Movies

Last updated Jan 7, 2001

Below are ruminations and observations inspired by movies I've seen recently. They may spoil movies you haven't seen yet; be warned.

Chasing Amy (1/01): Mixed feelings.
Liked it at first, mostly by virtue of fairly witty dialog I had to pay attention to to follow, always a treat. But once it got rolling I felt I'd stumbled into a well-dubbed foreign film, where characters get outraged at each other for reasons you have to be part of the culture to understand.
Maybe that says something about me. I think of myself sexually as fairly conventional, if not flat-out dull, but maybe I just move in unusually kinky circles... er, I mean, maybe I just have unusually kinky friends. And I do realize that dealing with not being monosexual is emotionally tricky. But is having sex with more than one partner at a time supposed to be such a huge deal? Or is the lesbian thing supposed to be so big a deal that his getting bent out of shape about her heterosexual escapades was supposed to be ironic? Or were the actors simply unable to convey a middle ground between Getting Along and Full Blown Emotional Crisis?
I mean, OK, she lied to him about her sexual history, and he's so thoroughly self-absorbed he doesn't stop for a minute to ask himself what their relationship looks like from her perspective. These are problems. Maybe even irresolvable problems. But their reactions seemed so thoroughly out of proportion to the events around them that I kept wondering what I was missing. She yells at him, walks out, comes back; he walks away, comes back; she walks away; his buddy is just plain weird; throughout I'm wondering what planet they're all from.
And then, that ending. Much has been said about it, but actually I think I may have liked it if I hadn't pretty much lost interest in all three characters by that point. I might have found it intriguingly ambiguous (or amusingly abrupt, depending on what I make of the bit where she puts/throws the comic away). But as it was, I just didn't care whether any of these people got together, and it wasn't worth thinking too hard about.
Ah well. Not bad, but not as good as I'd expected.
The Rock/ The Devil's Own (1/01): Saw them simultaneously, flipping channels during commercials. Worked well for me... I got to watch the actors I like (Connery and Ford mostly; Pitt's OK, mostly I like his eyes; can't stand Cage, though) without having to settle for the anemic gruel of either storyline. Admittedly, the blend had no more substance than either original, but at least the mix-and-match kept me entertained. (Well, OK, I admit I was reading a book, too. And I didn't bother to sit through the endings. But still...)
Art of War (12/00): Rented it expecting no plot and cool special effects/choreography; got a better plot than I was expecting but worse special effects. This was somewhat disappointing... maybe that says something about me, but even at "better than I was expecting" there still wasn't much plot. And it doesn't help that he never figures out what's going on 'till he's hit over the head with it... not only did Mission: Impossible did the "set up by your boss" thing way better, but it really made it hard to identify with the guy when he's being an idiot.
Good Man in Africa (12/00): Pending...
Dungeons and Dragons (12/00): Yet another movie I saw expecting it to be dreadful. It was. I very nearly walked out of it; it got a little better once they killed off the Wayans brother but still had basically no saving graces.
(A friend recently asked me why I see movies I expect to be bad... I dunno... doesn't everyone?)
Me Myself & I (11/00): Lovely little fable about the choices we make in our lives, the consequences they have, and our longing for the alternatives. I suspect the point one takes away from this movie depends on what one brings to it... for me, the point was that how you make the big decisions matters less than the thousand little choices you make in how to implement them -- God is in the details.
The 6th Day (11/00): Cloning-based SF stories frequently frustrate me, because they so often assume that clones are adult copies of their target, sharing memory and personality, and I get distracted by the fact that cloning just doesn't work that way. Since the author is typically making some statement about personal identity that depends on there being two of someone, my inability to suspend disbelief here interferes with the whole point of the story.
(Digression... by way of comparison, Bujold's Vorkosigan series actually did it right. Our hero discovers a clone, raised separately and with a completely different personality. Our hero's mother promptly adopts the clone as his brother, which he is by law. The question of personal identity simply doesn't arise; these are different people who share a genetic heritage, just like twins. That's how it ought to work.)
This movie managed to avoid that, which in retrospect fascinates me... their cloning technology with its "blanks" and brainwave recordings is all just a shell game around the same fundamental problem, but by shuffling the cliche elements around they facilitate suspension of disbelief. There's a lesson to be learned there about good storytelling.
Other than that, it was a fairly conventional SF/action/adventure flick that hits most of the obligatory cloning themes: "which one of us is 'real'?"... "is it moral to kill me because I was illegally created?"... "if someone identical to me always survives, am I immortal?"... "if there were two of me, would we get along?"... and of course, the classic technology question: "who gets to benefit? who decides?"
No new answers. Our hero tries to kill his clone at first but ultimately decides "it" deserves to live; since he's the good guy they get along. Our villain seduces the elite with the promise of immortality for personal gain; since he's the bad guy he and his clone don't get along. The government tries desperately to shove the genie back in the bottle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
For all that, it's not a bad movie. In an odd way it's the mirror-image of Total Recall... first Arnold discovers he's two people in one body, then he discovers he's one person in two. In both, he's basically this ordinary guy who just happens to foil well-armed, organized conspiracies; his ability to distract the audience from thinking too hard about this is indispensible.
Charlie's Angels (11/00): Yeah, I know, I know. But actually, much better than I expected. Funny, energetic, entertaining. Just don't try to make the plot make sense. And "the Chad" had me rolling in the aisles, though of course the topicality was unpredictable.
The Cell (9/00): Worth seeing for the visuals, but not for much else. Evocative, sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, but ultimately lacking any message worthy of the power of the medium. Unfortunately unmemorable.
Almost Famous (9/00): Very sweet little film; combination road-trip/coming-of-age movie. Evidently semiautobiographical based on the Led Zeppelin tour of the same timeperiod; I'm left with a sense that the recurring Zepellin-fan geek is more actually representative of the author than the somewhat idealized reporter character. We all want to remember those adolescent years as smoother than they were...
Highlander: Endgame (9/00): About what you'd expect. If you're a fan of the series, you may enjoy the movie; I'm not, and didn't. I find the Highlander mythos perpetually disappointing... it seems to have something to say about immmortality and the need for purpose in life, but never quite gets around to saying it, and in the meantime provides an interminable story about an elaborate, violent game played through eternity for reasons unfathomable not only to the audience but also evidently to the participants, painfully reminiscent of the worst parts of The Great Gatsby as envisioned by Mortal Kombat fans. And yet I keep watching the movies. Why, I ask you... why?
Saving Grace (8/00): A friend I saw this with wondered, afterwards, whether he'd have found it preachy were he opposed to legalizing marijuana. I'm still mulling that over. I'm not especially in favor of it (legalizing marijuana, that is, not the movie), but nevertheless reacted to the drug theme largely as background to an individual's story, so perhaps those strongly opposed to it would react the same way... which would make this movie, as said friend pointed out, an effective bit of social engineering. I'm interested in reactions from actively pro-criminalization types; if any of you read my web site and saw the film, tell me what you think.
The Beach (7/00): Didn't expect much, wasn't disappointed. There were some intriguing views into a disintegrating psyche mirrored in a disintegrating society, and a decent treatment of the "people not ready for paradise" theme, but ultimately uninspired and uninspiring. I suspect there was a good book in back of this, but the movie treatment was ignorably flat.
Man on the Moon (7/00): Surprisingly linear movie with no real surprises -- I suspect Kaufman would have hated it on that basis alone. Worth seeing if you're a fan of his, otherwise probably not. (I was, and enjoyed the film.) Jim Carrey does a phenomenal job at presenting the character, enough so that the occassional bits of Carrey that do float to the surface are jarring.
Girl, Interrupted (7/00): Mixed feelings about this one. It raises the question of how (and why) we define sanity, and where a culture fixes the line between eccentric behavior it can absorb and abberant behavior it must isolate. Powerful questions, those.
At one extreme is our narrator, the "borderline personality disorder", reminiscent of many people I went to college with. The question is raised: is she crazy, or just self-indulgent? It's left unanswered on the surface, but her "recovery" consists primarily of diverging from the path of least resistance, which leans me towards the latter pole.
At the other extreme is the beautiful sociopath, whom our narrator first sees as a romantic resistance figure, an ally against "the establishment", and later sees as a monster. But I'm left wondering if the two characters are that far apart, or if a "monster" is just what you get when you combine self-indulgence with sufficient charisma.
So the question of sanity is raised, but left unanswered. In the end I'm left wanting more resolution... perhaps the movie's intention.
X-Men (7/00): Raised the standard of comic-book adaptations from "bad" to "pretty good, not excellent." Stayed surprisingly close to the comic mythology while remaining accessible to newcomers, though I suspect I'd find it unsatisfying were I not already a fan. It rang the bells and hit the themes, but in a disappointingly pro-forma way.
Even more surprisingly, they improved on the mythology in places... making Wolverine and Storm younger, treating Storm's power as more chaotic and uncontrollable (not unlike the weather), treating the School for Gifted Youngsters as an actual school that happens to have some superheroes rather than simply a cover identity for them.
Surprisingly good production values, although as always I'm struck by how hard it is to do comic-book fight scenes in a live-action medium. The physics of comic book worlds are just fundamentally different... I give them credit for trying to do it, especially with Wolverine's fight sequences, but they didn't work too well. (The exception was the Toad -- I guess being a real martial artist makes a difference.) Amusingly, the Matrix captured the "comic-book" fight style much better, largely by being less realistic and going the whole stop-action 360-degree route... but had the XMen repeated that it would have come off as a Matrix ripoff, which would have been a shame.
Rocky and Bullwinkle (7/00): Must vatch moose and sqvirrel!
Vunderful -- I mean, wonderful movie! Not much to say about it, really... I just laughed a lot.
Random Hearts (7/00): This would have been a lovely little movie had it included the ending.
They set up the dramatic tension wonderfully. On the one hand, the protagonists were both basically likable people who had been shabbily treated and were finding a little bit of joy, so of course you root for them. On the other hand, they were fundamentally not having a relationship, just desperately trying to defer the grieving process, so of course you know it can't last.
So how would they resolve that, I wondered? Would they just break up and leave the audience disappointed? Would they cut to five years later or something and have them get back together? Would they go through some cathartic experience that got them through the grieving and then build a relationship out of the pieces?
I was happily wondering about this when it suddenly dawned on me that the movie had ended.
What's up with that?
Shaft (6/00): There's a great scene towards the end where five cars are barrelling the wrong way down a New York street, shooting at and jockeying each other in the traditional action-movie car-chase ballet, and a cab drives down the street coming at them. The cab drives right through the middle of the nonsense, completely unphased -- doesn't so much as swerve or honk -- and goes on its way. I loved it. Distilled essence of New York cabbie.
Other than that, the film was ignorable. It could have been a vaguely interesting gritty urban detective movie, except no actual detective work takes place: the murderer confesses five minutes into the movie, skips bail, then lets himself be arrested; the local hood postures a lot and does all the obligatory local hood things. Both are ineffectual and not especially threatening. They all spend the movie chasing a waitress who has been hiding behind the furniture for two years, which is not the stuff of which great suspense is made.
It could have been a vaguely interesting "caught between two worlds" kind of racial morality play, but it wasn't. Lots of racial insults, but ultimately of the "just joshin'" variety; a racist rich white murderer who does nothing with his money except skip bail; police corruption that nobody -- including the good guys -- cares much about.
Maybe I missed the point... perhaps this was a kind of absurdist action movie, in which ridiculous characters continually attempt to perform meaningful activities in a fundamentally meaningless world, a la Waiting for Godot or R&G are Dead, and I just didn't get it.
Never Been Kissed (6/00): Better than I expected. Admittedly, I saw this on late-night cable while unable to sleep, so I didn't really expect much. You can probably write the script yourself; it goes through all the obligatory steps, but I enjoyed watching Drew Barrimore perform them. As with obligatory short programs in figure-skating, there's nothing original or novel going on, but you can appreciate the style with which it's done.
Center Stage (6/00): About what you'd expect. Enough story to keep you going from one dance scene to the next, and enough cool dancing and eyecandy to keep you from thinking too hard about the storyline. (Well, unless you're as overanalytical as I am and thus distract yourself wondering why the dance school was intended for students in their late teens when all the main characters were so obviously in their twenties).
Mission Impossible: 2 (5/00): Disappointing.
I enjoyed the plot intricacy of the show and the first movie (compared to their peers) and expected something similar here. The first ten minutes set that up beautifully... the idea of two IMF teams trying to outpsych each other via ever-more-involved setups was a beautiful premise for a movie. (And still is, if anyone feels like making it!).
Instead, we got two hours of pointless gunfights, car chases, and a retread world-destroying-virus plot that not even the principals seem to take seriously. Adding insult to insult is Thandie Newton's character: a knockoff of Catherine Zeta-Jones' character in Entrapment, a master thief who has evaded Interpol, etc. for years but contributes effectively nothing to the storyline except an embarassingly helpless damsel in a dress (sigh).
Jakob the Liar (5/00): Generally enjoyable, if you're willing to put up with yet another Hollywood version of the Holocaust. It's a Robin Williams vehicle, surprise surprise, but he does OK... surprisingly subdued but still entertaining.
Eyes Wide Shut (5/00): Why was everyone so into this movie?
OK, it was well made, but no more so than many other movies. The story was ultimately an emotionless series of aborted couplings and meaningless deaths surrounding a thoroughly self-absorbed man about whose fate I could not conceivably care less, and left me thoroughly cold. What was so engrossing about it? Tell me.
High Fidelity (5/00): Enjoyed the movie but it didn't leave me with much to appreciate afterwards.
I mostly don't like the gimmick of having the main character narrates the story by breaking the fourth wall. It's basically self-indulgent, and it grates on my nerves. I can't stand a lot of Woody Allen movies in a very similar vein, the whole experience starts to resemble those interminable conversations at parties with boring people who answer "so, what are you up to?" literally and at length.
In this movie it's an entirely appropriate mechanism -- but that's precisely because the movie is basically self-indulgent. It really captures what I like and what I dislike about John Cusack... he's got a kind of wry, reflective humor that I appreciate, but which can easily cross the line from self-analytical to self-absorbed. This movie is like that... self-absorbed, self-indulgent, almost masturbatory. Fun, but ultimately unsatisfying.
On the other hand, one does get a sense that he does some growing up in the course of the movie, which I value. There's the real chance that after the credits roll he might actually get his act together. (Or might not, but the possibility is there.)
Frequency (4/00): I've heard the reviews of this movie summarized as "Good characters, but it falls apart halfway through." I actually found the characters disappointingly stock (unshaven cop whose girlfriend leaves him, reckless fireman, concerned wife/mother, gruff but loyal police sergeant, etc.) but surprisingly engaging for all that.
But I wouldn't say it falls apart so much as becomes muddy, and to some extent that's inevitable given the plot assumptions... after all, when your main character takes actions that alter the historical underpinnings of his motivation to perform those actions, not just once but several times, and retains overlapping memories of all tracks, it necessarily becomes hard to follow.
To some extent they make it worse near the end, where in an attempt to tie things together into some kind of climax they poke some serious holes in the consistency of their own world. But mostly it's just a hard thing to convey in a basically linear medium... you either fade the edges and create a somewhat muddled story, or you keep the edges sharp and create a somewhat psychotic one... it's hard to find a middle ground unless you're a film genius, which this director wasn't. It reminds me of Sliding Doors, except there you're invited to stand outside the universe, viewing both lives distinctly in parallel. Here you're invited to experience the overlap of both (all) lives.
But the thing is, I didn't care much about the plot while watching it. All the time-travel plot gyrations are largely irrelevant to the father-son relationship at the core of the movie -- basically, the movie raises the question of how you relate to a physically absent person, like a parent, who nevertheless plays a critical role in your psyche. In that sense, Frequency reminds me of Truly, Madly, Deeply and Field of Dreams, both of which use the metaphor of raising the ghosts ofthe dead. Frequency instead uses the metaphor of communicating across time, which is trickier to navigate but (I think) somewhat richer in its potential, and they explore some of that potential, which was cool.
The Devil's Advocate (4/00): Unimpressive, but enjoyable. And please don't tell anyone, but I'm actually starting to like Keannu Reeves... he seems to have the knack of finding roles where his fundamental woodenness doesn't cause too much disbelief. As with the Matrix, he stumbles through the plot of this movie without ever quite noticing his surroundings, which is entirely consistent with the movie as a whole.
My Dog Skip (4/00): The voices in my head made me see this movie because of the dog, who was fun to watch. Other than that, it was a romp through post-war small-town America that veers perilously close to sentimental melodrama but mostly manages to avoid it.
Magnolia (3/00): Or, six plots in search of a story.
The basic theme -- the coincidental facts that connect otherwise unrelated lives -- becomes a mechanism for splicing together a bunch of unrelated stories into a single movie. Unfortunately, while the individual threads aren't bad, they compete with one another rather than forming a coherent whole. Like a poorly designed patchwork quilt made of nice fabrics, individual patches are enjoyable but the overall effect is turgid and confused.
Isn't She Great (1/00): I hadn't known this was about a real-life story when I saw it -- the ads don't emphasize the fact -- so I was startled and delighted when they suddenly began talking about Valley of the Dolls. For a while it inspired me to read the book, which I never have, until I realized that it was probably embarassingly tame by modern standards...
That said, the movie itself was forgettable. Bette Midler is always a treat to watch, but I've seen it before, and Nathan Lane is so understated as to be uninspiring. Well executed, but I was left with a general sense of "yes, and...?"
Hurricane (1/00): Yow.
You know, I'm not actually so naive as to believe that the criminal justice system works smoothly and impartially. I know stuff like this happens. But somehow I manage not to think about it most of the time, so watching a movie like this one freaks me out a little by making me think about it. Twitch, twitch, twitch...
Anna and the King (1/00): Lovely, but suffers from lack of focus.
The several relationships/conflicts (Anna/Mongkut, England/Siam, reactionary/progressive, hawk/dove...) compete for time, rather than enhance one another... and so little time is devoted to each that they feel somehow insignificant. Personal conflicts are resolved with little visible effort, military conflict is resolved by comic-book theatrics, and social conflicts are not so much resolved as sidestepped. Anna's status as an important female is finally acknowledged by the Siamese potentate ("Please, ma'am."), but solely in the context of her personal influence on the King. The questions of slavery and corporal punishment are raised graphically, then discarded as morally equivalent to cigar smoking. (Which they may well be, but then why raise them at all?)
Admittedly, this is a common problem for stories drawn from actual events... real life is rarely organized tightly around a single thematic point. OTOH, the story departs radically from the actual events for dramatic purposes anyway, so it can't very well claim historical accuracy as a defense.
Don't get me wrong -- I enjoyed it tremendously, thematic analysis notwithstanding. Well-acted (even the children), visually entrancing (great costumes!), stately, elegant, and some great banter between Anna and Mongkut. And I kept expecting Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fat to burst into song, which (while sometimes distracting) added something to the film.
Galaxy Quest (12/99): I'm embarassed to admit that I spent much of this movie thinking "But wait! That doesn't make sense... why would... and how did... and why didn't...". It took me halfway through the movie to get over myself, relax, and go along for the ride. Less pedantic folks than myself probably don't have this difficulty.
Once I stopped thinking about it, this was a thoroughly enjoyable, utterly mindless, and ultimately forgettable romp that does for obsessive Trekkies what "Bill & Ted" did for moronic slackers across America. What that is exactly, I'm not sure, but whatever it is, it's fun to watch.
Virtuosity (12/99): I've wanted to see this ever since it first came out, but it disappered from the rental shelves almost as soon as it arrived. So when I saw it on the "If you liked the Matrix, you'll like this" shelf, I snatched it.
Mind you, its disappearance was justified, though not as bad as I'd expected. (Why did I see it if I expected it to be bad, you ask? Beats me. Happens to me a lot, though.)
Talented Mr. Ripley (12/99): Creepy. Disturbingly, powerfully, creepy.
I was expecting a traditional bad guy -- a slick, competant, villain. What I got was an invitation to a first-person psychotic episode. Kicked me in the head in a big way.
People's varying impressions of this film intrigue me. A friend of mine had the "disturbing? what was disturbing about it?" reaction, which floored me... after some discussion, I concluded that a lot depends on how you see Ripley -- is he just a liar, or is he out-and-out psychotic? If the former, then he's so embarassingly bad at it that he becomes pathetic... if the latter, then it's a very engaging invitation to a very disturbing reality. Either he's just an incompetent villain, or he's a man trapped in a deeply warped world of his own creation, and which it is seems to depend on your perspective -- on how in control you perceive Ripley as being.
The same friend characterized this as a "villain"/"victim" dichotomy, which intrigued me... I certainly wouldn't call Ripley a victim, in that he's in the driver's seat every step of the way. But I'm hesitant to call him a villain, too, in that he's really not in control of the bus. I'm so used to psychotics portrayed compassionlessly as 3rd-person villains that being presented with the same archetype in a 1st-person compassionate mode creates a completely different subjective experience, and I want a different word for it to capture that distinction but I can't think of one.
In many ways it reminds me of the guy in Falling Down, and Judas in JCSuperstar... in both cases the character could be a simple villain if you weren't seeing the world from his POV.
(Then again, maybe it's just me... I often suffer from the assumption that people are behaving reasonably within their own context, and that if I can manage to share that context everything will be just fine. The reality is that sometimes people are just being assholes, even in their own terms.)
Speaking of similar movies... this reminds me of "Six Degrees of Separation" in a psychotic funhouse mirror... like Will Smith's character in 6DoS, Tom Ripley compulsively, compellingly weaves an ultimately nonexistent high-class identity and sexual relationship out of charm and myth and misdirection and outright lies, tangling up those around him... dragging them along and sometimes dragging them down. The two movies play with many of the same boundaries -- personal and social identity, sexual and platonic intimacy, order and chaos -- and have many of the same things to say about the tenuousness of those boundaries.
But where 6DoS is cleverly satirical and in some ways inspiring, TMR is grim and disturbing. Tom Ripley doesn't symbolically tear the boundaries around people's lives... he tears up their lives, quite literally in some cases. Smith's targets tell embarassing stories about the experience at the dinner table or, at worst, quietly suicide off-camera. Ripley's victims die bloody deaths at his hands. Yeesh.
Wonderful film, but I'll be just as glad if they never make a sequel...
Stuart Little (12/99): I expected this to be a piece of fluff, as indeed it was, but it's amusingly well done for all of that. My stuffed foxes very much enjoyed the cat's discomfiture.
Toy Story 2 (12/99): A near-impossibility -- a sequel that improves on the original!
It assumes everyone's seen the original, and takes advantage of that to bypass a lot of the establishing shots and exposition that TS1 was obligated to provide. So it hits the ground running, picking up the same characters where they left off and keeping the same charm and energy and humor that drove the first movie.
Along the way, it actually explores some fairly interesting ideas. At the risk of being embarassingly overanalytical in public... I really enjoyed the exploration of what an intimate relationship between beings with vastly different life-cycles (in this case a toy and a child) really implies. The deck really is stacked against the toys... their purpose for existence lies in their relationship to Andy -- a relationship doomed from the start, and they know it. But it's basically the only game in town.
It's ironic that a "kids movie" managed to get this across effectively, where the more "serious" Bicentennial Man (below) didn't quite manage it.
On another note... I've been wondering for a while whether this would have been a better or worse movie if done with real settings (streets, room, etc.) and actors (for the humans)... I'm envisioning a Hobbes-esque (the tiger, not the philosopher) thing where as soon as a human (or dog, or whatever) sees them they not only fall limp, but actually turn into toys (rather than cartoon toys). I can't decide whether the effect would be to make them more real, or less so.
Bicentennial Man (12/99): Surprisingly loyal to the book (Positronic Man), which is both its strength and its weakness.
The root of the story, in both media, is the relationship between Andrew and his family, and his ultimate decision that he can't be part of the family -- or of any fully human relationship -- while remaining immune to the great equalizer of mortality. Which is kind of a shocking statement if you think about it, and I'm deeply ambivalent about it.
But the book gets hundreds of pages to steep me in the feel of two hundred years lived linearly among intimates with a double-digit lifespan, enough so that I can empathize with the slow decay of contemporaries, the absence of peers, and the ultimate decision to die. In the kingdom of the blind, a one-eyed man may well poke out his remaining eye... I may not like it, but I can appreciate it.
By comparison, the movie ends up with time-lapse montages and cutaways that eat decades at a pop, creating a series of vignettes that somehow ruin my ability to empathize... so at the end his death seems more an act of political expediency than an expression of fundamental humanity.
As above, while I'm ambivalent about both suicide and "passing for white" as personal choices, I can respect and maybe even admire them in certain contexts. But as politically-motivated expedients they outrage me; I'm left wishing he'd told the government to shove its narrowminded bigotry up its collective organic sphincter and gone off to colonize Mars or something. Consequently the whole slow deathbed scene feels like an artificial attempt to cloak in poignant nobility what has by then come to feel like an act of oppressed martyrdom... it would feel more brutally appropriate for him to wire a bomb into his head and invite the UN to press the trigger when they feel it's time for him to be dead.
Ironically, some of the same issues were presented with more emotional impact in Toy Story (above), of all things!
Dogma (12/99): I enjoyed the movie enormously as a fun romp (they really should have done a genital-less full-frontal nude shot with Matt and Ben, just for the amusement value), but I didn't find it particularly thoughtful or thought-provoking, and have been somewhat puzzled ever since by my friends who seemed deeply theologically/emotionally aroused by it.
I suspect they are reading their personal experiences with religion into the movie itself... but maybe it's the other way around. I often find myself unusually prone to see humor inherent in spiritual practice, and I tend to think that anyone who approaches the Big Questions without laughing themselves silly is already on the wrong track, whatever Answers they come up with.
Admittedly, the movie has a message and is not shy about beating you over the head with it. But I'd sum up that message as "It's important to have faith, but you have to think clearly about the consequences of what you choose to have faith in, because you're responsible for them"... which strikes me as kinda a conversation-stopper... there's not much to say about it, really.
And there's so much they could have done with the premise had they wanted to make some serious statements about theology, or morality, or whatever. They wouldn't even have had to change the tone of the movie much, they just needed to actually explore some of the issues they picked up and dropped. The idea of a religious abortion-clinic worker carrying the virgin-born Child of God is beautifully ironic, but scratch the question a little harder and some tricky theological questions emerge. Leaving aside Catholic dogma about abortion, is she free to abort it? If not, what happens to choice? If so, what happens to faith?
The idea of reconciling the "vengeful God" mythos with the "loving God" mythos is another one with great potential, though less original... still, most JudeoChristian-inspired theology tends to pick one or the other, and they really don't fit well together. Dogma skirts the contradiction but doesn't explore it.
Heck, one could do a whole movie centered around the crisis-of-faith-ridden Christian heroine finding God locked in a mortal body on life support in a hospital room. What does she do? Why? What happens next? It might not be a simple decision... the JudeoChristian God is basically a self-righteous prick, and even if granted proof of Its existence one might choose to just let It sleep... maybe the world is better off without It. Dogma dodges it altogether by making it an action-adventure plot device, but there were any number of other ways to stop Bartleby from receiving plenary indulgence. (Easiest: shoot him after he becomes mortal but before he walks through the gate. Stupider but better cinema: heck, if I can consecrate a water faucet, I can deconsecrate a church -- I'm the Last Scion of Christ, dammit! I was actually expecting them to do the latter, they surprised me.) Pulling the plug was an act of faith in God, not just Its existence but also Its value -- and they completely ignored that.
(As long as I'm on the theme of "other movies you could do in the same world", you could also do a MontyPythonesque movie out of the implications of Christhood being a hereditable condition... suppose she has hundreds of cousins, siblings, etc., all of whom are Scions, and the action of the movie takes place at the family reunion... Aunt Sophie the lush in the corner, turning water into Scotch... the possibilities are endless!)
And they ignore the whole question of power vs. divinity... basically, the angels etc. demonstrate their power, assert their divinity, and the movie proceeds casually on the implicit assumption that the former serves as evidence of the latter. Had it been me, I'd agree in a minute that I was in the presence of powerful entities that were fond of Christian mythology, but I've read "Lords of Light" ... it doesn't prove a thing about the existence or attributes of a divine being, really. Now admittedly, it doesn't matter much to me -- but to a Christian or anyone else who believes that divinity == morality, it should make a huge difference. Not that the question is answerable, but failing to ask it blurs the important dividing line between an act of faith and simple stupidity.
And (last one, really) the whole "it doesn't matter what you have faith in" theme really needed more exploration... not only do I disagree personally, but Rufus was quite simply wrong about that in the context of his own world, in which choosing to accept faith in Christian dogma entailed awful, world-destroying consequences.
A friend of mine made the observation that the playwright didn't seem to understand what the word "faith" means in common American usage, since "resolving a crisis of faith" by directly perceiving God's Presence is antithetical to the common meaning of "faith". After thinking about this for a while I conclude I have a quirky definition of faith... something like "that thing you have in a proposition which causes you to act as if it were true even when you aren't sure," rather than the more common "belief without evidence." So as far as I'm concerned, she resolved her crisis of faith when she decided she was going to go to New Jersey on the strength of a nocturnal vision, a percussion instrument in her bed, and a chance encounter with a quiet man and a guy using the word "prophet". She decided to act as if "God's Voice" had spoken ("Spoken"?) to her, despite the absurdity of that notion... by me, that's faith. (Had it been me, I'd have stayed put, wondered where the instruments came from, and lived out the rest of my (short) life with a periodic nagging suspicion that perhaps I ought to have done something about the whole situation.)