Category: Movies / TV / Stage

I saw two good movies last weekend. One was Duma, a coming-of-age story about Xan, a white farm boy in South Africa during the apartheid era, who must let go of his nearly-full-grown pet cheetah, Duma. He runs away from home to try to return Duma to the area he came from, and ends up crossing hundreds of miles of the wild on foot, including part of the perilous Okavango Delta. In addition, he needs to teach a very tame cheetah who loves to play with other animals, how to hunt. Xan, who was home-schooled and sheltered, must also learn to trust Ripkoen, a mysterious black wanderer, in order to survive. As unlikely as it seems, it’s based on a true story.

This is the kind of movie people used to go to the movies for! It’s directed by Carroll Blanchard of The Black Stallion and Fly Away Home fame. If you get the chance to see it, do it. You won’t be disappointed.

Technorati Tags: Duma

Another good film shown at the Naro last weekend was Naked in Ashes, Paula Fouce’s documentary on the sadhus (holy men) of India, and their extreme asceticism. The documentary focuses on three small groups of yogis (each with two or three practitioners) and follows them for several weeks.

As I suspect many are, I’ve generally found extreme acesticism, especially of the Eastern kind, very off-putting. I can understand St. Francis and his love of having nothing but God, but wasn’t able to make the same connection to these ash-covered guys in India.

Naked in Ashes sheds some much-needed light on the sadhus. Some are true bodhisattvas, dedicating their austerities to taking away the sins of the world. One guru said, “The world is suffering. That is my problem. I take on myself the sins of all, and wash them away in Mother Ganges.” I came to realize the answer why these holy men live in caves with nothing is not that far from why Jesus went to the Cross. The spirit of all-consuming Love is behind it.

The experience was further enhanced by a guest speaker, (an ODU professor on Eastern religion) an excellent enthusiastic discussion afterwards.

Technorati Tags: yoga, yogi, sadhu

I haven’t really been slacking. I fact, I’ve posted three new reviews and have expanded the First Contact, 2005 page. The whole thing reads now like a four-page mini-site, with reviews of Surface, Invasion, and Threshold. I’ll be posting my review of War of the Worlds this evening.

The Navigator (New Zealand, 1988) is a wonderful little spi-fi (spiritual fiction) gem. Great movies aren’t always “masterpieces”? the big, conspicuously-wrought if not over-wrought works. There are also gems?small films on tiny budgets that pack more meaning and feeling in 90 minutes or so, than George Lucas did in the most recent seven hours of Star Wars. Please don’t confuse this movie with the cheesy 1986 children’s sci-fi The Flight of the Navigator. This is different. Very different.

The setting is a village in Celtic Cumbria in 1348, which is anticipating arrival of the Black Death any day. Griffin, a boy in the village, has been having visions (filmed in color in an otherwise black-and-white movie) of a journey to the other side of the world and erecting a cross on the steeple of a huge, white church. When his older brother Connor comes back from a journey, he brings news that the Death is much closer than previously feared, and will probably begin striking the village when the full moon sets, which is the next morning.

Griffin inspires the men of the village to follow him to a cave where they can punch through to the great city on the other side of the world, and erect a cross as an offering to God to spare them from the plague. There, in the cave, they see the strange sights that Griffin’s visions described, and depending on him as their guide, he navigates them through the frightening vision that is 1988 Auckland, New Zealand.

I don’t want to give anything else anyway?but suffice it to say this is perhaps the most realistic look at mediaeval British village life ever shown in a movie. The peasants, though illiterate and superstitious, are intelligent, and respond to the horror threatening their world with perfect faith and trust in God, as well as in the visions of their young mystic, Griffin. Ultimately, though, the offering that is needed is not of a cross, but the teacher’s demonstration of love.

This is a brilliant metaphor of Christ’s descent into hell, and the bodhisattva heart. It’s a paean to those shepherds, teachers, shamans, and navigators who devote their lives to guiding us in the territory that only the soul can see. Directed by Vincent Ward, director of Vigil, Map of the Human Heart, and What Dreams May Come, The Navigator also has a brilliant, moving film score by Iranian-born Davood Tabrizi. Only complaint? Subtitles would be useful. I’m an American. I don’t speak that English!

A Different Kind of Thriller

This is easily the best film I’ve seen this year. It’s a conspiracy thriller that breaks all the rules: there are no long chase scenes, no fights, no James Bond-esque heroics, no dramatic explosions, no wrenching suspense, and no pat happy ending. But it works, and works brilliantly.

Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) weaves languidly in and out of linear story-telling with stream-of-consciousness and flashbacks used in a unhurried, dreamlike way. It takes a little time for it to work, but the effect is that rather than just seeing the love that Justin and Tessa Quayle have for each other, we feel it, in meandering sequences of snapshots, home videos, and flashbacks lovingly photographed.

Interspersed in this intimate tangle of images and experiences, is the unfolding mystery: Justin (Ralph Fiennes), an experienced, middle-level British diplomat in Africa, is trying to solve the mystery of the murder of his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), whose activism on behalf of Africa’s poor has begun to make many enemies. Even worse, he began doubting her faithfulness to him shortly before she was killed.

Who’s to blame—the drug companies doing often-lethal tests on uninformed patients? The governments of Kenya and the UK? Arnold Bluhm, the African doctor with whom Tessa had been spending so much time alone?

Filmed through the Heart

Love, grief, and a fierce need to know the truth, no matter what it is, nor how painful it may be, fuel Justin’s dangerous investigation. We experience the story through the torment of his soul, and this immediacy makes The Constant Gardener riveting while it shuns all the standard tricks of the trade. As a love story concerned with a man doubting his spouse’s faithfulness, Gardener achieves what Eyes Wide Shut failed to, due to Kubrick’s inability to make us participate in the conflicts of the heart.

This movie is magnificently beautiful! Meirelles has a wonderful sense of beauty and shows it to us in the most original and tender ways, from admiring the beauty of the nude pregnant figure, to capturing flocks of white birds wheeling above their indigo shadows on the surface of a still lake. His love of humanity shines through the lens; even in the squalor of a hell-hole where kids play alongside sewage-filled ditches, Meirelles captures the beauty of the incorruptible imago Dei / Buddha-nature shining through their smiles.

However, I had initially planned to criticize Meirelles’ for his over-use of the hand-held camera. He makes the events literally spin around us, a technique I found quite distracting upon viewing. Strangely, though, that flaw dissolves after the movie is over. What remains is the ineffable hope, sorrow, and beauty of Africa, of love, and of life.

To One of the Least of These…

Gardener boldly advances the tradition of social-justice film. Although most of its particulars (based on the John LeCarré novel of the same name) are fictitious, the general outlines of the exploitation of the Third World by the First World are all too true.

Gardener gives us a look at an Africa quite different from the quaint one of picturesque villages that National Geographic persists in promoting. This is an Africa of shantytowns, rusting tin roofs, and omnipresent disease; of corruption beyond comprehension, and human suffering of an extent that is painful to even think about. It’s an Africa where the circles of political influence congratulate each other with martinis in lavish restaurants, and where the knots of de facto power determine the law of the moment by the barrel of an AK-47. It’s an Africa where magnificent scenic wonder contrasts with the horrific darkness of the ego-centered heart. Most of all, it’s an Africa that challenges us to respond.

“‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?’ Then he will answer,

‘I tell you solemnly, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.’—Jesus, Matthew 25:44-45

Movie stills © 2005 Universal Studios.