Entries Tagged 'Movies' ↓

Who has seen Ben Stein’s satirical take on the Darwinist establishment, “Expelled”? I haven’t, and I’m not sure when I’ll get to. I see that even conservative blogs are just aghast at Ben Stein daring to defend Intelligent Design and to ridicule evolutionists. How well does he pull this off?

Here is a preview of the next Narnia movie, an interview with the producer: Behind the scenes of ‘Prince Caspian’.

HT: The Pearcey Report

As evident in last week’s blog about cricket, India makes for a good case study about the effect of pop culture on a traditionalist society. In this article about the struggles of India’s “untouchable” caste to break into the country’s “Bollywood” film industry–Bollywood No Longer A Dream Too Far for India’s Lower Castes - washingtonpost.com–we learn just how much the poor people are taken with the fantasies they see on screen:

Going to the air-conditioned cinema is a popular national pastime without parallel in this country, especially for low-caste laborers who work under India’s unforgiving sun — in construction, in farming, as cow herders and as fruit vendors. For Indians, most of whom subsist on less than $2 a day, the masala mixes of drama and dance are the ultimate escape.

So beloved are Hindi film stars that there are Hindu temples named after matinee idols. Political rallies always include a Bollywood starlet. Some political leaders are former actors. And in small-town theaters, audiences are so personally involved in the melodramas — often four hours long — that they whistle, clap, imitate dance moves and sing along with the songs.

“India is really a special place for film. It’s second only to religion in the way it occupies people’s minds and dreams,” said Barry John, a longtime drama teacher.

The movie version of “The Hobbit” is getting under way. Here are some details:

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was named on Thursday to direct two movies based on the J.R.R. Tolkien book “The Hobbit” to build on the blockbuster success of “The Lord of the Rings” series.

Plans to make a two-part precursor to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, based on Tolkien’s three-volume follow-up to his “Hobbit” story, were announced in December after settlement of a bitter legal dispute cleared the way for the project.

Del Toro, whose credits include “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Blade II,” will move to New Zealand for the next four years to work on both “Hobbit” films with executive producer Peter Jackson, who directed all three “The Lord of the Rings” movies, according to New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

The studios have said that filming will begin in 2009, with tentative release dates set of 2010 for the first film and 2011 for the sequel.

The plans call for del Toro to work back-to-back on “The Hobbit” and its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between that story and “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the studios said.

Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was a pretty remarkable fantasy movie, however creepy and depressing, so he should be OK. Jackson, who did such a good job with the trilogy, will be in charge. That this two-movie arrangement will include not just “The Hobbit” but will cover the 60 years before “The Fellowship of the Ring” is interesting, indeed. I guess that means that filmmakers will be taking on at least part of “The Silmarilion.”

Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84 - New York Times

The night before word of Heston’s death came out, I was watching “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” and marveling at how bad it was. I noticed how that totally idiotic pod race, with 5-year old Anakin Skywalker being drug around a track by two jets on tethers, was modeled after the chariot race in “Ben Hur,” which was a thousand times better. It made me reflect on how good of a movie “Ben Hur” actually was. Charlton Heston was brilliant in that film. He was a great Moses too, the later attempts to dramatize the Exodus making “The Ten Commandments” loom even greater. I think Heston came to be under-rated by later film critics, his stock probably going down once he started his pro-gun rights activism with the NRA. Yes, he did some silly films, such as “Planet of the Apes.” But his remained, literally, an epic achievement in Hollywood.

In a comment to “Aesthetics & American Idol,” Reader Mason Ian perfectly describes the “arduous” process of perceiving the greatest beauty:

Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:

When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I “should” treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.

Then, after forcing yourself to merely “mentally ascribe” the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.

This is achieved in literature by reading more. The more you read, the more you read. Sounds like very droll truism, but by it I mean the process by which reading one book end us turing you on to several other books, other authors, different ideas and concepts and styles. I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge and find a dozen more obscure authors through his quotes and references, which in turn leads me to more reading. Then, after ten years I come back to Milton and find that Paradise Lost IS beautiful to me in a very different way than the alien beauty I had firs admired as an outsider.

So at first I liked it for reasons outside of myself (others regarded it as the pinnacle of English poetry, etc, etc) then I learned to love it myself, through my own tastes and my own reflection.

We go from being outsiders to being insiders.

However, as it was pointed out, hollywood goes another way. The simple and quick way. the way of the lowest common denominator. Grasping beauty and goodness is a slow art that requires years of honing and exercise. Who has time? Pare down the representation of love to three lines of cheesy dialogue and a wet kissing scene and the audience is satisfied right?

Hardly. Here’s to those who take the time to find and create what is beautiful. It is a long and arduous journey but one which holds the most epic of rewards.

See, Milton and Shakespeare don’t make concessions to our impoverished vocabularies. You may have to read them with a dictionary at first. And they don’t pause every twelve minutes for a word from their sponsors. They go their own way and we have to catch up. But it is worth it when we do. The very subjective pleasure, if you want to reduce everything to this, is so much greater and deeper and more intense with these writers than with the lesser entertainment we content ourselves with (for one thing because we don’t always want to involve ourselves so much or work so hard–which is fine sometimes, as long as we don’t reduce our aesthetic standards to our own lazy pleasures and exclude what is really objectively good).

Remember the predictions of a surge in Christian-themed movies after “The Passion of the Christ” became such a smash hit? Well, it didn’t happen. Studios, such as Fox, did open divisions for religious films, but they are mostly churning out straight-to-video adaptations of sappy Christian popular fiction. See Faith-based films few, far between.

Contrary to my usual custom, I really don’t have anything to say about the Academy Awards. I tried to watch some of the show, but I found it insufferable and had to turn away. Which raised another question in my mind: Is it really true lately that movies influence the culture? I think we are seeing the dysfunction evident in the rest of the arts, in which the “high culture” of the artsy elite has become culturally irrelevant, while the “pop culture” of the money-makers simply conforms to whatever trends are out there.

Roman Catholic bishops in Italy are telling  actors they had better not do sex scenes.  They are catching flak for interfering in the artistic process, but I salute them.

According to movie critic John Podheretz, the academy-award nominee “Juno” is a profoundly culturally-conservative-in-the-best-sense movie, being against both abortion and, even more subversively to today’s pop culture, against the very concept of “cool.” Now I want to see it.

The Academy Awards nominations have been released:

Performance by an actor in a leading role

George Clooney in “Michael Clayton” (Warner Bros.)
Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood” (Paramount Vantage and Miramax)
Johnny Depp in “Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
(DreamWorks and Warner Bros., Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount)
Tommy Lee Jones in “In the Valley of Elah” (Warner Independent)
Viggo Mortensen in “Eastern Promises” (Focus Features)

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Casey Affleck in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (Warner Bros.)
Javier Bardem in “No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage)
Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (Universal)
Hal Holbrook in “Into the Wild” (Paramount Vantage and River Road Entertainment)
Tom Wilkinson in “Michael Clayton” (Warner Bros.)

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Cate Blanchett in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (Universal)
Julie Christie in “Away from Her” (Lionsgate)
Marion Cotillard in “La Vie en Rose” (Picturehouse)
Laura Linney in “The Savages” (Fox Searchlight)
Ellen Page in “Juno” (Fox Searchlight)

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

Cate Blanchett in “I’m Not There” (The Weinstein Company)
Ruby Dee in “American Gangster” (Universal)
Saoirse Ronan in “Atonement” (Focus Features)
Amy Ryan in “Gone Baby Gone” (Miramax)
Tilda Swinton in “Michael Clayton” (Warner Bros.)

I’m embarrassed to say that, former movie critic though I am when I was Culture Editor for WORLD, I have seen NONE of these shows. Can anyone speak to them? Can anyone deduce any cultural significance from this list?

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. We need a word for the commemoration of a bad event that we mark with the opposite of celebration: This is not a holiday, but an unholy day. Thousands will mourn the unholy day here in D. C. in frigid weather at the March for Life.

But perhaps we are seeing a little progress. A study of every abortion facility in the country has found that the number of abortions has declined sharply. From ABC News: Why Are Abortions Down in America?:

The study, conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, which researches issues related to reproductive health and sexuality, found that in 2005, the U.S. abortion rate fell to 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 to 44, the lowest level since 1974. The total number of abortions also declined, to a total of 1.2 million in 2005, well below the all-time high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990.

But the study raises a fascinating and tricky question: Why?

The researchers who conducted the study said they simply don’t know, but they do have two theories.

One reason could be that since people now have easier access to contraception — including emergency contraception like Plan B — there are fewer unwanted pregnancies.

Another reason could be that there are also fewer abortion clinics.

OR, maybe pro-lifers are winning the debate. It is absurd to take too much comfort when abortions are “only” numbering 1.2 million. Notice, though, how many recent movies are about “keeping” the baby, evidence perhaps of a cultural shift.

Today’s Washington Post is marking the anniversary with a celebratory article on the increasing use of RU-486, the abortion pill, which supposedly makes abortion easier.

“The impact and the promise is huge,” said Beth Jordan, medical director of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. “It’s going a long way towards normalizing abortion.”

But, from what I can tell from the article, abortions done by RU-486 are counted in the declining abortion statistics. So if abortion has become easier and more widely available, as the article claims, and yet are STILL going down, we may be making more progress in the battle for hearts and minds than we realize.