The Light of the World The Light of the World ...
Traditionally, Jack Chick Publications produce baseball-card-sized religious comic books. Who would have guessed they would make the feel-good movie of the year?
Their DVD debut, The Light of the World, is a series of paintings strung together under voiceover narration, similar to a Ken Burns documentary. It's a hodgepodge of Biblical and Chick comic book storylines, presented in lurid color and jarring voiceover. The movie is creepy and obviously aimed at elementary school children; imagine Mr. Rogers reading Slayer lyrics.
The first chapter is a goofy retelling of Genesis. Adam is nondescript; Eve is an idealized 50s housewife, all round, rosy-cheeked and pleasantly vacant. Satan is a rainbow-colored snakeman who could work nights as a comic book villain. Eve gets Vampirella's eyebrows after she eats the plum-tomato-like fruit of evil.
After that, Satan controls the world. The art looks like an old Iron Maiden album cover. A hood-wearing Satan, with yellow eyes, red skin and chaotically set fangs and horns holds the Earth in his hands. After that, the Old Testament is condensed into a series of gory whipping scenes, thorny stakes and bulbous open wounds.
Cut to present day when a narrator informs us that "the whole world is filled with liars, thieves and fornicators" with the forced-sounding awe of the voiceover for a Christmas-themed McDonald's commercial. This section is called "This was your life" and is based on the Chick tract of the same name. It tells the story of a man who thought he lived a decent life, but finds himself condemned for eternity to hell.
But what a hell it is! It's a feast of explosions of blood, cross-species monsters, huge dragon snakes and great, glowing orange eyes. Jack T. Chick LLC really gets off on gore, pain and blood. Later in the movie, Jesus' face looks like a bloody stump when the Roman guard spits on him.
The bulk of the film relates the life of Christ. Satan plays the most active part in the story, conspiring to have Jesus born in Bethlehem and tricking Judas into betraying the Son of God. Jesus and the Devil are like Batman and the Joker, except that Jesus is almost totally passive in the plot Satan sets in motion.
The last chapter, "Invitation to Receive Christ," is the money shot. Until then, the movie has been Chick-lite, but with the image of an 80-foot Satan leaning on the UN, the floodgates are officially open. Satan, it seems, controls an axiomatically corrupt ruling system, with part of that ruling system being false religions. The religions include Buddhism (the Buddha's dead and can't protect us), Islam (Mohammad rejected Jesus' love and turned to Satan) and Roman Catholicism (false idols). There is no "I'm okay, you're okay" in the Chick philosophy. You people are going to hell if you don't start sprinting in the direction of Jesus?but quick!
This movie is perfect for parties and for playing on onstage monitors at death-metal shows. But it needs to be watched at home first. Pay close attention. This is the best comic book adaptation to date, and I can't wait for the sequel.
?Adam Bulger
Plus, for better or for worse, most of the new films approach Godzilla as if none of the previous films existed. They've done away with the established mythology in order to develop their own. In one we learn that Godzilla is a female. In another, that his/her heart is actually a nuclear reactor. In still another, that he's possessed by the spirits of all the Japanese soldiers who died during WWII.
In Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (one of three newly released titles) we learn that Godzilla has only stomped all over Japan three times in the past half-century (instead of, you know, 40): in 1954, 1966 and 1996. And he showed up each time to feed off the nuclear power plants. This has led the Japanese government to stop using nuclear energy, and to create an anti-Godzilla task force called the "G-Graspers."
The G-Graspers conclude that the best way to get rid of Godzilla forever is to suck him up into one of the mini black holes they've been developing in their labs. (Which isn't so far-fetched?physicists really are working on such things.) Unfortunately, the first test releases a horde of big prehistoric dragonflies, and later a giant nasty one called Megaguirus.
With the dragonflies causing problems and Godzilla on his way again for some reason and Tokyo inexplicably flooded, the G-Graspers launch a black-hole gun into orbit. From orbit, see, they'd be able to fire a mini black hole with pinpoint accuracy anywhere on Earth. You can pretty much guess where things go from there.
The final wrestling match is very old school, and one of the best in years. In fact, the movie as a whole is awfully entertaining (love Godzilla as I do, I haven't had the patience with some of these more recent outings). Best news of all about the disc, though, is that Columbia Tristar has finally come to their senses. In the past when Godzilla movies arrived in America, they were chopped all to hell to make them more palatable to American audiences. After the Godzilla 2000 butcher job, though, they've started simply dumping the Japanese versions onto disc, adding subtitles and releasing them widescreen. It's the best damn thing they could do.
?Jim Knipfel
Even though Spielberg was widely quoted as saying he made the film in b&w because that's how he thought about WWII, his other Second World War movies, 1941 and Saving Private Ryan, prove otherwise. Schindler's List confronts the Nazi extermination camps so boldly and with such esthetic honesty because Spielberg was surely responding to Alain Resnais' classic documentary essay Night and Fog (1958) which studied the historical event of the Holocaust in startling color. Spielberg needed a purer pallette. Resnais' movie had been considered definitive due to the way it simultaneously reported and reflected. Spielberg's narrative mastery achieves both effects in fictional form. The rousting of the Warsaw ghetto is an example of montage-editing that is almost as brilliantly complex (and self-referential) as the letters sequence in The Color Purple.
Schindler's List isn't agenda filmmaking (although most critics praised it as that). Spielberg has never separated serious purpose from the art of storytelling (although most critics have trouble seeing the ethical quandary that is knowingly presented in films like Jurassic Park and Minority Report). Schindler's List transcends the special pleading that customarily inspires WWII movies and makes even a lousy one like Life Is Beautiful such Oscar bait. Yet, it is also a perfectly honorable presentation of issues that the filmmaker finds meaningful and crucial. He fortunately found a readily receptive culture.
In a coincidence that someone has termed "counter-programming," Schindler's List gets its first-time DVD release in the midst of debate over The Passion of the Christ. However, the coincidence helps to clarify what lofty motivations and admirable skill the films share. Spielberg's powerful train scene between separated mothers and children recalls Gibson's Via Dolorosa scene in which Mary flashes back to a childhood moment when her motherly protection was sufficient. Both scenes work as historical memory and human memory; they're as potent as anything in Griffith. They connect all faiths. Sincerity in movie art has become rare, but it's never coincidental.
?Armond White
The film's title is deliberately possessive, naming a place and expressing a degree of ownership over it. Rather than an expression of Palestinian nationalism, Wedding in Galilee is, for the most part, a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Palestinian and Israeli lives are inextricably intertwined. Israeli soldiers rhapsodize over the food they ate in Aleppo, Syria, and an older Palestinian man, asked by a soldier if he feels well, responds, "baruch Hashem" (Hebrew for "thank God"). The fractious relationship between the two nations living side by side is poetically expressed by Khleifi in a powerful sequence in which the mukhtar's horse has broken free and is running loose in a mined field. The Tarkovskian mysteriousness of this poisoned ground speaks volumes about the tangled affiliations on display here.
The younger Palestinian generation is differentiated from their elders by their Westernized dress and more traditionalist, fundamentalist ideology. In contrast with the strained but stable truce of their fathers with the Israeli presence in their lives, the young men lean toward choosing violence and conflict, pondering an attack on the Israelis at the wedding. The soldiers invited to the ceremony, while somewhat sympathetic, are depicted as highly similar in looks, and by implication, outlook?they are all nappy hair and mirrored sunglasses. Meanwhile, the young turks are in love with the idea of themselves as revolutionaries, neglecting to take into account the fact that they will endanger the lives of their families and friends in the process.
In the end, no one is hurt, and the only bruises are the mental ones of a tense, trying day. The sense of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a powder keg waiting for the most propitious moment to ignite, though, is one that calls with the intonation of undeniable truth, standing where we do 17 years later. And as the soldiers leave the wedding ceremony, surrounded by two identical rows of chanters tossing various items in their path, it remains unclear whether they are being feted as honored guests or disdained as foreign invaders. For this one day, disaster was averted, but other, later days would tell different stories.
?Saul Austerlitz