Faith through Film and Fiction

This week i watched No Country For Old Men for the book to film category. I actually started watching the movie a couple of weeks prior because i wanted to watch it at the time. Overall, i really liked the movie. It did a great job of holding a continuous and tense narrative while tracking the 3 main sets of people hunting each other down. The scenes with the antagonist are quiet and brutal, and the camera is in no hurry to get anywhere, just like the serial killer himself. The tone of the movie is reflected by each character's personality in terms of camera speed and ambient noise during each scene. I would absolutely recommend watching this movie with the stipulation that it's best seen not in a group. The movie's ambiance will certainly be lost if a large group is watching due to the tension that comes from the large amount of silence in the movie. I'd also like to read the book that the film was made after. 9/10.

         For this week's book-to-film theme I was deciding between Goodfellas and this film. To me, this plot sounded slightly more interesting, so I decided to watch this. This is one of my favorite movies I have watched for this class this year. It is charming, sad, and hopeful all at the same time. It examines some interesting themes involving criminal rehabilitation and the question "what is truly crazy?" It was interesting to see things like how many of the patients at the mental hospital were actually there voluntarily. After doing a bit of research online, I found that the original text of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was told from the point of view of the Chief. The author was apparently so angry that the movie didn't follow this that he refused to ever watch the film. I found this interesting, and it made me think about how people always argue over whether the movie or book version of a story is better. I also wonder how much author-director discrepancy delays the making of movies. As far as the story goes, this movie kept me intrigued the entire time. It is a fairly long film, but I was actually disappointed when I got near the end of the film and saw that I only had a few more minutes of watching this gang of misfits. The acting in this film is superb. It won five large Academy Awards, all of which were very deserving. Nicholson delivered a classic role that anyone could feel connected to. Danny Devito played a perfect Martini, and I could not imagine the role being played better. The actors/actresses of Billy, Nurse Ratched, and Turkle's roles also stood out to me. The cinematography in this film was interesting, as many of the most important camera angles showed the idea of a "crazy mental hospital" perfectly. Some of these involved showing patients doing crazy things in the background, or watching blank televisions in the World Series scene. Also, there were many shots of Jack Nicholson's facial expressions that revealed more than any dialogue could have. In all, I would absolutely recommend that all see this movie. It is a classic, and with good reason. I give it 9 cigarettes out of 10.

I was hoping I would never have to say this but for my film this week I watched Allegiant. As a disclaimer I really didn't want to see this movie but I got outvoted. I went in expecting this movie to be absolutely horrible, but I was pleasantly surprised by the first few scenes, which presented a really interesting and surprisingly intelligent message on retribution, show trials, and repeating other people's mistakes. I found myself really engaged and thinking to myself that maybe all the reviews were wrong, and maybe this would be a pretty good film, and then everything hit the fan. It was at this moment that everything simply stopped making much sense. The protagonists resolve to leave the city, which is apparently forbidden on pain of death for lord knows why. They then break Tris' brother out of jail in broad daylight with everyone there, and when confronted by the guards, Four just shoves him into a ditch and pretends to shoot him, and the guards suddenly lose all suspicion and just keep on walking. Then Caleb pops up, they produce official travel papers that they somehow managed to procure, and just waltz on out until someone finally figures it out and tries to stop them. After attempting to cut through a very clearly electrified fence and one of them nearly dying, Tris runs down and blows up the power generator(that they paid no mind to five minutes earlier) in a cheesy slow motion explosion that gave me painful Michael Bay flashbacks. Then they climb back up, one of the protagonists dies, but its the most unemotional death scene of all time and I'm not entirely sure why I'm supposed to care since I'm not emotionally invested in that character at all. They wander aimlessly through the void, and it seems like there's no one until they very predictably run into super advanced people who save them from the dictator lady's goons(I still have no idea why they care so much about stopping these guys other than as a way the filmmakers could create tension). Then they go to some crazy wonderland where Tris completely sells herself on following this shady guy who everyone seems to hate and won't divulge his motives or even speak to anyone but Tris(spoiler alert, he turns out to be a bad guy). And this sequence really highlights the two painfully glaring issues in what I will loosely define as a plot. Everybody in this movie is so stupid and gullible, and every single betrayal and "plot" twist can be seen coming from miles away. So Tris is very easily fooled by this guy who's abducting children and wants to (I think) release a forgetting serum on the whole of Chicago. And this brings me to point number two, the motives of the bad guys in this movie don't make any sense at all. I cannot for the life of me explain why on earth the main bad guy wants to make everyone in Chicago forget everything. By the same token I have no idea why some of his followers help the protagonist(or why he is so blind as to not figure it out). And in all of this the political story of a power struggle and trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, the only coherent, intelligent, and captivating plot line in the whole film, is completely left aside until it's almost over and is still only serving to support the utterly ridiculous main plot line(as the dictator lady is very obviously manipulated and betrayed by a guy serving the main bad guy David on an obviously fake promise of reward). Ultimately, Tris defeats the main threat of the movie but shooting a machine and stopping the gas(which apparently has not done anything in the 10 minutes or so its been in the air), and David just sits in his all seeing chair from where he can control everything, and the movie just ends. Ultimately nothing has been accomplished and there in as much danger as ever. The shots in this movie are actually pretty good, as were the special effects, but the plot was so utterly incoherent that all of the movie's positive aspects are essentially null in void. I would give this film a 3 out of 10 and would not watch it again.

Lauren Slouffman

Lauren Slouffman

I decided to watch Passion of the Christ this week, expecting great things after generally hearing about it a lot, and was sadly some what let down. When I was reading the summary of these movies, I thought that the last 12 hours of Jesus' life sounded very interesting and would make for a good film. It seems that the 2 hour movie focused almost exclusively on the hours Jesus spent dying on the Cross, with little in depth storytelling before or after.. The use of close-ups throughout the movie was nice as it made the viewer feel like they were in the room with the disciples rather than just watching what they were doing. I did like also how the disciples looked like they were really living on nothing, preaching the message of their mentor. Often times these Christian films, will have them looking like they just came out of the shower in time to shoot the scene. The actors, especially Jesus (James Caviezel) all did a fantastic, and the movie overall was very well cast. The cinematography and directing I thought was very good as well. While all of these things worked well, it was the storyline I had a problem with. I felt like the 12 last hours could have been such a cool idea to see the shift of emotion from the beginning to the end of the movie making one sort of big circle with the Resurrection. While there definitely was emotion, I felt that Gibson was so focused on making everything seem so realistic, that the details of the story rather than the blood on Jesus' body got lost. The film was gory, and while probably was very realistic, was at the same time over the top. I like the fact that Gibson did not make this movie like every other happy, everything is okay, Easter film, but I think he was trying so hard that it went a little too far past the mark. When there is a close-up of Jesus on the cross being whipped you really connect with him, that is if you can handle what is being shown on the screen. It is definitely a very different take on that part of Jesus' life, and overall was a good movie, but definitely not my favorite for the reasons mentioned earlier.
Rate: 6/10