Category: Movie Reviews

Dr. Phibes Meets Shakespeare REPRINT

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From December 28, 2012

Betcha didn’t know Vincent Price could do Shakespeare; but that’s what he does, in spades, in Theater of Blood (1973).

This won’t be everybody’s cup of tea because it’s… well, kind of bloody. It’s about a crazy Shakespearean actor taking revenge on drama critics: so the forms his vengeance takes are all lifted from Shakespeare’s plays. Think Julius Caesar, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus (couldn’t leave out that one!), and so on. Please bear in mind that much of Shakespeare’s work contained some rather gaudy episodes of violence. And Price gets to recite soliloquies as he murders in the flesh the critics who murdered him in print.

If you don’t mind a bit of make-believe blood and guts, Theater of Blood is off-the-wall fun. You not only get Vincent Price, but also a terrific cast with Diana Rigg, Michael Hordern, Robert Morley, Jack Hawkins, et al. I promise you, you’ve never seen Shakespeare like this before.

Watching this film will not cause you to grow spiritually; nor will it make you wiser, nor even enhance your understanding of Shakespeare. But it’ll give you some 90 minutes of fun–I mean, really, a sword-fight to the death… on trampolines? Just try to find that anywhere else.

 

Shunning Movies Made by Immoral People

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People who know me know I love the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and they’re always surprised to find out I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies. Well, I don’t want to give any of my time or any of my money to Ian MacKellan, an unrepentant homosexual who brags about defacing Bibles. He plays Gandalf. That’s something I like to forget when I read the books.

So I can appreciate what some of you are saying when you say you don’t want to watch movies made by immoral people. We all have a suspicion, though, that that would rule out most movies. If you’re looking for virtue, Hollywood is probably not the place to start.

I do try to avoid movies that I know have been made by really sleazy people. But it’s not always so simple. In fact, God sometimes uses really sleazy people to do His will on earth. Can good things be done by bad people? I think we must admit they can.

Here at Chez Leester, we have a Thanksgiving tradition of watching two movies in particular: on Friday, Godzilla vs. Megalon, and on Saturday, Miracle on 34th Street. The one movie completely takes my mind off the dreary and disturbing news that I’ve been covering all year. The second never fails to remind me that there are truths that don’t–ahem!–lend themselves to factual analysis.

I watch lots of movies, including ones in which grossly immoral people may have had a hand in making. My calling in this life is to tell stories. To do it well, I must consume stories–lots and lots of stories. There are readers who say that reading one of my books is like watching a movie. Well, you can’t even guess at the number of hours I’ve put into achieving that effect. And I couldn’t do it if I didn’t watch as many movies as I can.

Don’t get me wrong. There is sleaze that I will walk a mile to avoid. And I’ll walk at least half a mile to dodge chick flicks, Serious Mainstream Dramas About Sophisticated People With Painful Personal Problems That They Can’t Solve Because They’re Pinheads, crime movies in which every character is rotten to the core, and several other kinds.

Anyway, I think we can all be thankful that God doesn’t require us to be absolutely perfect before He can make use of us. Serving Him in any way we can is both a glory and a privilege, and even sinners get a crack at it. Who knows? It might be habit-forming.

So I Went to See the Harry Potter Movie…

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First they clobber you with commercials, all of them featuring exceptionally bad music with the volume turned up so that your bones vibrate.

Then come the previews, about a dozen of them. And they all look like the same movie! Is it my imagination, or are movies getting uglier? They previewed a new Stephen Spielberg film based on a video game, “Cowboys and Aliens,” and all the actors looked like they’d just crawled out of the gutter trying to find another drink. I guess they just don’t make movies like “Casablanca” anymore–you know: with smart dialogue, fascinating multi-dimensional characters, and an actual story line. Who needs that stuff, when you can base your movies on video games and comic books?

I’ll have much more to say about “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I,” in the review that I’ll write for Chalcedon (www.chalcedon.edu ). But here are a few short takes.

1. Why do some of the characters in this movie say “My God,” when there is no God in J.K. Rowling’s alternative universe? Correct me if I’m wrong, but what role would God play in a world where children and bad guys wield fantastic magic powers and function as gods themselves?

2. Is it my imagination, or does one of the female villains in the movie bear a striking resemblance to Hillary Clinton?

3. If there is no God in the Harry Potter world, and the good guys and the bad guys use exactly the same techniques to get their way (you can tell the bad guys from the good guys in this movie because the bad guys are even uglier than the good guys), what is the source of morality in this alternative universe?

4. Why do so many Christians, especially Christian parents, seem to have no problem with this stuff?

Once again we see that modern Christians seem perfectly content to take the culture as they find it, and make no effort to bring it under the dominion of Christ the King.

Maybe that’s why our culture is turning into a cesspool.

REPRINT Missing Aslan: A Review of the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

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You have to be careful when you try to improve a work of art. Sometimes when you gild the lily, you lose the lily.

I’m afraid this is what has happened with Prince Caspian, the second installment in the Disneyfication of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. They’ve lost the lily, and only the gilt is left. It’s pretty, but it’s not enough.

Caspian has gotten off to a good start at the box office. But then it’s only competing with movies based on comic books and video games. Even with its flaws, it can’t help being better than these.

Where’s Aslan?
As Lewis wrote them, the Narnia tales are centered on the figure of Aslan, the Lion—and Aslan represents Jesus Christ the Lord. It is Aslan who gives life to Narnia and all its creatures, who draws children from our world into Narnia to carry out important missions: who, by sacrificing himself on the Stone Table and then rising from the dead, is Narnia’s redeemer. Without Aslan there is no Narnia, and no Chronicles of Narnia.

But you would never get that from this retelling of Prince Caspian.

If you didn’t see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first, or read the books, you’d have no idea, from this film, who Aslan is or why he matters. You’d think he was just another fantasy creature in a fantasy world inhabited by fauns, centaurs, dwarfs, talking animals, river gods, and whatnot.

Aslan’s in this film, of course, but the filmmakers have played him down. This is where they’ve lost the lily they were at such pains to gild.

They should not have assumed that the audience, especially the children in it, already knows all about Aslan. Some will surely never have seen or heard of him before.

But even if that assumption were correct, Aslan is still the most important person in the story, and should have been treated as such. No direct mention is made here of his atoning sacrifice. If you didn’t know about it from another source, you won’t learn about it in Prince Caspian.

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Joe Collidge’s Movie Review REPRINT

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Image result for images of idiot man dressed as woman

I seen This movie yestadday it “was” in Gender Studies class and it was jist apsolotely grate!! only i cant rebember what “it” was callled. Aslo i cant rember whoo was in it but It was abuot some guy he Got his self turned into A wimmin and al Her fammly thay got Mad at waht she done And “so” thay made a Lot “of” micro-gresions aginst Her! and thatt was becose thay al ware no-good stopid christins.

Wel “let me” tel yiu that storey it got me good and mad! Wen yiu get yore selff turned into a Wimmin evryboddy has got To afirm yiu and cellerbrate waht yiu done! Hear at Collidge us Interllecturals we has maid sure “that” noboddy even aloud to Say annything hatful wen “someboddy” thay gett a Gender Change and if yiu dosnt say It “is” goood yiu gets Put inta Diversity Training!!!

Gee i wish I culd rember Waht was the Tietal of “that” movie but when thay showed The tietal thare was Somthing rong with My Moth Antenners thay was itchin somthing feerce and i jist keeped scrachin and scrachin butt “it” wuldnt stopp!! Wel yiu cann fiend out More abuot “this” movie Iff yiu go to Collidge and sine up For Gender Studies becose fromm Now “on” evryone hear has got “to” see it and wee “wil” make It a “New Rule” that yiu has to say its Goood or else yiu bein hatful “and” Intollerent and we wil beet yiu up Until yiu larn How to bee “more” Tollerent and aslo Incluesieve!

So dont yiu Dare “miss” This movie!

And nowe My antenners thay stil ichin I got to gett Out “of” hear.

From 2016

REPRINT Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I Jan 14, 2011

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Movie Review by Lee Duigon

It’s hard to review a piece of a movie-which, for all its nearly three-hour length, is what this is. If you haven’t seen the earlier Harry Potter movies, or read the books, watching this movie will be like entering a roomful of strangers all talking about people and incidents you have never heard of. There’s no flashing back to make things clear, no explanations provided for anything. If you’re not a Harry Potter fan, you can forget about understanding this film.

So why review it, then?

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels have sold millions and millions of copies, and millions of movie tickets, too. This is the most successful series of books ever published, and it has revolutionized young readers’ fiction. It would be irresponsible to ignore it.

Because Harry Potter is such a cultural phenomenon, and this movie is a slice of it, we can look at it to see what it can tell us about our culture. What has Harry Potter taken out of our culture, and what has it put in?

Magic and Science

In the alternative universe of Harry Potter, everything important gets done by magic-or “wizarding,” as they sometimes call it. Witches, wizards, and warlocks are the elite of that world.

As a thought experiment, plug in “science” for “magic”-and you’ll see that the Harry Potter world pretty closely approximates our own. By “science” we mean what Jean-Marc Berthoud calls “the cultural domination of our whole culture by a purely mathematical model of the universe (the so-called scientific worldview, valid in fact only in its strictly limited domain, that of the measurable) as normative of every aspect of reality.”1

Materialistic “science” in our culture has excluded God. In Harry Potter-land, “magic” does the same. Given the awesome power of magic in that world, there would appear to be no place for God.

Despite various efforts to spin the Potter books as some obscure kind of Christian enterprise, we see no evidence at all in Deathly Hallows I that there is any Christianity at work in any of the characters’ lives, or any other recognizable religion, for that matter. Yes, there is one brief scene in which we see a village church with people inside it singing Christmas carols. What of it? Millions of Americans celebrate Christmas as a generic holiday and are dead to its religious significance. And every now and then, a character in the movie says, “my God.” But that doesn’t mean that they believe in God. For millions of Americans, “God” and even “Jesus” are just words to be tossed casually into a sentence, stripped of all meaning.

J. K. Rowling has been accused of promoting witchcraft. But I think it important to note that in Deathly Hallows I, there is no hint of any power higher than that of the magician. Paganism is supposed to feature pagan gods and goddesses, but we see no gods here. The world of Harry Potter much more closely resembles the fantasy world of The Humanist Manifesto II than it does anything in paganism. Take the Humanist Manifesto and substitute “magic” or “wizarding” for words like “science” and “technology,” and you will instantly find yourself in Harry Potter’s universe.2

Thus we discover that Rowling is not promoting paganism. Wittingly or not, she is promoting humanism.

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Chronicles of Narnia III: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

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The young king sails into unknown waters seeking seven lords, loyal men driven into perpetual exile by a villainous usurper. To accomplish the mission, the king has to journey to the very edge of the world, surviving deadly perils and witnessing miracles.

That’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as C. S. Lewis wrote it. But that’s not the story you’ll be seeing on the screen.

Maybe, if you’ve never read the book, or seen the BBC-TV rendition of the story, you’ll be perfectly satisfied with this film. It opened strong at the box office, it has a fine cast, all the special effects you could desire-and it’s in 3-D, too.

In spite of all these things going for it, Dawn Treader misses the mark. By how much, the audience will decide.

Old Errors Out, New Errors In

What went wrong?

The second movie in this series, Prince Caspian, was a disappointment. It had some major problems, which have been corrected.

Ben Barnes returns as Caspian, but a very different Caspian. Prince Caspian should have been introduced to us as an idealistic boy in his early teens, but somebody in charge of such things in Movie No. 2 decided to present him to us as some kind of smoldering hunk, a Narnian Fabio. This was so they could hint at a romance between Caspian and Queen Susan. Yick.

In Dawn Treader, even though he now sports a beard, Barnes gives us a younger, fresher, more innocent Caspian, thus proving that the foolishness in Movie No. 2 was not his fault (and also proving he’s a marvelous actor).

Georgie Henley returns as Queen Lucy, the youngest and most faithful of the Pevensie children from our own world, the first of her siblings to discover Narnia. She’s perfect in the part, just perfect. Skander Keynes is back as her brother, King Edmund. He wasn’t given much scope in Movie No. 2, but in this outing he comes into his own.

Will Poulter joins the cast as Lucy and Edmund’s cousin, Eustace. This character is supposed to start out as an obnoxious little prig whose truer, better self is brought out by the grace of God and by his experiences on the voyage. Despite being lumbered with some over-the-top dialogue, young Poulter is terrific. His body language has to be seen to be believed.

Reepicheep, the mouse version of Errol Flynn, is computer-generated. Thankfully, the makers of Movie No. 3 relieved him of the inane dialogue he spouted in No. 2.

The silliness that marred Prince Caspian has been taken out of the sequel. We also get magic swords, a sea-monster, a dragon, sword-fights, a book of magic spells and whatnot, all of it convincingly executed on screen and backed up by excellent performances. So what’s not to like?

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Are We in Narnia Yet?

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I have been to see “Chronicles of Narnia III: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” and it makes me fear for the future of this series of movies. I’ll be writing a full review for www.chalcedon.edu , so this is just a preview. (Hint: When you go to the movies these days, arrive late enough to miss the commercials and the previews. You’ll be glad you did!)

“Dawn Treader” has received mixed reviews so far (not a good sign). Apparently a lot of the reviewers don’t know the story as C.S. Lewis wrote it, and are blissfully unaware that the story has been radically changed. In fact, they changed so much of it, I wondered why they bothered to make the movie at all.

Why, why, why do they do that when they make a movie? If C.S. Lewis’ story was so inadequate as he wrote it, why would you want to make a movie out of it in the first place?

And then we’ve got Liam Neeson, who provides the voice for Aslan in these films, flapping his jaw in public about how Aslan isn’t just Jesus Christ, he’s also Mohammed and Buddha, blah-blah… How stupid can you get?

Bowled Over by a Movie Classic

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It’s embarrassing to compare our current popular culture with what we used to have. Our movies today seem to be based on the presumption that people stop growing, mentally, once they reach the age of 11 or 12: so every other movie has to be based on a comic book, or some really stupid gimmick like a foul-mouthed, dirty-minded teddy bear. For those who insist that they are adults, we have movies about boring, silly people in which nothing much happens.

Yesterday, at home, we watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), with its ho-hum cast of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin, Ed O’Brien, et al. It’d cost a billion dollars to assemble such a cast today. They save money by using bad actors, animatronic thingamabobs, and cartoons.

In case you have not seen this jewel, this treasure, this marvel of a movie, I won’t spoil it for you by giving away the plot. Suffice it to say that it’s not what you expect! And to carry along the dazzlingly innovative storyline, you have superb performances from every member of the cast. They have to be good performances because the actors are actually playing complex, interesting characters and making you believe in them. I mean, I got so cheesed off at John Carradine, I could hardly contain myself.

Here is a movie that will jangle your emotions, make you think, and stay in your memory for as long as you live–and it didn’t even get an Oscar (except for best costuming: Edith Head, as usual).  Somehow I doubt a Kardashian-based civilization can produce anything like this. Bloody comic books…

Next! Previews of Coming Attractions

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1950s ANIMATION WS Marquee proclaiming "Coming Attractions ...

G’day, boys ‘n’ gulls! Byron the Quokka here, holding the fort for Lee in case he feels better later and releases our new TV listings. We’ve gotta be careful with those: the big networks are always trying to steal ’em.

A duck-billed platypus named Izod says CNN has offered him all the worms he can eat if he joins their nooze team. We know better, from way back! It’d serve them right if they gave him a whopping big contract and only then found out what an infernal liar and twaddle artist he really is.

I say that meaning no disrespect.

See you all late this afternoon… maybe.