Given that the greater part of our site's purpose here on the Street of Prophets is to provide a place where people who might describe themselves as religious progressives can come together to explore not only faith but the larger questions that revolve around it and our hopes of impacting the world in a positive, progressive way, I am providing these weekly film reviews. I thought that submitting reviews of off-the-beaten-track films that often nudge this kind of thought and discussion might be a plus. I'll be offering this each week on Fridays and would happily entertain recommendations for future reviews. Feel free to post comments about the films reviewed here today as well as your own recommendations of films you feel may fall along these lines.
Some suggestions on what you consider "Classics" would be nice...
This film seems like a fitting one to begin with following last weeks review, mostly of documentaries, of the five year anniversary of war in Iraq. Before Iraq, of course, there was Afghanistan, a country just as devastated by its long history of conflict between Eastern and Western cultures.
Nominated for four Academy Awards, The Kite Runner tells many tales, even the importance of telling tales as a critical part of making sense out of our collective world. We are flipped back in time and space from present day America where we meet Amir, a young man who's just published his first book, which he brings home to his new wife with great pride, only to be transported back to 1978 and Kabul where he grew up. There Amir, aged eight or so, seems always to be in the company of his devoted friend, Hassan, a servant boy to Amir's family. It is the story as much of betrayal and redemption as of loyalty and devotion. It is also the tale of clashing cultures, classism, and taboos which all threaten to stifle the human spirit as much as it degrades and seeks to diminish the love between brothers and sisters, fathers, sons and men.
Amir becomes tortured by his failure to stand up for his friend Hassan, the kite runner, who remains loyal to the end accepting this betrayal, along with the persecution of others, as nobly as any sultan might. Amir's own world is turned upside down with the invasion of Russia and flees with his father through Pakistan to America eventually where they must struggle on the fringe of society just to get by. After the rise of the Taliban, Amir is called back to Kabul, where he is able to atone for his failures but only at great peril and enormous risk. Often, it seems, doing the next best thing is harder than doing right the first time, however hard that may seem at the time.
As much as this is a difficult and heart-wrenching film we are left with hope and faith that love can triumph in the end. I found it enormously helpful in understanding how little I really know about what life must be like in a nation we have found ourselves so intricately enmeshed. I never even knew you could fly kites like they did in Kabul before the Taliban outlawed it, let alone what it means to a kite runner.
Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters is the true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire and a jew. After getting arrested he is placed in a German concentration camp. He has learned to use his skills as an artist to survive the camps and in 1944 agrees to help the Nazis in an organized counterfeit operation set up to help finance the war effort. It was the biggest counterfeit money scam in history. Over 130 million pound sterling were printed, under conditions that couldn't have been more tragic. During the last years of the war, as the German Reich saw that the end was near, the authorities decided to produce their own banknotes in the currencies of their major war enemies. They hoped to flood the Allies economy and fill the empty war coffers. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks were separated from the rest of the camp and the outside world, and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiters workshop. "Operation Bernhard" was born. Prisoners were brought to Sachsenhausen from other camps to implement the plan: professional printers, fastidious bank officials and simple craftsmen all became members of the top-secret counterfeiter commando. They had the choice: if they cooperated with the enemy, they had a chance to survive, as first-class prisoners in a "golden cage" with enough to eat and a bed to sleep in. If they sabotaged the operation, a sure death awaited them. For The Counterfeiters, it was not only a question of saving their own lives, but also about conscience as well.
As the son of two Danish Resistance fighters, I grew up on stories like this one with the additional reminder that the Nazis are still at work in the world and we must continue to resist. This film also brings home the essential element underlying war: the lust for money above everything else and how even ordinary people are coerced into providing (one reason I have purposely screwed up my taxes since 2004). Am I implying there are Nazis running our government today? Well, its not fascism when we do it, is it? The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile as much as to the human spirit.
The Academy Award winner for Best Original Screenplay and receiving three other Oscar nominations, Juno is the surprise box office hit that tells the unlikely story of a sixteen year old pregnant girl who changes her mind about having an abortion when she discovers she is nine weeks pregnant. As much as abortion has been such a hot button issue among the faithful, this is one we should all watch, indeed, this is one doodle that wont be undid.
Juno, played in a delightfully offbeat performance by Ellen Page, who gets pregnant by way of best friend Paulie Bleeker, played by Michael Cera, decides, after an off-putting visit to an abortion clinic, to keep the baby and put it up for adoption. The adoptive parents (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) seem at first the perfect choice - an assessment that unravels over time. An underlying sweetness colors the film, making even the most forced irony palatable.
It's funny, it's light, yet there is something deeper going on, not unlike the baby in a young mothers womb (shades of another unexpected pregnancy two thousand years ago?). Abortion remains a white-hot-button topic, but Juno never forces the issue (it has, in fact, faced some criticism for treating it so blithely). However you feel about the movie's handling of the subject, it's an ever-present force, lending it a gravity the film otherwise wouldn't have.
Juno is rightly titled after its heroine, this time saving her child for the world, rather than saving the world for her child.
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