower class peasant is played by James McEvoy (Last King of Scotland). The script wants us to know, constantly, that we are talking about JANE AUSTEN here, and so it makes Anne Hathaway into a rather irritating screen character. She speaks in gigantic words all the time, and is so condescending to everyone outside her immediate family that one takes an immediate disliking to her. It’s supposed to show her “rebellious, girl with a mind” nature, really it makes her officious and annoying. The seduction scenes between her and McEvoy are painful in their attempts to be dialogue-clever. I promis, Jane Austen did not talk like this in real life. And I wasn’t even there.

In the end, Becoming Jane is a movie every one of us has seen hundreds, maybe thousands of times (many of them with Anne Hathaway). It’s the oldest story in movies, and to pretend you’re talking about a real human being, a literary titan such as Jane Austen, is insulting to the viewer. And to Jane Austen. Are we to believe this romance shaped her entire life and gave us all her books? That she never existed outside the framework of this relationship? Remember - she’s a real person, we KNOW how this ends. Far more interesting would have been watching her attempt to become a writer! She is a woman, it’s 1795 - it’s going to be tough to get people to read her stuff, to publish her, to use her name, a female name, on the books! That would have been far more interesting than just taking the easiest story in Hollywood and trying to make a real person fit that story. Don’t watch this movie. Just read Persuasion and Mansfield Park and enjoy those.

I have long said that Roy Dupuis is the French Canadian version of Colm Feore. When you have a big Canadian icon that you want to immortalize on film or TV, you pick one or the other. Anglophone icon? Feore. (Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould.) A Francophone icon? Dupuis. (Maurice Richard, Romeo Dallaire.) And so there was no question in my mind when I heard that Shake Hands With The Devil was going to be made into a feature film as to who would play Dallaire. It was Dupuis, or the film would not have been made. By the way, in order to avoid those “do your research” and “get your facts straight” emails, I would like to state right now that I am indeed aware that Pierre Trudeau was a Francophone. But that movie was mostly English.

Dallaire’s book was a sensation in Canada when it came out. A tragic and devastating look at the genocide in Rwanda. It was later made into a documentary film, which helped make people aware of the horror a little more, and now this movie, which might help even a little more. The thing that made me saddest in watching this film was the fact that it came out so many years after the genocide was over. Same for the documentary and the book. Now, it’s not like Dallaire could have written his book while things were going on. But it’s sad to think that so many people pay attention now, and watch other films like Hotel Rwanda, and feel sad and mourn the tragedy and get enraged over things like “why didn’t somebody do something”. And yet, when we see those things on TV, on the news, in the papers, and we are aware it is taking place RIGHT NOW, we don’t do much. As Joaquin Phoenix says in Hotel Rwanda, we go back to our TV dinners and turn on the hockey game when the news is over.

Part of this, I feel, is because of the nature of the media. When genocide is taking place in Darfur, in Africa, way across the sea, it is treated as simply a news story. A two-minute piece on the horrors in Darfur gets as much importance as a two-minute piece on the possibility of the defeat of the budget in the House of Commons. Very often, it gets less. A school shooting is big news, front page on every paper, lead story in every newscast. That is a tragedy that hits close to home. But more people died in thirty seconds during the genocide in Rwanda than have died in all school shootings in North America combined. It doesn’t affect us. It is reported as “here’s what’s going on in a country that isn’t ours”, and is followed up with “a small town in France has outlawed public toilets!” and we forget all about it. Toilets! That’s hilarious! I think it’s safe to say that most of us know (myself included) know more about Columbine and Dawson College and Virginia Tech than we do about Darfur. Really, this isn’t exactly the fault of the media. This is really the way we want to be fed our news, and they are just complying with the wishes of the general population - you wouldn’t get many ratings if you showed machete massacres every night.

And so we get Shake Hands With the Devil, a movie that has been made only when it could be made, many years after the fact. And hopefully, it makes people aware that such things are still going on, or curious enough to find out. (Steven Spielberg has just pulled out of the Olympics in Beijing to protest China, feeling that they haven’t done enough to stop the genocide in Darfur.) And the movie is pretty good, as a movie. Dupuis is steely and tough as Dallaire, a man who carries himself with the utmost dignity and commands respect as a lifelong soldier. His supporting cast is for the most part excellent. Having just finished the book, I recognized most of the characters being protrayed just as I had imagined them. Especially James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley, who has a few tough scenes. This is a fascinating story, and that alone makes the movie worth watching.

But there is a little problem with the movie, looking at it solely in the context of a movie. It is a dramatization of real events, but somehow, it doesn’t feel dramatized enough. There are scenes taken directly from the book - a scene where Beardsley is confronted by a mob of machete-weilding Interahmwe, as he tries to get a wounded woman to safety, and he punches the man who stands in his way. In the book, the scene is tense, dramatic and poignant. In the film, it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing. Is that guy standing in his way…or not…or OK it’s over. Another scene where Dallaire and Beardsley are blockaded from a portion of the city and must get out of the car and walk through the barricade, as weapons are cocked and the bad guys say they will shoot. Again, in the book, this scene made me pretty nervous. In the movie, it is treated as a matter of course.

Doc hated Gone Baby Gone because he had read the book first, and he couldn’t reconcile what he saw on the screen with what he had imagined in his head when reading. I had the same problem with Shake Hands With the Devil, seeing scenes that were so familiar to me and yet not feeling their poignancy as much as I had while reading. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone would understand this movie without having read the book first. There are so many factions and institutions - the RPF, the RGF, the Interahmwe, the president, prime minister, interim government, and countless others. Each with their own politics, their own attitudes, their own enemies and their own clandestine secrets. It is such a complicated picture that the movie can’t hope for a moment to make sense of it all in less than two hours. In the end, this film should be watched, and is certainly good, but if you had to make a choice, read the book.

I am giving Beowulf the benefit of the doubt here. It is a movie that relies mainly on visuals, and the only TV I have where I can actually see the picture and hear the full sound is in the shop. I guess when I bought it, it had a faulty screen, and the warranty does indeed cover it. I sent it into this shop a week and a half ago. I called them yesterday to find out when I could have it back, and they said they thought perhaps, with some good luck, they might just have the parts they need to fix it within a month. Good thing I have that Blu-Ray player and pay for those HD cable channels. So, I had to watch Beowulf on a TV with a shaky, tiny screen and only one channel of sound. Which means that I will give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that the visuals ARE amazing and that the sound is impressive. Hey - anyone who has seen this film - can you tell me something? Angelina Jolie comes out of the water naked in the middle of the film, right? And she is all metallic or something, and there is no definition and no nipples. But at the end when she comes out of the water, there are nipples. Right? I couldn’t really tell.

But the animation seems strange to me. This movie is done sort of like 300, where it is live action actors which then have animation done over them. This worked with A Scanner Darkly, because it was constantly obvious. Right now, I’m not terribly certain why these movies are doing this. At least in 300, you forget the technique about halfway through the film. And then you just let the mindless entertainment wash over you. With Beowulf, it seems to come and go. Sometimes the actors look like real-life actors, and other times they look like computer animations from a kids’ movie. Which is bizarre. It also means that those computer-generated characters walk like the characters in Shrek. Shouldn’t they walk like, well, real people? Because they ARE real people? Again, I will assume that I thought this simply because of the lousy TV. Although I doubt it.

There are some cool scenes in the film, and it is fairly easy to make some decent entertainment out of the story. Not, of course, by following the original classic story line, but simply by pitting a mythic hero, Beowulf, against an indestructible monster, Grendel. After that, I guess people assume they can just do whatever they like. Much like 300, this involves a lot of yelling and flexing. The giant Grendel shows up first, and rips people apart in a Dansih banquet hall. As far as monsters go, he is more reminiscent of The Elephant Man or that kid in Mask than he is of any truly frightening creature. We watch him slink back to his lair to be comforted by his mother after his rampages, and I guess we’re supposed to feel some kind of sympathy for him? I guess. Then Beowulf shows up. For about half an hour after his arrival, I was expecting the punchline. I mean, this guy couldn’t possibly be for real, or played straight. He kicks open every door, flexes, screams “Beowulf!” at people…he’s like that kid on your high school football team who has permanently screwed up his brain with steroids, and can’t control the volume of his own voice, and the only word he really has command over is his own name. So he yells his own name over and over to get pumped up for that big football game. Then gets ejected for fighting on the first play. Don’t do ‘roids, kids. I’ve actually known this guy. He is now in prison.

Beowulf decides that since Grendel is unarmed and has no armour, that in order to make things fair, he will have to face him completely naked. This leads to an incredibly comical series of camera shots that cover up his wang with various objects, a la Austin Powers. I really don’t think it is meant to be funny. I think it is meant to suggest that Beowulf is hung like a telephone pole. The objects obscuring his junk are a sword, a spear, a mace…anything mean-looking and long. God, I hope it was done for comedic effect. Otherwise, it was the dumbest thing in the whole movie. So the woman looks at his wang and almost faints, he lies down naked among his men while they drink and carouse, and he waits for the monster. Then defeats Grendel, rather easily, while still being naked and still having those crotch-obscuring shots. Which makes the fight rather implausible. Grendel could possibly have won the fight had he not spent so much time putting his arms and legs in the right places so we can’t see Ray Winstone’s computer-generated penis. Poor Grendel. And I’m still waiting for the punchline.

Then we have naked Angelina Jolie. Only, she’s a cartoon. A very obvious cartoon. And there are no nipples or any kind of definition whatsoever, because that allowed Beowulf to keep it’s PG-13 rating. You see, in movies such as this one, all kinds of blood and gore are OK, because it is basically a cartoon. (In Kill Bill, Tarantino changed some scenes to black-and-white, and others to anime cartoons, so that the film would still be R-rated and not NC-17.) So you can show Grendel ripping guys in half, drinking their blood, chewing off their heads, and it is still PG-13. However, if you put nipples into the mix, this film would have been slapped with an R. So Angelina Jolie looks like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Well, in it’s metal form, not it’s Robert Patrick form. Completely smooth, with no features at all, except for her face, which is a cartoon, and therefore not nearly as hot as she ought to be. And that’s the scene everyone seemed to be raving about.

There are many scenes that made me laugh out loud because they really did look like a set-up to a punchline. Ray Winstone’s Beowulf is a character begging to be mocked, yelling his own name at anyone who will listen, bragging about himself at every turn - this is the guy who, in any other movie, would be exposed for the fraud he is, and would receive his comeuppance. But in this movie, it just means he’s that much more heroic. If this was all it took to be a hero, Terrell Owens would be Superman. TERRELL! And while his performance is consistently laughable, so too is the monster Grendel. He rips a body in half, and then he cries, he drinks some blood and then covers his ears because the shrieks drive him nuts…apparently he was “played” in the film by Crispin Glover, but he’s just a giant computer-generated freak, and as such could have been “played” by me, my grandmother, a six-year-old, or Terrell Owens. And during the final, climactic battle scene, there is a dragon incinerating the world. It gets to the Danish castle where Beowulf’s wife and young concubine are hiding, for some reason, on a bridge. When the dragon appears, it pops it’s head up over the bridge in the same manner one would use to attempt to scare one’s younger sister by thrusting a sock puppet up from behind the couch upon which she’s asleep. Boo! It then tilts it’s head comically for some reason, before burning up the place with it’s fire-breath.

And John Malkovich is there too, apparently to provide some kind of human face to evil. He is set up, through the whole movie, as the dastardly back-room dealer who will usurp the king and take power himself through some kind of unscrupulous deed. But then he and Beowulf have a very laughable confrontation, he admits Beowulf’s superiority, and they bond. But we’re still given the feeling that this show of good faith is insidious and devious on Malkovich’s part, that he doesn’t mean a word of it. And then…he just keeps showing up through the movie, and nothing happens. He still looks and talks evil, and in this cartoon world of characters that must obviously mean he IS evil…but he stops doing stuff. Maybe his talk with Beowulf convinced him? Or maybe the film crew forgot he was evil. My money is on the latter. Based on what I saw, Beowulf gets 3 stars out of ten. but I’m giving it an extra two assuming that it would be far more visually brilliant were I to have my good TV back. If I could truly believe that the intention of Robert Zemeckis and his people was to make us laugh, that the intent of the movie was satirical, it would get 7 stars. Which means it’s campy enough for the bad-movie fans out there to really enjoy it.

Atonement is the story of love between a sock puppet and a stick figure. The sock puppet is played by James McEvoy, who has become the go-to guy when you need a young, attractive, possibly rough-around-the-edges but with a heart of gold guy to appear in a period piece. Keira Knightley plays the stick figure, the female love interest in this period piece, which tells a tale of a time when food did not exist, and what food there was, was kept away from Keira Knightley.

The film starts out in a familiar way, in that different people watching the same events perceive them differently. That difference in perception stems from the innate bias each character brings to the scene, and becomes a difference in truth as well. Specifically, a couple of scenes between McEvoy and Knightley that are observed by Knightley’s younger sister, played by Saoirse Ronan. Ronan is fantastic in the role that won her a nomination for best supporting actress at the Oscars this year. Her character, Briony Tallis, is actually played by three different actresses, including Vanessa Redgrave, who is terrific in her three minutes of screen time.

The first hour of the movie is fantastic, an hour that accentuates the distance between the characters by placing them all at great distances from each other in the country mansion in which they live and work. Briony Tallis intercepts a letter meant for her sister from McEvoy, and that begins a series of events that will destroy lives and crush romance. (By the way, this movie, and that letter, make the best use of the “c” word I have yet seen in a film.) The younger Tallis accuses McEvoy of a heinous act, one that we all know he did not commit. It remains unclear whether Briony knows, herself, that he didn’t, but we definitely know that she did not really see what she claims to have seen.

The second half of the movie becomes more conventional and boring in a period-piece sort of way, as McEvoy is released from prison directly into the army during World War II. There are some obligatory period-piece army scenes, and the lovers pine for each other from a distance as he gets evacuated from Dunkirk while she works as a nurse in a military hospital. This part of the movie (the second hour) sags immensely, and loses a lot of momentum. This part of Atonement could have been inserted in Becoming Jane, mid-way through, and no one would have blinked or realized it was a different movie. But the last three minutes redeem the movie almost entirely, as Vanessa Redgrave is magnificent as the older Briony, now a best-selling author, telling her tale and explaining the final result of her lie. Which the movie, with a running time of two hours and three minutes, is 51 percent excellent.

Atonement was nominated for best picture at the Oscars, and I think it was the least-deserving of the picks. Redgrave was more deserving of a best supporting actress nomination over Ronan, but Ronan is very good, and the new fresh face in Hollywood, so she will always get the nod over an elder Hollywood stateswoman. Atonement is good, but it is not Oscar-worthy. It’s just a well-done, well-written, well-acted period piece that will likely be forgotten in ten years. A far better choice for a nomination would have been either In The Valley Of Elah or Eastern Promises, two films that will likely have staying power and relevance far beyond what this one will manage.