NOTE: There may be spoilers.

Flannery O’Connor might have written this short story and called it, “A Serious Man is Hard to Find.” Cathleen Falsani has (literally) written the book on the Coen Brothers’ treatment of religion, but this time it’s personal, focused on growing up Jewish in Minnesota. I found this essay (film) a provocative meditation on growing up in a faith tradition one neither understands nor trusts, and wonders whether there is anyone in or out of its professional clerical class who does. God is in the whirlwind in this movie, the big bad wolf waiting to blow the protagonist’s house down. Whether He does, and whether that confirms or annuls this new Job’s faith is left open. Like the Minnesota skies.

Shutter Island

There is no getting around the fact that a B movie is a B movie, even if it is made by Martin Scorsese. The question is whether it was intended as such. Since Scorsese doesn’t need to make homages to anyone, maybe he wanted to cast and direct some of his favorite actors in a period piece that retraces some of the 1960′s “Is he or isn’t she mad?” sorts of movies. Movies like Polanski’s Repulsion perhaps. At any rate, because of the relentless trailers over six months and the earliest review telling us there is a “trick” coming, it becomes impossible to watch for suspense reasons, and becomes a “Memento” like puzzle to retrace after the final credits. I suppose it applies to every movie somewhat, but in this one it is absolutely essential to its presumed enjoyment NOT to know anything about this before entering the theatre, or, by then, it’s too late.

Moon

This first effort by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie (not that that makes any difference), is a heavily plotted conceit about a technician left on a commercially sponsored solo-manned Moon station. His journey and ours is made pleasant enough by a Kevin Spacey-voiced computer companion. The enterprise is focused on harvesting a new source of energy to be delivered to a now depleted Earth. Like one of its parents, 2001 A Space Odyssey, part of the interest within this movie is to uncover what it makes of the future into which this episode is situated, everything from how the new energy source is marketed, to how communication is maintained between Earth and its moon, and on to how relationships between spouses and children are maintained during long exiles, and what, by contrast, constitutes the ideal human life. For that quite achievable goal, Jones’s script handles it well enough, and, if I want to be generous, I would go on to suggest the movie is a parabolic treatment of human loneliness and what it takes to maintain mental health when you are the only person you truly have the ability to measure such health against. Were I not being generous, I would simply say, see Moon, knowing Jones’s next effort may be about the isolation of traveling salesmen amidst the loneliness of the turnpike.

District 13B

I am a profound late-comer to this 2004 French movie (which now boasts a sequel out in limited distribution) and its intricately plotted story driven by the phenomenon of parkour. This original, produced by Luc Beeson, is premised on a future Paris divided into district-fortresses to keep the bad guys in so the good guys never have to enter it. But what if there are some good, or, at least, less perverse, honor-bound residents left within, and, let’s say, somehow a nuclear weapon got smuggled in and needed to be reacquired by the good guys? And let’s say the noble policeman to be sent in desperately needs the help of that honor-bound resident who’s recently been imprisoned for trying to save his sister from being kidnapped into slavery? And let’s say this duo happens to have the most amazing athletic skills upon which to base their hairpin escapes and rescues while knocking out loathsome assassins and brigands on every hand in countless breathless sprints and marathons across buildings, viaducts, and scaffolds without the help of CGI? You have one of the greatest thwart-the-despicable, death-without-dishonor-anti-buddy buddy movies ever made. I am fiercely glad not to have known there was a name (parkour) for what I got to see fresh and yet somehow gratified that there exists a tradition and a holistic philosophy built up around it to justify its existence. I don’t reckon I will have to wait another six years to see the sequel.

 
Posted in Movies by Bruce Edwards

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