ask the mansplainer: 'ghostbusters'

Dear Mansplainer:

A number of my female friends have been speaking very highly of the new all-women "Ghostbusters" movie, and my daughters have begun to express interest in seeing it as well. Should I take the girls to see this movie with its tacit message of female empowerment, or should I show them the original "Ghostbusters" movie with Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd?

Concerned father

Dear dad:

Of course you should not take your children to see this movie, under any circumstances, Take a look at your own letter, and you'll see the problem right there -- this new, politically correct "Ghostbusters" has a tacit message of female empowerment that is threat to right-thinking men everywhere,

The original "Ghostbusters" was a summer blockbuster comedy about a team of men who operate a business capturing ghosts and end up saving New York City from supernatural destruction, This new movie is a summer blockbuster about a team of women who operate a business capturing ghosts and end up saving New York from supernatual destruction. Do you see the difference? It's a whole different ballgame!

The original movie focused on comedy, on laughs, and having a good time, and starred men. By making a new movie with women, the liberal ne'er-do-wells in Hollywood are attempting to erase men's role in history. Before long, you won't be able to find a copy of the original Harold Ramis movie because it'll have been replaced with this new version, just like Marval Comics has confiscated all our old issues of Spider-man and replaced them with new copies starring Miles Morales, and the new Harry Potter play has turned Emma Watson black.

Stories have to remain the same, or everything about our civilization will perish in flames. Don't let them take "Ghostbusters," or the next thing you know, they'll be coming for Alexander Hamilton.

'To Catch a Killer': Brian Dennehy as John Wayne Gacy

 

I've spent about three hours the past two nights watching Brian Dennehy play John Wayne Gacy in "To Catch a Killer."

Gacy, for those unfamiliar with him, was a Chicago-area serial killer convicted of sexually torturing and murdering some 30 teenage boys and burying their bodies in his basement, under his garage, under the floorboards of his rec room, and elsewhere. To all outward appearances, he was an upstanding member of the community who regularly donated to civic organizations, and who performed for children as Pogo the Clown. The movie was made for TV, and aired in 1992.

Dennehy gives a great, just-the-right-side-of-creepy performance of Gacy, a man with cocksure grin who engages police in cat-and-mouse maneuvers as the pressure slowly builds; opposite an equally strong Michael Riley as Detective Joe Kozencza, who becomes convinced early on that Gacy is behind the recent disappearance of a local teen and then gradually realizes the monstrosity of Gacy's crimes.

The movie's got some good drama. In addition to the performances of its leads and supporting actors, it depicts Kozencza as a man under pressure as he overcomes colleagues' professional skepticism to bring Gacy in. He's got to convince not only his chief to provide the manpower, but his detectives that he's not wasting their time; and he's got to complete the case before Gacy's attorney can file a harassment lawsuit that will shut the case down.

It's got a few weak points too. I could have done with fewer car chases, myself; and the decision to include a psychic (Margot Kidder) seems silly in a story that focuses on more serious detective work in a true crime story. It also felt too often like the movie focused on Gacy's orientation, as if that were a sign of his depravity instead of incidental to it; but that at least may be a product of when the movie was made.

Still, what a movie. Dennehy was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Gacy; and Riley and director Eric Till each were nominated for a Gemini Award. I generally don't think much of TV movies, and there's no doubt that the movie glossed over the more horrifying elements of Gacy's crimes; but this was a good movie.

Part two:


 

'Jesus Camp'

My first thoughts after watching "Jesus Camp": Geez, that was unsettling.

Filmed in 2006 during the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Samuel Alito, "Jesus Camp" follows three children to a summer camp at Devil's Lake, North Dakota. There they are taught about the need to stand up for their faith and for righteousness in America, and to reclaim the nation for Christ. The "Kids on Fire" summer camp is led by the Rev. Becky Fischer.

This is one creepy movie.

I feel that creepiness in part because I'm a former Pentecostal myself, having joined the Assemblies of God in 1989, about a year after my own spiritual awakening. I don't recall seeing anything as extreme as what I saw in "Jesus Camp," but I definitely saw the tendencies. Watching the movie was like looking into a mirror and seeing in its reflection all your inner workings when you're accustomed only to seeing your outward appearance.

Evangelicalism generally and Pentecostalism particularly stress the importance of an emotional born-again experience, where the person awakens to a keen sense of their sinfulness and unworthiness to stand in the presence of God.

This isn't just an intellectual assent to "Yes, I've done wrong in my life." In the Pentecostal church especially there is pressure to make it an emotionally driven affirmation of wretchedness. You have to feel that the building is on fire and there is no way out, that the water is rising and you are running out of air, that there is a gunman about to blow the brains out of everyone you love -- and it's all your fault.

To be fair, I'm exaggerating a bit, but less than some of my Pentecostal and evangelical compatriots would like to think. Altar calls, as they are called, are emotionally driven affairs, given while the music is playing softly and a preacher you've taught to respect greatly because of his ministerial office, gently and repeatedly implores people to accept Christ.

A typical appeal goes something like this: "I know you are out there. You've been coming to church for years, thinking you're following Jesus, but deep inside, you know you aren't. You've been fooling everyone, even yourself, but not God. And now he wants you to make it real. Every head is bowed, every eye is closed. If you'd like to accept Jesus as your savior, raise your hand."

That's a lot of emotional manipulation for adults, but it's unconscionable to subject children to it, especially when you consider that the message Jesus and the Apostles brought to the world wasn't "You're going to hell," but "Follow me."

So while it was weird to see a mullet-haired boy named Levi saying that he had become a Christian at the age of 5 because he "wanted more out of life" -- I guess the Cartoon Network and Oreo cookies just couldn't fill that void -- it was distressing in the extreme to see children, some seemingly as young as 6 or 7 years, brought to tears by this church pastor over their sins.

Children do have the same human nature as their parents. Anyone who has had a child between the ages of 2 and 4 knows how selfish, angry, and even cruel they can be. But honestly, is it necessary to indoctrinate children, using the same psychological techniques of breaking down and rebuilding that get used for brainwashing adults? The term "abuse" gets abused a lot these days, but I don't think it's much of a stretch here.

(And Fischer is aware of what she is doing. Watch the movie and you'll see her working on a PowerPoint presentation for maximum impact, complete to picking a blood-drooping font for the Bible verse "The wages of sin is death.")

Fischer also repeatedly appeals to the example of Islamofascist camps run by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, where children are taught to hate and kill Jews and Christians. Her argument is that it's necessary to do the same with our children, in order to save the world. That's not a comparison I like, personally. In addition to the Islamophobia she encourages with blanket statements about Islam, Fischer is also suggesting that the proper response to Islamofascism is christofascism. I wonder if she appreciates the irony of using the same justification that terrorists use in defending her ministry.

I could go on, as many others have, about the false correlation of Christianity with conservatism; about the children who are taught bad science in the name of Truth; and the generally unsettling attitudes being inculcated by groups like this. (I will say I was amused by the boy who confided to his breakfast table that he watches Harry Potter movies when he visits his father. It generated the same reaction you might have expected had he produced a copy of Playboy.)

It's a frightening thing to see a large group of children being indoctrinated into militant paranoia, but that's essentially what this movie shows. I don't think it is an entirely objective perspective on evangelicalsm, but it is an accurate depiction of what goes on in a vocal and active subset of evangelicals here in America.

A friend tells me that when she watched "Jesus Camp," she felt like she was watching a documentary of her own childhood. I can't claim that, and I'm glad that my children can't either. I teach Evangeline and Rachel, rather than indoctrinating them, and I encourage them to ask plenty of questions not just of their Sunday school teachers, but of me as well. I don't have all the answers, and my hope is that they will see that from the get-go, and not be crushed when they discover that themselves in years to come.

But for children like Levi, Rachael, and Tory, unpleasant discoveries are on the way. They don't know it all, and their parents don't either. At some point they are going to learn about a much larger world outside their church doors, and hopefully the damage done by well-meaning evangelists won't overwhelm them and leave their faith in ruins.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.



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Disney's 'Freaky Friday' (2003)

It may be unpopular to say this these days, what with schaudenfreude and all, but I liked the "Freaky Friday" remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan."

"Freaky Friday" ostensibly is based on the book by Mary Rodgers, though Evangeline (who read the book and enjoyed it) assures me that neither movie follows the book too closely. In a nutshell, the plot is that a mother and her daughter end up switching bodies and seeing life through one another's eyes for an entire day. In the original movie, it was because they both wished they could change places, at the same time; in the remake, it was because of a Chinese fortune cookie gone bad.

The original movie, made in the early 1970s with Jodie Foster, was decent enough. The girls liked the funny stuff, like when the police chased Annabel to the marina and suffered one mishap after another -- a squad car gets cut in two at one point, though neither officer is hurt -- but the movie never got past the obvious jokes. (Nor particularly past some rather narrowly defined expectations for young girls. All Foster's Annabel wanted to do was to put on makeup and brush her hair.)

The remake goes for the laughs, and it delivers. Made only five years ago, it presents a drastically altered treatment of the story.

The original mother was a stay-at-home mom, and presented no real between mother and the daughter beyond how each failed to appreciate what the other's life was like. As a result it never progressed much beyond the expected and tired jokes about a teenager getting overwhelmed by laundry, carpet cleaners and other housewife duties, at least until mother and daughter return to their own bodies.

The remake follows a widow (Jamie Lee Curtis) set to remarry and her 15-year-old daughter (Lindsay Lohan), who resents the interloper, and plays heavily into the dynamic of a mother who does not understand her daughter as well as she thinks she does, as well as the fish-out-of-water daughter in her mother's body.

Jamie Lee Curtis kicks ass. So does Lindsay Lohan for that matter. She doesn't upstage Curtis, but she definitely plays a better teen and mother-in-teen's-body than Foster did.

So while the first one went for the standard yuk-yuk-yuks, the remake reinterprets the story in some impressive and imaginative ways. It got more laughs from me, and deeper ones, than the original did, and went quite a bit further with the character development. It's not really clear that Annabel and her mother changed all that much in the original "Freaky Friday"; in the remake, the movie spends more time establishing their difficulties, and shows them realizing how selfish and myopic they've been about their relationship. By the time it's over, there has been major character growth for both of them.

I also saw the remake of "The Parent Trap," or most of it anyway, a while ago. It's not nearly as clever or as inventive as this one. It follows the original movie way too closely to have been worth doing. In my opinion anyway.

'into the woods'

A note to my fellow parents: Despite its fairy tale themes, "Into the Woods" might be a little intense for your young child.

For those not familiar with it, "Into the Woods" is a musical by Stephen Sondheim that strings together an assortment of Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Included are Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and an original fairy tale by Sondheim, that serves as bridging material. We will call "The Baker and His Wife." The stories all blend into a coherent and entertainingly light-hearted first act that ends with everyone living happily ever after.

The second act shows what happens after "Happily Ever After." This is when the Princes Charming grow bored with the wives they pursued so hard in the first act and are now pining after Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. This is when the Baker and his Wife have their child and must now deal with the realities of having a baby. More importantly, this is when the giant's wife comes looking for the boy who repaid her hospitality with theft and murder.

We've been listening to the revival soundtrack for the better part of a month, and the girls and I even have had a discusson about who deserves the blame for the giantess' rampage through the kingdom. (There's a whole song dedicated to this question.)

For her birthday, we got Evangeline a DVD of the original production of "Into the Woods" starring Bernadette Peters, and spent the evening tonight watching it.

The move night was great fun, the girls loved it, and now are curious to see other plays and musicals we have on video. Still, it got a little intense. Around the time the giantess had destroyed the baker's house, wrecked the castle, stepped on Rapunzel, crushed the baker's wife beneath a falling tree, and thrown the narrator to his death, and everyone was arguing over whose fault it was and whether they should hand Jack over to the giantess for justice, I glanced over at Rachel. She was looking a little undone. Her blue eyes were wide and she was trembling.

Luckily her mother was sitting right next to her. I told Rachel that her mother looked scared, and maybe she could calm her down and remind her that everything would work out all right in the end. She grabbed on and held her mother tight and told her all those things, and we watched the rest of the movie without further incident.

Maybe she's not ready for "Arsenic and Old Lace."


Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'open season'

"Open Season," a movie about a docile grizzly bear's return to the wild at the start of hunting season, is a richly rewarding experience, bursting with christophanies and flowing with deep spiritual currents that will stir the soul and leave the contemplative soul with many new and interesting thoughts for days and weeks to come.

 

Set in and around the fictitious town Timberline, "Open Season" sets its sights upon a grizzly bear named Boog (Martin Lawrence), raised since he was a cub by a forest ranger. He has grown up, practically a pet, staying in the ranger's garage and performing tricks for her audiences as she presents lectures and shows on nature. Compelling metaphoric for modern humanity, Boog is bamboozled by the treats and easy life he has, unable to recognize his enslavement for what it is.

 

Rescue comes in the form of Elliott (Ashton Kuchner), a buck expelled from his herd for the crime of being different, whom a hunter (voiced by Gary Sinise) hit with and mounted upon his pickup truck. Elliott uses his apparent vulnerability to appeal to Boog, who severs the ropes that hold him.

 

This spiritual awakening, marked by Boog's first awareness of the needs of others, continues as Elliott leads Boog into town, and convinces him to revel in all that the world that he is so accustomed to, offers. Again, the very things that mark success and comfort in America are the things that make Boog sick, and the next day Boog, still ill from an orgy of self-indulgence, loses control at the show and must be tranquilized and transported back to the wild.

 

The metaphor continues as Boog, not realizing that he is where he belongs, continues to search for a way back to captivity, much as Scripture tells us the ancient Israelites longed for the chains of Egypt once they had tasted freedom. But Elliott, fulfilling his role as Christ figure, rejected by his herd for the sake of his righteousness, leads Boog ever deeper into the wild, hoping to awaken the true and lost self to the glories of his proper identity.

 

Tension in the movie comes as the hunter, cast in the role of Satan the Destroyer, continues to seek those he considers his lawful prey. Lesser hunters, mere demons, enter the wild as well, reveling in the destruction and slaughter of innocents that they can bring.

 

A near encounter with Satan the hunter awakens Boog to his need for a relationship with Elliott, and formerly having spurned his savior, he now returns and works to restore their friendship, reciprocating for the first time the selfless agape love Elliott has shown him.

 

The spiritual awakening, now continued, bursts into full flower during the deadly confrontation with the hunters. Although the lower demonic hunters easily are repelled, the captain of the fallen host is too elusive and mighty, and fires a deadly shot at Boog -- a bullet that Elliott takes. One is reminded again of the example of Christ, who "being in very nature God did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped, but became a servant; and being found in the form of servant, humbled himself and was obedient, even to death on a cross."

 

With Elliott's substitutionary death for Boog, the awakening is now complete. Boog remembers that he is a grizzly bear, and with the power and might of a grizzly bear, in Elliott's name he overpowers and defeats the mightiest of the hunters, disarming him and utterly destroying his weapon.

 

And now we find at this point that Elliott is alive, returned from the dead, and as the movie ends, clearly come to instate a new and heavenly period for the animals of the forest, one where they never will need fear the hunter, and one where the lion will lie down with the lamb, or even the doe with the bear.

 

No, not really. The movie sucked.

'the others' (spoilers)

Take one part "Beetlejuice," stir in three parts "The Sixth Sense," and add a soundtrack that plays on the nerves like "The Shining," and what do you get? No, you won't get a great horror movie, you'll have wasted $20 on videotapes or DVDs that you've just ruined beyond repair.

 

"The Others," which I finally overcame my general dislike of Nicole Kidman enough to watch, thanks is an excellent ghost story. I'd heard before that it had a surprise ending, so it's probably no fault of the movie that I figured out within the first ten minutes of the movie that the main characters were all dead, and realized as soon as the haunting started that they were being disturbed by live people who had moved into their house. Still, even knowing all this, there was enough mystery and suspense surrounding the supporting characters and the nature of the main characters' deaths to keep me watching. In that sense, it was a combination of "Beetlejuice" and "The Sixth Sense," but it was a good and clever combination.

 

"The Others" tells the story of a woman living in Jersey at the end of World War II. Her husband has gone off to war, and she has had to bear the burden of caring for their children by herself, a burden heightened substantially by their extreme photosensitivity. An actual condition used in the movie, people so afflicted suffer severe burns from any measurable sunlight. Grace (Kidman) has been caring for her children by herself, cut off from the outside world and modern conviences because of the war, and has been pushed to the edge.

 

The story begins as Grace hires three strangers as new servants, the previous servants having disappeared from the house a week earlier. As the new servants settle in, strange things begin to happen and the children report seeing other people in the house, including a mother; a father; their son, Victor; and a strange old woman who has appeared more than any of the others. The servants plainly know something about what is happening, but they say little to nothing about it.

 

The movie dangles a number of clues in front of the viewer about what has happened -- Anne keeps saying that their mother went mad; Grace actually attacks her daughter at one point when she thinks the girl is possessed, and Anne screams, "She's mad! She's not going to stop until she kills us!"; and there are several oblique references to "that day," although what exactly happened never becomes clear until the last several minutes of the movie.

 

The child actors did excellent job with their parts, particularly the girl who played Anne. The way they interacted -- not just in words, but in body language and tone -- telegraphed the family history, although the exact nature of that history didn't become clear until Grace walked in on the seance. "A pillow? Is that how your mother killed you, children?"

 

The medical condition, and the need to keep the curtains closed at all times, was a brilliant metaphor for the family's efforts to keep themselves in the dark about what had happened, the way the boy kept denying anything had happened, the way Anna admitted it openly but still kept its exact nature from herself, and of course the way Grace tried to convince herself it had never happened. Their reactions at the seance were incredible, too. Anne's shock, her brother's insistent screams, "We're not dead! We're not dead!" and the way Grace staggered and dropped her Rosary as she realized that it hadn't been a bad dream, that God hadn't given her quite the second chance she had thought, and the way she tore into the seance, as if she hoped that by shaking the table and tearing up the papers she might make it not true.

 

The moment before the seance was one of those great moments, incidentally, where Anna joined her brother in hugging their mother, the first sign of affection she had shown the entire movie. You could see that she had forgiven her mother for hurting her earlier, and that forgiveness led to the first real act of tenderness on Grace's part, as she cuddled with her children in the hallway and soothingly explained everything that had happened and how horrified she had been at what she had done.

 

And of course, the other three ghosts -- Mrs. Mills, Lydia, and Mr. Tuttle -- were downright spooky toward the end, when they walked silently toward the children and the house, side by side, unmoved by anything. Mills was brilliant the entire movie, evidently knowing more than she was letting on and yet not wanting to push things until Grace was ready for it all to come out.

 

We ended up renting the movie because we had a coupon for a free rental from Blockbuster, and my best friend had recommended the movie very highly back when it first came out on DVD. I love a good ghost story, and in a way, I'm sorry I waited so long to experience this one.

beckett

I found "Beckett" surprisingly boring for a movie with 12 Academy Award nominations.

 

A 1964 film, based on a play of the same name and starring Peter O'Toole (King Henry II) and Richard Burton (Thomas Beckett), the movie tells the classic story of Henry's attempt to increase his power base by appointing his close friend and chancellor to the post of archbishop of Canterbury. The move backfired as Beckett displayed unanticipated religious devotion and openly opposed the king's efforts to extend his control to include the church as well as the state.

 

I first encountered the story of Thomas Beckett in any significant length when I was in college and one of the student acting groups put on a performance of T.S. Elliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" in the college chapel. It's a great story, and of particular relevance today as it deals with the uneasy co-existence of church and state and what happens when they clash ... but I really couldn't get into this movie.

 

Without a doubt the main problem is the age of the film. Production values and our expectations of movies have changed considerably in the 43 years since "Beckett" first showed on the silver screen. Some movies -- like "The Ten Commandments," "Ben-Hur" and "Spartacus" -- have held up, but even they show their age. The spectacle and pagaentry that used to be a mainstay of these old movies, with thousands of extras and elaborate sets, have fallen by the wayside and contemporary audiences prefer movies with less spectacle and faster action.

 

And by faster action I don't mean car chases and gunfights. In "Beckett" the long pauses were excruciatingly painful, extended camera pans that consisted of nothing but people walking across the room, or boats crossing the English Channel while the music played and tried to seranade us to sleep.

 

All that said, there are many things I did enjoy about the movie. Peter O'Toole gave a command performance as Henry II as a perennially adolescent king, incapable of controlling his urges or exercising any manner of self-restraint. He yells at his wife, bullies his children, and when he discovers that his old drinking buddy won't go along with him is brutally torn between love for his friend and anger over what he sees as betrayal. This internal divide dogs him until finally, in a drunken fit that has involved yelling at his wife and mother and humiliating his son Henry III, he asks "Who will rid me of this troublesome archbishop?" -- which of course three knights overhear and take to interpret as a royal order.

 

The story, as always, was excellent. I'd be interested in seeing the play at some point.

new rules to live by

Taken and adapted from CHRefugee:

1. Stop giving me that pop-up ad for Classmates.com. I'm not in touch with my high school classmates 20 after graduation, because high school sucked and the people who made it suck were my classmates. Why would I want to reconnect with them -- so they can make middle age suck too?
2. Don't eat anything that's served to you out a window unless you're a seagull. People acted all shocked that a human finger was found in a bowl of Wendy's chili last summer. The chili cost less than a dollar. What did you expect it to contain, trout?
3. Don't complain about high gas prices. There's an easy way to deal with it: Drive less, and do it in a car with better mileage than a minivan or sport utility vehicle. And don't tell me that corn-based ethanol is going to save us all. Corn is for food, not for putting into our gas tanks.
4. Stop saying that teenage boys who have sex with their hot, blonde teachers are permanently damaged. There isn't a man alive today who didn't want that same thing when he was a teenager. Try sending the message to teenage boys that women are people, not sexual encounters.
5. If you need to shave and you still collect baseball cards, you're a dope. If you're a kid, the cards are keepsakes of your idols. If you're a grown man, they're pictures of men.
6. Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone. Here's how much men care about your eyebrows: Do you have two of them? Okay, we're done.
7. There's no such thing as flavored water. Flavored water is called a soft drink. You want flavored water? Pour some scotch over ice and let it melt. That's your flavored water.
8. Stop screwing with old people. Target is introducing a redesigned pill bottle that's square, with a bigger label. And the top is now the bottom. And by the time grandpa gets it open, he will be in the morgue. Congratulations, Target, you just solved the Social Security crisis.
9. The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the jerk. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low, and one NutraSweet," your picture deserves to be in the dictionary, next to the word jerk.
10. I'm not the cashier. If I'm spending my money at your store, is it too much to ask to have one of your employees run my purchases across the scanner, ring me up, and tell me how much my bill comes to? No one has complained, "Stores are getting too personal and friendly. They should lay off some cashiers and replace them with Do-It-Yourself express lanes."
11. A tattoo with Chinese characters it doesn't make you spiritual. It's right above your butt crack, and it means "beef with broccoli." The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren't pregnant. You're not spiritual. You're just high.
12. Competitive eating isn't a sport. It's one of the seven deadly sins, and it's gross. ESPN recently televised the U.S. Open of Competitive Eating, because watching those athletes at the poker table was just too damn exciting. What's next, competitive farting? They already do that. It's called "The Howard Stern Show."
13. I don't need a bigger mega M&Ms. If I'm extra hungry for M&Ms, I'll go nuts and eat two.
14. If you're going to insist on making movies based on old TV shows, then you have to give everyone in the theater a remote so we can see what's playing on the other screens. These things were TV shows in the first place because the idea wasn't good enough to be a movie.
15. No more gift registries. You know, it used to be just for weddings. Now it's for babies and new homes and honeymoons and graduations from rehab. Picking out the stuff you want and having other people buy it for you isn't gift giving, it's just a lazy way to go looting and pillaging.
16. If you ever hope to be a credible adult and want a job that pays better than minimum wage, then for God's sake don't pierce or tattoo every available piece of flesh. If you do, then plan your future around saying "Do you want fries with that?"

hoodwinked

The Nova Bastille library showed “Hoodwinked” Monday afternoon as the first installment of its summer movie program.

 

Rachel was a little disappointed they had picked it for their first movie, since they had showed it last summer too, but it’s a good movie. It gives a humorous treatment to the popular Red Riding Hood fairy tale, by telling and retelling the story from the point of view of each major character: Red herself, the Big Bad Wolf, Granny, and even the woodcutter.

 

As a bonus, none of the characters is quite what you’d expect from the fairy tale as the Brothers Grimm popularized it, and the entire story takes place against the backdrop of corporate espionage under investigation by both the police and an investigate journalist who is played by one of the main characters.

 

Natasha saw a preview for the movie and disparaged it as something that wanted to be “Shrek” but couldn’t manage it. For myself, I loved the movie both times. I thought it was witty in the extreme, presents a strong female character in Red Riding Hood, and manages to go the entire movie without relying on potty humor or pretending to be deep, like “Shrek” did.

 

I also recognized the voices of John Belushi and Anne Hathaway ― not marquee stars, I suppose, but still fairly impressive for what I believe was an independent film effort.

 

Evangeline also was disappointed that they showed “Hoodwinked” again this year. She was at art camp, and would have loved to have seen the movie a second time. She immediately got on my case to buy a copy so she can watch it “lots of times.”

 

And that, of course, is why the good Lord invented allowance.

x-3 (spoilers)

I finally saw "X-3" last night, and I can honestly say it was worth the wait. I had enough time to lower my expectations to the point where I could be amused at how awful it was.

The movie revisits the story of Dark Phoenix, starting out twenty years ago where Erich and Charles visit the home of a young Jean Grey. In the first two movies, we learned that Jean was telekinetic and that her power was growing. Here we find out that as a young girl her power was virtually unlimited. (We later discover that Charles erected psychic barriers in Jean's mind, telepathically creating a repressed personality called the Phoenix.)

The next flashback is of Warren W. Worthington III, the Marvel character with the worst case of alliteration, more commonly known as Angel. Ten years ago he found wings growing out of his shoulder blades and tried to cut them off in the bathroom.

Fast forward to the present. The X-men are playing a "Days of Future Past" scenario in the Danger Room, Professor X is having an ethics discussion with some of his students, and Scott and Logan are both trying to deal with Jean's death at the end of the last movie. It's harder for Scott, though, because it turns out that Jean is still alive and speaking to him telephatically from the bottom of the lake where she is alive, inside a cocoon of telekinetic energy.

Scott goes to Jean, finds her alive, they have that Phoenix moment from the comics where she telekinetically contains his optic blasts, and then something happens. When the Storm and Logan go later, they find a bunch of things floating around in mid-air, including Scott's glasses. It eventually turns out that Phoenix destroyed Scott.

In the midst of all this, it turns out that Worthington Labs has discovered a "cure" for the mutant gene that will turn mutants into regular, nonpowered humans. This cure is derived from a careful study of a mutant similar to the 1980s comics character Leech, who had the ability to suppress the powers of other mutants. Warren's father tries to use the cure on his son, but Angel flies away.

Kelsey Grammar shows up as Hank McCoy, the U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs. He's bright blue and painful to look at. His main function in the movie appears to be to act as an intermediary between the X-men and the U.S. government so each group knows what the other has discovered.

The Morlocks show up, expressing mutant pride and their refusal to be "cured," and join Magneto. They free Mystique, who had been captured by the government, along with Juggernaut and Jamie Maddox. A guard fires the cure at Magneto, but Mystique gets in the way and is turned into a regular human. He leaves her there because, as she is no longer a mutant, he no longer has any interest in her.

Logan discovers that Charles placed the psychic barriers in Jean's mind, and they both discover that the barriers are down. Increasingly it is Phoenix who is in control, not Jean and in what I thought was an interesting departure from the comics, they revisit the love triangle and reveal that Phoenix, the repressed side of Jean, was the one who loves Logan. Amazingly, this actually becomes relevant.

Magneto and Professor X, with their attendants, both try to get Jean to join them. She actually telekinetically flays the professor alive and blasts him into dust before leaving with Magneto, who is massing an army of mutants to destroy Worthington Labs and the cure for the mutant gene. After that, pretty much all she does is stand around and try to look imposing. (Personally, I thought she looked more like Natalie Portman did throughout "Attack of the Clones"; i.e., she had a look that screamed, "Why did I sign a three-movie contract?")

Things finally come to a head when Magneto steals the Golden Gate Bridge to get his army-size Brotherhood of Mutants to Worthington Labs, which is under military protection in anticipation of the attack. The troops there are all armed with plastic weapons that will fire doses of the cure in plastic containers.

The X-men -- Logan, Storm, Iceman, Kitty Pryde, Colossus and the Beast -- arrive and the fight begins. There's a nice scene that shows how everyone uses their powers to get down to the ground alive, there's a clever bit where Kitty out-thinks Juggernaut, and there's a totally pathetic scene where Angel shows up and saves his father from being dropped to his death.

When it becomes evident that there's no other way to survive, the X-men actually use the cure to stop Magneto. I was surprised by that. And then, with Phoenix killing everyone around them and whipping up a maelstrom of debris, water, earth and bits of disintegrated people, Logan closes in on her. She keeps flaying him alive, but of course he heals -- even his pants heal! -- and gets close enough to explain that he's not there because he'd die for the others, but because he'd die for her. And then he kills her.

Despite some potentially great scenes like that one, this movie really sucked. The first X-men movie was character driven. Audiences cared what happened to Logan and to Rogue, and audiences were intrigued by the interactions among the main characters.

This movie had a glut of (ahem) new mutants who had virtually no bearing on the plot, such as Colossus, Leech and Angel. Others, such as Beast, could have been replaced with a conventional relationship between the X-men and the government.

It was also loaded with subplots that had virtually no bearing on the movie. Rogue and Iceman have been an item for the past two movies; here they added a flirtation between him and Kitty Pryde that added nothing consequential to the story, except that it triggered another subplot where Rogue wanted to be cured -- only we never really saw much evidence of a struggle beyond the obvious surface stuff, and it only got a total two minutes screen time, tops.

Angel's presence in the movie was utterly pointless, since a cure could have been developed for any reason and had the same effect on the story, and even Leech was useless as a character.

The closest thing the movie had to a theme was power -- Jean is power incarnate, humans feel so powerless, Mystique loses her power, Rogue wants to lose her power, Storm finds it an insult that their power is seen as needing a cure, Magneto is only interested in mutants with power -- but aside from a couple good quotes, there's no message here, either.

My wife and I were talking this morning about how it could have been a better movie, and we generally concluded that the director and screenwriters should have eliminated the mutants who existed only as plot functions, like Angel, Leech, the Beast, and probably the Morlocks as well; have the cure come from somewhere else, like perhaps Forge, who is himself a mutant; and surprise everybody by having a nonpowered Mystique be the one who ends up neutralizing Magneto with an injection of the cure.

It's a shame, really. "X-men" wasn't a great movie, but it was at least decent. This one was easily the worst of the three, and it wouldn't have been that hard to make it better.

The Shining: That's one creepy movie, yo

On Friday night, I had a rendezvous with a piece of cinematic history that was long overdue. On Friday night, I watched "The Shining."

Released in 1980 with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in starring roles and Stanley Kubrik at the helm, "The Shining" has to be one of the finest movies I have seen in ages. In the movie, Jack Torrance (Nicholson) is hired as the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado during the hotel's five-month closure. The hotel has a bit of a past; ten years earlier, another caretaker went insane and killed his wife and two daughters when the prolonged isolation presumably got to him. Over the winter, Torrance experiences a mental breakdown and tries to kill his wife and child.

I'm not generally into horror movies -- either they're so schlocky that they're not believable, or they just substitute vulgar gross-outs for actual horror -- but this was a movie I found absolutely haunting.

The horror starts out with the opening credits, actually. As the credits roll, we hear disconcerting, ethereal music and follow Torrance's Volkswagen as it goes up the long road to the Overlook Hotel. There's not a scene in the movie that doesn't in some way add to this creeped-out feeling of being watched, followed, or just of encroaching doom.

As the movie goes on, Kubrik repeats the following motif: the camera follows Danny around the Overlook Hotel, uncomfortably close, as he rides his Big Wheel about; in the Overlook Maze, we follow him uncomfortably closely as he runs for shelter. In many ways, the entire movie is a labyrinth, as we work our way into the dark corners of Torrance's unraveling mind.

Kubrik's use of the ghosts is also brilliant -- they appear, setting the characters and the movie-goers on edge, then disappear. For the most part, they're not characters as much as they are props, meant to establish the setting and feel of the psychoscape: the murdered girls of the previous caretaker, the woman drowned in the bathtub, and ultimately the entire crew at the ballroom.

And tell me that doesn't creep you out when Torrance, at an empty bar in a ballroom by himself, offers to sell his soul for a beer, only to lower his hands from his eyes and find the bartender ready to give him a drink. Talk about Faustian bargains -- and this is where he really starts to go nuts.

The odd thing about the movie, from the point of realism, is the ending. As the camera pans in, it eventually settles on a picture of the July 4, 1920, ball, where Jack Torrance is featured prominently. At an earlier scene in the bar, the quintessentially British waiter -- whom Torrance recognizes as Delberton Grady, the 1970 caretaker who killed his family -- assures Torrance that he, Torrance, has always been the caretaker at the hotel. And Torrance himself said earlier in the movie that when he first went to the hotel, he felt as though he knew it intimately, as though he had been there before.

Realistically, this is impossible, and I spent a few days trying to figure out the significance of the ending, since it's obviously a key to understanding the movie. If it can't be taken literally, it has to be taken figuratively. The Overlook Hotel is a metaphor for something larger -- some commentators I've read suggest it's America itself, and the genocide we not only committed against the American Indians but are content to overlook, while others suggest it's the dark side of human nature.

The first viewpoint has some credibility -- the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground, for instance, and there is a fair amount of Indian iconography incorporated into the movie -- but even if that was a specific point Kubrik wished to make with the movie, the broader application still works. As the main character, Torrance is someone we're meant to identify with, even though he ends badly, frozen to death in the maze, and we have to believe that his dark side is something we know ourselves. Just as he denies any guilt in injuring his son two years earlier, in a drunken rage, we like to deny our own guilt over our crimes ... and we deny our guilt or responsibility for crimes our ancestors have committed, whether it be the legacy of genocide against the American Indians, the oppression of blacks, or years of other bigotries and small-minded prejudices.

This movie is a winner in every sense of the word. The score is brilliant, Nicholson and Duvall give stand-out performances the whole way through the movie, and Kubrik shines unfalteringly as the director and co-writer of the script.

The movie was based on a novel by Stephen King. I hope to watch the movie again, but all the same, I don't think I'll be reading King's book any time soon. His books usually don't do much for me.

the tables turn

Chances are somewhere around 100 percent that my children will need therapy by the time they grow up.

The way I see it, needing therapy is nothing to be ashamed of. It's part of being human, although many of us prefer to tough it out, rather than get the help we need to become balanced, well-adjusted individuals. As far as the girls are concerned, I figure, since they're going to need therapy anyway, we might as well make it interesting for the therapist.

Just before Christmas, we took the girls to see the new live-action movie of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." The movie, as should be expected, was a tremendous hit with them both. Rachel was a little confused by the story and couldn't keep track of who was who or what was going on, and Evangeline thought some of the monsters on the White Witch's side were laugh-out-loud funny-looking, but heck, they are only three and six years old, respectively. They had a good time, and Evangeline knew the story already from reading the book last year, and that's what counts.

On Christmas Day, Rachel opened one of her presents to discover a DVD of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Once we explained what it was (being only 3, she knows most of her letters but not how to read), Rachel was excited to discover that the movie had come out on DVD already. Actually, as we explained, this was the classic animated movie distributed by Sesame Workshop.

Rachel, far from being disappointed, has asked to watch the movie almost every single day since then.

I am beginning to think that my children are not the only ones in the family who will need therapy by the time they grow up.

disappointment with narnia

Now that I've seen the new, live-action version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," I better understand what critics like Polly Toynbee have been saying.

Toynbee, writing in The Guardian, is one of a few critics I've read lately who accuses the movie specifically and Narnia in general for supporting a militaristic interpretation of Christianity, viz. Christ as the fierce lion Aslan rather than as a meek lamb. Toynbee specifically linked the movie to the ongoing war in Iraq and suggested it offered a spiritual justification for the presence of coalition forces there.

This entry contains spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie and intend to, stop reading now.

The movie begins during the London blitz of World War II. Starting here, a few days or weeks before C.S. Lewis' book does, gives moviegoers some context for why the Pevensie children are at Professor Kirke's house in the first place. This is all the more important when you consider how removed children in 21st-century America are from the blitz, especially compared with the English children who were Lewis' immediate audience.

More importantly, though, it provides some important insights into the characters of the Pevensie children, particularly Peter and Edmund. Their father, it appears, is away from home and serving in the British military. It's his absence that makes Peter the bossing sort of older brother that we see elsewhere in the story, and it's Edmund's resentment over Peter's efforts to assume their father's role that leads his act of betrayal later in the story.

But as important as this is for context and character development, it does a lot to bolster claims that the movie provides spiritual justification for Bush's war on terror. For American audiences, particularly here in the shadow of Ground Zero, images of an invading force dropping ordnance on the innocent residents of London can't help but conjure images of 9-11 and the carnage unleashed when the jets flew into the Twin Towers.

Suddenly the horror of World War II is real to us. We don't just understand the fear that drove the children from their homes out to strange houses in the countryside, we feel it ourselves. And of course it's in the idyllic English countryside, where the movie reminds us repeatedly that they have fled to escape World War II, that the Pevensie children are swept up into another battle, in Narnia, between Good and Evil.

The movie reinforces this connection repeatedly. Both Susan and Peter complain that they just fled one war and don't want to enter another. Peter, mindful that he's already assumed his father's role in protecting his siblings, resists assuming his father's role as a combatant, and by the time all is said and done, it's impossible not to see the war the Narnians are fighting against the White Witch and her evil invading forces as a parallel to the one England is fighting with Nazi Germany, nor even to the one the United States is in with the insurgents in Iraq.

That's a connection I've never made in at least four separate occasions when I've read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." I realize that's just my experience, and it may not be true for other people who have read Lewis' children's books, but I can't help but feel a little saddened to see the movies making that connection at all.

While the battle between Good and Evil is central to "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," in the book it's clear that the physical battle is hardly the main event. For the main event, we turn to the events on the Stone Table on the eve of the battle, where Aslan takes Edmund's traitor's death upon himself and so fulfills the requirements of the Deep Magic. It is there that Lewis lingers, and after the Stone Table is broken and Aslan is restored to life, Susan and Lucy celebrate his resurrection, putting flowers in his mane and thrilling at his impossibly glorious resurrection.

The movie shifts this focus away from the spiritual victory and toward the earthly one. The Beavers and other talking beasts of Narnia are more excited over the Pevensies' arrival than they over Aslan's approach, and it's as though they and not he are credited with bringing Narnia its first springtime in a century. Throughout it all is the growing expectation that Peter will lead an army to victory against the White Witch and deliver freedom to Narnia; even as he walks through the White Witch's castle and restores all those she has turned to stone, Aslan urges Susan and Lucy to find every statue they can, since Peter will need all the help that he can get.

Peter's battle against the Witch and her army, in other words, is the climax of the movie, and his ascension to the throne with its siblings is its end. Aslan's sacrifice on the Stone Table is just a step toward that goal. And why not? It is the children who are the stars here, not just of the movie, but of the story the movie tells. The Aslan of film is less than the Aslan of the books. He's big, but he's not larger than life. In fact, you can't help but get the impression that he's been waiting for the Pevensies to arrive, rather than their arrival simply serving as a forerunner of his return.

Still, if the movie fails at transferring some of the nuances of Lewis' book to the silver screen, it surpasses him in character development and turns the Pevensie children into more fully developed people, with pasts and futures that can be seen from the vantage of the present. In her talk with Professor Kirke echoes the voice of an older Susan who is more concerned with popularity and appearance than with Truth; in her resistance to the weight of the Beavers' expectation we can see the future Susan of whom Peter one day will say "My sister the Queen Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia."

And if Peter falls easily into his role of the bossy oldest child, and Edmund into the role of resentful and overshadowed younger sibling, the movie's Lucy expresses an easily seen childlike faith in the impossible world of Narnia, just as she points to the arrival of Father Christmas as vindication of beliefs held in her own world.

The more I think of the movie, the more disappointment I feel over what Narnia lost in its translation to the big screen. It's not that it's a bad movie, but it never really captures the feel of the book. Most of the pleasure in reading Lewis' book lies in its simple charm. A lot of the charm got lost amid the spectacle and pageantry as the filmmakers turned a G-rated book into a PG-rated movie.

This is not the Narnia that I fell in love with fifteen years ago, nor is it the Narnia I want my children to remember.

narnia negativity

Polly Toynbee at British newspaper The Guardian has written a most interesting critique of the new "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" movie.

The movie, which appeared in theaters last Friday, is based on the popular children's book of the same title by C.S. Lewis. The book is especially popular among Christians, who love its allegorical elements, with Aslan representing Christ; the White Witch, Satan; and her castle with stone statues, the grave with all those who died in the time before Christ came and broke the power of death.

I won't be seeing the movie until tomorrow, but still, I got a kick out of reading Toynbee's piece, because it's so laden with irony. The writer, who obviously has a serious grudge not just with Narnia with Christianity, nonetheless deserves high points for spiritual perception. She seems to understand the gospel very well:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.

It's not the first time I've heard such complaints, but I don't get them where the faith is concerned. Jesus is revealed in the book of Revelation as the Lion of Judah, and (paradoxically) as a Lamb. The lion's glory and power is manifest in the Lamb's weakness and humility, but he's still a Lion -- and while he's not militaristic or fascist, I don't think Lewis' Narnia, for all its failings, depicts him as such.

I'm curious to see how well the movie treats the subject matter. I've heard a few people express concerns that it might be too violent, upsetting or scary for the girls in a few parts. I guess we'll find out this weekend.

(Personally, I thought Toynbee's article would have been well served with a headline like "The Chronicles of Narnia: Why I hate God, Christians, Jesus, America, and you.")

Jamie Foxx: 'Ray' (2004)

I've wanted to see "Ray" ever since I saw the preview two years ago, and I'm glad we finally had the chance Saturday night to borrow a copy from the local Blockbuster.

"Ray" is the 2004 biographical movie about legendary musician Ray Charles. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about Ray Charles  -- but his impact on music in America is legendary. (I won't embarrass myself by displaying my ignorance and trying to describe it, since I'm not going to do it justice.)

The movie was excellent. You couldn't help but like Ray Charles the way Jamie Foxx played him, but at the same time, it was hard to respect him much.

The movie, which I'm sure took its share of artistic license with the story of Ray Charles' life, shows Ray Charles' steady rise from playing small acts with the McSon Trio in Seattle. From there he moves up to a solo career with Atlantic Records before ultimately landing a lucrative and unprecedented contract with ABC Records.

In that sense, it's uplifting because he's succeeding despite his obvious disability, and it's also uplifting because he was so good at his music, whether it was country, gospel, reggae and blues, or the fusion of those styles and others that made him so famous.

And unlike many other artists' careers, at least on screen, there was no moment where his career utterly fell to pieces. He just kept going higher and higher, up to the point that his recording of "Georgia on my Mind" became Georgia's state anthem.

On the other hand, it was hard to think highly of Ray Charles as a person, whatever you might rightly believe of him as a musician. The movie showed him as having at least one long-term affair with one of the female singers in his band, which is kind of hard to view as anything but a moral failure, considering that he was married.

And he was also a heroin addict, a habit he initially tried to conceal from his wife and that he repeatedly made excuses for, even after being arrested twice for drug possession.

In the movie at least, the heroin addiction was linked to the death of his younger brother, George, whom he had seen drown in a wash basin when Ray was only 5. The movie depicted Ray as simply watching his brother drown without trying to rescue him or calling for help, as though he thought George were playing a game; according to CNN, he tried to pull him out but couldn't. Either way, I can see why a memory that horrible could lead someone to try to escape through drugs.

And there were other things that made me respect the man wholeheartedly. During the Civil Rights Era, he was scheduled to play a concert in Georgia, but he refused to perform, in protest of the segregation laws in effect. That ended up being a costly move, since he ended up being barred from playing in Georgia for years afterward, but there can be no question it was the right thing to do. It's hard not to respect someone who takes that sort of principled stand.

And as awful as his infidelities to his wife were, the movie shows that he had a measure of character even there. When his long-term mistress in the movie dies, we discover that he's been sending her money every month to help support her and their child.

The movie, to make a long story short, presents Ray Charles as a complex and musically brilliant man. The story it tells isn't a pretty one, but its honesty makes it worth seeing.

DVDs that are worth a buck

I have in my possession what must be the cheapest new DVDs available for purchase in the continental United States.

Rachel and I bought them this afternoon after taking a meander down to the Stop 'N Shop supermarket in Hoover Point. In a cardboard display of about a dozen DVD titles I'd never heard of, like "Huey Junior," "Aladdin" and "Thief of Baghdad,"were three titles that grabbed my interest: the Rankin and Bass animated "The Hobbit," a collection of Daffy Duck shorts, and "Asterix and Cleopatra." All for a buck each.

I half-expected the DVDs to be trash, and to freeze 10 minutes into the movie. To my surprise, no such thing happened. The girls watched Daffy Duck while I got dinner ready, and the disc played the whole time, with a clear picture and clear sound. It was vintage Daffy Duck in his heckler days, making life difficult for Porky Pig and others.

The disks, of course, are as no-frills as you can get. They come in clamshells; and have no foreign language tracks, subtitles, special features or Easter eggs. If you put the disk into your DVD player, it starts playing the feature immediately, with barely a minute for the copyright notice.

A menu does appear if you press the menu button, but your choices are "Play Movie," "Select Scene," "Also on DVD" and "Web site." The Also on DVD link takes you to a list of other titles available from East-West Entertainment LLC, apparently all Warner Brothers properties, and as far as selecting a scene, well, there are three of them.

That's right. "The Hobbit" is broken into three chapters, each untitled, and even the Daffy Duck scene selector doesn't let you choose a specific cartoon to start at. It's section one, two or three, and try your luck figuring out where the girls were when you turned it off.

Still, they were a buck, and there are no commercials to skip through. I can deal with it.

Spielberg's 'Hook' (1991)

Tonight we introduced our girls to Peter Pan and the world of Steven Spielberg's "Hook?"

Released in 1991 and featuring Robin Williams as Peter Pan and Dustin Hoffman as his titular foe, "Hook" spins the Peter Pan story on its head. Instead of a boy who won't grow up, "Hook" portrays a grown-up Peter Pan who has forgotten what it was like to be a boy. Now he has to return to Never Never Land and rescue his kids from Hook, who has kidnapped them.

It's not exactly Spielberg's best, but it's a kid-friendly movie and we have it on DVD, and since we were all feeling sick, we decided to watch it.

For the first 30 minutes or so, as the movie sets up the whole premise, the girls were uninterested. Evangeline practically fell asleep on her Spider-Man futon, and Rachel started playing with one of the educational toys that is supposed to help her learn her numbers.

They finally got into it when Tinkerbell showed up and dragged Peter Pan back to Never Never Land. By the time Peter Pan's memory started to return, they were hooked. Evangeline was drawing a picture in full color of Tinkerbell flying above the lagoon, while mermaids sun themselves on a rock and a pirate ship sails through the background.

The best part came at the end, when Hook and Peter Pan got into their duel and the giant crocodile fell over and ate Hook. Rachel, who had been drawing a picture of the crocodile, was horrified.

For about 20 minutes after the movie, she kept complaining how mean it was that the crocodile ate Captain Hook, and it shouldn't have done that. Natasha tried to explain that Captain Hook was a bad man and the crocodile did it because Peter Pan wouldn't, and we tried explaining that it was just a pretend story with actors and no one was really eaten by anything, but Rachel wasn't having any of it.
It was not nice that the crocodile had eaten someone, and it shouldn't have done that. I even offered to help her write a letter to Dustin Hoffman, saying that she didn't want him to be eaten by a crocodile, but she wouldn't budge. Crocodiles shouldn't eat people, and that's that.

(She finally resolved the crisis by drawing a picture of Hook running away from the crocodile in time.)

I'm glad she feels this way -- like when Evangeline decided she wanted the Cinderella stories to have Cinderella living in a big room, and her stepsisters and stepmother treating her nicely. It shows that Rachel is developing the emotive skills to realize how someone else feels -- but man, this is going to eliminate a lot of children's entertainment if she really feels this way.

Are there any Disney movies that don't have someone getting killed? A boulder falls on the queen in "Snow White," Ursula gets stabbed with a ship in "The Little Mermaid," Mufasa is stampeded to death by wildebeest in "The Lion King," and even Bambi's mom gets hit by a pickup and turned to roadkill.

No one dies in "Pinocchio" (well, except for the title character, but he gets better), but it gave me nightmares as a kid when I saw all those kids turn into Democrats on Pleasure Island, particularly the one who can still talk as they're being shoved into crates and packed off to the salt mines.

Heck, even Daffy Duck gets shot in the face and blown up with dynamite at least seventeen times in an eight-minute short. ("Elmer Fudd shouldn't have shot Daffy like that, mommy.")

The other odd thing I noticed is Rachel's choice of favorites. When she watched "Shrek," last year, she made that her nickname and even insisted "I ogre!" After Evangeline discovered the joys of Spider-Man, Rachel decided she wanted to be the Green Goblin. And now that we've shown her "Hook," she identifies with James Hook.

It makes me afraid to let her watch "Jesus Christ Superstar."

le phantom de l'opera

Well, my wife and I finally saw the "Phantom of the Opera" on DVD, and I have to say that, despite my initial concerns when I saw it was a Joel Schumacher film, I was impressed.

"Phantom" is arguably one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's finest musicals, along with "Jesus Christ Superstar." It tells the story of an impressionable chorus girl named Christine Daae who receives musical instruction from an unseen Angel of Music who turns out to be a brilliant but dangerous man who lives inside the Opera Populaire, and whose presence and actions have given birth to the legends of a ghost who haunts the opera. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, the musical is a neat blend of the Faust legend with the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast.

I read Leroux's novel in September 1992, when I was living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and saw the musical at Pantages Theater in Toronto in 1994 with my family. Lloyd Webber made some drastic changes to the story (as is to be expected), moving a few scenes around, eliminating Raoul's older brother, and combining the character of the Persian detective with Madame Giry, who manages the chorus girls.

Still, even though Lloyd Webber eliminated Leroux's twists and turns as Raoul descends into the opera house to find Christine, he made one hell of a musical. Despite my initial disappointment at the changes in the story, the soundtrack became one of my favorites pretty quickly, enough that my wife knew the soundtrack long before she ever saw the musical performed. (Which would be the other night, incidentally, on DVD.)

I'm usually leery of watching musicals put on film. The two media don't blend well, in my opinion; you can suspend your disbelief in Jean Valjean's singing his innermost thoughts on stage, but it's kind of hard when you see him do it on screen. One of film's great strengths is its illusion of realism, just as the stage excels at provoking the imagination.

Well, Schumacher got around that problem somewhat by adding a few bits of dialogue, such as when the old manager of the opera house introduces Carlotta to the new owners of the opera house, or other character-building bits that come out in snippets of dialogue. A few of the shorter exchanges that in the libretto are done to music, like when Christine begs Raoul not to make her play the bait in a mousetrap they're setting for the Phantom, Schumacher instead had delivered as dialogue. Unfortunately, I thought these came off as kind of weak, since the words have a lyrical rhythm to them that remained, so they sounded like lyrics being recited rather than lines delivered.

That was pretty minor, though. The casting was excellent, and the woman who played Christine absolutely blew the rest of the cast away, with the two fortunate exceptions of the actors playing Raoul and the Phantom. Schumacher also moved a few scenes around -- such as Christine's visit to her father's grave, which in the movie comes right after the Phantom delivers his opera score during the Masquerade, and not right before the performance of the opera -- and did it in such a way that I felt it actually enhanced the flow of the story.

The biggest change of all, though, was the falling chandelier. In Leroux's novel, the Phantom drops it about halfway through the book, a lead that Lloyd Webber followed, since it corresponds with the end of the first act. Schumacher followed the lead of the other cinematic adaptations of Leroux's novel, though, and moved the chandelier-dropping scene to a more climactic moment, namely, the abduction of Christine.

In other words, everything happens all at once. The Phanton kills the tenor Piangi and takes his place on stage, where no one in their right mind would expect him to be. Christine unmasks him at the end of a very racy "Past the Point of No Return," and he drops the chandelier and makes his escape as the theater catches fire and Raoul chases. It's much more intense this way, and it makes Firmin's lament "We're ruined, André, ruined!" less comical than it's always seemed to me in the musical.

The woman who played Christine in the movie was absolutely tremendous. It's not just the vocals, which are understandably a challenge for any soprano, it's her acting too. She absolutely nailed Christine's characterization dead-on, with the wavering between Raoul and the Phantom, and the powerful draw she feels for each man.

Excellent movie, really. I suppose we shall have to buy a copy at some point.

the rise and fall of the american empire

A friend of mine from my biweekly D&D sessions sent me a lengthy piece from CTheory that analyzes political, social and economic trends in the United States today, and looks ahead to the next fifty years. It's a fascinating essay, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of it either. It's fairly lengthy and not as readable as one would wish for something this complex. I definitely see the power to what the author is saying, though, on several points:

• America has become a nation of consumers rather than producers. Our industry has been outsourced to other countries, and many "American" businesses are, more truthfully, multinational companies with assets so widely scattered it's hardly fair to say that they're American in the sense that originally would have meant. Our factories are in Mexico and China, our tech support comes from India, and plenty of other intellectual services, such as architecture, have been outsourced to places like Egypt, where the knowledge comes more cheaply than from a place here in the U.S.; and even our food is grown all over the world. It makes shareholders happy when the bottom line is blacker, but it makes us progressively less capable to provide for ourselves. As fuel costs continue to soar, we can expect the price of the goods we consume to rise also, and we'll have little alternative,since we've shut down our factories, developed our farms, and outsourced everything else.
• Our economy is riding an inflated bubble, and we're probably facing another Depression in the next ten years. Savings reached zero percent this year, and people are borrowing like crazy to get everything. It's a "standard of living" issue, but our standard of living is preposterous, with the things we "need." The writer notes -- and I agree -- that we've inverted the Protestant work ethic that made our nation what it is (or was). Instead of working hard with a delayed gratification, we've opted for a model of instant gratification where we get what we want now, even if we don't need it, and spend the next twenty or thirty years working our way out of debt. We do this not just with houses, but with cars, education, appliances, entertainment and pretty much everything else we buy. That's unsound economics, as anyone who remembers Black Friday in 1987 will attest.
• We're ignoramuses of our own history and culture. I actually thought this was an interesting stament in the piece you sent, since the author makes the point that our pop culture is recycling itself, with remakes of old TV shows, movies and TV shows as movies, a la "Dukes of Hazard." Part of this is the dimming of the American mind, to be sure, but it also hearkens back to the lost tradition of storytelling, where people would retell familiar stories from one generation to the next. What I gleaned from this point was that our new mass storytelling isn't connecting to our cultural heritage -- our history, Shakespeare, antiquity, the Bible -- it's connecting to recent stuff instead, and most of it fairly lightweight, like superhero movies or "Dukes of Hazzard." Rather than wrestling with the deep and troubling stories told by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo or Moses, we're going for the simple-minded morality tales of Batman fighting the Scarecrow, and the Duke boys getting the upper hand on Roscoe P. Coaltrain.

I'd have to say that I think a lot of the analysis here is dead-on, and it makes me think of a line from Alex Ross' "Uncle Sam" comic with Vertigo a few years back. Brittania, talking to Sam, recalls when she fell from glory and then adds: "Of course, when you fall, it's going to make what I went through look like a bloody cricket match."

And as the writer interprets from current events, it's not that the United States is going to fall. We've already started to topple.