The Rapture

The Rapture

1991

Director: Michael Tolkin

Starring: Mimi Rogers, David Duchovny, Kimberly Cullum

I’ve made it a point to avoid organized religion in my life.  I’m not averse to the concept of a higher power, but religion bothers me.  Despite these personal preferences, however, I am more than open to films that explore faith and religion, and especially how the two converge.  By partaking of art that deals with these topics, I know that I am working out some of my own questions while I watch.  I was looking forward to seeing The Rapture because I knew the basic premise – moral degenerate finds faith – and was hoping to delve into these issues yet again.  In all honesty, though, The Rapture let me down. 

Sharon (Rogers) is a telephone operator who says the same twenty odd words at her job all day long and goes trolling for sexy locals with her swinging friend at night.  She meets Randy (a mulleted pre-X-Files Duchovny), picks up a hitchhiker, and overhears her co-workers talking about some sort of religious dream involving a pearl.  Eventually, she realizes she has been living in sin and becomes essentially a born-again Christian, believing fully that the Rapture will come any day now and she will be whisked away to Heaven.  She manages to ditch her old ways and converts Randy, getting married to him and having a child, Mary (Cullum).  Things get interesting, however, when several events happen to test her faith.

My big problems with The Rapture have little to do with the fact that it’s about faith and Christianity.  I’m cool with that.  I’ll watch that story.  No, my problems with it are all about Sharon’s journey.  Sharon has two major character changes to go through, the first where she finds faith and the second where she might lose it.  I’ve seen several films that deal with either finding or losing faith, and find them fascinating… when done well.  I didn’t buy either of Sharon’s transformations, and as such, I was annoyed with this movie.

Frankly, the movie had me for about the first half hour or so.  There are signs and hints in the movie up to this point that suggest some sort of mythical, mystical, slightly cult-like faith.  Door-to-door messengers for God have an intriguing conversation with Sharon.  Sharon is fascinated with an enormous pearl tattoo on the back of one of her sexual partners.  Conversations with Randy, before their conversion, bring up issues of right and wrong and the messages of religion.  There is a feeling here of something unknown, unknowing, just beyond the grasp of human consciousness.  I am 100% in favor of this sort of mood in a film.  It’s the same mood that permeates The Last Wave, another movie indirectly about the Rapture and issues of faith, and I think The Last Wave is pretty damn good.  For the first half hour, I was excited, because The Rapture was shaping up to have this same sort of aura of mysticism and faith.  Great!  I’ll take it, I will gladly watch your movie.

But then we run into trouble.  Sharon feels these slight pulls around her, she can smell that something seems to be happening, but then BAM she wakes up one morning born-again.  She transitions too fast, far too fast, and with absolutely zero self-doubt.  I didn’t buy her conversion in the slightest.  One minute she’s having sex with David Duchovny (lucky girl) and the next she tells him to get out of the bed because the sheets are unclean and so is she and she wants her salvation and will meet her God, and in the same scene she’s quoting the Bible.  Wait… what?  This is how religious conversion works?  Just like that, in the flash of a moment, you go from zero to sixty?  Now, I cannot speak for those who do, in fact, claim to be born-again, so maybe it really does work that way, but it doesn’t work for me.  I can’t believe it for a second, and for this movie to work, you really have to believe Sharon.  What’s worse, Sharon later manages to convert Randy, but we never even see his conversion.  He goes from cynical lay-about to Christian leader in the space of a film edit.  Maybe this is my problem; I enjoy seeing people grapple with faith and religion, and that is not what I was treated to in this film.  I was expecting things The Rapture had absolutely no intention on providing me with.  Perhaps my expectations did me in, but I really cannot forgive a movie that is so much about one woman’s journey in faith for not actually SHOWING me a damn lick of that journey.

The other major problem in Sharon’s story is her facing a loss of faith in the final act of the film.  For the middle third of the film, the story has managed to convince me, somewhat against my will, that Sharon has become a God-fearing proselytizing good Christian wife and mother.  The film spends a tremendous amount of energy proving this is true.  Fine, okay, I’ll bite, despite the fact that you never really show to me how she gets there, she whole-heartedly believes in Jesus Christ and God.  Fine, if it’s necessary for the story you want to tell me, I’ll believe it.  And then, just as suddenly, she’s losing her faith and might never get it back again.  Wait, what?  REALLY?  No.  Even facing the tremendous and horrible tragedies that Sharon goes through, I cannot believe that the woman the film spent such effort getting me to buy into would suddenly become so damn obstinate in her lack of faith, especially when the unthinkable occurs and she actually gets some PROOF.  Sharon is not as obnoxious as that, except, well, she apparently IS.  I just don’t buy it for a second.  And I’m angry at the film for making these two huge shifts in character development with tremendously little to go on.  Frankly, it’s bad writing, and Mimi Rogers isn’t nearly talented enough to overcome it.

It’s really too bad.  I wanted to go along with Sharon’s journey, I really did, and the rest of the movie serves well to bolster up around her story; for example, the production design is full of silence and tension and the delicious burn of a slow build.   But it falls so spectacularly flat.  Not even Will Patton and Patrick Bauchau, veteran character actors, can save it.  Not even several truly shocking twists in the final act are enough to save it.  Heck, not even David Duchovny’s ridiculously ripped abs can save it. 

It’s so frustrating to want to like a movie, but then realize it’s going to disappoint you.

Arbitrary Rating: 5/10.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv)

1964

Director: Sergei Parajanov

Starring: Ivan Mykolaichuk, Larisa Kadochnikova, Tatyana Bestayeva

In watching Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors a second time in order to review it, I borrowed the DVD from the local library and wanted to watch it on the big TV in our living room.  My husband was in the room as well, so I asked him, “Is it okay if I put on a really weird Soviet movie?”  He looked up from his video game and said, “Yeah, that’s fine.”  Ten minutes later, he turned to me and said, “You really weren’t kidding, this is weird.”

Indeed.

Alright, “weird” is not exactly the most fitting adjective here, but still, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is hardly typical cinema.  The story is about young Ivan (Mykolaichuk as an adult), a boy growing up in a Hutsul village in the Carpathian mountains of Ukraine.  As a boy, he falls in love with Marichka (Kadochnikova as an adult) despite the fact that her father killed his father.  The two grow up together inseparable, but when Marichka dies in an accident, Ivan is grief-stricken.  Ultimately he marries Palagna (Bestayeva) but still thinks of Marichka.  After not producing any children, Palagna turns to sorcery which causes a rift between her and Ivan.

  

I can understand why Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is included in 1001 Movies, but it is not a movie I enjoy.  So, why is it in 1001 Movies, then?  Because first and foremost, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is about the Hutsul tradition.  It’s essentially a fictionalized ethnography, for lack of a better term.  Part of why I am so committed to not just watching but writing about the 1001 Movies book is because I know it will stretch me outside my comfort zone, and this film is exactly that.  The culture and traditions in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors are wholly unlike those I am familiar with; the movie has exposed me to a time and place I would otherwise not have known, and that’s important. 

There are many cultural traditions on hand here, starting with the simple church service that opens the film, but is full of such colors and sets to feel very different.  There are the requisite weddings and funerals, but also the Christmas holidays, simple pub outings, a winter market, and tending to the farm.  What makes me prefer the type of cultural education presented in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to that in a more traditional ethnography is that this is all presented in terms of a fictionalized and fantasized story.  We see all these events through the window of wistful nostalgia and mysticism.  Parajanov’s manages to weave cultural education together with a fairytale-like atmosphere of images and sounds and feelings.  I prefer that Parajanov leaves many ceremonies completely unexplained; I’m still not sure why those villagers were wearing ridiculous masks in one scene, but I don’t think I really care.  It was as if I was an impartial observer, simply sitting back and watching this village without knowing the language.  What results is a whirlwind of color and dance and costume and sound, and it’s pretty heady.  

  

Additionally, on a personal level, I live in an area with a rather high Ukrainian population.  In my classes over the years I’ve been teaching, I’ve had several Ukrainian students; last year alone, in a class of only thirteen students, I had a Rostislav, a Petro, and a Vladimir, and they would frequently speak Ukrainian to one another.  Heck, sometimes they would go back and forth between Ukrainian and English in the same sentence. (and really, the amusement factor of watching two high school students yelling in Ukrainian at one another because they each think the other botched their chem lab results is pretty damn high… I will always remember Rostislav barking out incomprehensible orders to Petro from across the room.)  Because of this fact, I am a bit more interested in discovering Ukrainian traditions now than before I started teaching, if for no other reason than having a better understanding of where my students are coming from.  I understand that my students are separated by years from the traditions on display in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, but it is still interesting to discover nonetheless.

Speaking of sound, I rather enjoyed the music in this film.  Having played symphonic and large group classical music all my life, Russian and Soviet music always stems from its small town cultural roots.  When you listen to Tchaikovsky’s works where he is not writing to please Western European tastes (as in “Capriccio Italien”, for example), there is – obviously – significant Russian undertones and thematic elements.  Some of my favorite pieces of classical music are from the Eastern European composers, such as Shostakovich (forever associated with Stalin’s regime, unfortunately), Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky… the list goes on and on.  One of my favorite concerts I’ve ever performed with a community band was when we played Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave”, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (yes, all of it), Shostakovich’s “Finale” from Symphony No. 5, and assorted smaller works, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Dance of the Tumblers” and Prokofiev’s “March” from The Love for Three Oranges.  It was staggering music, full of such cultural richness and tones, and an absolutely drop dead fantastic concert.  The soundtrack in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, all music composed directly for the film, is ripped from that same tradition.  It could fit right in beside Rimsky-Korsakov easily.  If nothing else, the aural and visual components of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors are very striking, and this is why I understand why it makes it into 1001 Movies.

  

But.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is not exactly a fun watch.  It’s not brutal or tortuous, in the way that horrific war films are, and nothing bad really happens, but it’s… trying.  Plot is not the point.  Subtitles that precede the film call it a “poetic drama.”  A visual tone poem, if you will.  At only an hour and a half, it’s not too long, but it’s still a bit of a task to sit through it.  The pace is decent enough, never really too slow or lingering too long on one thing, but I still struggled to pay attention.  In short, there is a great deal to appreciate about Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, but much less to actually like.  I wouldn’t exactly recommend this film to anyone who wasn’t going through 1001 Movies, not because I think it’s a crap film, just because I don’t think anyone would really like it. 

And ultimately, this is my final opinion of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.  I can appreciate it, but I don’t particularly care for it.  If I’m looking to watch a Soviet visual tone poem, I’ll reach for Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo or Stalker in a heartbeat over Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.  The colors and music and cultural richness is fine, maybe even important, but this movie is also the filmic equivalent of being forced to eat my vegetables.

Arbitrary Rating: 5/10.

Scarface

Scarface

1983

Director: Brian De Palma

Starring: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia

Scarface is one of the more notable titles on my “List of Shame.”  It’s achieved a definite presence in pop culture that persists to this day, finding new fans amongst the young all the time.  I ask my students questions about their likes throughout the year (“Favorite comedy,” “Favorite dessert,” “Favorite author”) and nearly every year, Scarface will get a few mentions in various categories.  While it feels good to be able to check this film off, I’ll say right here, right now, it was a film that was precisely what I thought it would be, and I didn’t think it would be for me.

Tony Montana (Pacino) arrives in Miami from Cuba in the late seventies after essentially being told to leave his homeland by Castro, who purged his land of political dissidents and a fair share of criminals.  Montana falls in the latter category.  He and his friend Manny (Bauer) work their way into Miami’s drug syndicate by catching the attention of boss Frank Lopez (Loggia).  Montana, for his part, pays attention to Frank’s girl, Elvira (Pfeiffer), a woman who doesn’t exactly follow the rule of “Don’t get high on your own stash.”  Tony is cruel, hard, and ruthlessly ambitious, so it is inevitable that his climb to the top of the drug power ring comes at a cost.  When his beloved sister Gina (Mastrantonio) becomes drawn into this world, however, Tony’s problems push him over the edge.

While not the start of Pacino’s acting career, I will make the case that Scarface was the start of Pacino’s overacting career.  Pacino’s work in the seventies was phenomenal.  I think of The Godfather and its first sequel, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, and Pacino delivers intense yet fairly subdued performances that rise when they need to, but also fall when they need to.  But in Scarface, we have the start of the Pacino that has now become a caricature, a performance that is nothing but highs and yelling and shouting and craziness.  To be fair, from what I’ve seen of his filmography, this was the first time he turned in a character whose volume is set at eleven throughout the entire performance, and people were obviously impressed.  If I hadn’t known Pacino for such a type of character, I’d have been far more impressed with his turn as Tony Montana.  But the problem with seeing iconic films after you’ve already seen a metric ton of other films, though, is that you lack this historical perspective.  To me, this is just another example of Pacino being over the top, crazy Pacino.  It felt like a Pacino caricature.  It felt like I had seen it all before during skits on Saturday Night Live.  And personally, I’d rather have the seventies Pacino. 

Scarface is so eighties, it hurts.  It physically hurts me.  Which, of course, is fitting, because Scarface is all about excesses, and so were the eighties.  As this film came out early on in the eighties, it is also easy for me to see how Scarface’s success could have shaped and defined this sort of celebration of immoderation throughout the rest of the decade.  The sets are utterly ridiculous, reeking of gilded age glitz and spending money like it’s going out of fashion.  Tony’s estate in the second half is painfully eighties.  Then there’s the montage sequence halfway through that separates Tony’s rise from his fall.  Shown with the requisite synthesizer music in the background, it was so stereotypically eighties, it actually made me laugh.  I threw my hands up in the air and bent over, I was laughing so hard.  I suppose there’s little else for me to do than embrace all the ridiculous eighties trademarks in Scarface, though.  

I was irrationally bothered by the – hm, do I actually call it racist?  Yes, I’ll call it racist – racist casting in Scarface.  Almost the entire cast of characters, with only a few exceptions (the most notable being the fact that Manny, a significant character, is actually played by a Cuban), are meant to be Hispanic – Cuban, Colombian, Bolivian – but only the minor characters and extras were actually played by Hispanic actors.  What was most galling was the decision that Italians = Cubans.  Pacino, Loggia, Mastrantonio.  This really, REALLY bothered me, and although this sounds odd, I’m not entirely sure why.  It’s certainly nothing new in film; look at the movies from the twenties, thirties, forties, etc, and just how much blatant racism they contain.  White actors playing black characters, white actors playing Hispanics, white actors playing Asians.  I tend to forgive this when I come across it as a “sign of the times.”  Unfortunate and ugly, yes, most definitely, but, well, it was how Hollywood used to operate.  I find myself willing to overlook it.  Why, then, am I so bothered by the exact same idea in Scarface?  The only possible answer I can come up with is that I had hoped that by 1983, we would have known better.  By 1983, I think I was hoping I wouldn’t have to sit through the painful experience of watching Robert Loggia, an actor who celebrates his Italian roots, ridiculously try to pull off a Cuban accent.  I didn’t buy it, not for one damn second.  I didn’t buy Mastrantonio, I didn’t buy the actor who played Sosa.  I marginally bought into Pacino as Tony, but that was the only one.  Am I being irrational here?  I might be, and I completely own up to that, and on reflection, I don't expect ALL of the actors to be of Cuban descent.  And yet, there's something that gets under my skin about seeing actors who are not only not Cuban, but AGGRESSIVELY Italian (for the most part) playing Cubans.  It reeks of blackface to me.  As I said, I know that I am willing to forgive similar faults in older movies.  Why can’t I forgive it here?  I'm not entirely sure, but it was a major block to my involvement in the film.

She's all, "Bitch please, you ain't even CLOSE to Cuban."

One thing I will definitely say Scarface got right is knowing precisely how to pull off a remake.  As readers of this blog undoubtedly know, this Scarface is a remake of Scarface, sometimes subtitled “The Shame of the Nation,” from 1932 starring Paul Muni.  Both films follow the same general plot structure – aspiring mobster rises then falls from power – but feel worlds apart.  And that right there is precisely what a smart remake ought to be.  Scarface, the remake, doesn’t try to pull off a thirties gangster picture, but instead introduces the drug syndicate angle, something that would have resonated far more with modern audiences.  It feels current and slick and stylish, and not at all like it’s trying to simply copy a film that came before.  What’s more, there are several reverent touches in Scarface, the remake, alluding to the original, to show that De Palma and producers really do respect their predecessor.  The message “The World Is Yours” is significant in both films, and De Palma actually dedicates his Scarface to the writer and director of the original Scarface. 

Scarface is a fairly straightforward story of someone’s rise and fall from grace.  Nearly every plot device it employs was telegraphed to me miles in advance, so absolutely nothing came as a surprise.  Then again, I am most definitely not the film’s intended audience.  Ultimately, though, it is nice to have seen this film, even if I have zero compunction to see it again; it is a film that survives, it is still seen and loved and quoted by today’s youth, and if nothing else, I can now laugh at Kendra’s obsession with it when I guiltily watch reruns of Girls Next Door.

Arbitrary Rating: 5/10.

Broken Blossoms

Broken Blossoms

1919

Director: D.W. Griffith

Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess

Silent films are curious.  They are so far removed from the cinema we know today that it can be difficult acclimating to their distinctly separate style.  There are certainly exceptions to this rule; great films are great films regardless, but only a handful of the silents I’ve seen have managed to break through their constrictions of time and place and really, truly impress me.  Films like Keaton’s comedies, City Lights, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or The Unknown are examples of this.  Unfortunately, Broken Blossoms does NOT fall into that category, feeling instead like a film ridiculous in how utterly out of date it is.

Cheng Huan (Barthelmess) starts off in China as a well-intentioned missionary who means to go to London to spread the word of the peace of Buddha.  Once there, however, he becomes addicted to opium and winds up tending a grubby little shop in the Limehouse district.  Lucy (Gish) is a waif who shuffles to and fro in between beatings by her cruel boxer of a father.  Cheng falls in love with Lucy from afar, and one night, when Lucy is left on the streets, he takes her in, feeds her, and nurses her back to health in the most chaste way possible.  Of course everyone will pay for this act of kindness.

  

Let’s deal with the obvious first, shall we?  This being 1919, Hollywood (and America) wasn’t nearly as progressive as it is today (and frankly, I’m not so sure it’s terribly progressive today).  We have, in Broken Blossoms, a thoroughly American actor playing a Chinese character, complete with squinty eyes and everything.  Oddly enough, this doesn’t completely bother me.  I know it’s repugnant by today’s standards, but is it fair to hold Broken Blossoms up to today’s standards?  I tend to be pretty tolerant to issues like this in very old films, and when you look at the characterization of Cheng Huan in Broken Blossoms rather than simply the outward caricature, he actually becomes the kindest character in the film.  I don’t like watching Barthelmess play an Asian any more than the next blogger, but I have to hand it to Griffith for making the Chinese character the closest thing the film has to a hero, and this in the middle of a phase in American culture called “Yellow Peril” where the fear of Chinese immigrants was reaching a peak.  It’s an odd feeling, really; I very much wish that white actors weren’t playing people of color in Broken Blossoms, but at the same time, I respect the presentation of Cheng Huan in a positive light and understand that the film is ultimately a product of its time.

No, far more than the whitewashing in Broken Blossoms, the thing that turns me off about the film is the unrepentant Melodrama with a capital “M.”  Melodrama, as a genre, has never sat well with me.  Even as a young teen Siobhan, I cringed when having to read books in school like Sister Carrie or any of the “young adult” fiction foisted upon me.  When I was in middle school, I remember being agog at all my classmates who insisted on writing the most utterly ridiculous short stories and poems about drugs, abuse, suicide and the like, none of which were realistic, and all of which ended badly.  Consequently, I dislike films where I have to watch things go badly in the most predictable way possible and with as little nuance as can be managed.  And Broken Blossoms is definitely that film.  Lucy’s father is evil for no other point than to be evil and brutish because the plot demands it.  Oh, okay, sure, I don’t need any kind of believability there, go right ahead.  Gish’s Lucy is so tortured in her childhood that she cannot physically smile and must actually use her fingers to curve her mouth upwards.  To pull out a phrase from my youth, gag me with a spoon.  This style of filmmaking, so popular in the early days and certainly around albeit a bit evolved today, does less than nothing for me.  I really dislike melodrama.  So Broken Blossoms never stood much of a chance.  

  

A few comments on Lillian Gish in this film.  In general, I am a fan of La Gish; it’s difficult not to be, considering she’s one of the pioneers of cinema.  I’m not sure how much I like this particular performance, however.  For one thing, there is the age of her Lucy.  In 1919, Ms. Gish would have been 26 or 27 years old.  I cannot for the life of me figure out how old the character of Lucy is supposed to be.  In some scenes, it appears as if she’s meant to be late teens; in others, more like 13 or 14.  For her part, Gish plays Lucy on the immature and infantile side, having her entranced with a simple doll and completely unaware of the feeling of love directed at her from Cheng Huan.  Frankly, skewing Lucy so young, even if it’s only emotionally that young, makes things a bit… squicky.  It’s a bit worrisome already that I’m trying to overlook historical whitewashing, but now I have to watch an older man fall in love with a woman who has the mental capacity of a 12 year old girl.  This does not for fun times make.  

  

But there is one scene in particular where Gish shines, and that is the scene where she has locked herself in a closet to escape the temper of her father, who has just discovered that she had been inside Cheng Huan’s shop.  Here is where we really see Ms. Gish’s acting prowess, as she convincingly gives us a performance of a frightened and cornered animal incapable of seeing a way out.  The naked fear on her face is staggering, and she is sole reason why I found this scene the most emotionally affecting of the entire film.  Her face, her body language, everything is committed to the feeling of true dread. 

I suppose I need films like Broken Blossoms every now and then to remind me just how amazing other silent films are by comparison.  It’s not nearly as preachy as Intolerance or as hateful as The Birth of a Nation, but I’m still not a fan.  Melodrama’s not for me, thanks.

Arbitrary Rating: 5/10