Tag: Mig's Reviews

BOY AND THE WORLD (Brazil, 2013)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Alê Abreu
CAST: Vinicius Garcia, Alê Abreu, Lu Horta
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A little boy goes on an adventurous quest in search of his father.


Filmmaker Brad Bird, the mind behind The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, once said something that occurred to me multiple times while I was watching the Brazilian animated film, Boy and the World.

“…animation is not a genre.  And people keep saying, ‘The animation genre.’  It’s not a genre!  A Western is a genre!  Animation is an art form, and it can do any genre.  You know, it can do a detective film, a cowboy film, a horror film, an R-rated film, or a kids’ fairy tale.  But it doesn’t do one thing.”

Boy and the World proves Bird’s statement correct by delivering a succinct, poignant film, virtually without words, that defies classification.  Is it a kids’ film?  It’s colorful, vibrant, and contains no long words, but it was rated PG in America.  Is it a “grown-up” film?  There is absolutely some thematic material that might require some parental explanation, but the style of the film’s images is almost like a children’s book come to life.  Boy and the World is quite unique in animation, at least in the animated films I’ve seen.  The only film I might possibly compare it to is Walt Disney’s Fantasia…or more accurately, I’d say Boy and the World was inspired by Fantasia’s core concept.  It’s a fairy tale and a cautionary tale and a coming-of-age story and a visual tour-de-force all in one.


We first meet the titular Boy in this story as he seems to be hearing music coming from under a colorful rock in a field.  The Boy is never named.  Indeed, what little dialogue we ever hear in the movie is conveyed either by grunts and coughs and harrumphs, or by a peculiar, unrecognizable language.  I turned on the Blu-ray’s subtitles, and it only said “SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE.”  But the film’s story is so well-constructed, a literal understanding of their speech is never necessary.  (Trivia note: I learn from the disc’s special features that the language we hear is Portuguese…spoken backwards.)

The Boy lives with his mother and father in a humble dwelling in the Brazilian countryside during an unspecified time period, though his clothing indicates something close to present day.  One day, his father simply decides to leave, boards a train, and is gone.  We are not given a clear reason for his departure.  The Boy is distraught, so one night he packs a suitcase (its only contents: a photo of him with his mother and father) and sets off to find him…

From there, the movie becomes an absolute visual feast.  I do not wish to give further plot details – and there IS a surprisingly compelling plot – but I do want to give some idea of the startling originality on display during the film.

  • The Boy has a unique ability that no one else in this world seems to have: he can see music.  Whenever his mother hums a tune, or his father (in flashback) plays a song on a recorder, the Boy sees the music appear in the air as little balls of color, like cotton balls or tiny clouds.  Later, he watches a parade go down a street, and the music clouds rise and swirl together in the sky, forming a huge multicolored bird.  Later still, a military formation marches down another street.  The boy sees that music as blacks and greys, and the bird it forms in the sky is far more imposing and ominous.
  • Nothing in the film is a literal representation of what it’s depicting.  For example, when the Boy sees a big city for the first time, most of the vehicles appear to have faces.  The language on all the ads and billboards doesn’t make any sense.  The sports he sees on the TV sets in the shop windows are confusing and nonsensical.  It is more like an impression a child might have of a big city, and it feels more real because of its stylistic liberties.  When he sees large industrial machines in operation for the first time, they look more like elephants and dragons than tow trucks and construction cranes.  This is something animation can do better than any other medium.

  • There is a heartbreaking scene when the Boy sees a train pull in at a station and sees his father step out.  The Boy runs forward…and then his father steps out of another car.  And another, and another.  And soon the platform is crowded with scores of men, all identical to the Boy’s father, and the Boy falls to his knees in frustration.  I interpreted this as an eloquent analogy of how anyone in the Boy’s situation might see a recognizable figure in the distance, only to be disappointed again and again.  Instead of it happening 15 or 20 times in the movie, we got it all at once, and it was an unexpectedly powerful moment.
  • Listen closely, and you’ll hear that a lot of sound effects, from birds in the jungle to car horns honking to clattering machinery, are made by musical instruments or the human voice and/or body.  Yet another unique element to an already unique film.
  • The resolution of the boy’s search took me completely by surprise.  There were little visual clues that had me believing the movie was not going to have a happy ending.  But then it unfolded, and the effect was eye-opening.  I won’t say one way or the other if he found his father or not, but I will say the ending felt earned, authentic, and very satisfying.

All told, Boy and the World is a marvelous little discovery, one that I plan to re-watch soon to drink in its marvelous visual concoction once more.  My colleague, Marc, is a playwright who once wrote a short play as a pantomime.  He believed (and still does, I think) that the main purpose of the visual arts is to show us something new and exciting whenever possible.  Boy and the World would be right up his alley.

ENTER THE DRAGON (Hong Kong, 1973)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Clouse
CAST: Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Certified Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “Watch a ‘B’ Movie”

PLOT: A Shaolin martial artist travels to an island fortress to spy on an opium lord under the guise of attending a fighting tournament.


I have just finished watching the quintessential ‘70s chop-socky kung fu flick, Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee’s fitting, if all-too-early, swan song.  I now sit in front of my computer terminal and try to figure out how to review this movie that screams low-budget, from its liberal use of zoom shots and slow-motion, to the gloriously cheesy score from Lalo Schifrin, interspersed with kung fu yells during the opening credits, to the cookie-cutter nature of the bare-bones screenplay.

I sit.  I ponder.  By any “serious” metric of film criticism, this is not a “good” film.  Sure, it was probably groundbreaking for its time, but in the years since its release, other movies have trumped it on many levels.  I’ve seen movies with WAY more kung fu action (Drunken Master II, Kung Fu Hustle), movies with way higher production values (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Big Trouble in Little China), and movies with way better screenplays (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Kill Bill).

But Enter the Dragon has one thing those other movies don’t: the sheer charisma and magnetism of the master, Bruce Lee.  In every scene he’s in, Lee’s eyes always seem to be working, working, working, whether he’s having a conversation with a British official or defeating an opponent twice his size in a kung fu tournament.  His intensity radiates off the screen.  In one scene, he instructs a young pupil in short, clipped tones, exhibiting nothing but concentration and admonition.  Then later he wins a bet on an unusual animal fight – praying mantises – and check out his cocky smirk as he reaches out for his winnings.  He may not be subtle, but who cares.  He’s Bruce freaking Lee.

He is the single “x-factor” that elevates Enter the Dragon into the pantheon of hallowed action films.  If it had been made with another actor in the lead, it would have been forgotten a long time ago, the second half of a double bill for all eternity.  The story is decent enough, although it feels cribbed from more than one Bond movie, or maybe all of them at once.  The screenplay is…well, let’s say it doesn’t give its characters very good things to say.  One of my favorites is when Williams (Jim Kelly) looks at the vast squalor of the “boat cities” in Hong Kong Bay.  He shakes his head ruefully and says, “Ghettoes are the same all over the world.  They stink.”  It’s not exactly Tennessee Williams.

Then again, that may be one of the factors that works in the film’s favor.  We must come back once again to Bruce Lee.  With his imposing presence throughout the film, that fierce stare, that iconic yell, that chiseled physique, perhaps more realistic or polished dialogue wouldn’t quite fit.  If you’ve got an actor swinging for the fences, don’t try to hinder him, or anyone else in the film, with exquisitely crafted lines.  Accept the fact that all the characters, not just Lee’s, are intended, nay, EXPECTED to behave in very specific ways, and just switch your brain to “low-power mode.”  That’s where Enter the Dragon lives.

By the way, I’m a big Jackie Chan fan (he has a VERY brief appearance in Enter the Dragon as “Thug in Prison”).  I love the intricately choreographed, unbelievably long action sequences in his films.  Enter the Dragon has multiple fight scenes, but none of them are very long when compared to Chan’s movies.  Truth be told, some of the fights in Dragon feel a little…stagey.  But that staginess is balanced by, once again, Bruce Lee’s intimidating aura that brings believability to every scene because, by god, HE certainly believes it.

Is Enter the Dragon the end-all/beat-all of kung fu movies?  In my opinion, no.  That title goes to Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II with its mind-boggling battles that go on forever.  However, Enter the Dragon is an excellent example of how any movie, however badly written or shot, can be improved with the right actor in the starring role.


QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Best line or memorable quote?
[after watching an opponent trying to intimidate him by smashing a board in mid-air:]
“Boards don’t hit back.”

Why did you choose this particular film?
First, I had to Google search “notable B movies” to see what would fit the bill.  I’ve seen Birdemic, Troll 2, and the execrable The Room, but I don’t own any of them.  I saw a lot of 50’s monster movies on the lists I found, but I don’t own any of them, either.  Suddenly, pay dirt.  Turns out Psycho qualifies as a B movie…who knew?  But that movie is too darn good to be lumped with movies like The Blob and The Tingler.  I needed a movie that exhibited its low-budget restrictions on its sleeve and still managed to be unironically entertaining.  Voila: Enter the Dragon.

SAFE (1995)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Todd Haynes
CAST: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Peter Friedman
MY RATING: 4/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An affluent but unexceptional homemaker in the suburbs develops multiple chemical sensitivity.


From Wikipedia:  “Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS)…is an unrecognized and controversial diagnosis characterized by chronic symptoms attributed to exposure to low levels of commonly used chemicals…Blinded clinical trials show that people with MCS react as often and as strongly to placebos as they do to chemical stimuli; the existence and severity of symptoms is seemingly related to perception that a chemical stimulus is present.”

I lead off with that because the disease showcased in Safe is utterly unknown to me.  To me, it sounds like a fancy term for bad allergic reactions, but I’m not a pharmacologist, so there you go.  I don’t mean to suggest it isn’t real, despite the blinded trials.  For the people afflicted by it, their symptoms are real enough for them, so it’s good enough for me.

And yet, despite the fact that Carol (Julianne Moore), the protagonist of Safe, is clearly suffering from something – clinically, mentally, or otherwise – affecting her health in unusual ways…I simply didn’t care.  Safe is one of those movies probably best discussed with a group so I can get opposing viewpoints, because mine is fairly negative.  Apart from Julianne Moore’s effective performance, the movie is a well-photographed but ultimately confusing slog.

Carol is an affluent housewife – sorry, homemaker, she makes that correction herself in the film – whose days are filled with making sure the 2-piece sofa she and her husband ordered is the right color, tending to her rose garden, lunching with friends, baby showers, and Jazzercise (the film takes place in 1987).  Her speaking voice sounds as if she’s internally apologizing for filling the gaps in conversations.  Her relationship with her stepson isn’t the greatest, and the role of her husband (Xander Berkeley) seems to be little more than that of a breadwinner and baby-maker.  Moore is a great actress, and in Safe she succeeds in making Carol a void, which is not an easy task.  (I was sometimes reminded of Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day where his one goal as a butler was to make sure everyone forgot he was there.)

One day, Carol suffers a coughing fit after driving behind a dump truck that spews vast amounts of smoke.  Later, she zones out at a dinner engagement with her husband’s clients.  She has trouble breathing after drinking a glass of milk.  She gets a spontaneous nosebleed after getting a salon perm.  The way the movie and Carol’s character are constructed, I got the idea that her illness was directly related to her nearly crippling ennui.  Actually, Carol reminded me of the main character in Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, that semi-obscure Belgian film that was recently named the best film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine.  In both cases, a woman goes through the routine of everyday life while something percolates beneath the surface.  Safe attacks the story directly while Jeanne Dielman takes the long, long, LONG way around the barn, but the principle is the same.

Carol sees her family doctor who pronounces her perfectly healthy, aside from her apparent reactions to chemicals.  She starts wearing a mask when going outdoors.  One day, she walks into her local dry cleaner’s wearing her mask before realizing the place is being fumigated for pests.  She immediately falls to the floor with convulsions; blood suddenly appears in her mask.

So far, it’s looking like a “Disease-of-the-Week” Lifetime movie.  Ah, but here’s where it gets sort of interesting.  In a nearly throwaway line, it is revealed that the blood in Carol’s mask didn’t come from her lungs or her nose.  Apparently, she bit her lip.  No one can fathom why she bit her lip, least of all Carol herself.  So, I’m thinking, “Okay, she’s really suffering, but it’s not from anything real.  She bit her lip because she saw the exterminators and their masks and their sprayers and she needed to be sick.”

Mind you, despite the sensational nature of that plot description, the movie up to this point is slow as molasses.  It seems to want to create a sense of creepiness or dread, but because I was pretty sure she wasn’t truly sick, based on the information provided in the story, it didn’t really grab me.

Eventually, Carol winds up at Wrenwood, a kind of “rehabilitation clinic” she saw in a commercial on TV.  If the movie was weird and confusing before, it gets more so from here on out.  Wrenwood is not so much a clinic as a metaphysical/holistic retreat.  Its leader, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), speaks to his patients/slash congregation with a curious message that can be distilled down to this: if you’re sick, it’s because your negative emotions – anger, fear, envy, etc. – have gotten the best of you and are affecting your immune system.  In other words, it’s your fault.  And to get better, you just have to be more positive.

This philosophy is insidious to the extreme.  I have a friend right now who was just recently diagnosed with ALS, a disease for which there is no known cure, and which is invariably fatal.  I wonder how he would respond if someone told him that, not only is this disease his fault, but he would get better if he would only be more positive.  Pardon my French, but that’s a load of horseshit.  ALS and cancer kill many thousands of people a day, no matter how positive their attitudes are.  Are you telling me they died because they didn’t smile enough?  Give me a break.

So, here Carol is, with this guy, and she listens to his orientation speech (which is followed by a musical duet right out of a stereotypical hippy commune from the late ‘60s), and she goes back to her cabin and cries her heart out.  And I’m thinking, “Finally, she’s come to her senses.  She realizes, like we the audience do, that this guy isn’t going to help her illness, imagined or not, because he’s a charlatan.”

But no!  She buys into it.  The movie keeps throwing these plot-related curveballs that made it difficult for me to understand what the filmmakers are getting at.  I’ve read that Carol’s illness is a metaphor for AIDS.  Okay, if that’s the case, what is Safe trying to say?  That there’s no cure?  What else is new?  This movie was made in 1995, long after AIDS first invaded the cultural zeitgeist, and two years after the movie Philadelphia brought it into the cinematic mainstream.

But let’s say that is the message.  Okay, let’s talk about how Safe delivers the message.  Short answer: it doesn’t.  At first, the movie would have you believe Carol’s illness is motivated by hysteria and not pharmacological.  Then it isn’t.  Then it is again.  Then she finds a haven that might provide a cure.  Then the haven turns out to be a fraud.  But she goes along with it anyway.  But then her condition seems to get even worse…

Safe wants to have it both ways.  Maybe it’s a Rorschach test.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it Schrodinger’s movie, where both solutions are equally possible, depending on who’s watching.  Are there movies that can pull this off?  Maybe you can list other examples besides 2001: A Space Odyssey, because I can’t.  By the time the cryptic ending rolled around, my chains had been yanked so many times that I just didn’t care anymore.  Carol is suffering from her illness, imagined or not, so it’s real to her.  But if the movie isn’t going to come down either way, what is it actually saying?  Having no perspective is worse than having one I disagree with.

Like I said, I need to watch this movie with other people, and we need to discuss it afterwards.  Maybe other viewpoints will broaden my mind a little bit to grasp Safe’s message, whatever the heck it is.  Viewed by itself in a vacuum, much like Carol herself, I was bored sick.

[P.S. The trailer for Safe is one of the most misleading trailers in film history, yet another in a long line of scenarios where a studio cuts the trailer for the movie they thought they’d get as opposed to the one they have. Watching it, you’d think you were in for another Outbreak. But, alas, no.]

MONSTER (2003)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Patty Jenkins
CAST: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 81% Certified Fresh Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “A Movie Based on a True Story”

PLOT: Charlize Theron gives a searing, deglamorized performance as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, an intense, disquieting portrait of a profoundly damaged soul.


The first time I tried watching Monster, some years ago, I watched it with my girlfriend, but we never finished it.  The scene where Aileen Wuornos (Theron) is attacked and raped, leading to her first murder, was so visceral that my girlfriend had to leave the room before it had finished.  Since that time, she has watched hours and hours of “true crime” documentaries about Wuornos and Bundy and Manson and Speck and so many others.  Go figure.  Having finally finished Monster on my own this morning, I believe she could be ready to give this movie another try, although I’m not sure the version of Aileen Wuornos portrayed in the film will have much resemblance to the one seen in all those documentaries.

In the past, I’ve enjoyed movies like Se7en and Silence of the Lambs and even Zodiac, featuring implacable, inhuman murderers with unfathomable motives and blank faces.  I enjoyed David Fincher’s series Mindhunters far more than I thought I would, despite its disquieting subject matter, partially because the killers portrayed in that series may seem normal at first, but they are eventually revealed to have massive personality disorders, genuine sociopaths with little to no consciences to speak of.  But in Monster, director/screenwriter Patty Jenkins (who wouldn’t direct another film until 2017’s Wonder Woman) denies us the ability to pigeonhole Aileen Wuornos so easily.  She pulls a Hitchcock/Psycho on the audience: getting us to root for the ostensible villain even as she commits one murder after another.

Jenkins accomplishes this by showing how a dysfunctional home life and a sometimes apathetic and cruel society ground down a young girl with the same kinds of hopes and dreams we’ve all had into a damaged woman desperately looking for a connection.  One such apathetic soul in the film says what I’ve thought so many times in my own past about anyone who makes questionable life choices: “Lots of people have bad lives, and they still choose to move towards the light.  Otherwise, we’d all be hookers and druggies.”  Well, sure, that’s easy for me to say, with two loving parents, a private school education, living in a 3-bedroom house and a steady job, etcetera.  But what choices would I have made if my father knew his friend had been molesting me for years and not only did nothing, but beat ME up for it?  What if, in my first job interview, the office manager hadn’t taken a chance on a teenager with no job experience and instead berated me for not having a master’s degree or my own apartment yet?

Monster is not a typical serial killer movie because, while it absolutely does NOT approve of Aileen’s murders, it does not try to pretend she is a mindless, man-hating predator.  She is motivated by hopelessness and, as it happens, love.  Aileen meets and falls desperately in love with a naïve young woman, Selby Wall (Ricci), the first bright spot in her otherwise bleak existence, and will do anything to keep her in her life.  If “anything” happens to encompass hooking and murdering the occasional john, for her it’s a small price to pay for the happiness she has been denied for so long.

Monster has the look of a film shot on a shoestring, much like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which enhances its authenticity, especially when it’s clear the movie was shot in the real locations visited by Aileen and Selby in real life.  Having lived in Florida for over 35 years, I recognized the feel of the locations, the city streets crowded with convenience stores and car dealerships and seedy motels.  I’m pretty sure I’ve actually been to the “Fun Stop” where Aileen and Selby ride the Ferris wheel.  The usage of these real locations made everything feel legitimate, almost like a documentary.  (Full disclosure: Selby Wall is loosely based on Aileen’s actual girlfriend, Tyria Moore, but Moore refused to allow her name or likeness to be used in the film and divulged little-to-no information about her personal life, so Selby’s character is an estimation at best.)

And then, of course, there’s Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning performance as Aileen Wuornos.  Anyone familiar with the Wuornos story has seen her most famous photos.  Take it from me: the makeup department used every trick in the book to make Theron look like Wuornos’ double.  It’s uncanny, on par with Rami Malek’s transformation for Bohemian Rhapsody, down to the false teeth that subtly alter her profile.  She even shaved her eyebrows.  But those cosmetic marvels are nothing, nothing compared to Theron’s performance itself.  I recently watched Cate Blanchett in Tár and called that the greatest performance I had ever seen by a woman.  I must now amend that statement.  Theron completely sublimates her famously glamorous persona into a chaotic jumble of nervous speech patterns and a fake swagger and the rambling patter reminiscent of a junkie looking for her next fix.  The only time she ever seems at peace is in the arms of her lover.  This performance is even more remarkable considering how “non-flashy” it is compared to other movie killers like Hannibal Lecter or John Doe.  Sure, she has her outbursts, but rather than feeling like hammy histrionics, they felt raw, like watching hidden camera footage of someone genuinely losing their shit because of some deep personal loss and not because they got the wrong size coffee at Starbucks.  It’s a phenomenal performance.


Attention should also be paid to Christina Ricci’s performance as Selby.  It’s easy to lose sight of Ricci in a film that clearly belongs to Theron, but she pitches her performance just right as another needy soul looking for a connection and all too willing to overlook (initially, at first) the red flags of a girlfriend who comes home in a different car every other night.  Her home life may not have been as scarring as Aileen’s, but she will take any port in a storm offering relief from oppression.

I enjoyed Monster in almost the same way I enjoyed Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.  These people are not the most sympathetic characters ever, or the most relatable, or even the most likable.  But I see how their dysfunctional backgrounds brought them to their desolate situations step by step, and it makes me wonder whether I would have done anything differently in their situation.  I’d like to think I wouldn’t turn to murder and/or drug use in my despair, but Monster made me realize there’s no way to know for sure unless I walk a mile in their shoes.  The last lines spoken in Monster, which I won’t spoil here, lay out the kind of misery Aileen Wuornos seems to have faced at every stage in her life.  Imagine how things might have turned out if she had just been given a chance.


QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Best line or memorable quote?
“‘All you need is love and to believe in yourself.’  Nice idea.  It doesn’t exactly work out that way.  But I guess it was better to hear a flat-out lie than to know the truth at 13.”

After watching this film, did you want to learn more about the true story?  Why or why not?
I must be honest and say, no, I did not.  I do not claim that Monster tells the 100% true story from beginning to end.  It’s not a historical document.  It’s a piece of entertainment that strives for truth at the expense of slavish dedication to factual accuracy, and I’m okay with that.  I’m one of those people who believe JFK is a marvelous film, inaccurate though it may be, because it captures the feeling of what it was like during that timeframe.  The same with Monster.  I could watch however many documentaries on the life and death of Aileen Wuornos, and I can’t imagine any other piece of filmmaking approaching truth to any greater degree than this movie did.

EVE’S BAYOU [Director’s Cut] (1997)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Kasi Lemmons
CAST: Jurnee Smollett, Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 83% Certified Fresh

PLOT: What did little Eve see–and how will it haunt her? Husband, father, and womanizer Louis Batiste is the head of an affluent family, but it’s the women who rule this gothic world of secrets, lies, and mystic forces.

[Author’s note: this review ended up being vaguer than I intended, due to a pivotal moment that, the more unexpected it is, the more effective it becomes.  Apologies in advance.]


Eve’s Bayou is one of the most self-assured, naturalistic directorial debuts I’ve ever seen.  Director Kasi Lemmons (you may remember her as Ardelia, Clarice Starling’s roommate at the FBI Academy in The Silence of the Lambs) has created a movie that feels less like a movie and more like a recreation of someone’s memories, not quite like a documentary, exactly, but it feels…real.  It’s melodramatic, but it’s not pumped up with overwrought hand-wringing and dramatic close-ups.  It’s fiction, but with a ring of truth that I usually only see in the best biopics.  I was delightfully and unexpectedly engrossed from beginning to end.

Let’s talk about that beginning, to start with.  The time is 1962, in a little Louisiana town called Eve’s Bayou.  (There may be white folk in this town, but the movie stars no Caucasian actors whatsoever, kind of like the Black Cinema equivalent of the Bechdel test; it’s just one more surprising and refreshing quality of this wonderful movie.)  Over the course of a lively evening party hosted at their house, we meet and learn a little bit about each member of the Batiste family, just like the opening sequence of The Godfather, which I didn’t realize until just this moment…neat.  There’s Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), the town doctor and rakish charmer, husband to the gorgeous Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and father to three children, 9-year-old Poe (Jake Smollett), 14-year-old Cisely (Meagan Good), and 10-year-old Eve (Jurnee Smollett [Black Canary in Birds of Prey, my GOD, I’m old!]), named after her hometown.  This opening scene establishes that very specific tone I mentioned earlier, one of matter-of-fact realism somehow combined with entertaining cinema.

There’s also Roz’s sister, Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), a woman twice widowed at the top of the film, and who later worries she may be cursed by God.  In an emotional monologue later on, she wonders why God has seen fit to bring so much misfortune to her life, and also wonders how terrible it might be to discover there was no purpose to it at all.  Mozelle has a side business in telling fortunes, and she is quite good at it.  (This will come in handy later, but no spoilers.)

In a nutshell: Eve wanders out to the toolshed late that night and witnesses her father being WAY too friendly with another man’s wife.  The protective Cisely urges Eve not to tell anyone what she saw.  A local voodoo priestess, Elzora (Diahann Carroll), tells Roz to “look to your children”, so she forbids her children from leaving the house unattended for weeks.  Louis continues his womanizing ways as the town doctor.  Roz finally lets her kids out of the house when…well, again, no spoilers.  Life continues at a leisurely pace without ever being boring.

I love how the setting is established and mined for its mood in Eve’s Bayou.  I know there have been countless other films set in and around swamps, Louisiana and otherwise.  But Eve’s Bayou is one for the books.  There is something about the way the cypress trees and dark waters and Spanish moss are photographed that made me almost smell the swamp.  Maybe the intent was to give a visual hint or cue to the secrets being kept in the Batiste family, especially later in the film.  I don’t want to get all “film theory” on this topic, but it’s just something I noticed specifically as the movie progressed.  It’s masterfully done.

I enjoyed the little details that, again, made everything feel like real memories of a real family.  What does a kid do in a large house in the early ‘60s when they can’t leave?  No Nintendo, no Netflix.  Just bouncing a ball against the wall.  Or teasing your siblings.  Or getting mad when someone won’t get out of the damn bathroom.  The Batiste house has a large spreading tree in their front lawn, and one of its huge branches grows just low and long enough for Eve to use as a makeshift hammock.  I liked that.  There could just as easily have been a bench or a chair, but no, she sits on the tree branch, and that feels exactly right.

Mirrors are put to interesting and innovative use in Eve’s Bayou.  Mozelle tells Eve a story about how she once took a lover, and he confronted her husband with a gun.  As she tells the story, she approaches the mirror, and in its reflection, behind her, we see pieces of the story taking place, all done practically with no fancy special effects.  It’s simple, and it may have been done before or since, but I can’t recall this effect ever being so…effective.  It was downright spooky at times.  At one point, she even walks into the scene that we are watching in the mirror, an elegant visual representation of someone getting lost in their memories.

The opening narration gives us a hint of what must, or may, eventually happen in Eve’s Bayou: “The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.”  There is a key moment later in the film when, because of that narration, the inevitable outcome of a particular situation is perhaps easy to see, but the film is so effectively constructed and edited that I was still wondering how it would happen.  That’s not easy to do.  Kudos to the screenplay and the director once again.

Eve’s Bayou was an exceedingly pleasant surprise, a movie told from an unfamiliar perspective that still feels familiar in many ways, because human emotion is universal.  When Roz and Louis fight downstairs, and Eve can hear them through her upstairs door, and she covers her head with her pillow, I was taken back to memories of my own parents’ divorce and their heated arguments, things I never really talk or even think about, but this movie captured that vibe perfectly.  While the movie does have its own mission and ultimate destination, it remembers something very important: the more specific you make a scene with its details, the more universal the appeal, regardless of your race, color, or creed.

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Trey Parker
CAST: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman, Isaac Hayes
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Certified Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “Watch a Movie Based on a TV Series”

PLOT: When the overprotective mothers of South Park convince America to go to war with Canada over a Canadian R-rated cartoon (wink, wink), they unwittingly set off a chain of events that could lead to global apocalypse.


I sat down and watched South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut for perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth time in my life.  My mind went back to the first time seeing it in movie theaters in 1999, one of the single greatest years of American cinema since 1939.  [Fight Club, The Insider, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, The Iron Giant, Galaxy Quest, Three Kings, need I go on?]  I recall laughing and laughing and laughing, then forcing myself to be quiet so I could hear the next joke, and then laughing some more.  I recall being shocked, yes, SHOCKED to hear such salty language coming from the mouths of animated children.  I had seen the first season or so of the TV series, especially the pilot featuring the battle between Santa Claus and Jesus, and the aliens who force Cartman to sing, so I was not unfamiliar with the formula.

And yet, as transgressively funny as the TV show was, here comes the movie, which featured, among other things I’m sure I’m forgetting:

  • Several uses of the “F” word.  (Not THAT one, the OTHER one.)
  • A socially unacceptable use of the word “retard.”
  • A very brief glimpse of a white character in blackface.
  • A character who uses very naughty language to describe God.
  • Satan and Saddam Hussein having conjugal relations in Hell.
  • A song with a passage containing musical farts.

…the list goes on.  (One of my favorite exchanges: “Haven’t you heard of the Emancipation Proclamation?!”  “…I don’t listen to hip-hop.”)

These are the kinds of jokes you only repeat to your friends when you’re certain there are no eavesdroppers.  Heck, some of them I wouldn’t repeat to my best friend on a desert island.  But I must be honest: I laughed and laughed again.

Naturally, the satirical elements are bloody ingenious.  The story revolves around our lovable heroes – Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny – sneaking into a Canadian R-rated film based on one of their favorite television shows, “Terrance and Phillip.”  The aptly named Asses of Fire seems to contain three hours of nothing but two goofy-looking characters farting, making fart jokes, and singing songs about farting and having carnal relations with your mother’s brother.  Our heroes walk out of the movie thoroughly entertained and sporting a new profanity-laden vocabulary that would be right at home in The Aristocrats.  When their mothers hear where their precious children heard such foul language, they form a protest group against Canada and sing the Oscar-nominated song (true story!) “Blame Canada,” which contains this revealing line: “We’ve got to blame Canada, we’ve got to make a fuss / Before someone thinks of blaming us!”

To everyone’s great surprise, it turns out these events might bring about a Biblical apocalypse in which Satan will escape Hell and cleanse the Earth, with Saddam Hussein by his side.  Because, you know, why not?  How this crisis is averted, and how it involves a Clockwork Orange-esque “V-chip” implanted in Cartman’s brain, I would not dream of revealing.

The cleverness of this plot is breathtaking, skewering the concept of forced morality with wit and poop jokes, but something tells me they’re preaching to the choir.  The folks who most need to see this film are clearly the ones who will stay the farthest away from it.  (In one of Hollywood’s supreme ironies, since “Blame Canada” was Oscar-nominated, that meant it was to be performed at the Oscar ceremony, but the network censors would not allow the singer, Robin Williams [!], to sing the word “fart” on national television.  How they got around that absurd logic, I leave it to you and Google to discover.)

This is one of those “review-proof” films, like the Jackass or Scary Movie franchises.  You could line up established critics around the block, telling everyone how juvenile and crude and offensive this movie is, and it will not matter a tiny, tiny bit; they made money, and lots of it.  I might even agree with those critics to a certain degree.  But I cannot deny the fact that tears of laughter rolled down my face when Cartman sang “Kyle’s Mom Is a Big Fat Bitch.”  I cannot deny that watching Saddam Hussein’s idea of foreplay made me first recoil, then cackle with more laughter.  I cannot deny that my best friend and I still laugh today if one of us starts singing, “Shut your ******* face, uncle ****** / You’re a *****-biting bastard, uncle ******.”

It’s juvenile.  It’s rude.  It’s socially unacceptable.  But sweet baby Jeebus, it is funny.


QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Best line or memorable quote?
[I already said what my favorite exchange was, but what the heck I’ll double-dip:]
“Remember what the MPAA says: Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words! That’s what this war is all about!”

If you have seen the television series, do you prefer the movie or the TV version?  Why?
Another moment of full disclosure: I haven’t watched the South Park TV series since shortly after they introduced “Mr. Hanky, the Christmas Poo.”  Honestly, the show’s style of humor started wearing thin, at least for something that aired weekly.  I thoroughly enjoyed 80 minutes or so of the movie, but the show itself just got tiresome.  (You can’t see it, but I just shrugged.)  Even Parker and Stone’s next movie project, Team America: World Police, had its laugh-out-loud moments, but the pinpoint satirical accuracy was missing, and it just seemed mean-spirited compared to the South Park movie.  Apparently, my taste for fart jokes and pervasive profanity does have its limits.  Who knew?

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (Canada, 2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg
CAST: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Scott Speedman, Kristen Stewart
MY RATING: 5/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In a dystopian near-future, the human pain threshold has suddenly disappeared, giving rise to bizarre performance artists who publicly showcase bodily mutations and self-mutilations.


Somewhere at the core of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is a crackling good thriller waiting to happen.  I was still waiting for it when the end credits rolled.  I couldn’t predict what was going to happen next, which is normally a big plus for me, but the problem was, I didn’t care what was going to happen next.  Just when the movie seemed about to kick into a new gear story-wise, boom, credits.  Shame.

In the near future, human bodies worldwide have started undergoing bizarre mutations involving the development of new internal organs and the disappearance of a pain threshold.  This leads to the proliferation of underground performance artists who are either publicly mutilated or mutilated themselves.  Why?  Because Cronenberg.  We get close ups of the lead character, Saul Tenser (Mortensen), lying in a special chamber while knife-wielding robotic arms controlled by his partner, Caprice (Seydoux), slice, probe, and excavate his thorax in search of unwanted new organs.  Another performer lies in a chair while a surgeon literally cuts grooves into her face.  Yet another performer has grown dozens of additional ears all over his body, and has his eyes and ears sewn shut while he dances to modern music as a voice intones, “NOW is the TIME to LISTEN.”


This is all typical stuff from Cronenberg, who was and is a virtuoso of so-called “body horror,” going all the way back to Scanners, Videodrome, and the remake of The Fly.  It’s so typical, in fact, that the sight of various bodily injuries and mutilations didn’t really faze me as much as I thought it would.  Or should.  Maybe this says more about me than about Cronenberg, but the most off-putting sight was that one dancer with the extra ears.  Everything else, while graphic, didn’t feel “real.”  It all felt like effects.  Instead of recoiling, I found myself thinking, “Wow, how’d they do that?”  (By contrast, the dancer with the ears may yet give me nightmares.)

The storyline of the movie remains maddeningly vague for the first half.  In a weird prologue, we watch as a mother performs an unthinkable act after seeing her son eat a plastic trash can as if it were made of gingerbread.  Saul Tenser seems to encourage the growth of these new organs in his own body, even though they could become harmful over time.  His assistant, Caprice, gets turned on by seeing him getting carved up in his chamber; he seems to enjoy it as well.  They call it “the new sex.”  There is a subplot about a new police division, New Vice (not terribly original), trying to crack down on people who perform these public acts of mutilation.  We watch as an unknown gentleman stalks Saul and Caprice while he eats what looks like a purple chocolate bar.  At a bar, another stranger inexplicably grabs the purple bar and takes a bite out of it himself, and immediately experiences something that makes him wish he hadn’t.

This is all interesting, cerebral stuff, I must admit.  The makings of a dystopian thriller a la Blade Runner or Gattaca (with more blood) are all there.  But the mood and lethargic pacing of the movie literally put me to sleep.  I had to rewind it several times during the first half to catch what I missed.

But then the second half kicks in.  Saul is contacted and asked to perform a public autopsy on a child who may have inherited a surgical self-mutilation from his father, a medical first which might be the signal of a true next step in human evolution, but one which was engineered by man and not by nature.  New Vice reaches out to a deep-cover agent (whose identity I wouldn’t dream of revealing) who is assisting the search for cells of bio-terrorists who are trying to alter the course of human evolution.  Meanwhile, Saul, who has been battling some kind of respiratory affliction for the entire film, is tempted with one of those purple bars.  Caprice undergoes a self-transformation of her own…

And then, when a crucial discovery is made that might change the course of the entire movie…it’s over.

How to describe my disappointment?  I was a huge fan of Cronenberg’s two entries in the genuine, “traditional” crime thriller genre, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, both starring Mortensen.  Both films are much more conventional than Crimes of the Future, but both are light years ahead in terms of holding my attention.  I naively thought this film (with the word “crimes” right in the title!) would be along the same lines.  Am I critiquing the film I wanted it to be instead of critiquing the film it is?  Maybe I am, because the first half of the movie was so bland and stultifying that I can’t think of anything else to say about it except to compare it to something that I wish it had been.

Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s first feature film after an 8-year hiatus, sees him returning to a horror sub-genre that he virtually created, or at least perfected, nearly 40 years ago, and he does have something meaningful to say about what mankind is doing to itself and the planet without regard to future generations.  I just wish he had found a way to say it without boring me for the first fifty-four minutes, then leaving me hanging at the end.

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Great Britain, 2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Martin McDonagh
CAST: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Two lifelong friends find themselves at an impasse when one abruptly ends their relationship, bringing unexpected consequences for them both.


Is The Banshees of Inisherin slow?  Yes.

Is The Banshees of Inisherin sad?  Yes.

Does the movie have a sad ending or a happy one?  Yes.

These are not normally the trademarks of a movie I rush out to see.  In fact, I didn’t see The Banshees of Inisherin at a movie theater for those very reasons.  I had heard that, yes, it is well-written and extraordinarily well-acted, but that it was a bit of a slog.  I had hoped Banshees would be another film like In Bruges, one of the finest dark comedies ever made, but that did not seem to be the case.  So, I stayed away.

Well, I have just finished watching it at home, and I can confirm the film’s slowness and unavoidable moments of sadness, but they are contrasted with unexpected comic beats.  (I was going to say “unintended,” but they were surely intentional, further confirming the ingenuity of the screenplay by director Martin McDonagh.)  I can also confirm that this is one of the most unpredictable stories I’ve ever seen, and I mean literally, like ever.  At first, I was comparing it to Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, but that turned out to be woefully inadequate.  The Banshees of Inisherin does have the structure of a fine short story, but there its similarities to Melville ends.  I’m not sure if Banshees has a chance of winning the Oscar for Best Picture, but it’s certainly one of the strongest contenders for Best Original Screenplay.

Pádraic (Farrell) lives on the fictional island of Inisherin, off the Irish coast, in the early spring of 1923.  He is stunned one day to learn that his best friend, Colm (Gleeson), has abruptly decided to end their lifelong friendship, cold turkey.  Colm doesn’t want to talk to Pádraic for any reason whatsoever, nor does he give a reason, at least not initially.  When Pádraic persists in speaking to Colm, Colm gives him a warning: Every time he talks to or bothers Colm in any way from here on, Colm will cut off one of his own fingers and give it to Pádraic, until he stops or until Colm has no fingers left.

It was at this point that I sat up and started really paying attention.  I’ve lived long enough to know the specific kind of grief and consternation that occurs when a long-term friend abruptly cuts off all contact for reasons that are not at all clear.  So I felt Pádraic’s pain, I saw it in his face, when he realized how serious Colm was with his threat.  At that moment, I drew mental lines: Pádraic was the protagonist, and Colm was the antagonist.

Of course, Pádraic is the good guy.  He’s nice!  His adult sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), confirms it!  I mean, sure, he’s a little dull, and maybe not all that smart, and maybe he has a pet miniature donkey that he lets in the house when his sister isn’t looking, and he’s never heard of Mozart, but is that a crime?  Is that reason enough to end a friendship?  Pádraic doesn’t think so.  I didn’t think so!  Pádraic is so full of righteous anger that he confronts Colm.  Colm is dumbstruck.  Their conversation ends in a bit of an impasse.  And then, the next morning, as Siobhan prepares breakfast, they hear a thunk on the front door…aaand you’ll have to watch the movie for further plot developments.

(While I watched The Banshees of Inisherin, my girlfriend wondered if I was watching some kind of slapstick comedy with the volume of laughter coming from our movie room.  My explanation of why I was laughing, and what I was laughing at, didn’t quite translate.)

What is Banshees trying to say?  In my opinion, perhaps it’s this: you can’t go through life worrying about what other people think of you.  When Colm lays down the law, Pádraic should have just sucked it up and moved on with his life, right?  I was originally comparing their situation to something that might happen on social media, when someone expresses a very negative view of your post or opinion or whatever.  What do you do?  Latch onto it and let it gnaw away at you?  Post rebuttal after rebuttal until you change their mind?  (Spoiler alert: you won’t.)

As I said, that kind of thinking made Pádraic the good guy and Colm the bad guy.  But then Pádraic starts making some very bad, very DUMB decisions.  He starts listening to the advice of the closest thing they have to a village idiot, Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who suggests that Pádraic just needs a new approach: tough love.  At that point, if he’s dumb enough to take advice from a moron, whatever happens next is on him, right?  So now the balance changes.  Now Pádraic is the bad guy/dumbass and Colm is the good guy.  Just leave him alone, dude.

(For the record, Colm does explain his decision, which may shed some light on his own state of mind.  Depression?  Despair?  The screenplay offers clues, but nothing truly definitive.)

All through the film is Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan, who functions as the audience surrogate.  “You’re all f*****g boring!  With your piddling grievances over nothin’!”  She is as dumbfounded as we are at Colm’s stubbornness.  Not to mention at her brother’s foolish attempts to reconnect with someone who clearly doesn’t want to be bothered.  There are a couple of moments when it seems as if all is forgiven, but alas, it is not to be.  Siobhan’s solution to rid herself of their bickering is as simple as it is final.

When the credits rolled, I found myself wondering what kind of review this was going to be.  I liked the movie.  But it is slow and sad.  But its massive unpredictability sucked me in as inevitably as if I were watching Kill Bill or Interstellar.  That’s the key factor to The Banshees of Inisherin.  You may think you know what’s about to happen, but just try to guess exactly how the movie ends, and see how wrong you are.

MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Terry Jones
CAST: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Carol Cleveland
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “Watch a Controversial Film”

PLOT: Born on the very first Christmas in the stable next door to Jesus Christ, Brian of Nazareth spends his life being mistaken for a messiah.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Let the record show this was originally going to be a review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but the author had just seen 2 or 3 dramatic films in a row and apparently decided it was time to switch gears a bit.  Complaints about this adjustment may be directed to the author’s colleague, Marc Sanders, who promises to reply to each and every complaint at about the same time hell freezes over. ]


Life of Brian is widely considered Monty Python’s tightest, most well-written film, even if it’s not quite as hysterically funny as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I agree.  I can speculate that this is due to the subject matter, and so great care needed to be taken to ensure that viewers would not mistakenly think the film was poking fun at the Jesus Christ Himself.  On the contrary, right from the very opening, it’s quite clear this movie is not about Jesus, but about the poor sod who was born in the stable next door and the deluded individuals who continually mistake HIM for a messiah as a grown man.  (“…how shall we f*** off, oh lord?”)

But that didn’t stop the mighty train of offensensitivity from rolling right along.  To wit:

  • Norway banned the film for a year.
  • Ireland banned it until 1987.
  • A town in Wales banned it until 2009, after a cast member was elected Mayor.
  • A town in Britain banned it until 2015.

However, no amount of bans and protests could prevent Life of Brian from becoming an integral part of the cinematic comedy landscape.  At the annual Venice Film Festival, the Premio Brian (Brian Award) is awarded to the most rationalist/atheist movie presented at the festival.  It was named the funniest comedy of all time by the BBC’s Channel Four, beating out Groundhog Day and The Full Monty.  In 1982, during the Falklands War, sailors aboard a severely damaged British vessel started singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” while awaiting rescue.  You can’t BUY that kind of publicity.

After a brief prologue in which the Three Wise Men visit the wrong manger by mistake (“We were led by a star!”  BRIAN’S MOTHER: “Led by a bottle, more like!”), we jump ahead to when Brian is just about Graham Chapman’s age, struggling to hear the Sermon on the Mount from a distance (“Blessed are the cheesemakers?!”).  Much like Holy Grail, the film is punctuated by sketches, some of which are pauses in the action, but most of which still manage to carry the story forward.  That’s quite a feat when you consider their subsequent film, The Meaning of Life, was composed entirely of self-contained sketches, albeit with a common theme.  The fact that the Pythons were able to rein themselves in and keep things relatively lean is rather admirable.

If I kept relating plot developments and summaries of sketches and funny quotes, I would be here all day:

  • The “Biggus Dickus” scene.
  • The stoning.
  • The unexpected Latin lesson.
  • “What have the Romans ever given us?”
  • Graham Chapman’s willy.  (Hey, it’s a memorable scene, shut up.)

If I must be honest, though, I was never, and still am not, a fan of the film’s ending.  Yes, I get the supreme, absurd irony of the situation juxtaposed with that cheerful song, but…to be honest, it’s always felt like the Pythons said, “Okay, so we’re here, aaaaand…now what?  Any ideas?  No?  Okay, let’s end the movie.”  Perhaps they always meant to end it that way.  So be it.  But I’m selfish.  I wanted just a little more.  …although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what kind of mileage you could get out of a bunch of people at a tomb waiting for someone to emerge, but never does.  There’s a joke there, somewhere, but I’m not the one to tell it.

There is one scene that I found VERY interesting.  It never stood out before, but it does now.  People are fond of saying, “Well, you could never make Blazing Saddles today.”  Perhaps, but I bet the chances are even slimmer of someone trying to make Life of Brian today, and even if someone did, the scene in question would probably not make it to the final cut.

Picture this: Four members of the People’s Front of Judea (NOT to be mistaken for the Judean People’s Front…those splitters) are trying to decide something when one of the male members, Stan, reveals he wants to be a woman and asks everyone to start calling him “Loretta.”  The others ask him why, and he says, “I want to have babies…It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them!”  “But you can’t HAVE babies!” retorts Reg, “you haven’t got a WOMB!  Where’s the fetus gonna gestate, you gonna keep it in a box?!”  They eventually agree that Stan/Loretta can’t actually HAVE babies, but they will fight for his RIGHT to have babies.  “It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”  (“…symbolic of his struggle against reality…” grumbles Reg.) [Ed. note: view the full scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlo7YZW8vPA ]

If you ask me, in today’s society, if that scene were to appear in a contemporary film, even in an obviously comic context like this one, it would become an even bigger controversy than “Nipplegate.”  Forget about all the religious overtones and perceived (but non-existent!) blasphemy.  All it would take is for one person to call that scene out, and Monty Python would be on the road to social cancellation faster than you can say, “Carla’s your uncle.”

ANYWAY.  As a lifelong fan of the Pythons, I consider Life of Brian their high-water mark in terms of storytelling and contextual comedy.  If it’s not quite as funny as Holy Grail, well, I ask you, what is?  Any arguments about the movie being blasphemous are easily deflated by pointing out it’s not about Jesus.  It’s about this other idiot and the group-thinking idiots who follow him.  Case closed.


QUESTION FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Best line or memorable quote:
(Talk about being spoiled for choice…it’s a little out of context, but if you know, you know:)
“He has a wife, you know.  Do you know what she’s called?  Incontinentia.  …Incontinentia Buttocks.”

After watching the film, can you see both sides of the controversy surrounding it?
I can acknowledge that two sides exist (or existed), but the anti-Brian argument is pointless because, once again for the cheap seats, the movie is not about Jesus.  It can’t be blasphemous if it barely even mentions His name.  My two cents.

TENDER MERCIES (1983)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Bruce Beresford
CAST: Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 84% Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “A Movie that Won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay”

PLOT: A broken-down, middle-aged country singer gets a new wife, reaches out to his long-lost daughter, and tries to put his troubled life back together.


Tender Mercies does not feel like a movie that was released the same year as WarGames, Octopussy, and Return of the Jedi.  It has more in common with the spare, character-driven films of the early ‘70s like Five Easy Pieces [1970] and The Last Picture Show [1971].  It’s a movie where not much seems to happen, at least on the surface.  Underneath the barren landscapes and big skies, however, great truths about life and acceptance are on display.

Anchored by an Oscar-winning performance from Robert Duvall, Tender Mercies tells the story of Mac Sledge (Duvall), whom we see at the opening of the film collapsing in a drunken stupor on the losing end of a fight in a rinky-dink roadside motel in rural Texas.  The next morning, broke and abashed, he makes an arrangement with the widowed motel owner, Rosa Lee (Harper): he’ll do odd jobs at the motel for room, board, and $2 an hour.  Rosa Lee’s son 10-year-old son, Sonny, watches this situation unfold impassively and asks Mac some very direct questions: “Did you used to have money?”  “How’d you lose it?”  “You think my dad would’ve liked you?”

The filmmakers (directed by Bruce Beresford, Oscar-winning screenplay by Horton Foote, who also wrote the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird [1962]) make some interesting choices for everything that follows.  There is a gentle scene between Mac and Rosa Lee where he shyly asks her, “You ever think about gettin’ married again?”  She says she has.  “Would you ever think about marryin’ me?”  She says she will think about it.  And in the very next scene, it’s made clear that time has passed, they got married, and have been married for several months.  In another film, that kind of “condensed storytelling” would go into the negative column in my book, but not here.  Instead, it feels…right.  We don’t need to show any further details of their courtship, their wedding, Sonny’s feelings about it one way or the other, etcetera.  Those extra scenes would have delayed the narrative structure, showing us things we don’t need to see, but which we can easily deduce.

There’s another scene (I’ll try to tread lightly here) where Mac gives a heartfelt, but still masterfully underplayed, speech to Rosa Lee about how he was in a bad drunk driving wreck years before, and how God saw fit to bring her into his life, but to do so meant her husband had to die, and so on.  “See, I don’t trust happiness.  I never did, I never will.”

When he finished, and Rosa Lee stood there taking it in, in my head, I imagined her replying with something like, “Well, Mac, you don’t have to trust happiness, you just have to trust me”, or “yourself”, or some similarly corny platitude.  Instead, in what must have been superhuman restraint on the part of the screenwriter, Rosa Lee simply stands there, processes what she just heard…and walks offscreen, leaving Mac alone with his thoughts.

That was a big moment for me.  It seemed to me to be a gesture from the filmmakers that this is not a movie about processed dialogue and ancient story arcs and the kind of emotional beats you might expect from a film.  Instead, it felt like I was looking at real people, reacting realistically to real dialogue.  Rosa Lee could have drawn the scene out, but instead she seems to realize there is nothing she can say that will make things better for Mac.  She loves him, but she knows this is something he’ll need to work out for himself, and no amount of sermonizing will help him towards that goal.  It’s a small moment, and it doesn’t occur until late in the film, but it’s this moment that convinced me Tender Mercies had a lot to say in between the pauses and transitional shots of country roads and straight horizons.

There is a lot more to the story, but the film presents very little of it with the kind of forward momentum we’ve come to expect as moviegoers.  Instead, we are treated to new developments almost as if we are intruding on these people and their lives.  Even in a scene at a crowded Opry house where we see Mac’s previous wife, Dixie (Betty Buckley!), belting some good old-fashioned, Parton-esque country tunes, the shot choices and editing still feel almost like we’re voyeurs as we watch Mac listening to one of Dixie’s ballads, then leaving, not quite in disgust, but clearly uncomfortable.  It’s in the aftermath of this concert we get the first solid information on his estranged daughter (Barkin), who would be about 18 years old by now.  Dixie screams at Mac, “She doesn’t remember you!  All she remembers is a mean drunk!”  This scene was so well-realized that I started having flashbacks to some of the fights my own parents got into before their divorce.

I don’t mean to suggest the movie does not have an arc.  It absolutely does.  But Tender Mercies does such a good job of “burying the lead” that I didn’t fully get what the movie wanted to say until the very last scenes featuring two characters tossing a football back and forth.  Mac’s life seems to be back on track.  His music career seems about to be resurrected.  Mac might still have trust issues when it comes to happiness.  Perhaps all we can do is appreciate the small moments of happiness we have while we can.  If sadness or tragedy comes, let it come.  It will hurt for a time, but it will also make those small moments all the more precious.

If that sounds clichéd, well, maybe it is.  Tender Mercies does a much better job of delivering that message than I could ever do, proving once again: a movie is not about what it’s about, it’s HOW it’s about it.


QUESTION FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Unless you read the script, you can only judge a screenplay by the movie. Based on the movie, do you feel this script deserved the award for Best Screenplay? Explain.
Great question!  For the record, the other nominees that year were the screenplays for The Big Chill, Fanny and Alexander, Silkwood, and WarGames (that last one kinda surprised me).  I am a little surprised Tender Mercies edged out The Big Chill, a movie with far more prominence than this little Texas character study from an Australian director, but I would say Tender Mercies certainly deserved the award based on the movie by itself.  Much like Lost in Translation [2003], the screenplay relies more on silences and context to deliver its message rather than on showy dialogue or melodramatic plot developments (to be fair, there is one sort-of melodramatic plot twist in Tender Mercies, but it’s handled so well it doesn’t play that way).  Sure, Tarantino and Sorkin might deliver high-quality screenplays that are flashier and certainly wordier, but to craft such a high-quality film in such a minimalist style is admirable and deserves recognition.