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on occasions seen gems

TRUTH TO
POWER

by Chris Dashiell

The calamities of politics and history are rarely a popular
theme for filmgoers. In the U.S., where unexpected vulnerability to
attack has recently created a kind of shock wave in the national psyche,
it might seem strange to recommend films that broach the subject at
all. But if, as I believe, we often seek human truths from art – as
opposed to the mere distraction we think we are seeking – then we might
very well be drawn to films that ask questions about our relationship,
as individuals, to the wider world. How should we act in times of crisis?
What should we believe, and how should our beliefs manifest in our day-to-day
lives? Questions like these, concerning human striving towards a right
or just ordering of communities and states, and human responsibilities
in the midst of the conflicts that have plagued our history, sometimes
seem intractable. But they are still asked by poets and thinkers, in
ever changing ways. To not ask at all is to abandon the better part
of our humanity.

Lumumba


,
a film by Haitian director Raoul Peck, is a portrait of the newly independent
Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who held office for less
than three months before being deposed and then murdered. The director,
with excellent location shooting in Zambia and Mozambique, effectively
recreates the tumult of the Congo in 1960 despite the limitations of
his budget. The film opens moments before Lumumba's secret execution,
and then shows two drunken Belgian soldiers hacking up his body and
burning it a few days after the murder – his killers were afraid that
the grave would be discovered. We then flash back to the beginnings
of Lumumba's swift rise to prominence. Peck plunges us into the maelstrom
of colonial and tribal politics, intent on describing each phase of
the process that led to the tragic end.

Most
political biopics depict the personal life of the main figure while
flattening out the historical details in order to make them more understandable,
or palatable.

Lumumba

takes the interesting, practically opposite
approach of focusing on the political machinations in all their complexity,
with very little attention paid to personal moments. We are shown the
negotiations and compromises that led to Lumumba's election, the revolt
by the army against their white commanders (there were no Congolese
officers), the bitter feud with Tshombe, the warlord of Katanga province,
the eventual secession of that province, which led to Lumumba's downfall,
and much more. The reward of this approach is that it allows us a stirring
(and frightening) glimpse into the political atmosphere of a nation
suddenly emerging from colonialism and facing the perils and pressures
of the Cold War in the early 60s. The film graphically demonstrates
how difficult it was to govern in such a volatile time, and how ideals
are inevitably distorted by realities. Most importantly,

Lumumba

is not dry or pedantic – it is a dramatic story, told with great skill
and suspense, and with fine performances from the actors.

The
drawback of Peck's approach is that, even in two hours, it is impossible
to convey the full range of events – and at the same time the lack of
emphasis on Lumumba the person makes it hard to understand him. The
title role is played by Eriq Ebouaney, who does marvelous work, projecting
an air of dignity and idealism, while also showing the uncertainty and
lack of experience that made it so hard for Lumumba to deal with the
forces arrayed against him. Still, scenes of Lumumba falling asleep
at his desk or playing with his daughter don't give us enough of a sense
of the man, despite Ebouaney's charisma. He does get good support from
the other performers, especially Alex Descas as Mobutu, the erstwhile
friend and ally who eventually betrayed him and became the despotic
ruler of the Congo.

With

Lumumba

focusing so exclusively on the year
1960, the novice in African history can be forgiven for feeling confused
during some of the film. Belgian tyranny is represented early on by
a scene of Lumumba being beaten in prison, but it would help to know
that the Belgians were arguably the most vicious of Africa's colonizers,
committing horrible atrocities in their greed for rubber and ivory.
Along similar lines, we are shown how Lumumba started out as a beer
seller in Stanleyville – but how he came by his political convictions
and oratorical skill, or managed to gain a huge following so quickly,
we are not told.

The
movie portrays Lumumba as heroic. Certainly he showed great courage,
and a devotion to the cause of the people that was undeterred by threats
from great economic and international forces. The film also shows him
as an inexperienced idealist, who was ill-equipped to handle the demands
made upon him in a crisis. This is in itself remarkable, as it adds
a certain depth to a story that could have been pure hagiography. What
Peck doesn't show us, however, is that Lumumba could also be maddeningly
unstable in his emotional outbursts, impulsive and reckless in his actions,
and that he closed avenues that could have helped him and his country
- notably from the UN and its secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld.
In fact, Hammarskjöld's efforts are not mentioned at all in the
film. Perhaps it would have taken another half hour or more for that
element of the drama to be explained. It would also have made Lumumba
less sympathetic, and in this respect Peck softens his portrait as so
many biopics tend to do.

No matter what you may think of Lumumba as a man or a
leader, there was no excuse for his brutal murder. Peck depicts the
details of this shameful act with complete adherence to the known facts,
including the complicity of Belgium and the United States. This is actually
the most powerful sequence in the film. As Lumumba sits handcuffed in
the back of a car, bloody from numerous beatings, awaiting imminent
death, his voice-over expresses faith that freedom will eventually prevail
in the Congo. That faith has not yet been fulfilled. The final image
of fire – we are back to the burning of Lumumba's remains in a trash
can – offers warning as well as hope.

Can ideals of social justice and self-determination be
made real in the world without succumbing to despotism of one sort or
another? What compromises must a person make in order to govern effectively,
and what compromises must never be made? Can we somehow transcend greed
and the drive for power, or will continuing violence always be our lot?
At film's end, the questions still burn.




The
gray area between public and private is the setting for Sydney Macartney's


A Love Divided


. In an Irish village in the 1950s, Sheila
(Orla Brady), a Protestant, marries Sean (Liam Cunningham), a Catholic,
and she makes him promise that no outside force will ever come between
them. Although she signs the pledge to have her children raised as Catholics
(necessary for the Church to bless the union), she balks at the village
priest's meddling in their affairs when the time comes for her eldest
daughter to go to school.

The
issue is a woman's right to have a say in the way her children are raised.
Sheila wants Sean to include her in the decisions without outside interference.
When he caves in to the priest without consulting her, they argue and
he strikes her. Her resulting feeling of betrayal causes Sheila to suddenly
flee the town with her children, ending up in Belfast, where she employs
a lawyer to mediate the conflict. Meanwhile the fanatical priest (Tony
Doyle), believing that all this is a plot, initiates a Catholic boycott
of the Protestant townspeople and their businesses, demanding that they
reveal the whereabouts of Sheila and the children. This, of course,
leads to increasing persecution and violence.

I
never know what to think when I am told that something is "based on
a true story." This is one of those true stories, it would seem, but
since I'm unfamiliar with it, I can only judge its merits by the artistic
treatment. The film is concerned with religious bigotry and intolerance,
and it certainly demonstrates their destructive effect in dramatic fashion.

However,
as is so often the case in such stories, the creators seem afraid to
allow their characters much complexity. The priest and his superiors
are outright villains who are set up so that we can eagerly wish for
them to fall. I don't doubt that such narrow-minded people exist, but
it is wiser to represent them in recognizably human form, rather than
in the framework of melodrama, which sweeps us along while absolving
us of the duty to think. (For the sake of balance, Macartney briefly
shows us a Protestant fanatic, but the deck is stacked all the same.)

Orla
Brady radiates passion, intelligence, and warmth, and she has an old-fashioned
Hollywood type of beauty that is very rare these days. Her performance
is so appealing that it tends to obscure the rigid aspects of Sheila's
character. Her actions are understandable, but not completely laudable
- yet it's hard to tell from the tone of the film whether Macartney
and his screenwriters are even aware of this. A little more subtlety
in the treatment would have gone a long way towards making

A Love
Divided

a more interesting and provocative film.

As
it is, it's not a bad film. Brady and Cunningham project a convincing
attachment, and their portrayal of the grief and loss they experience
in their separation adds some flavor to the picture. The reliable Peter
Caffrey is also on hand as a bar owner and IRA veteran who scorns the
boycott. He is a spirited actor, and things liven up quite a bit when
he's on screen. Still, the questions that should be aroused by

A
Love Divided

(How do we balance religious traditions and personal
freedom? Is it possible for women to gain more autonomy within those
patriarchial traditions? How do we reach across boundaries and live
together in peace without at the same time weakening our traditions
and values?) tend to be muted by the simplistic dramatic framework and
faux-Irish Masterpiece theater type production values, so that the film
reinforces the complacency of our good beliefs instead of challenging
us on a deeper level.




With
Jan Hrebejk's


Divided We Fall


showing alongside Macartney's
film at our local art house, there were two movies playing with the
word "Divided" in the title. The resulting confusion meant that ticket
buyers felt the need to specify whether they were paying for the "Irish
film" or the "Czech film." As it happens, the Czech film is an altogether
more thoughtful, interesting and successful piece of cinema. But since
it has subtitles, fewer people paid to see it – such is the reality
faced by art houses.

Divided We Fall

tells the story of a couple named
Josef and Marie (Bolek Polívka and Anna Sisková) who hide
an escaped Jewish refugee in their house during the war. Their difficult
situation is exacerbated by the friendship of Horst (Jaroslav Dusek),
a crude opportunist who has joined the Nazi party and also has his eye
on Marie. Josef finds himself having to appear as a collaborator in
order to protect the refugee and allay the suspicions of Horst, while
Horst's designs on Marie lead to convoluted (and comic) plot developments.

The
director attempts something very difficult here – a film with a comic
flavor dealing with very serious issues evoked by the calamities of
the Second World War and the Holocaust. The wrong emphasis here or there
would venture into bad taste or (worse) the minimizing of real horror.
Hrebejk, who also wrote the screenplay, finds the right touch. He knows
when to be pull back and be serious. He is good at conveying the extreme
danger and tension of the situation. And yet the film has a genuine
wit – wry, tinged with sadness, or sometimes just laugh-out-loud funny
- that highlights the emotionally moving elements of the tale without
undercutting them. Polívka and Dusek are excellent, creating
multi-dimensional characters that continue to surprise us.

Although
the director is too young (34) to have been a part of the great Czech
New Wave of the 60s, he has succeeded in capturing some of the style
and tone of that movement. The ironic humanism, the vision that includes
everyone (even Nazis) in a fallible and familiar human family, reminds
me of Ivan Passer and Jiri Menzel. In

Divided We Fall

, the evil
that people do seems to spring more from an appalling ignorance and
selfishness than from the dark and implacable force we so often imagine.
More significantly, the good that people do – up to and including the
heroism of the married couple who risk everything to protect a young
man from the Nazis – is accompanied by all the doubts, petty defects
of character, and self-centered fears that we are all prey to. Real
courage, the film tells us, is not the kind we see in the superheroes
of film and fiction – but is achieved in spite of, or even in some paradoxical
way because of, our inherent limitations as struggling human beings.

Hrebejk
weaves many strands together in this gentle, inspiring and humane comedy
of crisis. He holds out the hope that even the least bit of kindness,
by someone who might otherwise inspire our contempt, creates the possibility
of some sort of spiritual salvation. He also explores a great tragedy
of modern history – the almost total extermination of Jewish life in
Europe – in personal terms, with a deep sense of sorrow and loss, while
at the same time symbolizing (through an amusing complication of narrative)
a continuity between past and present, between the dead and the living,
and between parents and the children who embody our future.

How
do we respond when world catastrophe visits our doorstep? Where do we
find the will to do the best in spite of our fear? In the midst of violence
and hate, is forgiveness still possible? What can I, a single person,
do? These are just a few of the questions inspired in me by

Divided
We Fall

. That the film manages to be funny when dealing with matters
of such great importance is, for me, a sign of the best kind of art.
Laughing in order to escape seems like a strategy of avoidance – understandable,
but not a response that heals. To not laugh at all is to give up. But
to laugh in the awareness of the worst parts of our nature, to laugh
in the midst of suffering as a way to embrace ourselves and each other,
in all our aspects, is to endure and to affirm our humanity.

In the U.S., 187 is the coppers code for homicide. Street gangs have
incorporated the call into their own code; it means You’re indifferent.
When counsellor Trevor Garfield (Samuel L. Jackson) sees 187
scrawled throughout the pages of his teaching text, his being
stabbed in the hallway of his Brooklyn tipsy junior high school is a foregone
conclusion. When we next see him, 18 months later, he’s living in
South Central Los Angeles and working as a furnish teacher, and
his spark is gone. But those three troublesome digits are not.

Jimmy Stewart was an unprecedented choice to play frontier hero, and that’s correctly why his western adventures are so powerful. Unlike more classic cowboy stars, Stewart’s gangly picture and reserved demeanor gave his characters a vulnerability rarely seen in the genre, while his ability to shade sinister, incensed emotions with his status as America’s Everyman lent his films a much welcome measure. His off alongside director Anthony Mann (the duo teamed up for eight pictures, five of them westerns) is credited as a significant connections on the growing completion of the western that sprung up in the 1950s and continues to this day.

Universal has repackaged six of Stewart’s previously released classic westerns (including three Mann films) into a unexplored box set simply titled “James Stewart: The Western Collection.” There are some changes on a few of the discs, most unhidden being the new widescreen transfer on “The Over the top Country” and a to a certain cleaner concept on “Winchester ‘73.”

Less palpable changes are more common. On discrete discs, the menu design has been minutely tweaked (still remaining: that awful menu music that sounds like generic western tunes as rendered by a Casio synthesizer) and some revitalized subtitle tracks have been added. The bonus material remains the same on all discs. Since you in all probability wouldn’t respect the difference without a direct side-by-side point of agreement (”Far Country” aside, but I’ll discuss that later), there’s little need to upgrade if you own these movies already. But if you haven’t yet added these titles to your library, here’s the perfect chance.

The discs every now come housed in slimline cases with a more unified look to the artwork; each case is direct, allowing for additional artwork on the inside of each package. The six cases (one flick picture show per disc) are housed in a silky cardboard slipcover.

“Destry Rides Again” (1939)

Labeled since its premiere as a raucous comedy, a rootin’-tootin’ side-splittin’ spoof, “Destry Rides Again” isn’t really that witty. The jokes are few and far between, and when we do get a discourage, it’s bright and cheap. Come to call to mind a consider of it, the songs aren’t terribly good, either.

I’ll admit that this is a risky statement, all things “Destry” is considered a classic, anyone of the titles listed any time someone talks about how perfect a year 1939 was for cinema. But bear with me here – the movie might not be anywhere near as good as its notorious suggests, and calling it the go-to western comedy is a great overstatement, but on the other hand, as a straight-up cowboy flick with some moments of light waggish relief, it’s a objectively fun picture.

The Destry of the denominate is Thomas Jefferson Destry (Stewart), son of a famous lawman and a noble fella in his own high-mindedness, credited here as having recently cleaned up Tombstone. When the citizens of the lawless township of Bottleneck are informed that their sheriff has decided to instantly move house away permanently (oh, maybe six feet down, possibly?), the corrupt mayor – on orders by the real bigwig in town, the crooked Kent (Brian Donlevy) – appoints the community four sheets to the wind (Charles Winninger) to be the replacement. But the drunk once knew the senior Destry and arranges for Tom to come to village as a stand-in.

Upon immigrant, Tom post-haste makes a big name for himself as “No-Gun Destry” rightful to his denial to cart arms. Deemed a sissy and an credulous target by the town’s thugs, they’re later surprised when Tom reveals himself to be a master marksman ready to fight when the time calls. And eventually it does call. Kent’s various land-theft and shoot schemes lead to murder, and when Tom’s efforts to work out matters peacefully fail, he grabs his guns and heads off work to the saloon, where Kent and his men cause holed up.

Thematically, Tom’s sudden hinge on to violence doesn’t fully interlock with the rest of the picture as well as it should. Unlike later Stewart westerns that would paint the star as a count on hero burdened by necessary killing, Tom’s attitude in the later scenes is more of “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” “Destry” spends much of its time preaching nonviolence (Tom gets toe to people by charming them with quaint anecdotes; his ephemeral show of gunplay isn’t a sign of manly swank but one of continued firm, a winking warning to the depressed guys that there’s more hiding directed his peaceful surface), yet fails to flourish much of Tom’s quick change in the finale.

Of course, “Destry” isn’t out to provender heavy meditations on card and motivation. All it wants it to explain us a safe over and over again, and so it pads the running later with colorful characters, large farce, amour, the occasional big reaction behaviour repudiate draughtsman fall apart, and plenty of music. Sharing top billing with Stewart is Marlene Dietrich, playing Frenchy, the slick saloon owner who sets up Kent’s schemes but eventually learns the by mistake of her ways.

This was Dietrich’s initial film in two years and marked a notable comeback for her, proving that she could still electrify audiences with her sultry ways. It’s spot-on casting, as the obscure offers a twist in gender expectations: Frenchy as the (politically as wonderfully as sexually) powerful center of reclame, Tom as the meek pacifist (a situation on account of which Stewart was also a whole match). Through Frenchy’s commanding presence, the women of the town are the ones who ultimately rally to defeat Kent’s men, and fifty-fifty if conductor George Marshall plays the theory more to go to chuckles than for genuine drama, thus woefully undermining any female-power notions that spring from the plot (women? being competent? what a hoot!), Dietrich is still able to sink-hole her teeth into the notes, making her characteristic untypical more than perfectly a execrable sexpot.

And staid though her song interludes – which meet too much of the running time – are mostly calm cabaret numbers with even the Blue Angel herself unqualified to breathe much life into them, her head up of the screen is what after all is said sells “Destry.” The fun she’s having with the duty is infectious, and her rapport with Stewart adds just the sound amount of allay this lightweight oater needs. Classic? No. But inevitable is a fun way to spend an afternoon.

“Destry” was an immediate impact with with critics and moviegoers alike. However, a snafu in the film’s put out date liberal it unsuited for the 1939 Academy Awards (namely, the Los Angeles opening night was one daylight too late). This left Dietrich missing her kindest chance at an Oscar, and the movie itself missed the opportunity to be listed among that year’s crowded record of Master Picture nominees. Voters failed to remember it the following year, although the caddy office boost was ample supply to rebound start a popular year for Stewart; he would have four box favour hits in 1940, the last of which, “The Philadelphia Story,” landed him a Best Actor Oscar. While many arrange suggested that award was a make-up prize for his losing in the same category the year before, others have respected that his win was more likely a happen of a busy, assorted, and wildly well-heeled twelve months, which all kicked below average with “Destry.”

Changes from the mortal release

Menus have been lose upgraded with contemporary fonts. Subtitles experience been upgraded.

125 MINUTES | BOSTON COMMON + FENWAY + FRESH POND + CHESTNUT HILL + SUBURBS

Sam Raimi?s

Spider-Man

films set the template for a new breed of on-screen hero, as witness Christopher Nolan?s

Batman Begins

. Now Zorro ? the masked avenger who inspired Bob Kane?s comic-book vigilante ? returns after a seven-year absence. Martin Campbell once again directs Antonio Banderas as a Zorro reinvented for Bush?s America and sporting

Spider-Man

-like agility. This is progress? Set in 1850, this bloodless, family-friendly outing finds the land-locked swashbuckler balancing domesticity with crimefighting ? battling not just for the impoverished but for the good of America! Zorro?s adversary? A Frenchman (non-threatening, non-French Rufus Sewell) with designs on Zorro?s wife, Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose sexy sparring with our hero has been tempered with impotent, sit-com-worthy situations. Throw in mugging 10-year-old Zorro Jr. (Adrian Alonso) and Zorro?s trademark "Z" will join the ones floating above your head.

BY BRETT MICHEL
Offspring Date: October 28 – November 3, 2005

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