Tarkovsky's Polaroids
Turns out the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky had a talent for Polaroids as well.Read more
100% Pure Yorkshire Beauty
Ever dream about going down to a pub and discovering one of those mysteriously gorgeous Yorkshire lasses with that mysteriously gorgeous way of singing, the voice that just carries you off into melancholy storytelling about the sea, about unrequited love, about hardship and longing...?
Okay, maybe that's my sort of thing.
I basked all weekend in the glow of the new album by Kate Rusby. Underneath the Stars is my favorite Rusby record yet — beautifully recorded, giving her voice all the space it needs, and supporting her with delicate musicianship. The lyrics are like a collection of good old-fashioned Irish poetry. And the song "Falling" is going to make it onto any mix-disc I make this year.
Here's a review from AllMusic.com.
Many thanks to my good friend Kenny Heaton for introducing me to Ms. Rusby's bewitchingly beautiful talents.
Now You Can Edit the Violence Out of Movies!
CT Movies posted a point/counterpoint today regarding the new "U-Edit-the-movies" ClearPlay DVD Player, which can be set to filter out cussing, violence, and nudity.Read more
Josh Hurst Calls for Closing the Doors on CCM
Josh Hurst at Reveal (www.revealarts.com) has just posted an editorial that should be read, discussed, and passed around. In it, he asks the blunt question (which I'm paraphrasing): Who needs the contemporary Christian music industry anymore, when there is music about spirituality from a Christian perspective being offered frequently in every mainstream and alternative genre?
He goes on to answer that question persuasively. Nevertheless, I can't help but chime in with my own proposed answer to that question: Christian artists who know they don't have what it takes in the "quality" department have figured out that if they release their music in the CCM industry, then, relative to the other music in that industry, they'll actually come out sounding pretty good. Either that, or they still believe that somehow, by releasing their music in the Christian industry, they're somehow insulating themselves against corruption, which is just another way of saying, they'd rather sing to the choir than get their hands dirty by singing to the culture.
Why would any talented Christian musician want to "hide their light under the bushel" of the CCM industry? Surely it's certainly not because the recording industry and mainstream audiences aren't open to giving them a shot. Heck, The Innocence Mission won album of the year on NPR for 2003. U2 sells like hotcakes. Switchfoot is huge. Over the Rhine has a devoted following. Emmylou Harris's albums are more and more brazenly gospel-filled than ever, and Johnny Cash is still a superstar. Daniel Lanois is a modern psalmist. Bruce Cockburn ... well, maybe he's trying to distance himself from anything that sounds like the gospel, but what about that troubadour-hero Bill Mallonnee? Or Sam Phillips, who never really left music about the mysteries of Christ; she just tunnelled deeper into Christ than most Christian artists dare go...
Need I go on with the long, long list of examples that are evidence against the need for a CCM category?
With each passing year, the "Dove Awards culture" is more and more obviously an event in which Christians get together and congratulate themselves on mediocrity. It's more and more obviously about an insulated community that is interested only in leading itself in worship rather than letting its light shine beyond the walls of the church.
Perhaps at one time, the CCM industry supported young talents who couldn't get a shot at any kind of attention in the mainstream industry. But that time is past. Amy Grant crossed over bravely, and for that, I still have a sentimental spot for her. Leslie Phillips was even bolder, and she's my hero. Sufjan Stevens is earning attention and rave reviews from Christians and "the secular world" alike for writing beautiful biblicalmeditations. David Bazan tells parables so dark Flannery O'Connor would get the chills. Bono has thrown down the gauntlet for all Christian artists and mainstream artists alike, reminding us that art is not an end in itself, but a path leading us to richer and more dedicated lives. Those Christian artists merely concerned about sales and fans and Dove Awards are lost in the lie of their own "sanctified" version of celebrity culture, while others go on to actually make a difference in the world.
I agree, Josh, and I commend you on your challenge to the industry. I know a lot of Christian musicians, and those that are taking their art seriously don't even stop to think about the CCM industry; it's not even an option.
I'm sure somebody out there will name an exception. Of course there are exceptions. But let's not keep this huge and expensive industry going just so there's a flicker of something worthwhile here and there. Let's shut it down.
There's a lot of salt staying in the salt shaker and sitting on the shelf, losing its saltiness. It's time to either open the shaker and use it, or dump it.
Did we sing that chorus "Hide it under a bushel? NO!" as children just because it was fun? Or did it mean something?
Okay, I'm going to go regain my composure, and gather my strength for a similar rant on the topic of literature....
Catwoman (2004)
[This review was originally published at Christianity Today.]
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Reviewing Catwoman, a film critic can take the easy road: find the most readily available derogatory metaphor relating to cats.
"It's the pick of the litter box," for starters. Or, "This kitty's just roadkill that's been left to bake in the sun too long." Too grisly? How about, "The summer's biggest hairball!" No, that was probably used in a review of Garfield—still, Garfield looks good compared to Catwoman. Critics will have a lot of fun with titles too. Will anyone try "I Tawt I Taw a Tawdry Tat"? Or, perhaps, "Wuss in Boots"?
Or, you could get personal: You could question why an Oscar-winning actress like Halle Berry would choose for her next big performance a role that reinforces damaging female stereotypes for sex-obsessed male viewers. Or you could just ask her why she'd take part in a movie with such a a worthless script.
The answer to those two questions is pretty obvious: more fame and more money. In The New York Times this week, Berry expressed her drive to "survive" in the business. "I've survived ups and downs. If this doesn't work, you keep trying, keep throwing it up against the wall. As an actor, it's what we do." Yep. "Throwing it up" just about says it all.
Someone should tell Berry about those actors who have more dignity and who aim for something higher than mere "survival," who show discernment in the parts they choose. Not every actress is so willing to compromise. Berry may be the first African-American actress to win an Oscar, but she's got a fair distance to climb to match the integrity and skill manifested by some of her peers. Alfre Woodard (Passion Fish, Grand Canyon) and Angela Bassett (What's Love Got to Do With It?, Sunshine State) have shown they can command the screen with performances rather than various states of undress.
But enough about Berry—it is the critic's primary task to assess the film, not the career of its star. And there's not much to say about Catwoman. The summer that gave us what is arguably the best comic book movie of all time—Spider-Man 2—has now choked up what is arguably the worst.
A quick history: On the Batman TV show of the 1960s, Eartha Kitt made Catwoman and her secret identity—Selina Kyle—famous. In 1992's Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer turned in an Oscar-worthy performance for director Tim Burton. Pfeiffer transformed Kyle into a wacky, semi-psychotic avenger for all exploited secretaries. There, she fought the bad guys in a man's world, but she also challenged damsels in distress to stick up for themselves. Her undisciplined tactics clearly identified her as a villain, but Burton was smart enough to depict her as depressed, dissatisfied, and redeemable. There was a broken heart driving Catwoman's manic antics. She was at least as interesting as Batman, if not more.
Thus, the Catwoman movie project has been a promising possibility, generating hopeful rumors for years. At first, fans hoped for Pfeiffer's return. For a while, Ashley Judd looked likely to wield Catwoman's whip.
Now we have Halle Berry's version of Catwoman, a similarly reckless vigilante who has a similarly secretarial start. She's not Selina Kyle, though. Her name is Patience Phillips, and she's a graphic designer for a cosmetics empire. Like Kyle, she's killed by her wicked employers after discovering that a new cosmetic line—Beau-line—has a devastating chemical makeup. Voodoo cats work their magic, and Phillips, like Kyle, is reborn as a woman with superhuman, feline abilities. With the guidance of a catwoman guru (Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy), she comes to understand her place in a long line of proud pussycat people.
Like Selina Kyle, Phillips lacks moral backbone, but there's a major difference: the filmmakers condone -- yea, celebrate -- Catwoman's wickedness. There's no Bruce Wayne to appeal to her conscience. In fact, there's no higher moral ground in this film for her to discover at all. She's treated like a role model for all women, exploiting her sex appeal in order to punish the bad men and manipulate those that are stupid but attractive. The film's villains exist only so Catwoman can claw, scratch, kick, and humiliate them while prancing around in the skimpy leather guise of a dominatrix. Pfeiffer's Catwoman dressed in black leather too, but that qualified as a costume; Berry's get-up reveals more than it conceals.
In fact, the whole "fighting crime" element seems secondary in the film, which spends its first half worshiping Berry's bronzed skin, bright eyes, and striking smile, and the second half flaunting her in her soft-core porn costume. It's rather ironic that the film's villains are the royalty of a cosmetics empire. We're supposed to scoff at these merchants of superficiality even as we cheer for a "hero" who's all about gratuitous lipstick and sexploitation.
There aren't even any good action scenes to make things entertaining. Catwoman's CGI-stuntwoman is so obviously the figment of a computer's imagination that the movie often looks like a video game in development. The director, Pitof, was brought in on the merits of his impressively designed French action film Vidocq. And again, he shows some sense of visual creativity. But he's more talented with sets and lights than actors, and the lousy special effects distract the audience from the film's somewhat impressive aesthetics.
The animation is bad, but the dialogue's even worse. And the "supporting" cast is no support whatsoever. Alex Borstein, who has earned a lot of laughs with her inspired work on MadTV, proves here that a dumb superhero comes with an even dumber girlfriend. Her comedy flatlines here and her character is reduced to an annoying "You go, girl!" cheerleader.
Then there's Benjamin Bratt, as the "love" interest who amounts to little more than an empty-headed Hollywood hunk. Bratt plays Tom Lone, a cop who gets a crush on Phillips when he saves her life. From that moment on, she's in heat and he's too distracted to perform any decent police work. In a scene that tries (too late) to make these characters dramatic and sympathetic, he is forced to interrogate his new girlfriend as a murder suspect, and he looks like he's re-auditioning for his old job on TV's Law and Order where he had a real character to play.
The villains, George and Laurel Hedare, are a pathetic pair played by Lambert Wilson and Sharon Stone. Wilson, who was so wickedly charming as The Matrix's Merovingian, plays just a dull, mean, cookie-cutter bad guy here. George's vain and venomous wife is the real villain. Laurel was once the glamorous face of the company's cosmetics empire. But now, a younger talent has replaced her both on the magazine covers and in her husband's affections.
There's something wonderfully ironic about casting Sharon Stone in this part. When she starred in Basic Instinct, Stone found stardom through sensual flaunting, the way Berry does here, albeit in a more R-rated fashion. Thus, it rings true to see her here playing a jaded middle-aged diva obsessed with preserving her youthful sex appeal, even if it turns her skin to "living marble," while other material girls rise to de-throne her.
But even Basic Instinct had a sense of good versus evil. Catwoman is so invested in exhibitionism that it never develops anything like an interesting question worth exploring. This is a match between villains and an annoying, arrogant vigilante acrobat. Oh, sure, she saves a kid from a ferris wheel gone bad, and her laughably digitized stuntwoman kicks the lights out of some bank robbers. But the central threads are her sex life and a duel between drama queens.
A talented storyteller could have found a good plot here about the difference between style and substance, flesh and spirit. Where Spider-Man demonstrates that "with great power comes great responsibility," Catwoman's slogan affirms only this: "Freedom is power." That's right. Your free will offers you the opportunity to return evil for evil, rather than overcoming it with good. "I may not be a hero," Patience admits at the conclusion, "but I'm certainly not a killer." She is, however, a liar, a vigilante, and a fool.
Berry says the movie is "about being empowered, being O.K. in your skin." Hopefully, we can be "O.K. in our skin" (and our clothing as well) without stooping to such self-indulgence. Explaining her willingness to debase herself in this way, she said, "It's sexy. It's where I've evolved to as a woman." If this is where evolution takes a person, we'd all do well to resist it.
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
[This review was originally published at Christianity Today.]
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If you could sit down and have a cup of coffee with anybody in the world alive today, who would you choose?
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has done even better than that. He's brought together many of his favorite pop culture figures and filmed them while they talk to each other over cups of coffee. He's been doing this for twenty years, and now moviegoers get to enjoy the results. Coffee and Cigarettes is a film for people who want something more than predictable entertainment. It's for people who love to watch people.
Coffee and Cigarettes is the latest experimental entry in a fascinating career. Jarmusch's consistently challenging and innovative work has earned him cult status in independent filmmaking circles. For this film, he abandoned plot entirely and instead focused on documenting a variety of amusing, thoughtful, sometimes surreal interactions between his former cast members and various other musicians, actors, and familiar pop culture figures. This isn't a documentary—the performers are working from sketchy scripts that lead to understated punchlines. But the pleasure of watching this collection of brief meetings is in the contrasting personalities, expressions, and improvisations that fill up the minimalist material.
Some of the meetings are more rewarding experiments than others.
The film opens with a meeting of spectacularly different personalities. The flamboyant and erratic Roberto Benigni—who starred in my favorite Jarmusch comedy Down by Law, as well as the Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful—joins comedian Steven Wright, whose photograph belongs next to the word "deadpan" in the dictionary. Benigni's faltering English and Wright's worried mumbling lead to a feeble-at-best conversation that culminates in a moment of unlikely decision. This meeting was filmed all the way back in 1986.
The meeting between British comedian Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) and actor Alfred Molina is a hilarious play on Molina's continuing lack of fame despite the incredible run of great films in which he has performed (Frida, Magnolia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the upcoming Spider-Man 2). Coogan treats Molina like an annoying fan instead of as the great actor of stage and screen that he is. The plot thickens when Molina presents a startling discovery he's made, and Coogan's disregard for his colleague backfires.
Fans of actress Cate Blanchett (The Lord of the Rings, Veronica Guerin, Elizabeth) will be delighted to see her deliver the film's finest performance. Blanchett plays herself in a meeting with her cousin, who shows up at a ritzy hotel during a film junket to make sour remarks about the attitudes of the rich and famous. Blanchett plays both sides of the conversation so convincingly, some viewers may never figure out the joke.
My favorite meeting takes place between French-Canadian actors Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankole, who say very little out loud, but their interplay of critical and bewildered glances becomes a comedy in itself.
There's a casual verbal sparring match between a couple of opinionated Italians (Joe Rigano and Vinny Vella), laced with excessive use of a certain expletive (you can guess which one) that might be offensive if it was used in a meaningful fashion. But only those who cannot tolerate encounters with profanity will come away without some affection for these cussing old coots. Sure, swearing, like smoking, is a bad habit. It just pollutes conversation and communication. And it usually betrays a certain sense of insecurity and weakness in those who do it. But sometimes characters who do swear can be endearing if only for how oblivious they are to their own foolish speech. As it is, the two fill the stereotypes formed from a thousand gangster flicks, reacting as if the entire world appalls them.
Other highlights include Bill Murray's appearance in a feeble disguise as a diner waiter. He joins hip-hop artists RZA and GZA, who can't seem to call him by anything but his full name as they advise him against drinking coffee straight from the pot. Rising alt-rock stars The White Stripes puff cigarettes and ponder a malfunctioning invention, one that everyone except its owner knows how to fix. Eccentric rock legend Tom Waits has an amusing meeting with Iggy Pop, who can't avoid stepping on Waits' toes, no matter how good his intentions.
Another interesting variation is the contrasting styles of the various cinematographers, including Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, The Ice Storm), Robby Muller (Breaking the Waves), Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and filmmaker Tom DiCillo (Stranger than Paradise). In the film's most sublime episode, actors Taylor Mead and Bill Reed share a table at night behind a restaurant where the light illuminates Mead's marvelous aged face in such a way to create a sort of holy moment—a picture worth capturing in a frame.
The conversations occasionally crisscross on similar themes and recurring statements, leading us to consider the way bits of news and quotable quotes thread their way from relationship to relationship, affecting each person differently. "The earth is a conductor of acoustical resonance," they muse, some of them profoundly intrigued, others completely perplexed.
Many will walk away from Coffee and Cigarettes shaking their heads, wondering what the purpose of such a meandering, plotless, talky motion picture could be. Others will be bothered by the film's frequently rough dialogue and the proliferation of nicotine. But it would be wrong to consider this a failed experiment. Viewers simply need to adjust their lenses to focus on smaller things, quieter moments, and quirks of personality.
It would also be out of line to call this a glorification of smoking. In fact, several characters voice the obvious detriments of smoking. Still, it's undeniable that smoking can be an expressive and revealing indulgence, and the huffing and puffing sometimes becomes a dialogue in itself. After a while, the cigarettes take on an almost symbolic significance, as if each smoke—and each cuppa joe as well—represent the common everyday moments that are burnt up, sipped away, with very little notice.
It is certainly fair to say that other filmmakers might have come up with more entertaining exchanges, wilder personality contrasts, and more imaginative situations than these. A few of the episodes never quite come to life. They never aspire to explore such ambitious territory as other "talk movies" like My Dinner with Andre or Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Waking Life.
But Coffee and Cigarettes performs a valuable service, reminding us that moments of revelation and inspiration happen outside of the typical contexts of big screen movies. Jarmusch's intention is to celebrate the simple things that bring us together, and to enjoy the wide variety of personal styles, faces, voices, and experiences that manifest themselves right in front of us every day. A film like this can help us enjoy each other more. It can help us appreciate how much we reveal about ourselves in our most casual and typical exchanges. It can also de-glamorize the cultivated images of celebrities and remind us how much we all have in common, how each one of us can make the briefest of encounters either meaningful, memorable, and revealing, or else cold, empty, and wasted.
The late Gene Siskel once commented that he sometimes measured films by whether or not they would be as good as a documentary of the same actors talking over lunch. He probably would have enjoyed this film. Hopefully Jarmusch will inspire other filmmakers to consider turning their cameras toward unconventional matters like this. Every hour of our lives is sacred and worth examining. And, really, how worthwhile is it to dwell on car chases, serial killers, scandals, and shallow romances anyway?
SHOCKER! Christian Critics Hate 'Saved!'
Right on cue, Christian film critics are lining up to condemn Saved! for being a "hateful attack on Christianity."
What it is, in fact, is a spot-on satire about the manipulative, militant tactics of many evangelical Christians who give the faith a bad name with their codes of conformity.Read more
Three Reflections on The Passion, Post-Hubbub
In the latest issue of SPU's Response, Todd Rendleman, film instructor, and Rob Wall, professor of the Christian Scriptures, join me in offering reflections on The Passion of the Christ now that the hubbub has died down.Read more