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1915: Art and Entertainment

Sep25

On March 3, 1915 the D.W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation premiered in New York City. It was three hours long, a silent movie about the Civil War and Reconstruction, and many critics thought then and many still do that the film itself was a masterpiece of cinematic art.

However, the film is also racist and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan while portraying black people as foolish at best, violent and sexually predatory at worst. The movie’s heroes are Klansmen who rescue the innocent young Lillian Gish, daughter of the Confederacy, from the evil black men, played by white actors in black-face make-up, who intend to despoil her.

Film critic Roger Ebert: “Certainly The Birth of a Nation (1915) presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet.”

I find it difficult, if not impossible, to separate a work of art from its message. If a piece of music or a painting or a film or a book, says something that is evil or depraved, then it may well be worth viewing or reading in order to understand how some people think—if the person consuming the art is able to remain untainted and unswayed by the message. However, a work of art cannot be truly “good” if its intent is evil, no matter how technically adept and talented the artist.

What is your opinion about “good” art with an evil intent or message?

1914: The Arts and Entertainment

Sep18

'Charlie Chaplin' photo (c) 2007, Fr. Dougal McGuire - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/'Mary Pickford' photo (c) 2008, bunky's pickle - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/British-born comedian Charlie Chaplin and Canadian Mary Pickford are the stars of Hollywood’s silent pictures. Charlie Chaplin makes his first appearance as The Tramp in 1914’s Kid Auto Races at Venice.

In December 1914, cartoonist Johnny Gruelle paints a face on his daughter’s faceless rag doll and invents the Raggedy Ann doll. You can read Raggedy Ann Stories by Johnny Gruelle here at Project Gutenberg.

Movies Set In the First Decade of the Twentieth Century: 1900-1909

Aug27

Lagaan (2001). Bollywood movie actually set in 1893, but it shows the cultural mileau of India under British rule. Warning: it’s long, with subtitles, but well worth the time.

Finding Neverland stars Johnny Depp as playwright James Barrie. I wrote about my initial impressions of the movie here. I would like to see the move again, and I think it might make a better impression the second time around.

Miss Potter (2006). Fictionalized biography of authoress Beatrix Potter.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Musical set in St. Louis, Missouri during the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Another classic musical set in Tsarist Russia in 1905.

How Green Was My Valley. Based on a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, this film features a Welsh family and the mining community in which they live around the turn of the century. the movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941.

Yankee Doodle Dandy. Biopic about American songwriter and composer George M. Cohan, starring James Cagney as Cohan. The song “Yankee Doodle Boy” was Cohan’s signature piece as a composer and as a song-and-dance man himself who performed his own work. The film came out in 1942, and production began on it just a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. So the movie was purposefully patriotic to the max in order to lift the spirits of an American audience headed into war.

The Winslow Boy. We just watched this movie, set in Britain and based on a true story, yesterday. Well, I watched, and the urchins fell asleep. It’s not an exciting or fast-moving plot-driven picture. However, the script and the setting are intriguing. The story is about an upper middle class family who sacrifice everything—their savings, the daughter’s upcoming marriage, the older son’s career—to defend the honor of the younger son who is accused of stealing a five shilling postal order and is expelled from military school. The boy, Ronnie, says he didn’t do it, and the family honor is at stake. Such a different world, different values. You can read more about the movie, the play by Terrence Rattigan, and the historical incident that Rattigan mined for his play at Wikipedia.

My twentieth century history students are supposed to choose one of these movies set in the first decade of the century to watch and then write a reflection paper (kind of like a blog post, at least like my blog posts) about the movie. Which one would you suggest to them if they asked your advice? Do you have any other suggestions for movies set in this time period?

Sunday Salon: Prequels and Sequels and Films, Oh, My!

Apr16

Frank Cottrell Boyce will be writing a trilogy based on Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: “The new story is about a family where the father has been made redundant and sets about trying to reconstruct a VW Camper Van. He unwittingly uses the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang engine for the camper van, which has its own agenda, to restore itself.”

Newbery Award winner Patricia MacLachlan has signed up with Albert Whitman & Company to write a prequel for Gertrude Chandler Warner‘s popular series, The Boxcar Children. I hope her prequel is better than the awful sequels/series extenders (over 100 of them) that were written and published starting in the 1990’s. Only the first nineteen books in the series were written by Gertrude Chandler Warner, and only those nineteen are worth the time as far as I’m concerned.

Walden Media announced that they will adapt The Magician’s Nephew next in the film adaptation of the Narnia series. I don’t know why they’re skipping over The SIlver Chair, but I would imagine that The Horse and His Boy, with its vaguely Arabic-culture villains would be way too controversial.

And Peter Jackson has finally started filming on his version of The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I say, “Hooray for The Hobbit! Long live Bilbo Baggins!”

The King’s Speech, the account of King George VI’s stuttering problem that won the Academy Award for best picture, is coming out in a PG-13 version in April. The original was rated R because of a scene in which the struggling king uses some crude and profane language to try to overcome his stammering. I thought, despite the language which is mostly confined to that one scene, the movie was wonderful, and it would quite inspiring for Christian young people to see the persistence and character exemplified in this story.

Some tips on How to Read a Classic (Novel) at A Library Is a Hospital for the Mind. Sarah makes these suggestions in relation to reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, but her ideas are adaptable for most classic novels. Good stuff. Challenge yourself.

We’ve been watching mostly TV shows on Netflix here at the Semicolon household: Larkrise to Candleford and Psych. That’s an interesting combination.

The Movies of January 2011

Jan31

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Semicolon review here.

Stone of Destiny. Recommended by HG at The Common Room. I enjoyed this movie based on a true incident in 1950 when four Scots student stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey and returned it to Scotland from whence it came back in the thirteenth century.

Bright Star. Also recommended by HG at The Common Room. Based on the life, romantic entanglements, and death of Romantic poet John Keats. This one was a little too sad and hopeless for my tastes; I think I’m developing a prejudice against all Romantic poets. They were all so emo, which I guess was the point.

Les Miserables in Concert. An old favorite that we enjoyed together as a family.

Celtic Thunder: Christmas. We didn’t get this one until after Christmas, but we watched (and swooned) and sang along anyway.

The urchins watched other things, too. They (we?) watch too many movies. I’m working on that issue.

You Are What You See: Watching Movies Through a Christian Lens by Scott Nehring

Jan20

The author begins this book about the Christian’s attitude toward movies with his conversion as an adult to the truth of Christianity and his life-changing encounter with near-death as he experienced a heart attack in the lobby of his bank. Mr. Nehring then shares that he is and has always been a film geek. Great introduction.

Then, in what is called “Section 1” of the book, we get almost 100 pages of what’s wrong with Hollywood. This first section of the book felt repetitive to me and can be summarized in this quote taken from chapter 8:

“Though many filmmakers may not recognize this desire for God, they know how to take advantage of it. The creation of figureheads, heroes, and celebrities is central to everything they produce. These products, in turn, attempt to fill our need for the Lord’s guidance. . . . When people remove God from their lives, they must replace Him with something. Just as generations have done for eons, we replaced Him with ourselves. It is not too late for us to learn from those previous generations that this is a bad idea.
We may try to remove God from our lives, but that does not mean we will not miss Him. What distracts us from God can never replace Him.”

True stuff, and Mr. Nehring is repeating a message that our culture needs to hear and that I need to be reminded of. Nevertheless, Section 2 of this book, entitled “The Structure of Film: Seeing What’s Right in Front of You,” was the part that I most enjoyed.

Each story begins with a Central Question—Will the boy get the girl? Can the hero learn to forgive? Can you fight city hall? The hero struggles through various trials on his way to learning the moral of the story—and in that ending we see the Answer to the Central Question.

This section continues by giving the reader an introduction to plot development, story arc or structure, heroes, villains, and other archetypes. This exposition of how characters and plot work together to produce a good story, either in print or on film, is the meat of the book. Even though I’ve seen some of this material before in other places (books about writing), Mr. Nehring brings a coherent voice and style to his explanations, and he also includes a wealth of examples from all the movies he has seen and analyzed. The author says that after reading this section of the book you will never watch movies in the same way again; you will see where the story is going and often be able to predict what will happen next and why. You will be intrigued by the choices the screenplay writer and the director made, and a bad movie or story will be seen as bad for a reason: it doesn’t follow the unconscious “rules” that we expect to see in a satisfying work of fiction.

I agree with Mr. Nehring’s prediction. I have been watching movies and reading in a different way since I read this book. I want to go back and review Section 2, though, because I am not as skilled as I would like to be at picking central questions (or themes), following the protagonist’s rise and fall and subsequent “resurrection,” and discerning the other character archetypes and heroic traits in any given narrative. This book is a reference tool that critics and literary and film “geeks” can use to understand the structure and meaning of the stories we are consuming. It would also be a useful source for aspiring writers of fiction, whether they be screenwriters, playwrights, short story writers, or novelists.

Section 3 of the book gives guidelines and suggestions, not rules, for Christians who want to watch movies intelligently and and grow in their discernment about which movies to watch and how to watch those that we do choose to view. Finally, Mr. Nehring’s thesis is that “movies matter. Movies impact your life every day, even if you never watch one.” If this statement is true, and I believe it is, then it behooves us as Christians living in this day and time to learn what we can about the impact of our cultural icons (movies) on us and on those around us. And since we are further commanded to be salt and light in a fallen world, You Are What You See is a good resource for Christians becoming that salt and light in the area of cinematic culture.

Scott Nehring is a film critic whose reviews have been syndicated on Reuters, USAToday, Fox News, and The Chicago Sun-TImes websites. Mr. Nehring’s reviews are available at www.GoodNewsFilmReviews.com.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: The Movie

Jan4

We just went to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, finally. It was a good movie. We saw it in 3-D, the first movie I’ve seen that way, and the action really does jump out at you and make you feel more involved. There was lots of good action, thrills and chills, and the dragon was well done and believable. There was a character named Eustace who was supposed to be annoying and somewhat comical at the same time, and the actor who played him was great. The actress who played Lucy also did a good job of playing a confused young teenage girl, and Edmund and Caspian were O.K. as rivals/friends, if somewhat wooden at times. My theory is that the Edmund and Caspian characters couldn’t figure out whether they were supposed to be best buddies or contenders for the same throne, so they got mixed up sometimes. The plot moved along at a good pace, and there were a few lines that elicited a chuckle from me and from my girls.

Unfortunately, almost the entire movie, including the characters’ names, the title, and parts of the plot, was plagiarized from a book by an Oxford don named C.S. Lewis. The book was published about fifty years ago, and the screenplay writers obviously borrowed freely from Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In fact, the best parts of the movie came straight from Lewis’s book, and the worst parts–evil green mist, magical vibrating swords, a totally out of place stowaway–were invented by whomever it was that wrote this brand new story ripped from the pages of C.S. Lewis’s classic novel.

Z-baby and I are in the process of reading The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis now, and although I hope it and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader are made into movies someday, I do hope that the people who made the movie we saw tonight don’t get hold of The Silver Chair. The silver chair would become a magic golden throne in a cave of green serpents with Eustace and Jill fighting duels with one another instead of arguing about the signs. Then, Aslan would appear and tell them to just believe in themselves and all would be magically resolved. Prince Rilian might get a bit part, and Puddleglum would be a complete clown.

If you haven’t seen The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, just re-name this movie in your head: call it Edmund and the Sea Serpent or something of the sort and enjoy it for what it is. Then, read or re-read all of the Narnia Chronicles and enjoy them for the wonderful, meaningful stories that they are.

100 Movies of Summer: North by Northwest (1959)

Jul14

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau.

Karate Kid says: The movie had a fairly interesting plot, but I didn’t like it that much because it didn’t confuse me. I thought it was predictable.

Betsy-Bee says: The movie wasn’t really scary, but it got my attention when the suspenseful parts came.

Z-baby says: It was about a guy getting mistaken for somebody else. He got drugged and arrested, and they were chasing him.

Mom says: I like North by Northwest because I like Cary Grant. And some of the scenes are unforgettable: Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) running through the corn fields to get away from the crop duster assassin, Thornhill and Eve Kendall climbing around on Mt. Rushmore, the flirting on the train and the meeting in the woods.

Some lovely dialog, too:

Thornhill: In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.

Roger Thornhill: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve Kendall: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger Thornhill: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve Kendall: Then again, she might not.

Roger Thornhill: What’s wrong with men like me?
Eve Kendall: They don’t believe in marriage.
Roger Thornhill: I’ve been married twice.
Eve Kendall: See what I mean?

Roger Thornhill: I don’t like the games you play, Professor.
The Professor: War is hell, Mr. Thornhill. Even when it’s a cold one.
Roger Thornhill: If you fellows can’t whip the VanDamm’s of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them and probably never come back, perhaps you should lose a few cold wars.
The Professor: I’m afraid we’re already doing that.

IMDB link for North By Northwest
Screen shot gallery for North by Northwest.
Buy North by Northwest at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Unforgiven (1992)

Jul12

Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: David Webb Peoples
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, RIchard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett, Frances Fisher

Mom says: When writing about the movie Red River, I said, “Dunson shoots or threatens to shoot a few men in cold blood basically for just getting in his way or challenging his authority, and that part was rather shocking to my youngest (and to me).” Now that I’ve seen Unforgiven, Red River would be a walk in the park.

Unforgiven is a western about cowboys and gunslingers, too. The movie begins with a shocking scene of graphic violence when a cowboy cuts up a prostitute’s face because she says something he doesn’t like. It get worse after that. I lost track of the body count towards the end. The language is crude, profane, and socially unacceptable. None of the characters is really very likable or sympathetic.

But what really bothered me were all the moments when I felt as if I were left hanging. I kept asking over and over again, “What the heck was that?” Why did Clint Eastwood’s character, William Munny, suddenly decide to leave his kids and go kill somebody after eight or nine years of peaceful pig-farming? Why did his friend Ned go with him? What was the significance of Little Bill’s bad carpentry? Comic relief? Or was he living in a shaky house, metaphorically speaking? Why were the prostitutes so vengeful and willing so spend so much money to get revenge? Why were two cowboys held responsible for the knife cutting when only one of them did it? What happened to the journalist fellow? Why was he in the movie at all? Why couldn’t Ned shoot at the critical moment? Why could Will shoot at all of the critical moments? Was the point of the movie that people never really change? If so, why does the Kid seem to learn from his violent act that he’s not really a killer at all?

Maybe the point of the movie was that people are crazy and unfathomable and don’t follow the movie western formulas. Although I easily can believe that, I don’t want to think about the fact that I inhabit a world in which violence and murder are so easy for some, the “unforgiven”, and so shattering and unrepeatable to others (the forgiven?). If the goal of the movie was to make me think and to turn movie conventions on their heads, Unforgiven was successful. I just don’t want to spend much time thinking about what the creators of this movie gave me to ponder–mostly a lot of unanswered questions and raw, violent brokenness and spiritual emptiness.

Key quote:

The Schofield Kid: [after killing a man for the first time] It don’t seem real… how he ain’t gonna never breathe again, ever… how he’s dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger.
Will Munny: It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid: Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.
Will Munny: We all got it coming, kid.

I don’t recommend this movie for children (rated R), and I actually felt uncomfortable with my 13-year old watching it. He lost interest fairly quickly, though. Adults who are interested in the western genre might find the movie has “redeeming qualities.” Not my favorite, but it did make me think.

IMDB link to Unforgiven.
Buy Unforgiven at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Jul8

Director: Otto Preminger
Writer: Screenplay adapted by Wendell Mayes from the novel by John D. Voelker
Starring: Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Eve Arden, Arthur O’Connell, George C. Scott

Mom says: The actors in this movie were of particular interest:

Jimmy Stewart is always good. The unassuming, but brilliant, country lawyer who outsmarts the big city sophisticates has become a cliche, but my man Stewart does the role with panache and credibility.

Lee Remick plays a beautiful and enigmatic young wanton, Laura Manion, and she has the allure to pull it off. She may be one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve ever seen. She was offered the role after first choice Lana Turner had a disagreement with director Otto Preminger.

Duke Ellington did the musical score for the movie, and he makes a cameo appearance.

George C. Scott plays prosecuting attorney, Claude Dancer. (Isn’t that a great name for a prosecutor? I wonder if it’s from the novel.) I couldn’t place him. I knew I knew him, but in this movie he’s so young. I just didn’t associate him with grizzled old Patton.

Ben Gazzara is, of course, Paul Bryan, the fugitive in Run for Your Life. In Anatomy of a Murder, Gazzara is Lt. Frederick Manion, on trial for shooting the man who raped his lovely young wife. He’s not a sympathetic character.

The movie keeps you guessing to the end. Did he or didn’t he? Was he justified? Was he insane? I thought it was a very cynical movie. Nothing is as it seems. No one can really be trusted. Defendants don’t really get exonerated as they do in Perry Mason, but rather they get off on a technicality or a mistaken doubt on the part of the jury.

Maybe that’s the way the world really is, but I prefer tales of innocence vindicated or guilt revealed and punished. I can see why it’s a good movie. Lee Remick, especially, gave a brilliant performance. The story reminded me of the perennially popular novels of John Grisham, right down to the jaded view of justice and the courtroom drama. But Grisham is more hopeful somehow.

The only hopeful thing about this movie was Jimmy Stewart’s indefatigable and irrepressible attitude. You just can’t keep a good man down.

I read the first chapter of Anatomy of a Murder by (Judge) John D. Voelker here. I might like to read the rest of it someday and compare it to the movie.

Link to Anatomy of a Murder at IMDB.
Buy Anatomy of a Murder at Amazon.